Fringe's Clowning glory
A Useful Play featured 20 extras, some passing pedestrians, and two actors who couldn't (or didn't) act. It was made by a film director who didn't have a script. It all took place in Spanish, and even the director was bored by the end of it. So what was useful about it?
This was one of the key shows in the first week of the Dublin fringe festival (now known as the Absolut Fringe), which runs until next Saturday, and it showcased the new notion of "documentary" theatre, in which ordinary life and people form the basis for theatre.
Its creator, Argentinian director Gerardo Naumann, had been walking around Buenos Aires one day, seeking inspiration for a screenplay, when he came across a tramp on a corner, thumbing through a well-worn copybook.
It was the diary of a young woman, Karina, and the tramp had found it. Naumann gave him a few pesos, brought the diary home, and read it straight through.
Naumann decided to find Karina, and ask her if he could make a film based on her diary. At the same time, he decided to make a play about the process of making the film. As he writes in the programme note, the play would be "the staging of my notes for a film". It would, in other words, be "a useful play".
Karina was an ordinary person whom chance would make the focus of his film; in any conventional artistic context, she would be merely an extra. This led Naumann to another idea: he would make extras critical to the process of making his play. He sent out a call for volunteers in Dublin, and recruited 20.
These, then, were the basic ingredients of A Useful Play: a chance encounter, a non-theatrical text and some "ordinary" people.
At the Project Arts Centre last week, Naumann sat on stage with his cast, issuing instructions and explaining to the audience what he was doing or thinking. He used his two actors to recreate scenes from the diary, used the extras to create background images, and used his assistant to film this on digital video, which was relayed live to a television on stage.
This 'documentary' theatre was deliberately untheatrical: the actors made no effort to pretend to be their characters, and the director made no effort to disguise his role. But it was also undramatic: Naumann made no effort to develop a plot or explore his characters.
And yet, he had not abandoned all artifice. For he was also working in a tradition that extends back, at least, to Hamlet: that of making plays about the business of making plays. Naumann, indeed, is a kind of procrastinating prince, so concerned with the ethics and aesthetics of his actions that he cannot make them cohere into a useful whole. Charlie Kaufman's recent film, Synecdoche, New York, played with a similar idea: its subject was a director trying to make an impossible play. Naumann, thus, was indulging in a well-established auteur's whimsy: that of denying the possibility of his own success. Most entertaining, Naumann is also a good clown: he used his extras as props (in the style of physical theatre) to create striking and witty stage images: they donned white T-shirts with photos of buildings to represent a city block; they made, and burnt, toast on stage to create a brilliant image of the diarist's life going downhill.
And yet, the play was less than the sum of its parts. Each of these was a moment of illumination in a piece of theatre that was meandering, incomplete and ultimately ineffectual. Eventually, Naumann's story simply fizzled out: we learned nothing more than some bare facts about the diarist, Karina; and we learned nothing about the extras beyond their enthusiasm.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
- Colin Murphy
