Imagined Theatres

Writing for a Theoretical Stage

Daniel Sack, Daniel Sack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351965590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre

Imagined Theatres collects theoretical dramas written by some of the leading scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. These dialogues, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary performance events that explore what might be possible and impossible in the theatre.

Each scenario is mirrored by a brief accompanying reflection, asking what they might mean for our thinking about the theatre. These many possible worlds circle around questions that include:

• 
  
  

• In what way is writing itself a performance?

• 
  
  

• How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections and imaginary conceptions that form the basis for real theatrical productions?

• 
  
  

• Are we not always imagining theatres when we read or even when we sit in the theatre, watching whatever event we imagine we are seeing?

1. 230 Titles (I)

Tim Etchells

Ice Pavements of Miami
No Indication
And in the Death
Future Story of a Backwards Nation
My Cacophony
The Virgin & The Roller-skater
Shame of a Telephone Switchboard Operator
Insane Island
Fortune 9000
Putrid Essence of a Bibliothèque
In the Land of Forgetting
Milan Subterfuge
Nine Suicides
The Mile Island Club
Jokers of Helmand Province
Beneath the Planet of the Master Race
6 Million Virtues
The Forgotten Pub
Death of a Vermin Exterminator
Subway to the Moon
The Tragedy of King Harrods
Monopoly & Mergers
The Vulgar Supermarket
Shifty Git Face
Mood Board Incarnate
Outlandia
The Trump Hole
My Days of Mail Order Misery
Beneath the Ozone Layer
Life During Water Rationing
The Hard Manacles
The Autumn Collection of Zanzibar Frume
Face Injuries of a Paid Protestor
Winter Season
Mischief in Mercia
The Seven Million Stolen Words
Spin Doctors Took My Codeine
Sister Mercury
Invincible Artifacts
The Irrelevant Symphony
An Eye Test for Reginald
Peephole to Melanie
Slippery Women
The Presence of Virtue in Doncaster
Long Haul
The Last American

Gloss—Tim Etchells

Five Invisible Trade Agreements
Fukushima Ahoy
Mental History of a Reptile Eater
Fat Men
Piss Factory II
Yasmine On Fire
10,000 Blow Jobs
Turn Left at the Traffic Lights
Investigation of a Suspect
Demolishing Coventry
Mohair
The First Day of the Final Year
Ice Age in Manchester
Electronic Memory
The Intuition Club
Cradle of a Grave
The Marriage of a Dentist in England
Puke Pavement
The Novice
Pixilation of a Cancer Patient
Death by Pro Bono
The Inches
A Makeup Tutorial by Michelangelo
Last Minute Substitution of a Moral Succubus
A Long Month of Indolence
Nine Knee-jerk Reactions of a Qualified Therapist
Small Changes in the Appearance of a Cardinal
The Shifting Hypothesis
Feelings of Resentment & How to Get Over Them
Kendal Jenner is Beautiful
Lawful Romance of a Geiger Counter
The Last of the Moderates
The Fame & Blame Game
Twenty-Seven Fortune Boulevard
Fascism of Intention
The Last of the Showboat Entertainers
Lipstick on Underwear II
Cut Throats in Plunge-Necks
The Inevitable Milk Bucket
Early Diagnosis
Down & Out in Qatar and Dubai
Astronomers of Old Earth
Stealing Ventolin
Dirty Hands & Dirty Feet
Crap Shoot Nova
Non-Binary Tenderness

2. 230 Titles (II)

Tim Etchells

Indecent Applause
The Vacuum Eaters
After the Psychedelic Festival
Screenshot Street
The Price of Meat in the Last Days of the Mechanical Age
The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive Shopkeeper
Family Misfortunes
Sea Stories
Great Phone Calls of New York
Sarcastic Living Room
False Memories of a Tunnel Digger
Eight Refugees
The Lonely Evening
Waiting for the Wolves
Rivers of Memory
On the Private Beach
In the Liar’s Forest
Defensive Measures
Welcome to Cadiz
Shivering in Taxi Cab
A Cryptographic Water Shortage
Self-Surveillance in the 21^st Century
Human Traffic
How to Dine Out on $10-$25 per Day
Proceedings of a Nebulous Investigation
Random Action on 100 Crank Handles
Maestro Central Dork Machine
The Rigged Game
Oracle Jones
Mission to Undo
Extremely Unfortunate Calligraphy
Malevolent Hair Loss of a Latter-Day Impresario
Mr Big Heart
There is No Way to Explain
Divorce for Losers
The Boring Restaurant
Crippled Knees
The Subterranean Workhouse Blues
No Win No Fee
Instant Photography in Focus
All New Tales of the Time Poor
Schrödinger’s Chat
Polymorphous Perversity in Chicago
Jinx of a Medium Quality Holograph
Guantanamo Xmas
Maelstrom Trouser Suit

