Back in the early 20th century, when a theatre wanted spectacle, it would flood an auditorium, have torrential waterfalls smash bridges and send coach and horses flying, or launch scaled-down ships to recreate historic sea battles. Or it might freeze the water to recreate a “Siberia”, complete with skaters and live polar bears (if you have a spare few minutes, the wonderful account by Peter Longman has these and even more extraordinary examples). Audiences of a thousand and more a night would be seated thrillingly close to the action.
Today, we have other means to create spectacles. Theatre company Slung Low takes audiences to real-world sites and there connects them, via headphones, with a live action that may also be interspliced with video projections. Previously, the company has hunted Moby-Dick in Leeds, raised a riot in Sheffield and recreated the first world war in York. Over the past year, under its artistic director, Alan Lane, it has been floating the story of a world-engulfing flood in Hull (a site-specific irony in this much-flooded city). In Flood, working with writer James Phillips, Lane takes the company’s technology-mediated, live-action mix further than before, creating one piece from a confluence of four live and small-screen performances (this week’s omnibus event offers parts two to four in one day).
Part one, filmed on a fishing boat in the North Sea, sets up the story: two fishermen, father and son, haul a net containing 100 orange lifejackets and a naked girl from a depth of 70m. Revived, the girl remembers nothing of her past; letters newly tattooed on her fingers spell “Gloriana”.
Part two is live (and available as podcasts). The sun is setting beyond Victoria Dock; the action takes place on floating platforms. Gloriana is delivered to a detention centre in the City by the Sea. Her story intertwines with others: the father and son (fishermen or people-smugglers?); escaped migrants; a reviled politician and her disaffected daughter. To the audience, shivering on the dockside, figures appear small and distant. Lights guide our attention to actors whose disconnected voices sound in our ears. The complicated plot concludes in spectacular catastrophe. Water spumes and lights flare against the now darkened sky; platforms break apart, helicopter blades whirr. The flood arrives. Is Gloriana a supernatural agent of salvation or destruction?
Part three (broadcast on BBC2 last August) introduces the post-flood world and part four (live) develops it. Three platforms floating on the dark dock represent three new societies: Holy Island (followers of the vanished Gloriana); Renaissance Island (led by the politician, who will “make things as before”); and Albion (violently authoritarian, where anyone who mentions Gloriana is put to death). Gloriana’s return precipitates a crisis, a battle, a resolution.
The logistics of this enterprise are extraordinary, but Phillips’s text drowns a potentially interesting, simple parable for today in a deluge of words. Nothing is done that is not described. Actors do not develop relationships, they interior‑monologue them. If the overall effect is disappointing, compensations include the glorious setting, some visual effects and Heather Fenoughty’s emotionally textured music (partly delivered by the Sheffield Chamber Choir).
The opening comparison between this event and the spectacles of last century is not intended frivolously. There’s no suggestion that a theatre is the only suitable venue for spectacular performances – which have anyway been presented outdoors for hundreds of years. What is missing in Slung Low’s work, though, is that which makes theatre theatre: mutual communication between stage and auditorium and among members of the audience. Headphoned up, we become atomised individuals. This sense of isolation is intensified by a dramaturgy that lacks shape and a script that leaves no imaginative space for the audience. We are being done unto by the performance rather than co-creating it with performers. I believe that Alan Lane’s aims are exciting and interesting but that he needs to think harder about the work he is presenting. It is not enough to find different spaces and make something happen in them: the something that happens has to be worth seeing in its own right.
