As everyone knows, we live in the age of mediated atrocity. Every day, in all the lurid media of modern life we grow ever more piteously accustomed to the sad arrangements, the crowds of the displaced and the dead. In the age of The Image, we need an ethics of The Image. But we don’t have an ethics of The Image. We’re not even close. We have the aesthetics, of course, but not the ethics, not yet.
Tim Crouch, like all of us, has grown up in the age of mediated atrocity. Unlike all of us, he is also a mediator of atrocity and is one of his generation’s finest. The Author, which was performed (in lieu of an more fitting word) on Thursday of 4th Week at the Michael Pilch Studio by a cast of immensely talented actors, is Crouch’s take on the ethics of The Image and of mediated atrocity. Like any work where the essential concern is ethics, it is at times heavy-handed, and only sometimes veers perilously close to the moral fable. But I have rarely seen (or read) a work that plays with these much played-with themes so intelligently and intriguingly.
The set-up is unconventional. Gone is the stage. Instead, we have four rows of audience, split down the centre, each half of two rows facing the other half. The actors – the roles – are positioned in the audience. One of the actors plays The Author, Tim Crouch. Two others, using their own names, play actors who’ve worked previously with Crouch in what emerges to have been an exceptionally harrowing play. The fourth is a theatre-goer, our closest point of reference as an audience. It is he who begins the show.
Each of the actors elaborates and comments upon the development, rehearsal and production of a play by Crouch. We learn, as their accounts turn darker, that the perverse process of this play’s production becomes abusive and exploitative. At one dreadful point, Crouch practically forces one of his actors – with the complicity of us, the audience – to play the part of a sexually abused woman whom they’ve interviewed as preparation. We are goaded on to probe a little deeper, to ask her questions. Some do. We learn also that the cast went to “The War” and witnessed “The Massacres” (always these monstrous generics) for the betterment of their art.
How do we explore the relationship and co-dependency of suffering? What are the ethics of the exploitation of real human pain for artistic gain? And, in the midst of all this, how can we jusify the complicity of an audience hungry for more as we face each other and listen to these horrors? These are old and serious questions, but they are rarely posed as intelligently and disturbingly as Crouch has done here.