Gloss—Tim Etchells

The Street of the Vagabonds
Tunnel of Love
Jazz Hands
The Courtesan and the Torturer
Men and Women of Langley
Miss Mish-Mash
Welcome to Rotherham
Scissor Jumps
Scraping Back the Skin
Lime Water
The Book Reader
Ghost Village
Ghost Taxi
The Internet of the Dead
Machinery
The Alphabet of Numbers
Short Changing
The Disco on the Edge of Town
The Terrorists in all the Good Hiding Places
Robot Children of Tomorrow
Crippling Frank
Piss On Me
The Viaduct by the Roundabout
Ink Job
Shoe Shine Boys
A Fugitive Spring
Shut Your Cake Hole
Italian Marble
Melancholia Forever
The Rubbish Seminar
Burst Water Main
Love by Telescope
Non-Islamic Justice
The Sharp Fish Man
Compliance Training of a Septuagenarian
Titanium Surprise
Race Relations in Budapest
The Haunted Slaughterhouse
Common Sense & Common Nonsense
All Eyes on Moses
Robot Replica of a Street Urchin
Straw Poll
A Life of Ishmael Ferguson
The No Hope Club
Soft Brexit (Waterlogged)
The Shandy Drinkers

3. 230 Titles (III)

Tim Etchells

The Sharp Blubber Suit
Fathers, Sisters, Mothers, Brothers
The Weeping Contest
Miss Berlin Wall
Zika Virus Come Home
Upgrades to an Imaginary Operating System
The Silence at the End of a Telephone Call
Evisceration Station
Beggars to the Rescue
Bromance for Daniel
Lost in an Elevator Shaft
Move Out Immediately Mr Basic
Mossack Fonesca
Wire Tappers
Six Homeless Individuals
Trial of Strength
A Phony Symphony
The Raw Meat of Advertising
Mexico or Bust
Slow Bleeding
Philistine Intellects
At the Angle of a Corner
No Surrender
The Evangelicals of Doubt
Autumn Leaves
Poisoned Riverbed
Goat Island
Retribution of a Supermarket Manager
Special Delivery for Robeson
Florescent Light
Throw a Six to Continue
Love Conquers Lethargy
A History of Cable Television
The Shit Eater
Depressing Feelings
Rachel and the Last Minute Change of Plans
Cheese Sandwiches Today
An Inexplicable Feeling of Regret
Beer for Breakfast
The Sadism of a Home Wrecker
Stolen Isotopes
Strange Fruit Hanging from the Popular Tree
Railway to Nowhere
Nowhere / Now Here
Perfect Mirage of The Mirage Hotel
Electric Bayonet

Gloss—Tim Etchells

The 230 titles reproduced in the preceding pages were found in papers retrieved from the ruins of the Limit Club in Sheffield, England, sometime in the early 1990s. Collected illegally from the abandoned premises years after the venue’s closure, the papers in question are said to detail the names of theatre performances staged in the club as part of its largely undocumented alternative performance nights during the period 1984–1988. The Limit, a cramped basement nightclub on West Street, now entirely demolished, was best known as a music venue, earning a reputation for drunken violence whilst hosting bands from outside the city including U2, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Gang of Four, and the B52’s as well as local regulars The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Artery, Comsat Angels, and Pulp. Beyond the titles of the theatre works listed here, no details are known about what they contained, how they were produced or in what style, or even who wrote, made, performed, directed, or watched them. Since no photographs, scripts, or other documents pertaining to them have been recovered, it’s possible that these plays or performances were never staged at all.

Amongst the 230 titles, several seem to prefigure or even predict events that were still far in the future when these performances would have been made—Fukushima Ahoy perhaps hints at the disastrous Fukushima Nuclear Power Station meltdown in 2011, whilst Jokers of Helmand Province appears to reference the troubled status of that region in Afghanistan during the conflicts there in recent years. Zika Virus Come Home, Mossack Fonesca, The Courtesan and the Torturer, and The Weeping Contest all nod to other future events that will need no introduction to readers of the current volume.

Further titles in the documents appear to reference existing works of theatre or film; 10,000 Blow Jobs points perhaps to Mac Wellman’s 7 Blowjobs (1991), or to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), whilst the The Price of Meat in the Last Days of the Mechanical Age appropriates the title of the last show by British performance group Impact Theatre. Turn Left at the Traffic Lights appears to be simply a translation of the title of an imaginary German television police drama series set in Neukolln, Biege bei den Ampeln links ab. The titles of other works supposedly presented at The Limit are harder to connect to other points of reference and we can only speculate about the significance or otherwise of performances such as In the Liar’s Forest, The Lonely Evening, or The Virgin & The Roller-skater. In any case, as other scholars of the era have already suggested—the list is best approached as a kind of partial trace—both an imperfect and incomplete echo of events that once took place and as a vivid cue to our present imaginings.

