There's something about site-specific performance that makes you hope it will be special or at least a little sexier than normal theatre. Is it the idea that we're somewhere new that makes us feel that we're going to witness the breaking down of whole new boundaries in the form? What is it that makes site-specific theatre specific to its site? And what's the point of performing in bad spaces when they're not relevant?
I was thinking this when huddled in a little square off Preston Circus in Brighton, waiting to be let into an unpromising and boarded-up pizza place for a piece of new theatre. So Close to Home is one of Brighton festival's main commissions for this year. It's a play about family and fatherhood, absence and independence, and it touches on the plight of the migrant "dishpigs" and "galley slaves" that make up the essential backroom staff of so many British restaurants.
So what better setting than an actual restaurant? We were led down an alley to the back of the pizza place and filed into the kitchen to find desperate and disparate men setting up in a business where two out of three outfits fail.
Swearwords bounced against the tiled walls of the derelict restaurant and water gurgled through the out-of-use pipes as the men drew water to down mysterious pills and wash away blood. The play reaches a denouement involving a slightly extraneous subplot about another restaurateur and some dodgy dishpig dealings. Strangely, all the action takes place outside this cramped and claustrophobic kitchen, in the dangerous world outside the front door. The tiles and the gurgling taps are all that reminded me we were in what might one day have been a working kitchen. Which leads you to wonder what makes site-specific theatre work.
Nods were made to food and eating - an apple chomped here, someone chopping fennel there. In a post-performance chat, the playwright Mark Wheatley commented on the show's lack of cooking, saying he "couldn't find a reason to do it in the play - though he could think of a reason NOT to do it". Which makes you wonder why this is a site-specific piece.
At their best, site-specific performances sink and grow into the spaces they inhabit. They are tailored to a space, and the action weaves into the walls. If it's about a particular space, why not take some of the difficulties and conventions of the site and work with them?
When you find yourself sitting in traditional little lines watching action play in front of you, the fourth wall remains intact and the site becomes decidedly less specific and more just like a normal theatre space. In fact, rather an awkward theatre space. Which is a bit annoying. In the case of So Close to Home, the promised marriage of place and performance proved simply undercooked.
