While television programming in the US and the UK during the nineties and noughties provided a steady stream of crime-scene investigation, talent shows and ethnographic observation of ordinary people, theatre also took a turn to the diagnostic. In a shift of focus from end to means, theatre became obsessed with the difficulty of unmasking the truth, and with the forensic endeavour needed to do so. Echoing the espousal of ‘naked truth’ and ‘unauthored characters’ that accompanied the birth of theatrical naturalism in the late nineteenth century, the most impactive works to usher in the twenty-first century, works as generically diverse as Desert Rain (Blast Theory), Blasted (Sarah Kane) and Fires in the Mirror (Anna Deavere Smith), propound an opposition between raw, pure, ‘found’ reality and inorganic, hegemonic modes of image production. The rhetoric that helps to make these works theatrical phenomena charges these hegemonic modes – which include, ironically, naturalistic theatre, as well as tabloid journalism and Hollywood film – with the mass production of a parasitic, informational coating that adheres invisibly to bare events and real identities. Along with a swathe of verbatim/documentary drama, much of it authored by journalists who turn to theatre as, or in collaboration with, playwrights, Desert Rain, Fires in the Mirror and Blasted deploy theatre forensically, upholding the idea that theatre is well disposed to identify and remove the informational skin that coats events and identities, ridding reality of its parasitic disguise. At the same time, and according to their specific artistic and ideological agendas, Kane, Smith and Blast Theory equivocate with theatre's diagnostic power, jamming the machinery even as they deploy it. That jamming of the forensic machinery is even more explicit in If That's All There Is, by UK-based company Inspector Sands, and in Must, by American performance artist Peggy Shaw in conjunction with British company Clod Ensemble. These two shows, I will suggest, resist theatre's turn to the diagnostic in particularly provocative ways.
Before discussing these contemporary examples more closely, I will try to situate the notion of theatre as a diagnostic regime diachronically, in relation to late nineteenth-century naturalism and its legacy, and synchronically, in relation to other cultural arenas such as reality television and tabloid journalism.
Diagnosis before and after naturalism
As de Certeau elucidates, modern Western medical practice evolved between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in close tandem with juridical practice.Footnote 1 A triadic process of clinical diagnosis became the conventional, and therefore ordinarily invisible, means by which medicine and the legal system inscribed the laws of a culture onto a social body, and onto the individual bodies of citizens. This triadic process – reading of symptoms→pronouncement of the subject's condition→prescription of treatment – not only underpins modern medicine, it underpins modernity. It is a process that bears specifically upon the evolution in the nineteenth and subsequent centuries of theatre theory, and is germane to the watershed movement in theatrical practice: naturalism.
Structurally and rhetorically, the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, Hauptmann and Zola echo the triadic process of medical diagnosis. The expository, symptom-reading phase of the well-made play as it was adapted by these naturalistic dramatists depicts a situation in a manner that scratches away at the surface, uncovering causes of a brewing conflict. The second phase involves accusations of malevolence that identify a breakdown of norms, symptoms of a malfunction in the social body. The final phase, the denouement, purges the effects of that breakdown/malfunction. These three phases might themselves be summarized as: reading of symptoms→pronouncement of the subject's condition→prescription of treatment.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Chekhov trained as a physician, and Strindberg and Ibsen as chemists, these playwrights consciously conceived the form and content of their drama in relation to medicine. Strindberg's The Father (1887) features a gnomic Doctor, while Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1896) features a more expansive, philosophizing one in Astrov. Ibsen's Ghosts (1881) centres on Oswald's congenital syphilis, while his next play, Enemy of the People (1882), similarly replete with metaphors that elide physical and moral health, centres on a conscious representation by the playwright of himself, Dr Stockmann. The period between 1850 and 1880 saw germ theory, which propounds that many diseases are caused by microorganisms, make its determinate but controversial mark on drama, as well as on medicine. When Dr Stockmann gleans evidence that the baths are infected with germs he believes caused the cases of gastric fever and typhoid he has been seeing, those germs become a metaphor for the human ‘vermin’, as Stockmann calls them, that he should like to see ‘wiped out’.Footnote 2
It was Zola, not a physician himself, who was most vocal in articulating naturalism's diagnostic intent. In a letter to his publisher in 1868, Zola described his writing as treatment ‘for the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world’.Footnote 3 As Stan Garner recounts, Zola opposes naturalism's consciously ‘medicalized presentation of character’ to theatre's ‘historical reliance on artifice, rhetoric, and convention’.Footnote 4 Seeking to correct theatre's institutionally corrupt ‘counterfeiting of nature’, Zola famously espouses the naturalistic mantra ‘that truth has no need of clothing; it must walk naked’.Footnote 5
