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Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch's SightSpecifics in ENGLAND and The AuthorStephen BottomsPublished online: 17 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Stephen Bottoms (2011) Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch's Sight Specifics in ENGLAND and TheAuthor , Contemporary Theatre Review, 21:4, 445-463, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2011.610315

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Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch’s SightSpecifics in ENGLAND and The Author

Stephen Bottoms

Who is this Spectator, also called the Viewer

[. . .] It has no face, is mostly a back. It

stoops and peers, is slightly clumsy [. . .]

The Spectator seems a little dumb; he is not

you or me. Always on call, he staggers into

place before every new work that requires

his presence [. . .] The epicene Eye is far

more intelligent than the Spectator, [and]

can be trained in a way the Spectator

cannot. It is a finely tuned, even noble

organ, esthetically and socially superior to

the Spectator [. . .] It must be waited on

while it observes – observation being its

perfectly specialized function: ‘The eye

discriminates between . . . The eye resol-

ves . . . The eye takes in, balances, weighs,

discerns, perceives . . .’1

This satirical distinction between ‘Eye’ and‘Spectator’, made by art critic Brian O’Doh-erty in his landmark study Inside the White

Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (firstpublished in 1976), gently mocks the still-familiar convention of discussing artworks asif they can be judged by some disembodied,all-seeing Eye. To implicate ourselves bodily inthe art exchange, O’Doherty implies, is tomaterialise – and, indeed, mortalise – our-selves; to render ourselves ‘slightly clumsy’.Spectatorial bodies are thus habitually ex-cluded from photographs documenting theplacement of exhibits in white-walled rooms:‘one of the icons of our visual culture [is] theinstallation shot, sans figures. Here at last thespectator, oneself, is eliminated.’2 The humanbody is an awkward inconvenience for the artgallery.

The superior attitude of the art-critical Eyehas often extended to a certain disdain fortheatre, since an assembled audience – ratherthan an empty room – is generally taken as aprerequisite for performance. ‘For theatre hasan audience – it exists for one – in a way thatthe other arts do not’, Michael Fried

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Stephen Bottoms, Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, University of Leeds, School of English, Leeds, LS2 9JT,United Kingdom. Email: s.j.bottoms@leeds.ac.uk

1. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of theGallery Space (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Universityof California Press, 1999), pp. 39, 41–42. 2. Ibid., p. 15.

Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 21(4), 2011, 445 – 463

Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1048-6801 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online� 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2011.610315

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famously wrote in his 1967 essay ‘Art andObjecthood’: ‘in fact, this more than any-thing else is what modernist sensibility findsintolerable in theatre generally’.3 It would beeasy, of course, to flip this distinction on itshead, and to claim theatre as the more honestmedium, foregrounding as it does the needfor spectators – not just some divine opticnerve – as a necessary part of its ontologicalequation. Indeed, in his short book Theatre& Ethics, Nicholas Ridout makes specialclaims for theatre on the grounds that its‘spectators are unusually conscious of theirown status as spectators, and thus as peoplewho may exercise ethical judgement [. . .] Wewatch ourselves watching people engagingwith an ethical problem while knowing thatwe are also being watched in our watching’.4

One might reasonably ask, though, howoften this is actually the case. In most theatresituations, still, we are arranged in rowsfacing a picture-frame stage, and tend to beaware of other viewers only when the backsof their heads temporarily obscure our viewof the stage. To return to O’Doherty’squestion, ‘Who is this Spectator? . . . It hasno face, is mostly a back.’ Certainly ‘[s]he isnot you or me’, since we are most likely tonotice this clumsy other if she is too tall andblocks our view, or shuffles around irritat-ingly in his seat.

In the theatre, then, just as much as in thegallery, the Eye (now accompanied by anequally disembodied auditory function, theEar) is traditionally dominant. There are good,historical reasons for this: the prosceniumstage owed its evolution, just as did easelpainting, to the illusion of depth perspective.In its earliest manifestations, perspective scen-ery was explicitly associated with an all-power-ful Eye: Inigo Jones’ designs for Jacobeancourt masques ‘did not make complete sensefrom anywhere’ other than the central seat ofthe King: thus, Russell West notes, ‘Perspec-tive gave plastic expression to aspirations to

absolute rule.’5 In Ways of Seeing, John Bergerelaborates on a similar point in relation topainting:

Perspective makes the single eye the centre of

the visible world, [which] is arranged for the

spectator as the universe was once thought to

be arranged for God. According to the

convention of perspective there is no visual

reciprocity. There is no need for God to

situate himself in relation to others: he

himself is the situation.6

There is, then, a certain (blasphemous?) hubrisabout the conventional assumptions at work inboth gallery and theatre. As viewing eyes, weare omniscient immortals, removed from thematerial plane on which mere humans do havea certain, ethical awareness of each other. AsBerger succinctly puts it: ‘Soon after we cansee, we are aware that we can also be seen. Theeye of the other combines with our own eye tomake it fully credible that we are part of thevisible world.’7 In this essay, I want to arguethat this simple, yet profound realisation iscentral to the impact of Tim Crouch’s recentplays ENGLAND (2007) and The Author(2009), which challenge and interrogate thespectatorial dynamics of both gallery andtheatre space, respectively. By foregroundingthe reciprocal fact of being ‘watched inour watching’, moreover, these plays lendcredence to Ridout’s sense of theatre’s too-infrequently realised potential for ethicalencounter.

In ‘Authorizing the Audience’, my essay onCrouch’s earlier pieces My Arm (2003) andAn Oak Tree (2005), I explored his distinctiveapplication of conceptual art strategies totheatre-making, as a means of making audi-ences imaginatively active in, and aware of,their roles as spectators.8 Frequently in thesepieces, Crouch (as both playwright and

3. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Minimal Art: ACritical Anthology, ed. by Gregory Battcock (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 116–47 (p. 140).

4. Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2009), p. 15.

5. Russell West. ‘Perplexive Perspectives: The Court andContestation in the Jacobean Masque’, The SeventeenthCentury, 18 (2003), 25–43 (pp. 26, 28).

6. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin,1972), p. 16.

7. Ibid., p. 9.8. Stephen Bottoms, ‘Authorizing the Audience: The

Conceptual Drama of Tim Crouch’, Performance Research,14 (Spring 2009), 65–76.

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performer) engineers a disjunctive awarenessof differences between what is being seen onstage with the viewing eye (actual) and withthe ‘mind’s eye’ (fictional). Physical objectsare given mismatching descriptions, perfor-mers stand in as characters they do notresemble, and the audience itself is recast asa fictitious variant of itself. In My Arm andAn Oak Tree, however, Crouch allowedaudiences to remain safely seated in theirfamiliar configuration, end-on to the stage. Inthis sequel essay, I want to explore the waysin which ENGLAND and The Author pushCrouch’s participatory aesthetics further, bycapitalising on the specific physical locationsfor which the plays were commissioned.ENGLAND was written in response to aninvitation, from the Traverse Theatre, tocreate a piece for performance in the white-walled Fruitmarket Gallery during the 2007Edinburgh Festival. The play is thus centrallyconcerned with the transplantation of theatreconventions into an art gallery – and, indeed,with the relocation of an English characterinto a non-English context. The Author wascommissioned by another leading new-writ-ing venue, London’s Royal Court Theatre,for its Jerwood Theatre Upstairs – the studiospace best-known for premiering controver-sial, ‘in yer face’ plays such as Sarah Kane’sBlasted (1995) and Mark Ravenhill’s Shoppingand Fucking (1996).9 Crouch responded witha piece that satirises the graphically theatricalsex and violence for which these plays arenotorious, but also removes almost all poten-tial for stage spectacle of its own by removingthe stage itself. Instead, two raked blocks ofaudience face each other in awkward con-frontation (‘in yer face’?) across a narrow,central corridor. The four actors sit amongstthem, and talk to them.

