There's A Room

Three Performance Texts by Third Angel

Third Angel ., Mala Voadora

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786827500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

There's A Room brings together three works by Third Angel: WHERE FROM HERE.
A man and a woman, trapped in a plain white room; a room that can become any room that holds a shared memory for them. They remember the times when they were happy together, and the times when, somehow, they weren't. They think about the times when they could happily kill each other. PRESUMPTION
Presumption is a show about love. Not romantic, thrill of passion love, not unconditional, unquestioned love. Everyday, what shall we have for dinner, will you be in later, expecting to go on living together – well what else would we do? – love. WHAT I HEARD ABOUT THE WORLD
A theatre piece with two songs: one original, one karaoke.
When you actually go there, you'll understand. The heat there. It's a different sort of heat. Or the cold. It makes you shiver in a completely new way. The light. They're always going on about the light.
There's a place where you confess your sins to voicemail.
There's a place where you can buy a cure for loneliness on CD.
There's a place where fake snow covers real mountains.
There's a place where the dances only exist in the memory of three old women.
There's a place where you can rent demonstrators to be angry on your behalf.
There's a place where you can rent strangers to cry at your funeral.
There's a place where they listen to a radio station that broadcasts silence.
There's a place where there are only five official haircuts for men.

Rachael Walton in Presumption publicity shot. Photo: Rob Hardy.

PRESUMPTION

Performance text by

Alexander Kelly

Chris Thorpe

Rachael Walton

Introduction

Best Laid Plans

Presumption began in a company meeting, early in 2005. In the midst of discussing something else entirely, Rachael had a flash of inspiration. What if a show started with a woman backing onto a stage, carrying a tray, and talking to people offstage, ‘in another room’? What if she turned round, still talking to the other people, to put the tray of glasses and crockery onto the table but the table is not there and so the tray falls to the floor and all the glasses break? She realises she does not have a set/any furniture, sees the audience, and is momentarily confused: where is all the stuff? What is expected of her? The confusion is partly between performer and character. And then she just gets on with it. She starts to build the set/bring the furniture on from the wings herself.

A few months later we tried this out. A twentyfive-minute work-in-progress performance that we called Best Laid Plans, as part of Sheffield Theatres’ Pyramid Project. From that starting point, Rachael repeatedly disappeared offstage to get another piece of furniture, and heaved it onto the stage. An armchair. A desk. A heavy computer monitor. A massive rug. A couple of cushions thrown on from the wings. Whenever we improvised this, we really liked the moment when the random collection of objects, with the addition of just one more item, suddenly looked like a room. A room where people lived, where things had happened. We liked how we could drop in clues to stories. Bringing on an armful of games, Rachael removed a few jigsaw pieces and hid them in the armchair. Each time she positioned a piece of furniture, she checked its position by half-performing a fragment of text or action, narrating to herself: ‘So I sit here, turn and look at him, there, and say, no, sorry, I don’t agree.’ Satisfied that the chair, for example, was in the right place, she would then head off for something else.

Performers do not usually go offstage in Third Angel shows. It was quite a big thing for us when the WOMAN and the MAN both go off in Where From Here. Because performers are (nearly) always themselves, or themselves as well as the character or persona they are presenting to the audience; they are always aware that they are sharing a space with the audience and spending time with them. So usually they stay on, and watch, even if they have nothing to ‘do’. We talk about performers being on-off.¹ They are still onstage, but they are not asking for the audience’s attention.

We had thought that Alex would also be in this early version, taking it in turns to drag something on, but in the week-long making process, we couldn’t make it work with two people, so we kept it to just Rachael. When it is a solo performance, going offstage is even more challenging. We thought of Best Laid Plans partly as an experiment to see how long an audience would watch a bare stage if they were waiting for something to be brought on. We worked out that the stage was empty (of people) for about half the length of the piece.

Audience feedback was positive. People did not mind the waiting – enjoyed it even. They liked how difficult some of the heavier pieces of furniture were to bring on. They were intrigued by the fragments of story that the task of the show offered them. We realised we were on to something. We were not sure if we had the first half hour of a show, or a full-length piece condensed to 25 minutes. As is often the case, it turned out that what we had was something between the two.

A Show About Love

One of the things that we particularly liked about Best Laid Plans was the way Rachael performed it, with the energy of actors doing a line run after a few days off, or a mark-through on the stage without full performance volume or physicality; a private ritual in preparation for a performance.

Planning the development of a two-person show, initially we planned to write, or in fact commission, a whole new play, which we would then only ever see fragments of, out of order, instigated by the different pieces of furniture being positioned, like we had in Best Laid Plans. The audience would be invited to piece together the narrative as the fragments of story and items of furniture built up on the set. But that is a very odd gig to offer a writer and so after some discussion we moved on from that idea. We knew that the show was about a couple, and so we decided that we would devise a bank of material – conversations, domestic interactions, confessions – that we could then draw upon for the show.

We talked about the couple, sharing a flat after being together for seven years. We talked about not knowing whether you are in love or not, and not knowing how to find out, because so many of the love stories in films, and books and songs, are about the thrill of getting together or the heartbreak of splitting up. We had discovered that Where From Here was about love during the devising process. This time we decided in advance that the show was about love. Not an intense, when do we see each other next, new-romance love. Nor a saddened, embittered, heartbroken love, but the place in-between. A love that has grown over years to the point where getting on with life has taken over. Where it is no longer clear whether the feelings have become a deeper, more integral part of you, or whether the relationship has just become habit. We talked about couples stuck in a situation where they are pretending it is the former, becaus...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: There’s A Room
• WHERE FROM HERE
• PRESUMPTION
• WHAT I HEARD ABOUT THE WORLD
• Third Angel