However, while early naturalistic dramatists frequently refer to bodily decay, they crucially distance themselves from physical reality. In a statement that might, prima facie, seem at odds with the ruthlessly diagnostic tone, structure and imagery of a play like Enemy of the People, and with his own rhetoric about the truth walking naked, Zola states that the naturalists’ policy is to leave physical reality to the medics and concentrate on the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of the human being. He declares,
If the terrain of the experimental physician is the body of man as it manifests itself through its organs, both in their normal and pathological condition, our terrain is equally the body of man in its cerebral and sensory manifestations, both in their healthy and morbid condition.Footnote 6
Far from taking naturalism out of the realm of medical diagnosis, Zola's overt sublimation of the body's physical life highlights a rule that usually remains unwritten. Diagnosis is the subjective identification of malfunction by appearances, or, as Zola puts it, ‘manifestations’, through which causes are evinced. The unwritten rule is that the subjectivity of this process of deduction must be denied. Medical and, following its lead, theatrical diagnosis erects a wall between subjectivity and objectivity. Maxim Gorky, for instance, states that ‘the characters of the drama should act independently of the volition of the dramatist in accordance with the law of their individual natures’.Footnote 7 For Gorky, as for Zola, characters exist in a state of nature, independent of the scientific intervention of the objective observer. A character's subjectivity is required to be both bound and unbound. Existing prior to the moral and aesthetic conventions that render it legible, it is nonetheless entirely dependent on those conventions, and on the diagnostician whose expertise harnesses them. Only after the body's materiality has been rationalized by the purported objectivity of the expert can the human being become a character/patient, legible as a carrier of symptoms.
Despite the fertility and breadth of theatre's twentieth-century manifestations, this paradoxical diagnostic imperative – to see the human being as unbound/free/natural while simultaneously asserting the power of the expert observer to fix being – has never been resolved. Lambasting the putative displacement of free will onto characters who have none, Pirandello's 1925 Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author responds to ‘the charge brought against [him] that the character of the Father was not what it should have been because it stepped out of its quality and position as a character and invaded at times the author's province and took it over’.Footnote 8 Pirandello refuses to put himself in the position of God, a position he describes as endowing characters ‘with being, [but] without the reason for being’.Footnote 9 A few decades later, Beckett's characters reflect a similar authorial disquiet, though the notion of God has conspicuously disappeared. But the diagnostic imperative has resurfaced with a vengeance in the last two decades.
The contamination of the real and the virtual
Given that, in medical diagnosis, symptoms are assessed according to the departure of the patient's symptoms from a perceived natural functioning of the body, it is ironically fitting that, in the twentieth century, experimentation in theatre was frequently calibrated in terms of divergence from naturalism. By the start of the twenty-first century, though, a time of continuing anxiety about the etiolation of the real, there is a revival of the diagnostic tone, and particularly the diagnostic rhetoric, of naturalism. A range of theatre-makers echo Zola's call for the truth to walk naked, free of theatrical artifice, but they do so far more self-consciously, reflecting the passage from Beckett to Blast Theory, during which reflexive interrogation of the artifice of theatre and of life became increasingly conventional.
A case in point, and one of the most vaunted experiments in live (though predominantly virtual) art at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Desert Rain (2000), by UK-based collective Blast Theory, casts spectators as players in a Gulf War-themed game that takes the form of a performative mission. Each visitor to Desert Rain is told to shed their outer garments and don a black hooded jacket, and is given a magnetic swipe card representing their target (the person they must find). They are then grouped into regiments of six. Only if the whole troop completes the journey together is the mission deemed a success. Obstacles along the way – including a large water screen onto which are projected images of the 1990–1 Gulf War, and through which performers unexpectedly emerge – (con)fuse the virtual with the live. This confusion extends beyond completion of the mission, when players are instructed to stand and watch their target being interviewed in a hotel room of which the players’ viewing environment is an uncanny replica. Each target has a connection to the war, but the interviews seem designed, more than anything, to leave the player pondering sardonic juxtapositions of reality and illusion. Glen Fitzpatrick, a British soldier, reflects on his awe at seeing missiles, the whole machinery of war, up close and personal. His testimony ends, ‘Then you've got to get back to the real world, or, well, I might put that the other way round.’ Another target, actor Sam Halpenny, describes what it was like to shoot Bravo Two Zero in a simulated warzone constructed in the Kalahari Desert. This interview ends as wryly as Fitzpatrick's. When Halpenny's beeper goes off, he gets up to switch it off, mumbling that he thinks it is broken, but then thinks again: ‘hang on; it says, “please phone your agent.”’