It might be tempting, then, to describethese plays as ‘site specific’, which in a sensethey are. A more accurate designation, how-ever, might be ‘site generic’, a term referringto ‘performance generated for a series of likesites’ – in this case the white cube and the

black box.10 Since Crouch depends for hislivelihood on touring his plays (in which healways performs), he cannot afford to tie themtoo ‘specifically’ to a single venue. More thanthat, though, these plays are in large part aboutthe international standardisation of such artsspaces. ENGLAND, in particular, highlightsthe fact that very much the same physical andideological features apply in white-walledgalleries all over the world, allowing for asmooth global circulation of art objects: ‘TheFruitmarket doesn’t only exhibit work byScottish artists’, explain the guide-narratorsat the start of the play, ‘but also work by artistsfrom all around the world – Chinese, Danish,German, Australian, Japanese, Italian, French,Russian, Canadian, Israeli, Icelandic, Dutch,Portuguese. And, of course, American’.11 Thisline, one of a number that refers directly to thegallery in which the play is being performed, isrewritten to suit whichever venue Crouch andhis fellow actor Hannah Ringham are perform-ing in. With The Author, however, the settingis specified as the Royal Court, ‘even when it’sperformed elsewhere’.12 This, too, can be readas a comment on the globalisation of artcommodities, given the success of Court-originated products across mainland Europe,North America and elsewhere. As MarkRavenhill himself acknowledges, the RoyalCourt ‘has been called, because of the numberof subsequent productions its writers receive,the Starbucks of playwriting. And sometimes,as I was invited to see my plays producedabroad [. . .] I felt like I was just anothermanager of a global franchise’.13 When TheAuthor was performed at the Traverse as partof the 2010 Edinburgh Festival, there weresome who resented this ‘imperialistic’ trans-plantation of a London theatre (complete with

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9. See Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today(London: Faber & Faber, 2001).

10. Fiona Wilkie, ‘Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-specificPerformance in Britain’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18 (2002),140–60 (p. 150).

11. Tim Crouch, ENGLAND (London: Oberon, 2007), p. 14.Subsequent page references from this play will beparenthesised in the text.

12. Tim Crouch, The Author (London: Oberon, 2009), p. 16.Subsequent page references from this play will beparenthesised in the text.

13. Mark Ravenhill, ‘Foreword’ to Dan Rebellato’s Theatre &Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),pp. ix–xiv (p. xiii).

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the play’s references to external spaces such asChelsea’s King’s Road) onto a Scottish theatrein the Scottish capital. Yet the frisson causedhere was a result of Crouch’s deliberatestrategy of permitting the site-specific (in thiscase, Edinburgh) to find its own resonance –whether consonant or dissonant – with theimported site-generic. ‘We let any associationscome to the audience however they want to’,he says of the actual works on the walls in thegalleries that ENGLAND has toured to:

In Pittsburgh, at the Andy Warhol Museum,

the energy of Warhol was infusing the show –

the notion of commodity, of reproduction, of

commercial value. In Yale, we were at the

Yale Center for British Art, with Turners and

Constables, and in the second act there was a

room full of Stubbses. Horses and lions! So

there was a huge weight of establishment and

imperialism which is ideal for the second act

of the show. We’re not wanting to force

those associations or connections, but hoping

that people will get them in the nature of the

space.14

By minimising staging apparatus, and thusallowing the unadorned sites to ‘speak forthemselves’ within the context of the play-frames he temporarily layers over them,Crouch opens up the possibility for audiencemembers to make circumstantial interpreta-tions of their own. This is part and parcel of hisconcern to individualise spectatorial response –to authorise his audience.

The White Cube

ENGLAND is structured precisely so as toforeground its spectators’ awareness of them-selves as bodies in an art gallery, engaged invarying modes of ‘seeing’. The location isinitially established, quite explicitly, as ‘here’ –as wherever this gallery is: ‘My boyfriend [has]never been to the Fruitmarket Gallery. He’dlove it if he came here’ (p. 16). The audience is

treated as a tour group being shown aroundthe exhibits by two animated guides, Crouchand Ringham, who welcome us with winningsmiles and direct eye contact – asking us to‘look’ at what’s on display. We stand, we walkaround, we are guided to look at differentcorners of the room – and yet direct referencesto the actual exhibits are deliberately cursory.Instead, the guides’ alternating commentaryevolves into a narrative in which we are askedto ‘Look! Look!’ at images that are presentonly (if we consent to the exhortation) in ourimaginations: ‘Here you can see me in thenight./Here you can see me leaning./Hereyou can see me in the early morning./Look.I’ve been sleeping on the sofa’ (p. 16). Thissets up an oscillating awareness, for thespectator, of both the images described andthe contrasting physicality of the speakers – adestabilisation further accentuated by the factthat the ‘me’, the ‘I’ of this narrative alsooscillates back and forth between Crouch andRingham. It becomes clear that they are bothplaying the same character, the same ‘I’, sothat we cannot neatly connect this person orhis/her image with either one of them. Byextension, when they refer to ‘my boyfriend’,the narrative appears to refer to a straightcouple when Ringham speaks, and a gay maleone when Crouch speaks. The developingstory tells, in the present tense, of theincreasing ill-health of the storyteller, and ofthe series of hospitals which s/he has to visit.But whose body, of which gender, is supposedto be breaking down? We cannot ‘see’ thepatient as a figure in front of us, and yet theplay’s insistently corporeal language highlightsthis perceptual disjuncture by rendering thesickening body in cinematic close-up ratherthan theatrical head-to-toe: ‘My ankles areswollen/Look’ (p. 24); ‘Look at the shallow-ness of my breathing./Look at the pulse at theside of my head’ (p. 32).

The omniscient ‘Eye’ of the beholder cansee such images thanks to the textual prompts,but the awkward body of the ‘Spectator’remains constantly at odds with any smoothlyillusionistic reception of the narrative. Ouractual field of vision consists of a situation inwhich two (apparently healthy) performers

14. Tim Crouch, unpublished interview with Stephen Bottoms.Leeds, 6 November 2008. Subsequent quotes from Crouchare taken from this interview unless otherwise noted.

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provide a focal point amidst a motley collec-tion of standing spectators: Crouch and Ring-ham periodically break up established crowdformations by moving through them toanother spot in the room, and – free fromany fixed seating arrangements – spectatorsnegotiate their own shifting relationships withthe action (just as they might if listening to agallery guide). At times one might stand closeby the performers, enjoying their unusualproximity (no proscenium to divide us); atothers one might lurk towards the back of thegroup, or detach oneself to peruse the walls.Precisely because our gaze is not beingdirected at anything very specific on thewalls, however, we become more aware ofourselves – and others – as bodies in the room;inverse complements to the dematerialisedbody in the narrative. The conditions ofgallery stewardship can further enhance thatawareness – as, for example, during a perfor-mance I witnessed at London’s WhitechapelGallery in 2009, when an invigilator actively

policed the sculptural exhibits populating thespace, by German artist Isa Genzken. Thesewere constructed largely from steel and con-crete, and did not appear to this viewer to be‘vulnerable and fragile’ – as the gallery’s blurbsclaimed. During the performance, a notionalexclusion zone around each Genzken sculp-ture was enforced by the invigilator’s physicaland sometimes verbal interventions (throughstern whispers) to prevent spectators fromstanding too close. In response, Crouch andRingham continually strove to ensure,through expression, body language, and – Isuspect – some strategic ad-libs, that theirvisitors were ‘very welcome!’ As the text itselfrepeatedly emphasises, the gallery and itsguides could not continue to function ifbodies did not enter the space: ‘If it weren’tfor you, I wouldn’t be here!’ (p. 13).

