Comparing arts - participation at the National Theatre
Last weekend I saw one of those plays at the theatre that makes you stop and think about the world. The Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer on the National Theatre's Dorfman stage is a short 1 hour 45 minute piece, with no interval, written by Bryony Kimmings in association with theatre company Complicite. It needs to be short and punchy because it's one of the most powerful, moving things I've seen. The audience left subdued and thoughtful, many of us a little teary and thinking of friends and relatives affected by cancer.
The premise is simple but sounds absurd - a musical about living with a cancer diagnosis. The story follows Emily as she moves through hospital with her baby son Owen, taking him for various scans. Along the way she meets a cast of patients dealing with different types of cancer. Emily is always on stage as large hospital 'Exit' doors suddenly close in her face behind other groups who move from one waiting room or ward to another. Songs challenge taboos around talking about death and cancer, about the social construction of 'struggle' and forced positivity around living with cancer. The characters are shown as part of an ever-growing group of 'the kingdom of the sick' but also as fierce individuals.
Alongside the characters, Emily meets a gloriously-dressed group of cancer cells who appear periodically clothed in neon and spangled, padded and knobbly costumes that resemble cell growths. As the play progresses, inflated forms grow into the space of the stage through windows and doors, so that by the end the cast are squashed up to the footlights. It's at this point that Emily starts to talk to the disembodied voice of director Bryony Kimmings (whose voiceover also introduced the show) asking why she wrote the play and what they are doing there. The actor's voices are replaced by the recorded voices of the real people whose lives they are portraying; and then the actor's themselves drop their characters to offer the names of loved ones affected by cancer. The audience are invited to join in, and the carefully built pitch of the show meant that many here did. Finally, and extraordinarily, a cancer sufferer walks up on stage from the front of the audience and offers brief personal thoughts and advice. The young guy on our night put the actors in the shade.
It's a powerful piece because of the unexpected mix - musical with terminal illness; personal stories with dancing cell growths; personal voices of both characters and actors; audience participation with slick staging; an invited adult from the audience. This list reads much like the ingredients for a pantomime. But I was also struck by certain trends I could see, which are comparable to changes in museum displays and programming, and which I somehow found I could look at more clearly in a separate art form.
There are many similarities. The present voice of the director is not unlike the move towards individually authored texts in museum galleries - making the curator visible within the institution. The neon, spangly cells made me think of the kinds of witty creative responses to medical histories that somewhere like the Wellcome does so well. The individual, personal voices had clearly come out of the kinds of workshop consultations that museums do with community groups to develop exhibitions, also becoming like the filmed 'talking heads' you might see in a gallery. The moment for audience participation was like the social media conversation around a gallery, the person on stage like the co-programmed event.
Some of these comparisons are slightly clunky of course, but they made me think. Knowing similar trends in museums, I could see the structure of the elements in The Pacifist's Guide and how they built up. I enjoyed the gear shift from stage craft to reality, and the presence of director and actors as people within their professions. I could feel the power of the space opened up for the audience to bring their own experiences. I've read reviews comparing this show to 'group therapy' as a negative thing, but I think that misses the point. In drawing together the creative and the factual, history and the present, professional and 'ordinary' voices, for me The Pacificist's Guide created a moment of magic, of group meaning. I hope museums can do as well.