While, as its marketing states, Desert Rain ‘looks for the feint line between the real and the fictional’ in ‘a world where Gulf War images echo Hollywood images’, it predominantly enjoys blurring that line.Footnote 10 Walk the walk though it does of their anti-Hollywood rhetoric, the piece also evidences Blast Theory's reliance on screen imagery to elucidate the machinery of illusion. Desert Rain both bemoans and models what Gabriella Giannachi terms ‘contamination of the real and the virtual’.Footnote 11 Endorsing Baudrillard's assertion that ‘the role of the media, advertising, and of the entertainment industries in the presentation of events is casually misleading at best and perniciously deceptive at worst’, Blast Theory cite Paul Patton:
Baudrillard's labelling ‘of events as virtual is related to the idea that real events lose their identity when they attain the velocity of real time information, or to employ another metaphor, when they become encrusted with the information which represents them.’ In this sense, while televisual information claims to provide immediate access to real events, in fact what it does is produce informational events which stand in for the real, and which ‘inform’ public opinion which in turn affects the course of subsequent events, both real and informational. As consumers of mass media, we never experience the bare material event but only the informational coating which renders it ‘sticky and unintelligible like the oil-soaked sea bird’.
There are many things to unpack in Patton's synthesis of Baudrillard, but Blast Theory unpack them only sparingly. They align themselves with Baudrillard's quasi-apocalyptic view that what passes for ‘the real’ in the age of ‘televisual information’ is a spectral reality-effect, produced when an ‘informational coating’ is slathered onto the ‘bare material event’. The opposition of ‘real events’ to ‘real time information’ suggests that it is the packaging of events as a consumable flow that clones the ‘material event’, changing it stealthily into an ‘informational event, which stand[s] in for the real’. Real-time packaging brings the event to life, but it is an illusory life: spectral, hollow, unnatural.
While germ theory furnished Ibsen et al. with imagery of a host being stealthily infected by a foreign body, Baudrillard's reading of the age of ‘televisual information’ furnishes Blast Theory with the metaphor of the ‘oil-soaked sea bird’, emblematizing a real/host ‘encrusted with information’. The idea of nature being invaded by foreign bodies is, in the Baudrillardian paradigm, still fundamental to the perception of cultural dysfunction, but the mode of invasion is slightly different. The foreign body does not need to bide its time, living inside and slowly attacking the host (‘the bare material event’); an invisible, parasitic skin, it slips over the host, leeching its authenticity.
Forensic reality shows
Blast Theory's anxiety about information coating the material event is not merely a corollary of their interest in virtual reality; a similar concern infuses other late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century theatrical forms. If the high/low distinction still applies to aesthetic forms, documentary theatre and reality television would seem to be worlds apart. There are, however, significant commonalities. Both forms of infotainment focus on the discovery of the real, and on the procedures that facilitate that discovery; both are on the hunt for bare material. In documentary theatre, the quarry is the bare material event, which the theatre-makers laboriously extricate from its informational coating; in reality television, it is the extraordinary nugget of talent or personality, which the programme-makers tease out of its unremarkable shell. Both forms boast the ability to satisfy that desire through forensic investigation.
While ‘forensic’ has come to routinely denote the application of scientific methods to investigate crime, it used to refer more explicitly to the opening up of private life into the public arena of a law court. In older usage, forensic, from the Latin forensis, meant ‘in open court, public, what is out of doors’. These denotations still obtain: like late nineteenth-century naturalistic drama, contemporary reality shows put private worlds on trial. But in current usage, the word ‘forensic’ immediately connotes crime scenes, and laboratories involved in criminol detection. Access to these areas is restricted to experts. Whereas, in naturalism, the art was to make the playwright invisible, so that the characters could act according to their own nature, of their own volition, the technical expertise of those determining the real is on display in the contemporary reality show. Anna Deavere Smith's early 1990s interview-based performances Fires in the Mirror and Twilight were lauded for their forensic sifting of the ordinary – normal non-fluencies of speech, banalities of opinion – uncovering jewels of insight and resourcefulness. The leading edge of a wave of verbatim theatre coterminous with an equally strong wave of reality television, Smith's On the Road: A Search for American Character (of which Fires and Twilight are instalments) continues to be cited by UK makers of verbatim theatre such as Alecky Blythe, director of the company Recorded Delivery. Like talent-spotter Simon Cowell, a rare example of a British television celebrity making it big in the US, Smith is a facilitator as (in)famous and accomplished as those whose talent she facilitates.