To its credit, the Whitechapel Gallery had atleast permitted performances of ENGLANDto take place. That has not always been thecase, Crouch notes:

We’ve had an extraordinary experience with

galleries around the world, where we have

come into contact with some incredibly

precious relationships to the work. There

are galleries where we haven’t been allowed

in, because the work is too valuable, and so

letting human beings into the space would be

a problem. One day in Australia, Hannah was

not allowed into the gallery we were

performing in because she was carrying a

small bunch of flowers. Apparently the

danger was that there would be bugs in the

flowers that would contaminate the work.

Such incidents speak directly to the concernsof a play that highlights a glaring mismatchbetween the material presence of walls,people, and things, and the dematerialisednarrative of artistic ‘value’. As Berger argues,the task of the modern gallery is to envelop artobjects in ‘an atmosphere of entirely bogusreligiosity’, thereby attaching to them a‘spiritual value’ that both masks and inflatestheir material exchange value.15 ENGLAND

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Image 2 The Audience in Act One of ENGLAND atthe Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Karl James.

Image 1 Hannah Ringham and Tim Crouch in Act Oneof ENGLAND at the Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: KarlJames.

15. Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 21.

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too makes that connection, by associating the‘here’ of the gallery space and its ‘clean lines’with ‘Here in Southwark Cathedral. I enjoythe peace. I enjoy the clean lines and the feeland look of the stone./Everyone talks soquietly’ (p. 26). Sacred space is also tellinglycounterpointed with private space: the story-teller and her/his boyfriend live in a white-walled duplex apartment – ‘It’s like heavenhere!’ – located in a ‘converted jam factory’(pp. 17–18). Within this post-industrial padfor those with jam today, a collection ofexpensive contemporary artworks by the likesof Gary Hume, Marc Quinn and Tacita Deanhang on the walls. ‘My boyfriend believes thatart shouldn’t just be in galleries,’ we are told:‘It belongs in people’s everyday lives./Art isfor all!’ (p. 18).

The joke here, of course, is that art inprivate homes is still more exclusive than thosein public galleries. And yet, if we are the kindof people who feel comfortable in this galleryspace, we are probably already among therelatively privileged. In Ways of Seeing, Bergerpoints out that such institutions are for themost part the preserve of the educated middleclasses: he cites French research figures inwhich two thirds (66 per cent) of ‘manualworkers’ saw galleries and museums as beingakin to churches (implicitly, hierarchical spacesthey felt uncomfortable in), whereas only 30.5per cent of ‘professional and upper managerial’interviewees saw the connection.16 Similarly,the implication of ENGLAND is that thehigher up the socio-economic scale one goes,the more ‘at home’ one feels with art, becauseone feels one owns it. As Walter Benjamin drilyproposes, it is only in private ownership that‘the objects get their due’: ‘The collector’smost profound enchantment is to enclose theparticular in a magic circle where it petrifies,where the final thrill (the thrill of beingacquired) runs through it.’17 Or, as thestoryteller’s boyfriend has it, ‘Good art is artthat sells’ (p. 29).

The analogy made most insistently byENGLAND, however, is not that betweengallery space and privileged sanctuary, butrather, that between the curatorial and theclinical. The ‘heavenly white space’ of thegallery, Crouch suggests, functions as anisolation ward, carefully screened for contami-nants, in which an object may be preserved‘beyond its natural life and beyond its naturalworth’.18 The storyteller recounts her/hisjourney through a series of white-walledmedical spaces, in an increasingly anxioussearch for effective treatment – from the GP’soffice to Guys Hospital, and then from aspecialist heart hospital near Cambridge (pre-sumably Papworth) to a private clinic in aconverted stately home in Berkshire. At eachlocation, we are informed, there is artwork onthe walls, thanks to its purportedly therapeuticvalue – ‘It helps them to feel better about theirillnesses’ (p. 25) – but the type and value ofwork also shifts markedly with context. At theGP’s there are colourful prints of works byHockney and Seurat; at Guys an anonymousoriginal of ‘African Woman with Child’:‘Don’t/touch it!/Even clean hands leave marksand damage surfaces!’ (p. 29). At the privateclinic, however, beyond the straitened budgetsof the NHS, there are ‘a genuine Bridget Riley,a Damien Hirst spin painting and a photographby Sam Taylor-Wood [. . .] It’s like being in achurch. Or a gallery. Everyone talks so quietly.Everything is so clean’ (p. 43).

The best health care, it seems, like the bestartwork, is the preserve of the wealthy. Thestoryteller is moved into private care by theboyfriend, who refuses to believe that lifecannot be extended with better finance. Butthis arrogance of immortality is counter-pointed in the play by increasingly vivid textualdescriptions of the body’s breakdown: ‘Lookat the muscles in the heart. Look at themthickening. Look at how the pumping cham-ber gets smaller and keeps the heart musclefrom relaxing properly between contractions’(p. 37). By this mid-way stage in the play,with the spectator’s legs beginning to tire of16. Ibid., p. 24.

17. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 1. Quoted intranslation (apparently his own) by Douglas Crimp, in Onthe Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA and London: MITPress, 1993), pp. 202–03.

18. Tim Crouch, unpublished interview with Stephen Bottoms.Subsequent unattributed quotes from Crouch are all fromthis source.

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standing, and the dominant perceptual white-ness of the accommodating gallery havingbeen painted by the text with unsettlingassociations with illness and hospitals, agenuine physical queasiness and lightheaded-ness can begin to set in – which the vividanatomical descriptions simply exacerbate.That is certainly my own experience, and itappears anecdotally to be that of others. (At aperformance in Leeds, one of my ownstudents – a diabetic – actually passed out atthis point in the play, prompting Crouch andRingham to move seamlessly into assisting thisailing body to a chair, before resuming theirdelivery of the text when they were sure shewas all right.) The very immediate sense ofphysical breakdown evoked by the play iscomplemented further by the use of the soundeffects which punctuate the text with increas-ing insistency as the storyteller moves towardterminal heart attack. These sounds, of whatappear to be grinding girders and crashingmasonry, are played at such disturbingly highvolume that they, too, function on a viscerallevel – as a sensory invasion of the space ratherthan as any neatly aestheticised ‘sound installa-tion’. The narrated breakdown of the story-teller’s body, then, is complemented by a vividsense of the gallery itself collapsing under theweight of its own sickness. As we exit the roomat the end of this first act, accompanied bydeafening noise, we seem to be walking – toborrow the title of Douglas Crimp’s seminalcritique – On the Museum’s Ruins.

Relief, of a sort, is provided for ENG-LAND’s audience as they are ushered into asecond room, for the second half of the play.Here, we are invited to sit down in rowsof seats set out in a conventional, end-ontheatrical arrangement. In what follows,Crouch and Ringham proceed to act out ascene taking place not ‘here’ in the gallery butin a fictional ‘elsewhere’. This shift ofapproach might seem, initially, like a retreatfrom the formal challenges of the first part – aplacement of spectators so that they are onceagain looking at the backs of each other’sheads rather than watching each other asfellow witnesses. Yet this transplantation oftheatre conventions into the gallery space

constitutes an invasion of its own – as Crouchhas made satirically clear by gathering acollection of carefully composed ‘installationshots’ of the rows of chairs placed in situ ingalleries across Europe, North America andAustralia. Following O’Doherty’s dictum,there are never any actual bodies present inthese images, and as a result the assembledchairs tend to take on a sculptural quality oftheir own – an ‘exhibit’ relocated to differentgalleries. Yet they are also, by their verydefinition as chairs, waiting to be filled byseated bodies. ‘If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’tbe here’.