(from Taxi to the Cashpoint: An Underground History of Sheffield, H. Stannington, Endland Press, 2014)

4. After Dinner

Julia Jarcho

ELIZABETH sits with TOMBOLDT and LIGLIA in their attractive dining room.

ELIZABETH. I’m very curious about your children.

TOMBOLDT. They feel the same way about you.

LIGLIA. They’re probably listening at the door right now.

TOMBOLDT. More?

ELIZABETH. Thanks, I’m really full. It was great.

LIGLIA. I’m so glad.

ELIZABETH. Is it complicated to prepare?

LIGLIA. It’s right in the middle.

TOMBOLDT. Lawrence turned us on to it.

LIGLIA. Your brother.

ELIZABETH. I had no idea you knew him.

LIGLIA. We owe him some money.

ELIZABETH. Oh—me too! From when I was staying at his place last summer. I was supposed to be subletting from him, but I never, I actually just didn’t have any money at all. I still don’t.

[ALL laugh.]

LIGLIA. Well. I’m sorry we have to charge you.

[BEAT. ELIZABETH laughs.]

TOMBOLDT. We’d love to say it’s on the house, but unfortunately.

ELIZABETH. What do you mean.

TOMBOLDT. The meal.

[PAUSE. ELIZABETH laughs again.]

ELIZABETH. You guys.

Gloss—Julia Jarcho

LIGLIA. Uh-oh. Honey. Uh-oh. I’m so sorry. We thought you realized. Critical theory ought to refrain from being theatre, because critical writing must bear an assumption incompatible with the focus on “performance”: universality. The universal is not the “universally human,” nor is it totality; it has no substance, no “body” as it were, no actuality. But as a specter, it is the only element of thought that cannot be conscripted into instrumentality. To pursue universality is to strive to master oneself in the name, precisely, of that with which one cannot identify. It is to recognize the limited nature of our experience, to recognize that what is available to experience within the modernity of global capitalism—what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, want, and feel, roughly speaking—is not all, is not enough. This is a restaurant.

TOMBOLDT (fiddling nervously with his tie). Well, we’ve been calling it a private supper-club. Invite only. Certainly one hopes that art, e.g. theatre, can afford the same recognition. But when this occurs, it belongs to the dimension of reception; it cannot, must not, be a principle of practice. On the contrary, artists must labor to deny the appeal of the universal, must burrow ferociously into the meat and marrow of the most particular, must stake their lives on the absolute value of whatever they can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, want, and feel that has not yet been an object of articulate knowledge. The moment they have succeeded, that fragment of experience will become available not only to criticism but also, alas, to commodification. And yet the process must be repeated, because while it lasts, it holds open the sole inhabitable time and space on our planet. The universal fails to do this. It is not located here or now. It’s been in the Times.

LIGLIA. Yeah and: how many times must we be asked to ratify flaccid, pretentious, confessional monologues that would never pass muster in a community of sophisticated artists, simply because their authors are resisting the supposed temptation to “assert mastery” over the conceptual material? It might be mentioned that elaborate demurrals from asserting mastery are perhaps the most ubiquitous sexual tic of modernity; witness the preponderance of simpering, utterly manipulative masochists, and the comparative rarity of dedicated sadists. But the truest justification of the purely conceptual may lie in the fact that aesthetic experience as such depends upon it. Kant writes that the judgment of taste—the judgment that something is beautiful—can be distinguished from the experience of the merely agreeable because the judgment of taste is spontaneously structured like a logical, i.e. conceptual, judgment, even as it is self-evidently not one. The “subjective universality” afforded by the beautiful is nothing more nor less than the subject’s flicker of awareness that particular, embodied experience—or let us say “culture,” “society,” “history”—has the formal possibility of adequation to truth: that is, that what makes our life false is contingent; that life could be true. To deny the difference between truth and beauty, between knowledge and performance, is to collude with capital in obliterating that possibility. It is to paper over the gap that denounces that possibility’s constant betrayal, it—

ELIZABETH (to TOMBOLDT). That’s enough. You have to tell her. (To LIGLIA). We …

[LIGLIA throws her plate at TOMBOLDT. It whizzes past his head and smashes. ELIZABETH stares at both of them, then runs to LIGLIA and clasps her in an embrace. The End.]

5. “All the World's a ...”

Baz Kershaw

True experiments story: 1968-2005

Ħ … that … urban theatre thing was stripped out totally back to black & blank irregular walls. Here & there concr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The horizon
• Acknowledgments
• A note on the website
• Introduction
• Imagined Theatres
• Notes on contributors
• Related works
• Constellations