Eco-worriers; Olympic farces; new directions?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Time to get peddling - and pedalling
Visiting the Arcola in Dalston the other night to see An Enemy of the People, I was impressed to read up about their ongoing scheme to make ‘Arcola the world’s first carbon neutral theatre’: The aim is to install ‘biomass heating, solar panels, fuel cells and state of the art energy saving technologies throughout the building’ and for this converted (essentially recycled) clothes factory to become ‘the first centre for new energy technology in the arts’. Engineers will apparently develop initiatives to tackle climate change and forge a ‘cross-fertilisation between art and science’. As someone who has no specialist knowledge about energy efficiency but a considerable level of guilt about the carbon footprint my theatregoing leaves (I rack up hundreds of miles a month scouting London and the provinces for the Telegraph), I find this project heartening in the extreme - and actually long overdue.
Rather than hanging around waiting for the Arcola to take the lead and make concrete strides I think most theatres should hasten to bring about immediate reductions in their consumption of resources. A number of suggestions spring swiftly to mind. Those lavish West End programmes should be phased out in favour of slimline cast-lists and biogs; an internet trading forum should be set up allowing theatres across the country to find a further home for the kind of props and fittings that would usually be broken up or binned at the end of a production; and there must be a way of harnessing theatre-goers as a method of electricity generation. Rather than lolling around drinking and slurping on ice-creams in the interval, the younger, fitter members at least should hoist themselves onto customised bikes to pedal up enough power for the second half. If the show proved so deadly no one wanted the fag of servicing the dynamos, the theatre would - and probably should - go dark.
May the outdoor farce be with us
Talking of unnecessary wastage of the Earth’s resources, the sheer entertainment value of the Olympic torch-carrying fiascos in London and Paris made me think they should be reconsidered as a species of street theatre. A lot of outdoor happenings are frankly lacking in drama - but this was something else. Such an arrestingly farcical carry-on between unarmed protestors and brute-handed coppers…. eat your heart out Dario Fo. And surely Harold Pinter himself would have been proud to pen so stark a delineation of state authority trumpeting its democratic virtues while unavoidably endorsing oppression. Perhaps this was in fact the early start to that mysterious Games warm-up ‘The Cultural Olympiad’. Or at least an involuntary hint of how to do it. In order to create events that grab the public’s attention and imagination, it is - we see - quite sufficient just to invite people to bear witness to a fragile symbolic action - the structure and meaning of which can then be determined by those who disrupt it.
The End of New Labour - the beginning of what?
If the opinion polls continue to hold their downward course for Brown and his team, we could finally be facing a moment of dramatic reckoning. With New Labour a spent force, and Cameron Conservatism yet to declare any defined ideological direction, we’re entering a period of dispiriting vacuum rather than galvanising vision. Can playwrights do more than pick up on the mood of despondency and drift? Is there an overarching political mission which can, however obliquely, inform their writing? The run-up to the next election looks likely to be dominated by pragmatism and calculation on the part of our politicians - will the theatre community be able to articulate an idea of Britain worth fighting for - or at least fighting over?