The Black Box

The disconcertingly material presence of audi-ence seating is made still more central toproceedings in The Author. As spectators enterthe theatre space, to be confronted only byrows of facing chairs, the conspicuous absenceof any identifiable stage area forces an im-mediate re-examination of expectations. Evenif one knows in advance of the stagingpremise, it is hard to prepare for the unfamiliarsensation of being obliged to look (since thereis nowhere else to look) at our fellow, fully litspectators seated immediately opposite. Wecan see and be seen – a reciprocal gaze whichraises immediate etiquette problems if, forexample, one accidentally makes eye-contactwith a stranger (do I smile awkwardly? Lookaway abruptly?). The opening lines of TheAuthor’s text acknowledge both the sense offun and novelty for an audience finding itselfplaced within this set-up, and a certain sense ofapprehension. ‘I love this’, a man announcesfrom the midst of the crowd: ‘When I came inand saw this, just this, and I thought, Ohwow! Didn’t you? Did you? Maybe you didn’t.Maybe you thought Oh Jesus! Did you? Oh,Jesus Christ, maybe!’ (p. 17). The laughterthat always greets this line functions to breakthe ice, to affirm a collective sense that the playhas somehow begun and that we have an actorto focus on – words to respond to. Yet it’s alsoa laughter of recognition: one can see just bylooking at expressions on the faces opposite

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that some are indeed thinking ‘Oh wow!’ andothers ‘Oh Jesus!’ From the outset, then, TheAuthor undermines the unwritten ideologicalcontract of most theatre production, in whichthe audience is assumed to be a unified,anonymous body who will follow the playtogether, laugh together, perhaps cry to-gether, and applaud together at the end.

This first speaker, Adrian (or Chris, in thetouring production19), plays the role of aspectator – one of ‘us’ – but he follows theexample of ENGLAND’s gallery guides inexhorting us to use our eyes in this space:‘we’re all so gorgeous, aren’t we? Look at us!

Look!’ (p. 19). His amiable wittering isentertaining, certainly, but his gushing over-enthusiasm is as likely to prompt individualsto dis-identify with him as a fellow spectator(‘he is not you or me’), as it is to prompt thesense of collective identity that the ‘we’ and‘us’ might seem to invoke. Adrian himself,moreover, introduces the sense of a potentialmismatch between the audience we areassumed to be, or are being ‘cast’ as, andthe spectators we feel ourselves to be: ‘I sawa play last year, and I remember thinking,‘‘that writer has imagined me’’. I’ve beenimagined! Poorly imagined! The audiencehas been badly written! We’re all going tohave to pretend ourselves’ (p. 20). By thisstage in proceedings, there may already beaudience members who feel they are havingto pretend to have a good time, despitethe generally good-humoured mood being

Image 3 Seating for Act Two of ENGLAND. Wiesbaden Museum. Photo: Tim Crouch.

19. The plays’ characters are all named after the actors playingthem. Adrian Howells originated the role of the audiencemember in the Royal Court production, but on tour it wasplayed by Chris Goode. I shall refer hereafter to Adrian,simply because that is the name which appears in thepublished text.

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generated by Adrian’s bumbling attempts tokeep talking.

As the play progresses, other speakers doemerge from the crowd: Tim introduceshimself as the author and director of a playthat Adrian once saw, while Vic and Estheremerge as the lead actors in that (fictional) play.With every speaker, however, Crouch’s textdrops in further prompts to individual disquietand dissensus among the audience.20 Tim’sown opening monologue, for example, inwhich he describes visiting a flotation tankfacility, includes a description of the womanguiding him to the tank: stream-of-conscious-ness observations lead him into a vivid andinappropriately public recitation of private

fantasy, in which we are invited to participate.‘I think about her naked and stretched outbefore me. Can you imagine? [. . .] I imagineher legs opening for me, her dress lifting up.Her soft flesh opening for me. I imagine I – Isthis okay? Is it okay if I carry on?’ (p. 22). Thisquestion, usually directed in performance toaudience members in Crouch’s immediatevicinity on the seating bank, has promptedreassuring nods of assent in every performance Ihave witnessed; yet there are bound to be many– perhaps the nodders included – who do notreally want this fantasised sex act to continue.Thankfully Tim resumes his monologue on adifferent tack, but moments later Vic throwsthis moment into perspective by recountingTim’s advice to actors on how to deliver adramatic monologue in order to ‘enlist’ or‘seduce’ an audience into engaging with itscontent: ‘Tim said you should get them to the

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Image 4 Seating for Act Two of ENGLAND. Yale Museum of British Art. Photo: Tim Crouch.

20. I will use the first name Tim to designate the character ofTim Crouch as written in The Author, and the surnameCrouch to designate the author of The Author (though thedistinction is sometimes necessarily blurry).

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point where they almost feel able to answerback. Or shout out’ (p. 24). The ‘almost’ hereis a twist of the knife, a declaration of the blithe– but perhaps not misplaced – assumption thatmost spectators will not make unseemly spec-tacles of themselves, however unseemly theplay’s subject matter.

In his much-discussed essay ‘The Emanci-pated Spectator’, Jacques Ranciere describeswith scepticism the efforts of ‘theatre refor-mers’ (he names Brecht and Artaud, but manyothers from Boal to Grotowski are implied) toovercome the perceived ‘passivity’ of theatreaudiences. The very word theatre derives fromthe Greek word theatron – a place of seeing –yet these reforming practitioners, Ranciereargues, have tended to assume an equivalencebetween seeing and passivity: ‘what humanbeings contemplate in the spectacle is theactivity they have been robbed of’.21 It wasthis same assumption that prompted Plato toban theatre from his Republic, yet paradoxi-cally these reformers have

claimed to transform theatre on the basis of a

diagnosis that led to its abolition. They have

made theatre the place where the passive

audience of spectators must be transformed

into its opposite: the active body of a

community enacting its living principle.

Ranciere then teasingly quotes the FrankfurtSommerakademie call to which he was re-sponding in preparing this essay: ‘theatreremains the only place where the audienceconfronts itself as a collective’.22

At first glance, The Author might look likea paradigmatic example of the reformingtendencies that Ranciere is questioning here:it is, after all, set up precisely so that ‘theaudience confronts itself’. In seating the actorsin amongst this audience, the play mightalso appear to agree that ‘the separation ofstage and auditorium is something to betranscended’.23 And yet, as should be clearfrom the various prompts to individual dis-ease

already cited, Crouch seems less interested inthe audience confronting itself ‘as a collective’,or as a ‘community enacting its living principle’,than in generating an awareness of the possibi-lity of differing individual responses. Indeed,the ‘optical machinery’ of theatre – as Rancierecalls it – far from being removed or overcome, ishere employed precisely so that we may look atother people’s reactions, and be looked at forour own. Spectating is instanciated as an active,rather than passive, observational process:‘Look!’