Diagnostic genres par excellence, reality television and documentary penetrate the everyday with a reading that extracts that valuable commodity, the ordinary real, from myths that encrust it. The deceptively ordinary emails and diary entries of an extraordinary young woman were gleaned and transformed into the powerful verbatim piece My Name Is Rachel Corrie.Footnote 12Talking to Terrorists (2005) transmits the frisson felt by author Robin Soans as he goes behind the doors and inside the minds of extraordinary yet ordinary terrorists and their ordinary yet extraordinary victims. Soans's universalizing emphasis on everyday bodily behaviour – romantic dreaming about boys or girls, liking certain kinds of biscuit, needing to go to the toilet – breaks down connotations of ‘terrorism’ with foreignness.Footnote 13 The play implies that these natural behaviours are a ‘real’ that we can all access, inviting us to follow the text's lead in extracting that real from myths that attach themselves to the label ‘terrorist’. In The Laramie Project, members of New York-based Tectonic Theatre dig beneath the surface of a small US town to examine the homophobia one might find in many small towns, before picking compellingly away at the question of how ordinary or extraordinary are those who tortured Matthew Shepard.Footnote 14
A review in the Chicago Free Press of the United States Theatre Project's 2008 docudrama Columbinus, which styles itself as inspired by The Laramie Project, associates verbatim theatre with television shows like CSI: ‘No crime scene investigation’, it enthuses, ‘could be more meticulous’ than this theatre piece.Footnote 15 Such rhetoric about meticulousness is typical of the critical reception of, and helps to constitute, the genre of verbatim theatre. It evidences an urge to invest in the theatre-maker's expertise in prizing the bare truth from the clamour of clashing subjectivities. Perhaps because our anxiety about the etiolation of the real is so strong, there has been renewed desire in the last two decades – despite, or maybe because of Pirandello's propulsive mockery of the idea of the god-like dramatist and everything that has followed since – to invest in the diagnostic objectifying of chaotic subjectivities. It is not surprising, in such an era, that journalists should turn to theatre.
Journalism under the microscope
Not only has journalism been the content of a lot of theatre, the roles of playwright and journalist have, also, frequently melded. Journalists such as Katharine Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian (who collaborated with Alan Rickman to script My Name is Rachel Corrie), Victoria Brittain (who teamed up with Gillian Slovo to write Guantanamo), and New Yorker staff writer turned playwright George Packer (author of Betrayed), turned to theatre to transcend, and attack, the dumbed-down, sound-bite tendency of their own conventional outlets. Packer reports that his turn to theatre came after interviewing two Iraqis for a story about the war: ‘Their voices were in my head, and I wanted to do them more justice than I could even in a 16,000-word magazine article.’Footnote 16
Journalists have themselves frequently been portrayed on stage. A landmark British play of the mid-1990s, Sarah Kane's Blasted (Royal Court, 1995), features a journalist, Ian, as its protagonist. When interviewers kept asking about the graphic imagery of Blasted, Kane kept underlining that the play was about journalistic responses to events, and the responses that journalism engendered in the public:
The thing that shocks me the most is that they seem to have been more upset by the presentation of violence than by violence itself. A 15-year-old girl has just been raped in a wood but there's more space in the tabloids about my play than about this brutal act. That's the kind of journalism that the play absolutely condemns.Footnote 17
Scrutiny of journalistic ethics on (particularly the London) stage is often somewhat forgotten amongst the things that Blasted is seen to have galvanized, including in-yer-face theatre. The contribution made by Blasted to theatrical debate about journalistic ethics is an important, though by no means transparent, one.
Kane targets the categorical thinking by which journalism justifies its prejudices and excesses. In his introduction to Kane's Complete Plays, David Greig identifies Blasted as the first of a quartet of plays exploring what 4:48 Psychosis describes as a triad of ‘Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander’.Footnote 18 Ian, states Greig, is ‘a journalist bystander who becomes a perpetrator, and finally a victim’.Footnote 19 Ian's misogyny and defensiveness, which come to the fore when he becomes the victim, are carefully calibrated, according, as Helen Iball puts it, to ‘distinctions’ on which ‘his profession as a tabloid journalist is shown to depend’.Footnote 20 Ian tells the Soldier, ‘I'm a home journalist for Yorkshire. I don't cover foreign affairs’, and that ‘soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land’ is not a story. ‘It has to be . . . personal. Your girlfriend, she's a story. Soft and clean. Not you. Filthy, like the wogs.’Footnote 21 Through every act of diagnosis it performs, the diagnostic tradition to which Ian adheres keeps foreign bodies well away from the home bodies it serves. But Kane's Soldier, who visits atrocities on Ian including raping him and sucking out his eyes, refuses to accept Ian's assessment of his responsibilities as a reporter. David Toole, who played Ian in Graeae's 2006 production of Blasted, describes the Soldier's compulsion ‘to tell this story and that's why it builds up to that rape because Ian is just not getting it and the Soldier will do anything to get the story across to him’.Footnote 22
There is a horrible continuity between the discourse within and discourse around Blasted. As Elaine Aston elucidates, a play inspired by Kane's outrage at ‘news reporting that kept events in Yugoslavia at a distance and in other ways trivialized by turning attention away from post-Cold War politics to “sex scandals (which sell more papers)”’ became subject to the very ‘switching between news- and scandal-reporting’ it attacks.Footnote 23 Kane's contribution to debate about journalism has been further buried by the sheer volume of other plays of the era that have scrutinized the profession.
