Paris & theatre spaces
I’ve been to Paris not for anything theatrical, I mainly ate good food and talked drugs, but it did remind me of my trip to Peter Brook’s Theatre, Bouffe du Nord to see Caryl Churchill’s Far Away.
To quote the Sunday Times, it is “an apocalyptic play, a play of an Armageddon created by its victims. …a question of silent consent, of turning a blind eye, of not standing up for anybody until, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, there is nobody left to stand up for you.”
The play is more abstruse, in my opinion, than that but good none the less. However, my first sensory experience was of the theatre itself.
Site specific, in many ways is all the rage – what site specific does is emphasise the power of a place. (Not that there’s anything new in the use of found space. The modern theatre evolved from galleried Jacobean inn-courtyards and their continental equivalents.) The Bouffe du Nord does exactly that.
It is hard to describe the quality the space gives you. On the one hand it is a stripped down, bare grand theatre of old. On the other hand it still evokes everything a theatre should be:
The experience of theatre should be both magical and challenging.
“The only purpose of a theatre is to reinforce the relationship between audience and performer,” Tompkins of Howarth Tompkins declares (rebuilder of the Royal Court and Young Vic, in progress). “We’re post-black-box, but pre-the next orthodoxy.”
I believe he is also influenced by the late Michael Elliott, celebrated artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre (see links) , who was on the building committee of the National Theatre.
Live theatre is a shifting rainbow and a conventional theatre is a heavy, inert piece of real estate. They don’t really belong together. “Isn’t it time we stopped lumbering our grandchildren with our mistakes?” he wrote in 1973. “In future shouldn’t we try to retain a certain lightness and sense of improvisation, and sometimes build in materials that do not require a bomb to move them? In short shouldn’t we stop building for posterity?”
Bouffe du Nord straddles that somewhat, being an abandoned theatre, refound and so lighter than a lumbering place. However, Elliot has a point and theatre and thus theatre spaces should at best always be a shifting rainbow and as a writer I try and remember that.
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About me
I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.
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Recent Work
Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).
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Nakamitsu
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Yellow Gentlemen
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