‘Emancipation begins when we challengethe opposition between viewing and acting’,Ranciere proposes: ‘The spectator also acts,like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects,compares, interprets [. . .] She composes herown poem with the elements of the poembefore her’.24 Crouch, similarly, is concernedwith maximising the possibility of personalresponses to – rather than herd-like acceptanceof – the enacted events. He makes hisspectators hyper-aware of themselves as agroup experiencing the same event, yet at thesame time makes satirical hay with thesuggestion that ‘we’re all in this together’.That phrase enters the play’s discourse viathe chorus lyrics of High School Musical, thestage version of which Esther claims to haveperformed in. ‘Would you like me to sing foryou?’, she asks the audience around her:‘Would you? Yes? Would you?’ (p. 28). Shethen proceeds to do so, a capella, whether ornot anyone has encouraged her to do so:

Together, together, together everyone

Together, together, come on let’s have some

fun [. . .]

Everyone is special in their own way

We make each other strong (we make each other

strong)

We’re not the same, we’re different in a good

way

Together’s where we belong.

We’re all in this together

Once we know that we are

We’re all stars - and we see that21. Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. byGregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p. 7.

22. Ibid., pp. 4–5.23. Ibid., p. 15. 24. Ibid., pp. 17, 13.

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We’re all in this together

And it shows

When we stand

Hand in hand

Make our dreams come true.25

The objectives of Ranciere’s theatrical reformersdid not, one assumes, entail overcoming spec-tatorial passivity so that we could all become‘stars’. The saccharine banality of these lyricspoints up just how manipulative, and indeeddeceptive, such calls for community bondingcan be. Recollecting her experiences on an anti-war protest march by London’s theatre ‘com-munity’, Esther ruefully notes that the peoplefrom the ‘serious’ theatres – ‘the Tricycle, theBush, the Royal Court’ – ‘looked down theirnoses’ at the companies of West End musicals(p. 27). There was little sense of ‘stand[ing]hand in hand’, she implies, despite the commonpolitical cause. Esther’s point was given addi-tional piquancy when, in the midst of TheAuthor’s Royal Court run – on 6 October 2009– the UK’s then shadow chancellor GeorgeOsborne made a prominent speech in which thephrase ‘we’re all in this together’ featuredrepeatedly.26 Osborne was attempting to rallysupport for the economic austerity measuresthat he claimed would need to be visited on thewhole population, as a result of a financial crisisprecipitated by super-rich bankers.

Of course, the politics of Crouch’s ownposition as a theatre-maker are complex and tosome extent paradoxical. How can he, as TheAuthor’s author, facilitate the conditions bywhich a spectator can indeed author her or hisown experience of and response to it? Oneprovisional answer to this question is providedonly 10 minutes or so into the play’s proceed-ings – before anyone besides Adrian has evenspoken – when a stage direction specifies that‘An audience member in the middle of a blockgets up and leaves. They are helped to leave by an

usher’ (p. 21). Whether or not other spectatorsaccurately perceive this person as a ‘plant’(frequently they do not), the staged walk-outsignals the possibility of an available choice foranyone else who – for whatever reason – maynot wish to stay in the performance. It breaks aninvisible membrane, because anyone choosingto leave subsequently will not feel the addi-tional pressure of being the first (and poten-tially only) one to leave.

Aside from the option of walking out(which has been taken up on many occasionsduring the play’s performance history), spec-tators are also presented with the chance torespond to the performance vocally. Adrian’svarious attempts at dialogue with thosearound him encourage those present to letdown their inhibitions about speaking duringthe play, because his individually directedquestions are always low pressure – requiringonly an amused ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from the personasked, or perhaps some uncontroversial pieceof factual information, such as their name,occupation, or how much they paid for theirticket. Yet the permission extended, duringthese exchanges, for spectators to speak alsocreates the possibility that some might re-spond more vocally to open-ended promptssuch as ‘Someone else go’ (p. 18).

The potential for vocal audience responsehas proved one of the most controversialelements of The Author, since – in circum-stances where unexpected interjections havesuddenly been made – the four actors willmake no effort to respond and incorporatethem through spontaneous ad-libs. Anaccommodating pause will be left, andthen the actors will resume delivery of thescripted text. This approach has sometimesprompted hostility, even anger, from thosewho feel that audience participation hasbeen solicited and then frozen out; that theactors have shown themselves incapable ofimprovising.27 Yet the resistance to engagingwith such speakers is ethically consistent with

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25. Presumably for copyright reasons, these lyrics do not appearin the play’s published text. A stage direction simply notesthat ‘she sings some of a song from a West End musical’(p. 28). The words here are quoted from http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/highschoolmusical/wereallinthistogether.htm [accessed 27 June 2011].

26. Report and video online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8292680.stm [accessed 27 June 2011].

27. See, for example, some of the responses discussed in TimCrouch’s own contribution to this Forum, ‘Response andResponsibility’, pp. 416–22 and various speakers’ commentsin the subsequent ‘A Conversation about Dialogue’,pp. 423–30.

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the play’s commitment to eliciting individualrather than group responses: if a spectatorchooses to become ‘actor’ by speaking out,that is a choice and a right, and the unscriptedwords will be heard – whether witty, poignantor otherwise – without gloss or contradictionfrom the ‘official’ actors. But nor is it theactors’ responsibility to fold such interjectionsback into some open-ended process of chat-back, group therapy or forum theatre (aBoalian construct28 very much predicated oncommunity engagement). Their responsibility,rather, is to those who have come to see andhear and respond to the play as written. It isup to the impromptu speaker to take respon-sibility for his or her interjection, just as s/hewould for speaking out during any other play,or for leaving the auditorium.

The uneasy dynamics of audience involve-ment are illustrated with particular clarity by thesequence in which Esther, recounting herexperiences as the actress in Tim’s play, re-enacts the process of being ‘hotseated’ in roleduring rehearsals. The character she performs,Karen, represents not her role in Tim’s play, butan ostensibly ‘improvised’ recreation of avulnerable young woman Esther claims to havemet in a women’s shelter as part of her researchfor the role. Seated directly opposite her, and inrole as the fearless director of his own play, Timinsistently questions ‘Karen’ about her abusivefather and what he did to her – steadilyextracting graphic details from her even thoughshe repeatedly says that she does not want to talkabout it. The exchange is excruciating to watch,and ends with Tim asking a question that isbreathtaking in both its banality and insensitiv-ity: ‘How did that make you feel, your dad doingthose things?’ (p. 42). At this point Estherbreaks out of role as Karen and asks ‘Can westop, Tim?’ His response is to ignore her requestand open the ‘game’ up to the audience: ‘Wouldanyone else like to ask Karen any questions?You’re happy to improvise aren’t you Esther?’Understandably, this invitation is usually metwith stony silence from the audience, sinceasking further questions would seem to many, or

most, like a further abuse of both Karen andEsther. And yet individual spectators do some-times intervene with questions of their own.These hang in the air but are left – quiteunderstandably – unanswered by Esther.

Anyone speaking out at this moment willappear, to many, to be implicating themselvesin an act (or at least, a re-enactment) ofexploitation. Yet in doing so, they are in effectgiving verbal expression to the unspokenspectatorial situation. Even for those of uswho remain silent through this sequence, thereis a palpable sense that we are in some wayresponsible for its taking place: it has beenresearched and rehearsed for our benefit asspectators of ‘socially serious’ drama. The sceneis, of course, bleakly satirical, and Karen neverreally existed in real life, yet part of Crouch’sachievement here is to demonstrate that theline between fact and fiction is – at best – blurry.When Tim asks Karen ‘about why you’re here’,and she responds ‘In the shel’er?’, his clarifica-tion is ‘In the shelter or in the theatre. It’s up toyou. Wherever you want to be’ (p. 40). Onevery occasion I have seen the play, this line hasshattered the momentarily generated mentalimpression that we are indeed ‘in’ a women’sshelter, ‘with’ a victim of abuse. It comes as akind of relief to be reminded that this is only atheatre, and that Esther Smith (as the actressEsther, as the character Karen) is only acting.But I also know, with uncomfortable clarity,that people like Karen really do exist, and thatthe staged abuse reflects obliquely on realcircumstances. So Tim’s line implicates metoo: it is up to me whether I ‘want to be’ inthe shelter (with the abusive enquirers) or inthe theatre (pretending that this is all just makebelieve). The ethical implications of eitherchoice are acutely discomforting.