Fleet Street editorial veteran and former theatre critic Bill Hagerty observes in 2007 that theatre's ‘love affair’ with journalism is long-standing – its products including Broadway comedy (The Front Page, 1928) and drama (Inherit the Wind, 1957), as well as British plays such as Stoppard's Night and Day (1978) and Brenton and Hare's Pravda (1985) – but ‘burgeons’ before and after the turn of the millennium.Footnote 24Complicit (Old Vic, 2009) depicts an American journalist pressured to reveal his sources, The Reporter (National Theatre, 2007) by Nicholas Wright delves into the mind of the late James Mossman, a BBC correspondent widely credited with shifting the role of the interviewer from broadcast-friendly presenter to tough questioner. The cryptic suicide note left by Mossman – ‘I can no longer bear it’ – is the catalyst for Wright's resonant investigation. In Steve Thompson's Damages (Bush Theatre, 2004), a tabloid newspaper office receives topless pictures of a children's TV presenter and legal/ethical/emotional arguments ensue about whether to publish; Ron Hutchinson's Topless Mum (2008) at the Tricycle Theatre treads similar ground. In Steven Lally's Oh Well Never Mind Bye (2009), which portrays journalistic responses to the de Menezes shooting, one of the hacks rehearses a familiar definition of his profession: ‘journalism is the best we can do with the information available’.Footnote 25 This cues a portrayal of that reality in the world of twenty-four-hour news that Vikram Dodd sees as ‘a theatrical version of [Nick Davies's book] Flat Earth News, even featuring Davies's term, “churnalism” – the churning out by desk-bound reporters of articles based on news agency wires, press releases and spin’.Footnote 26 Dodd is tired of staged questioning of journalistic practice, but there is no sign of it abating. Recent examples include Stiffed, which examines newspaper coverage of the MPs’ expenses scandal, along with revivals of Michael Frayn's Alphabetical Order, set in a chaotic regional newsroom (recently revived in a touring production by Hampstead Theatre), and Buried Alive by Philip Osment, yet another play about the ethics of photojournalism (first produced at Hampstead in 2001, revived at the Rose Theatre in 2010).
Distillation versus irony
Anna Deavere Smith sets her work in opposition to sound-bite journalism, in which, according to Smith, truth is dispensed in easily digestible packages. Her dramaturgy is valorized for scraping away layers of sedimented commentary to get to the essence of unmediated human nature. As Smith outlines in her introduction to Fires, her verbatim reperformances of responses by her interview subjects modelled the idea that truth was embodied, that it came through the humanity of utterances, through flesh, through presence. Her work asserts (a) that language is where identity becomes readable, but (b) that reading entails painstaking observation.
Smith wants to reclaim language from its degradation by spin. While American public-relations pioneer Edward Bernays is usually seen as the father of spin, the terms ‘spin’ and ‘spin doctor’ enter common parlance in the 1990s. Anxiety about the role of spin in binding contemporary politics more firmly than ever to journalism – Alastair Campbell, indicatively, was a Daily Mirror hack before becoming Prime Minister Blair's spin doctor – is key to the sense of etiolated reality that fuels the diagnostic turn.
In opposition to ‘churnalism’, producers of verbatim theatre, including the pioneering Nicholas Kent (Tricycle Theatre), describe their method as ‘distillation’, referring to the careful processing of raw material such as interviews, transcripts and reports.Footnote 27 ‘Distillation’ suggests a processing that makes potent by making pure. In its process of refinement, its filtering out, verbatim theatre strives to break down the informational coating that pollutes the bare material event.
