Neither of the short politically-minded plays that comprise Welcome Stranger’s This Is Good Advice is as thematically challenging as it might like to think it is. There is a certain predictability to the angry satire with which Caryl Churchill’s This Is a Chair and Martin Crimp’s Advice to Iraqi Women take aim at their targets. But neither could these texts be said to constitute a walk in the park, with the formal inventiveness of the former in particular calling upon both the audience and the theatremakers to engage with and question the processes by which meaning is made in the theatre.
A series of vignettes that conflate everyday events with broader geopolitical and sociocultural phenomena, This Is a Chair is the more complex and difficult of the two pieces, and seems to operate simultaneously on two very distinct—perhaps even contradictory—levels.
A blackboard to the bottom right-hand corner of the stage tells the audience what each of the vignettes is ostensibly about. A woman tells the man she is meeting that she’s double-booked and has to be somewhere else. ‘He Is Bosnia’, reads a blackboard held above the man’s head by another actor. ‘She Is Britain’, reads a blackboard above hers. ‘The Balkans’, reads the blackboard at the bottom-right hand corner of the stage.
The play’s title, of course, is a reference to René Magritte’s La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), 1929, which famously asserted that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). However, there is an important difference between Churchill’s title and Magritte’s facetious caption: the notable absence, in the former, of a certain load-bearing adverb. Unlike Magritte’s, Churchill’s concern is not with metaphor and the treachery of images, as I think the theatremakers have incorrectly interpreted it here, but rather with the manner in which the micropolitics of the everyday create and are created by the macropolitics of the global economic or military-industrial order. Unfortunately, the actors have a tendency to overplay the connection between these micro and macro elements, which has already been made explicit on the blackboards, the performances betraying what feels to this reviewer like a certain misunderstanding of the text.
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The piece is also an implicit commentary on the semantic mutability of the theatrical event and its ability to take on new meanings through the power of words and labels. In this sense, the formal logic of This Is a Chair seems closer in both intention and effect to that of Magritte’s The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930, than it does to La trahison des images. An interesting experiment might be to alternate the labels that get written on the blackboards from night to night, and to see how that affects the production and the audience’s understanding of it.
Despite some wholly unnecessary set design, Crimp’s Advice to Iraqi Women is the more successfully realised of the two pieces. Again proving the extent to which words and labels have the ability to qualitatively change the power and meaning of a text, what is in reality a well-written but essentially harmless satire on the over-zealous over-protection of children becomes, by virtue of the piece’s title, a scathing attack on British government’s hypocritical ‘Every Child Matters’ programme, which was being run at the same time as Iraq was being blown to bits. But is the piece really about Iraq? I would wager that it and that the title is doing eighty per cent of the work.
Esoteric Rabbit Blog/Vibewire, 10 February 2008