The World Outside

‘Make the audience feel the differences presentin the room and those outside of it’, writesTim Etchells in his ‘manifesto on liveness’:‘Give them the taste of sitting and laughingalone. The feel of a body that laughs in publicand then, embarrassed, has to doubt its

28. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 3rd edition (London:Pluto, 2000).

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action.’29 Crouch’s work fulfils these injunc-tions as powerfully as any I am aware of, but(as in the Karen scene) it does so not only byexploiting the ‘liveness’ of the performancesituation, but by fusing that experience withdramatic fictions that relate to real-worldexperience. Audiences are invited tosee themselves afresh, as being implicatedwithin the ideological context of the galleryor the theatre, but in both these plays Crouchalso telescopes our focus much further: asparticipating individuals rather than a groupof detached voyeurs, we are asked also toconsider our placement in relation to aglobalised context of material injustices.

This strategy is, perhaps, particularlyapposite within the art gallery context ofENGLAND, because such spaces are conven-tionally treated – like churches – as beingremoved from, or elevated above, such quo-tidian realities. As Douglas Crimp writes, ‘Themuseum constructs a cultural history bytreating its objects independently both of thematerial conditions of their own epoch and ofthose of the present.’30 Brian O’Dohertymakes a similar point in discussing themodernist emphasis on form over content:‘the picture plane, like an exclusive countryclub, keeps out reality and for good reason[. . .] Reality does not conform to the rules ofetiquette, subscribe to exclusive values, orwear a tie; it has a vulgar set of relations.’31

With ENGLAND, Crouch stages an irruptionof reality into the rarefied gallery space, notonly through an emphasis on physicalform (the awkward presence of breathing,sweating bodies) but through the projectionof narrative content, particularly in the play’ssecond act.

After the heart-attack conclusion of act one,ENGLAND’s resumption in a more conven-tionally ‘theatrical’ set-up extends the play’simplied critique of the gallery space by stepping‘outside’ it. Ostensibly, we are now no longer

‘in’ this gallery, but ‘in’ a westernised hotel inan unidentified Middle Eastern country;‘somewhere neutral’, the storyteller blithelyasserts (p. 47). The whiteness of the galleryspace, ostensibly a neutral surface on which tolocate globally appreciable artworks – ‘Art isuniversal’ (p. 23) – is now thrown intoperspective as ideologically indicative of theassumed, global hegemony of white wester-ners. It is a shift that Crouch has already hintedtowards during the first act, by having thestoryteller refer to a series of apparently non-white doctors: Dr Kumar the GP, Dr Frem-pong from Ghana at Guys, Mrs Raad from theLebanon at Papworth. The drain of trainedhealth professionals from poorer parts of theworld, to service western healthcare for higherwages, is a recognised (and deeply troubling)phenomenon of the globalised market econo-my.32 Now, in ENGLAND’s second act, it

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Image 5 Seating for Act Two of ENGLAND. NationalGallery, Melbourne. Photo: Tim Crouch.

29. Tim Etchells, ‘A six-thousand-and-forty-seven-wordmanifesto on liveness in three parts with three interludes’, inAdrian Heathfield (ed.), Live: Art and Performance(London: Routledge/Tate, 2004) pp. 210–17 (p. 215).

30. Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, p. 204.31. O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, p. 38.

32. See, for instance, Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge:Polity, 2007), pp. 189–90.

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becomes clear that the storyteller’s life has beensaved thanks to the transplantation of a heartextracted from an Asian man, Hassam.

The storyteller, who now acquires theculturally located name English in the printedtext, has come East to express her or his thanksto Hassam’s widow, for consenting to theorgan donation. Yet English is a fish out ofwater, whose ignorance about this newenvironment makes for some excruciatingexchanges. ‘Are they allowed Coke?’ s/hewonders aloud, after offering the widowrefreshment from a vending machine (p. 45).English seems to regard this Muslim woman asutterly alien, even primitive, and is taken abackto discover that she has a brother in Australia,that Hassam was a computer engineer, and

even that the city outside is modern andbustling: ‘This traffic. Could be anywhere’ (p.50). Some things, English discovers, really areuniversal.

In this second part of the play, Crouch andRingham again share the speaker’s role, leavingEnglish’s gender indeterminate. This time,however, they switch voice only once, withCrouch playing English in the first half of thescene, and Ringham in the second. The actornot playing English now plays the role ofInterpreter – truncating English’s often self-indulgently long-winded expressions of grati-tude into curt (English) summaries, and relay-ing the grieving wife’s (otherwise inaudible)responses back to him. In this equation, theseated audience is now cast in the role of thewife, and addressed directly by both speakers.Indeed, Crouch and Ringham both make apoint of picking out individual spectatorsthroughout this scene (‘maybe seven peopleeach’, he notes), and delivering lines to themwith unwaveringly direct eye contact. One hasto choose whether to hold the gaze and stareback, or break it and look shiftily away – either ofwhich has implications. We are being watched inour watching. ‘Because the audience are thatperson’, Crouch suggests, ‘ethically they areentered into the argument of the play – asphysical containers for the idea of that character.And my hope is that [this] gets them to sitforward in their chair, and feel connected, andfeel responsible’. Part of that sense of responsi-bility, in my own experience, stems from anuncomfortable awareness of the cultural dis-tance between myself, as a white, male, westerntheatre-goer, and the role in which I – we – havebeen (mis)cast; as an anonymous Islamic womanwhose face is veiled. ‘Hard to see how they’refeeling’, English notes in an aside to theInterpreter, ‘with just the eyes’ (p. 50).

What we learn, second hand, about thiswoman is far from reassuring. She claims tohave been persistently misinformed about herwounded husband’s fate, and regards him ashaving been ‘killed’ to save the life of thisEnglish (wo)man. Yet in the absence of anemoting actor to guide our responses, we haveto make our own (mis-)interpretations of suchclaims: is this woman righteously angry, coldly

Image 7 Seating for Act Two of ENGLAND. HughLane Gallery Dublin. Photo: Tim Crouch.

Image 6 Seating for Act Two of ENGLAND.Wiesbaden Museum, Oslo Photo: Tim Crouch.

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calculating, or irrational with grief? We learnthat she was offered first 300,000, then500,000, to consent to Hassam’s heart beingtaken from his vegetative, life-supported body,and this might tempt us to think that hagglinggot her a good price. But then, in another twistof translation, we learn that 500,000 in localcurrency is equivalent to about $US8,000.What price a non-western life, to perpetuate awestern one? Hassam’s life, we learn, wascurtailed by a head injury suffered in a bombblast outside the Marriott Hotel, which alsokilled an American official. He was collateraldamage in an anti-western attack, but as thewoman insists, via the Interpreter, ‘My hus-band’s death was not an accident’ (p. 54). Itwas, rather, a consequence of an unwelcome,neocolonial presence in this country – both atthe point of injury and the point of termination.