The ascetic quality of both the rhetoric around and performance aesthetic of much verbatim theatre seems designed to arrest spin via a media-refusing, stripped-down aesthetic. In sharp contrast to this ascetic approach, other theatrical experimentation that garnered attention in the last two decades (including Desert Rain) foregrounded playful manipulation of media, setting ‘real-time’ readings against technologically recorded information, spontaneity against script. The British National Theatre produced Waves (2006) and . . . some trace of her (2008), both directed by Katie Mitchell, adaptations of novels by Woolf and Dostoyevsky in which onstage filming and screening of the action infiltrated the action as a layer of reflexive, often ironic, commentary. Forced Entertainment, the independent but highly established British company of which Tim Etchells is the director, stretched irony to the point of self-sabotage in much of their work, including The World in Pictures (2006) and Etchells’ own live commentary on found video clips in Instructions for Forgetting (2001).
Unleashing awkwardness within a frame that announces itself as neat, ambitiously ordered, a kind of failure infuses Mitchell's adaptations and Forced Entertainment's projects. As Sara Jane Bailes puts it, failure ‘challenges the cultural dominance of instrumental rationality and the fictions of continuity that bind the way we imagine and manufacture the world’.Footnote 28 However, while ‘failure is generative, prolific even’, its generative power has weakened as tropes of failure have become ever more firmly embedded in a contemporary theatrical parlance steeped in irony. That irony, which leads to the kind of self-sabotage evident in the Mitchell adaptations, in Forced Entertainment's work, and in Desert Rain, is a metastatic progression of the reflexivity that, as Marc Robinson observes, became extremely conspicuous in theatre during the 1980s.Footnote 29
Herbert Blau roots theatre's interrogation of its own rendering of reality in the work of Beckett, in whose plays
the appearances from which theatre is made and upon which it reflects are conceptually elaborated and in turn reflected upon until there is a denial, or refusal, by means of theatre of the distressing and maybe crippling notion that in life there is nothing but theatre.Footnote 30
If British company Inspector Sands are anything to go by, the existential question of whether there is anything real in life or in theatre, and whether it is possible to separate the two, still haunts theatre-makers personally, politically and professionally.
Evading diagnosis
Deploying gaps and ambiguities to draw the spectator into the role of diagnostician, Inspector Sands's Hysteria (2006) depicts a heterosexual dinner date that is a conversational minefield of second-guessing, projection, entrapment. Pressure to say the right thing at the right time is punctuated by an obsessive, paranoid waiter, who makes frequent ambiguous reference in the form of charades and exclamations to apocalyptic scenarios in which misunderstanding leads to catastrophe. The date is preceded by a prologue speech to the audience that is reminiscent, in its enigmatic, pseudo-pedagogical, questionably de-matrixed tone, of Forced Entertainment's The World in Pictures. Ben Lewis, who plays the male diner, steps forward, not quite in character:
Thank you all for coming; it is a pleasure to see you all here. The nature of research is necessarily isolated, so it is wonderful to be in company once more. Today, I am going to diagnose the modern condition and offer a cure! To begin, I will provide you with a brief and selective historical survey of culture-bound syndromes in the West and beyond, including pibloktoq, to which I will return later; then there is latah, the condition of hyper-reactivity found amongst middle-aged Indonesian women, and amok, the sudden insane frenzy of violence that can overwhelm Malaysian men . . .; the penis panic of Singapore in 1956 . . .; virtual reality addiction amongst Japanese teenage boys; affluenza, the dogged pursuit of the American Dream; and the ones we all know about – anorexia, bulimia, repetititve strain injury. Any questions at this stage? Footnote 31
The prologue indeed raises some questions. Where does the framing of the show end and the show begin? What culture-bound syndromes do these characters have? Are we, as spectators, subject to the play's purported aim to ‘diagnose the modern condition’? What is the ‘cure’? These questions hover around Hysteria, and seep into Inspector Sands's next piece, If That's All There Is (2009), a show about diagnosis that further articulates the entanglement of the real and fictional with the entanglement of the personal, political and professional.
If That's All There Is opens with a groom addressing us as guests at his wedding reception. Fussily well-organized, Daniel describes the cake in minute detail, oblivious to the panic-stricken disposition of his new wife, Frances, who sits beside him, a picture of terror and suppressed rage. He has just finished detailing the cheese version of the cake when he falls to the ground, blood spreading around his heart, apparently dying. Seconds later, he seems fine. Perhaps the blood was just a red wine stain? Perhaps his slow death was Frances's fantasy?