The presence of English, as an uninvitedvisitor, exacerbates this situation, and the pitchis queered still further by our attempts toassess the true ‘value’ of the gift that s/he hasbrought from home to give to the widow – anostensibly valuable piece of original artwork. Isthis an attempt at buying off English’sconscience? Is it an arrogant display of westernmunificence toward a ‘poor’ foreigner? Or is ita true gift, an attempt at thanks for whatcannot be reciprocated, with something thatcannot be reciprocated? English insists that thepainting is a thing of beauty as well as a thingof life-changing value, but what exactly is it? Isit the ‘small Willem de Kooning’, the mosttreasured artefact in English’s boyfriend’scollection? Since he reportedly ‘paid an armand a leg’ for it, a heart may seem a reasonabletrade-in (p. 19.) Or is it something moredisposable from their collection – the ‘smallGary Hume’ perhaps (p. 18)? The question ofwhat we, as observers, think English wouldreally be willing to give away to a stranger, aforeigner – in thanks for a life – is also aquestion for each of us. Indeed, it has sparkedsome vociferous debates in after-show discus-sions, as Crouch surely intended.

ENGLAND, then, sited in a gallery, iscentrally concerned with the perceived marketvalue of objects (art for a heart). Conversely,The Author, sited in the Royal Court Theatre,

revolves around the question of spectacle. Thegeopolitical persists as an underlying con-cern, but the question here is not ‘howmuch are we prepared to pay?’ but ‘howmuch are we prepared to see?’ Crouch’s textmercilessly satirises the Court’s in-yer-facetradition of staging ‘wankings and rapings andstabbings and shootings and bombings’ for itsaudience’s delectation – ‘It’s a private club forthe depraved!’ (p. 47). Yet The Author itselfasks us to look at some quite appalling material– including the beheading of an Americancontractor by terrorists, and finally an act ofchild sex abuse – and the fact that Crouch usesspoken language to conjure these images inindividual spectators’ imaginations, rather thanproposing any attempt at theatrical artifice torepresent them on stage, does not make themany more palatable. Indeed, one could arguethat by co-opting our imaginations in this way,Crouch makes the violence and abuse seem allthe more ‘real’.

Yet, as Ranciere persuasively argues in ‘TheIntolerable Image’ (published alongside thetitle essay in The Emancipated Spectator),‘the issue is not whether it is necessary toshow the horrors suffered by the victims ofsome particular violence’, but rather, ‘thesensible system in which it is done’;33 that is,the framing and contextualisation of images ofatrocity are of crucial importance. Rancierecites the example of the South African photo-grapher Kevin Carter, who took his own lifeafter the media outcry over a photographhe took of a starving child in the Sudan,stalked by a hungry vulture. Was it not the actof a human vulture to take and display such aphotograph?, Carter’s critics had demanded,ignoring his career-long concern to drawpublic attention to real-life injustice throughhis photojournalism. Such moralising re-sponses, Ranciere argues, are symptomatic of‘the duplicity of the system that simulta-neously solicits and declines such images’: wedemand sensationalism, and then condemn itwhen it upsets us.34 Ranciere goes on toanalyse the re-mediating response of Chilean

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33. Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 99, 100.34. Ibid., p. 99.

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artist Alfredo Jaar, whose installation TheSound of Silence re-contextualised Carter’snotorious photo as a momentary, flashingslide image – the vanishing climax to an8-minute series of texts and images summaris-ing his life and career.

The systemic ‘duplicity’ apprehended in‘The Intolerable Image’ was also apparent inthe predictably outraged press reaction to theRoyal Court premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blastedin 1995. That play’s transposition of adepraved war zone onto a Leeds hotel roomwas, by Kane’s own account, an attempt tohighlight the seeming indifference of Britishsociety toward the genocidal horrors thenbeing played out in the former Yugoslavia.Yet such abnegation of responsibility was, in asense, reiterated by the reviews: as Aleks Sierzhas pointed out, the critics’ ‘cries of disgustwere both ritualised and often frivolous. How

seriously can you take a review that comments,‘‘Ah, those old familiar faeces’’’.35 Kane’sstartling stage images of rape, buggery andchild abuse were intended to shock, and thecritics duly performed their shock, but debateabout her play was never really concerned withits alleged real-world referents: the theatreworld too, perhaps, operates as ‘an exclusivecountry club [that] keeps out reality and forgood reason’. Instead, opinion polarised intotwo, mutually reinforcing camps: the morallyappalled condemned Kane for parading suchfilth onstage, while the morally concerned sawin Blasted an expression of its author’s‘unleavened, almost puritanical moral outrage’(largely irrespective of what that rage might beabout).36 A similar pattern was repeated in

Image 8 Seating for The Author. Trafo, Budapest, 2010. Photo: Tim Crouch.

35. Sierz, quoting Michael Billington’s Guardian review, inIn-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 95.

36. John Peter’s Sunday Times review. Cited by Sierz, p. 96.

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1996 with responses to Shopping and Fucking:‘Ravenhill is profoundly moral in his portrai-ture of contemporary society’, Dan Rebellatowrote later, dismissing as short-sighted thosecritics who saw him simply as ‘purveyingsexually explicit, sensationalist, shock-loadeddrama’.37 What is being played out in suchbinarised arguments is a ‘distribution of thesensible’ in which plays are assumed to havebeen imbued by their authors with a fixed,self-contained set of meanings which are thereto be apprehended (or misunderstood) byaudiences, who absorb their (im)moral state-ments as more or less passive receivers of aone-way communication.

In The Author, however, Crouch attemptsto elude this all-too-familiar pattern – not onlyby actively encouraging individual, dissensualspectatorial responses, but by re-contextualis-ing the depiction of horror and abuse withinthe complex economy of theatrical productionitself. Thus, a strategy of textual juxtaposition,intercutting monologues by the four actors,creates a cumulative picture of the (fictional)play that Tim wrote, Vic and Esther appearedin, and Adrian saw. To judge from itsprotagonists’ names (Pavol and Esha), thisplay is a Blasted-like response to unspecifiedeastern European horrors, and Tim’s self-justifying explanations present the moral andaesthetic argument for its extreme imagery:‘The play was a poem really [. . .] The violence isnot the most important thing, which some ofthe reviewers seemed to suggest. But it can’t beavoided. I mean look around us’ (p. 30).(Blasted, its director James MacDonald hadsimilarly insisted, talks ‘honestly about violence,but in order to do so it has to shock’.38) As Timcontinues, however, his words are set againstAdrian’s chirpy announcements about how andwhen he booked his ticket for the show (‘I’m a‘‘Friend’’! A Friend of the Royal Court Theatre[. . .] Is anyone else a ‘‘Friend’’? [. . .] Are you?Well done us! Hooray!’), and against Esther’sgraphic explanations as to how the onstageviolence was engineered theatrically: ‘The firstquestion everyone would ask us is, ‘‘What’s the

blood made out of?’’’ (pp. 31–32). The effectof such juxtapositions is at first blackly funny(again, spectators are made complicit throughtheir laughter), but as the account of theproduction process continues, it becomeschillingly clear that the company’s prioritieshave become grotesquely distorted. Vic de-scribes a research trip out to an unidentified,war-torn country as ‘the most useful thing’ forgetting inside his character’s psychology(p. 38), while Esther stresses that she was‘really lucky’ to find Karen: ‘I met a womanwho had been raped as a teenager by her father.That’s just like my character, I said!’ (p. 39).

What builds up is a grimly satirical, butnonetheless chilling picture of a situation inwhich real-world violence and suffering havebeen exploited to serve purportedly artisticends. The ‘moral’ claims made for suchgraphic plays are thus thrown into relief: whatbenefit is served, to anyone, by aestheticisingforeign horrors? Is this not, as in ENGLAND,a form of neocolonial capitalisation on thesuffering of others? ‘What we are prepared tolook at in theatre should not be seen as aseparate act from what we are prepared to lookat in everyday life’, Crouch maintains, becauseeven as spectators, we are involved in real-world feedback loops of action and reaction,truth and consequence. Witness Esther’srecollection of the day when the companyviewed a YouTube video of a terrorist outrageduring rehearsals: ‘And it happened there, in aroom in Chelsea. That beheading. With us allgathered around a laptop. On a coffee break’(p. 51). An observer cannot presume to takerefuge in either the pretence of physicaldistance, the anonymity of audience collectiv-ity, or the figleaf excuse of ‘poetics’. ‘Lookaround you and tell me that this world is notfull of horrors’, Tim exhorts his audience,immediately before asking those immediatelyaround him, on a more practical level, ‘Look.Look. Can you see all right?’ (p. 35).

Of course, the issue of responsibility cutsboth ways, and Crouch is in no way trying toevade his own central role in The Author’shorrors. This much is clear in his decision toplace himself – or at least, a character bearinghis name – within the play as its primary abuser.

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37. Dan Rebellato. ‘Introduction’ to Mark Ravenhill’s Plays:One (London: Methuen, 2001), p. x.

38. MacDonald cited in Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 97.

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It is ‘Tim’ that drives his cast members Estherand Vic into research on physical and sexualviolence that leaves them personally trauma-tised, and it is ‘Tim’ who – in the play’s final,intolerable sequence – describes masturbatingover child porn on the Internet, as Esther’sbaby sleeps next to him in a cot. From theoutset, Crouch was adamant that he had to bethe one playing this role: ‘the Royal Courtwanted to know if I would be up for somebodyelse to play the character of Tim Crouch, and Ijust looked at my watch. Me being on stagewith my words, it’s not a control thing, it’sabout taking responsibility. I need to be in it,and it needs to be about me.’ Unwilling to takerefuge in the excuse of fictionality by havinganother actor play words that are ‘just an act’,Crouch consciously blurs the fact/fiction dis-tinction, so that something ‘real’ is felt to behappening – particularly in Tim’s final confes-sion. He thus makes himself the willingscapegoat for those appalled or simply confusedby his play; he is there to be seen to take theblame – confessing to his guilt and volunteeringto pluck out his own eyes for watching childporn, to remove ‘the offending articles’. If hedoes not do so, it is because ‘you won’t forgiveme, anyway. I know you. Look at you’ (p. 58).

If The Author functions not only as a storyabout its author, and his actors, but as aninvitation to look at ourselves, then this finalscene crystallises the play’s preoccupations. Theshift of scene – from rehearsal and production ofTim’s play to his private Internet cruising –seems jarring on one level, but this move fromthe public sphere of the theatre to the solitude ofthe study enables Crouch to focus still moreintensely on the question of what are we willingto look at when there is no reciprocal gazedirected back at us; when we think nobody iswatching. ‘Images of flesh! I’m not proud, butwe’ve all done it, haven’t we? Haven’t we?’ Timasks, pointedly: ‘A couple of clicks before bed’(pp. 56–57). Perhaps some in the audience dis-identify with this attempt to assume theuniversality of one man’s behaviour; perhapsothers feel implicated here, or even exposed;perhaps others still start scouring the oppositeseating bank for likely wankers. Regardless, asTim’s narration continues, recounting the view-

ing of child pornography with which – onehopes – none of his spectators can directlyidentify, it is nonetheless difficult to avoid anuncomfortable sense that we are all beingimplicated here, merely by listening. Tim’slanguage leaves strikingly ambiguous thequestion of whether he actually abusesthe baby lying next to him, or watches someoneelse abusing a baby onscreen: ‘I watch the penisjust gently being placed against the baby’smouth [. . .] Actually quite gently. Quite lov-ingly’ (p. 57). Whether or not the penis inquestion is his, what appals here is the sense ofdetachment in the narration – the idea that onecould maintain any kind of observationaldistance on such a scene. It is difficult to drawany viable moral distinction between watchingpaedophilia for pleasure, and the actual act ofchild abuse. But if seeing and doing arefunctional equivalents in this case, then are theynot in others? And if so, what exactly have we gotourselves into?

The last line of The Author, in perfor-mance, is ‘The writing is leaving the writer’(p. 59). Tim gets up and exits the space,ostensibly as a signal of his suicide. On onelevel, his parting shot seems counter-intuitive:surely the writer is leaving the writing?Indeed, in the published version of the play(which went to press before the Royal Courtrun opened), the text continues after Tim’sexit – with Adrian asking if anyone would liketo say anything, and improvising an attemptat healing and closure for the audience:‘Together they will deal with what’s left – inwhatever way is felt appropriate in thatmoment – enabling the audience to leave thetheatre’ (p. 61). In practice, however, at-tempts at realising this ‘unscripted’ endingwere dispensed with very quickly, as Crouchand his colleagues realised that the play’s ownlogic militated against any such forcedgesture of being ‘all in this together’. Rather,the writing must indeed leave the writer, andbe allowed to sit quietly with the spectator.What follows Tim’s exit is a silence thatextends until people eventually begin pickingup their coats to leave. That extended,suspended pause stands as the most extra-ordinary testament to The Author’s impact in

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performance: the persistent absence of ap-plause at the end of performances providesparadoxical evidence of a collective desire todwell with individual responses and feelings,rather than submit to the habitual ritual ofcommunal hand-clapping. Something real hashappened in this room, in which all of us,whether more or less willingly, have beeninvolved. In these moments, we are indeed‘all in this together’ – alone with our private,conflicting thoughts.

Conclusion

In a 2008 interview with Crouch, I raised withhim the notion of spectator as ‘witness’ – a termoften favoured in discussions of contemporaryperformance to suggest something more ethi-cally involved than passive observation.39 Tell-ingly, however, he rejected the term, on thegrounds that ‘a witness still implies a thingviewed, rather than actively involved in. ‘‘Iwitnessed that accident’’ would imply that I saw

that accident but wasn’t involved in thataccident, and wasn’t responsible for thataccident’. A piece of theatre, by contrast, isenacted because we have volunteered ourselvesas its audience. We are responsible for it – and inthese plays, visibly so. That kind of exposuremight upset or even anger us, but as Timcomments in The Author, ‘even missing thebottom step can invoke a feeling of incensedoutrage at the invasion of the physical – intoour ordered little world’ (p. 33). In this playand ENGLAND, Crouch orchestrates a physi-cal invasion of the ordered little worlds oftheatre and gallery by the awkwardly real bodiesof his audience. It is very difficult, whenwitnessing these plays, to maintain any pretenceat being simply an ‘Eye’, casting divine moraljudgements from some privileged distance.Instead, ‘the Spectator’ – both emancipatedand implicated, ‘slightly clumsy’ and perhapseven feeling ‘a little dumb’ – is locatedmaterially in both these spaces and the widerworld they are part of. This spectator is, almostcertainly, ‘you or me’.

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39. See, for instance, Peggy Phelan’s Foreword to Tim Etchells’sCertain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and ForcedEntertainment (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 9–10, aswell as Etchells’s own commentary on the topic on pp. 17–18, 58–59. Also Karen Christopher’s ‘Beginnings’, in SmallActs of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, ed. byStephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish (London:Routledge, 2007), p. 51.

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