While we try to piece this together, Daniel, high on the success of his pie chart (with which he broke down the wedding guests by age, gender and romantic status), secretly visits a therapist, armed with behavioural graphs which he hopes will render his confusing new wife comprehensible. But it is Daniel whose dysfunction the therapist wants to diagnose, through alarming theatrical games. Scenes of the therapist playing dead to check that Daniel is still alive, and eliciting his aggression by dressing him up as a cowboy, are juxtaposed with Frances's workplace, where we see her squeezing onions into her eyes trying to release her inner tears.
If That's All There Is is a comedy about the diagnostic machinery of symptom-reading→identification of condition→prescription. Both of the newlyweds – if they are actually married, as the whole wedding scene may have been a rendition of Frances's fears – have a kind of locked-in syndrome. Spectators may wonder if the show's title refers specifically to the protagonists’ failure to feel, or whether that failure is symptomatic of a culture-bound syndrome that passes as normality. Is the striving for happiness the disease, or the cure? As the song goes, the best thing may be just to keep dancing; but even dancing produces a diagnostic dilemma. Frances and Daniel dance what is obviously a highly rehearsed routine for the traditional first dance at their reception. Each time Daniel sends Frances into the special spin, she lets out a screech; Daniel stops the music to ask what the matter is; Frances is unaware of having made the noise. The repetition of spin→screech→interrogation becomes the routine.
Also studying Frances is her bemused shadow/intern, Christina, who has come to help administer a study of contentment levels that Frances's company has been commissioned to conduct – the kind of ‘happiness survey’ recently, and controversially, conducted in the UK and internationally.Footnote 32 With Christina and the study out of the way, Frances finally has time alone. She throws confetti over herself carefully, but then finds herself attacking a shop-bought cake bedecked with classic bride and groom. Still unable to produce or even understand her own reactions, she gives up, reads a thank-you card for Christina who has left, having completed her internship, and bursts into uncontrollable tears.
Frances's body does not do what it should, and not just within the world of the play. Garner states that the body in theatre ‘is always caught between a radical actuality – it is alive and physically present to itself and its spectators – and its subordination to fictional otherness’.Footnote 33 But Inspector Sands challenge us to rethink our presumptions about ‘actuality’ and ‘otherness’. Frances is submerged in fictions, rehearsing the wedding way before it has happened. Her rehearsals appear more real than the wedding itself, where her mind is clearly elsewhere. Her body produces bizarre symptoms, like screaming when dancing, and not the symptoms like crying that reflect how she feels. She is not sure whether it is the external manifestations she should doubt, or her feelings. That Frances can make her body present to itself only through scripted performance suggests, pace Judith Butler, that being caught between actuality and otherness is not an accident that befalls the body in theatre, but a bind to which it is subject in life.
Both If That's All There Is and Must, performed by Peggy Shaw and director Suzy Willson's Clod Ensemble, complicate Anna Deavere Smith's view that language is where identity becomes readable. Like Smith, and like Frances and Daniel, Shaw expresses herself by standing outside herself. Whereas Inspector Sands use verbal and emotional inarticulacy to break the diagnostic chain of symptom-reading→identification of condition→prescription, Must breaks that chain by saturating the body with words and emotions. The more she scripts, the more it seems that her body tries to outrun the process of being scripted. The fact that Shaw was commissioned by Willson to make a piece as part of Clod's Performing Medicine series marks the piece itself. The summoning forth of the body is conspicuous. Underscored by piano, violin and bass, Shaw tries to reach conclusions while pouring out confessions and fantasies, all the while reporting, illustrating, dancing, as if answering a demand.
Shaw equivocates with the commission's imperative to map the body, and shows the continuity of that imperative with the contractual basis of performance, in which her body is expected to map meaning and we are expected to receive that meaning. ‘If you look at me from the front’, she invites equivocally, ‘you will notice there's a part of my body that you can't quite put your finger on.’Footnote 34 The interpellation of the spectator is a provocative device by which Shaw orients, reorients and disorients herself and our relationship to her. The show begins with a seemingly plain declaration, ‘I've been waiting for you and now you're here’, followed by a twistier, but still conspiratorial, ‘what do you think happened? Who turned on the light?’ At times, the ‘you’ offers a cabaret-style, quotational intimacy, but that can subtly or suddenly become a deeper complicity that made me wonder if I was being addressed as myself or being made to stand in for an unidentified lover, or a conflation of the two.
While Shaw projects onto us, her body is projected onto by images she sometimes tries to evade. The images include comic cartoons of skeletons romping in a graveyard, and a series of electro-microscopic plates of body parts: a hair cell in the inner ear, the wall of the uterus, motor neurons in the spinal cord and a section of the cerebellum. As the piece progresses, Shaw increasingly contends with, obstructs and flirts with the images. At certain points, she allows herself and us to stop and study them. The microscopic images are what they are, but they are seen so closely that they appear to be something entirely different. The closer the inspection gets, the more ‘foreign’ the body appears to be.
As its sub-subtitle suggests, Must: the inside story; a Journey through the Shadows of a City, a Pound of Flesh, a Book of Love is a mapping of the body in which the environmental, anatomical and emotional are bound together. Section Ten begins, ‘A couple of hundred million years ago, before you were born, my body was joined together to form one land mass.’ Using metaphor to perform an autopsy of her own living body, she begins ‘digging. Deep past the topsoil. There's no cutting involved. Just turning over the soil’. Must counters Western culture's denial of its reliance on metaphor, asserting that metaphor does not just describe the body, it is essential to one's sense of one's own and of other bodies, and therefore to the body itself.
Debunking Western culture's polarization of objectivity and subjectivity, Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By observes that the poles are held apart by an agreement that words have ‘fixed meanings’, whereas ‘metaphor and other kinds of poetic, fanciful, rhetorical, or figurative language’ do not.Footnote 35 Objectivism (the dominant pole) holds that the latter can ‘and should be avoided, since their meanings are not clear and precise and do not fit reality in any obvious way’, whereas subjectivism holds that such fancy ‘is necessary for expressing the unique and most personally significant aspects of our experience’ for which ‘the ordinary agreed-upon meanings that words have will not do’. Lakoff and Johnson argue that, ‘Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature.’ A Gulliver's Travels for the era of third-wave feminism, Must links exterior and interior in an imaginatively rational, experientialist synthesis. It does not so much pit subjective against objective knowledge of the body as obviate the distinction between subjective and objective, collapsing the binary on which diagnosis depends.
The martianist viewpoint of Must, and the primacy throughout the piece of rhythm and metaphor, reflect Shaw's sense that she is caught between nature and nurture, accident and design. She simultaneously articulates her body sociologically – with medical treatment of the female body, and with the history of US counter-culture – and asociologically, ahistorically, in terms of primal environmentalism:
August 15, 1969. New York City.
I had tickets to Woodstock but never made it out of town. When I went into labor, they placed my feet up, head back. The nurse said,
‘Lay down and I'll shave your pubic hair and give you an enema.’
I told her I'd rather be in the mud and the rain listening to Jimi Hendrix.
As Stacy Alaimo points out, the problematic legacy of aligning women with concepts of nature means that ‘invoking nature or the natural risks further congealing the signification of [the category] “woman”, thus foreclosing possibilities . . . for feminist agency’.Footnote 36Must invokes a third-wave feminist strategy described by Alaimo as ‘dwelling within – but subverting – the tenacious associations between woman and nature’ to pursue an ‘environmentalist’ agenda that does not ‘denigrate woman, nature, and the body’ by collapsing them.
When diagnosis is performed according to the laws of a particular tradition, the tradition lends credibility to the diagnosis, and is itself solidified by that (and every new) diagnosis made according to its conventions. The phrase ‘theatrical performance’ can be substituted for the word ‘diagnosis’ in that sentence to make a contiguous claim. If That's All There Is and Must are palimpsestic, writing over previous performances of diagnosis in ways that challenge the traditions that legitimate, and have been legitimated by, those performances.
The title Must refers to a condition that, notoriously, eludes diagnosis. Musth (alternatively spelled ‘must’) is a condition in bull elephants, characterized by highly aggressive behaviour. Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be sixty times greater than at other times. Whether this hormonal surge is the sole cause of musth, or merely a contributing factor, is unknown. Scientific investigation of musth is problematic because, during musth, elephants that are otherwise placid may try to kill humans. Interrogating theatrical storytelling in ways that illuminate cultural imperatives not only to perform, but to perform diagnostically, Must, like If That's All There Is, is full of residue, irreducible elements that escape but illuminate diagnosis.
Works such as Desert Rain and Fires in the Mirror identify a coating of information that covers the bare material event, and which must be surgically removed to access the ‘real’ beneath. Perpetuating the diagnostic imperative to align the real with the objective, these works want to jam diagnosis while retaining a diagnostic imperative. In contrast, Must and If That's All There Is figure information as that which circulates within, through and between bodies, including those of the performer and spectator. Inspector Sands and Peggy Shaw spotlight, and begin to break down, the diagnostic imperative. They lead us toward an experientialist economy in which the entwinement of the fictional and the actual is seen not as contamination but as the friction necessary for imaginative rationalization.
