In Response


On Mark Ravenhill, Rhetoric and Honesty

On Saturday I read something on the internet which made me angry. Which is, in and of itself, deeply unremarkable in as much as the internet is powered by cat pictures and anger (though, thankfully, rarely at the same time). What is noticeable about this one is that I got angry over something which a lot of people I know and respect thought was brilliant and important.

I got angry over the speech Mark Ravenhill gave for the Inaugural Opening Address of the Fringe Festival.

Quite rightly people had jumped in to defend Ravenhill from what I can only assume was a wilful misrepresentation of his words by the BBC and the speech got RT’d in to my twitter stream and a parade of friends “shared” it on Facebook, all indicating their endorsement by degrees of superlatives. And – me? I just got angry.

More angry than the content of the speech merited.

And I did wonder if this was one of those things – like the NT’s Curious Incident… or cheese – where my own disquiet about it is pushed into anger because no one else seems to have noticed what I’m talking about.

But then I came back to it today, as I’d promised myself I would once the momentary flare-up had passed and, free from the initial flame, I could actually see what troubled me.

I think the first thing to note – and this is important – is that it’s very well written. It’s funny – albeit knowingly funny (but then I just tried that with less success by comparing Curious Incident to cheese so who am I to throw stones?) – and there’s a lot of Big Issues contained within and it builds to a satisfyingly rousing conclusion and call to arms. Most of all – it’s hugely flattering to its audience. Us old guys – we did it wrong, but you young ‘uns – you can change all that. And you finish up wanting to punch the air and shout – YES! We shall be different! We shall have a cooperative van company paid for by all our members! (Seriously, we should have a cooperative van company – I totally volunteer to administrate it).

In short: it’s really, really good rhetoric.

And if you want to see what’s the problem with that I should point you towards Andrew Haydon’s own state of the (arts criticism) nation, which is much less rhetorically controlled and much more spiky and obviously problematic but also much more brilliant and risky and angry and important. There’s no getting away from the honesty of that piece. In contrast – and you can only properly see it when you stand it next to something like Haydon’s – Ravenhill’s is curiously sterile in the honesty department. It postures at being honest – the humour and the critique of “the arts sector” and what “we” have done – but that’s not actually honesty. That’s critique dressed up with extended metaphor.

The defence for this then becomes that Ravenhill’s speech actually proves the point he is making. Haydon – free of the “system” in his own blog and without the weight of delivering the Inagural Fringe Address and a contract with the RSC and all of the stuff that goes with being Mark Ravenhill – has the honesty which Ravenhill is lamenting the loss of for those who play within.

Form expressing content – it’s a writer’s wet dream.

Until now the word I have chosen to describe Ravenhill’s speech is rhetoric. If I were being less kind – or if I hadn’t been beaten around the head with examples of classical rhetoric during a particularly ill-fated episode during my BA – I might use the word “spin”. If I use the word “spin” Ravenhill becomes not trapped by the prevailing climate but complicit with the “New Labour” mode he is ostensibly railing against.

And that’s what made me angry. Because the speech raises a number of important, salient points but never properly owns them:

“I think the arts sector as a whole went astray during the last couple of decades.”

“I think they [the arts] weren’t telling the truth”

“most artists are…”

we were talking about working in the creative industries”

[my italics]

What we actually have there is some pretty broad brush strokes (am I to seriously believe that in two decades no one in mainstream art was telling the truth – whatever ‘truth’ might actually be, subjective as it often is? NO ONE?). And then there’s also a problem with slipping from “the arts” (which, in its own way, is as meaningless and unhelpful as “creative industries”) to individual artists to a “we” I’m not exactly sure who is part of.

The only point I come close to thinking we might get some honesty is:

and after a while for a few years a modest but real terms increase in government funding for the arts. And we artists were so grateful for that relatively modest bit of attention and money that we changed substantially what and who we were as artists.

The first “we artists” in that doesn’t even trouble me too much, it’s a we that seems to have some truth. The second one, however, that’s the sort of generalisation that makes me sad. Because I can’t work out if it’s an inability to say the word “I” – which is fair enough, it would be a difficult thought to say in your head, let alone in a room full of people in your industry – or if it’s because it’s a casual sweeping statement, suggesting something important is being offered whilst in reality being a bit meaningless. Then, just in case there was a risk of an “I” getting in there, we get an imaginary conversation between a mother and a child to send up the point. Which is nice as far as I like imagination and I like jokes, but not something that stands up to any sort of discussion about what truth this speech is based on.

And because there is nothing solid in the speech and no ownership I can only conclude that the speech is a negation of responsibility.

And if there’s anything I’m absolutely fucking sick of then it’s negation of responsibility. Since 2008 we’ve been drowning in the stuff.

But it’s okay – you, this new generation, you’ll get us out of this. You’ll dream up new ways of working.

Yes, me and my £13,000 in student loans (and it makes me blanche that a debt of that amount marks me out as one of the lucky ones) and overdraft and not really remembering what a weekend is and forgetting what normal social lives are and doing everything I can just to stick at this for long enough – just as everyone I know who is still hanging in is – we will imagine and re-design and it will be amazing and we will just have to eat a lot of toast and carry all of our stuff to Edinburgh.

I might only speak for myself here, but I think this particular “we” could do with some help. Help that’s better than a collection of well written words, or to borrow a phrase from some women who knew what they were talking about, “deeds not words”.

You’ve identified the problem (at least as far as you see it), Ravenhill. Now what are you going to do about it? Because my “we” – the disparate “we” I’ve seen doing and imagining and helping – it’s a “we” I embrace my part in. Own it. Own your words.


Trio of firsts for Charlie of WBN

Despite the fact that things in WBN Towers are frightfully busy I have been trying to see as much theatre as possible.

As such, I have been fortunate enough to see three shows recently from three companies that I have always wanted to see and have always respected (until now, from afar). It has been a while since I saw each show but they have stuck with me in different ways.

First up was Unlimited Theatre’s show MONEY the game show (which I saw at the Bush). I have always wanted to see a piece by Unlimited (especially because Corinne is always going on about a show she saw of their’s in Leeds). This one did not disappoint. I think the main thing that has stuck with me is how satisfying it can be to see Money on stage… and on this occasion I actually mean in production values and literally. Firstly, the set made me feel like I genuinely was an audience member of a dodgy game show on Channel 5 (sorry C5). This really added to the fun and games that we as an audience took part in. This made the story (and our implication in the end) all the more satisfying and thought provoking. Money well spent methinks. The thing that trumped the production values however was the ACTUAL MONEY on stage. Ten thousand shiny pound coins, stacked on stage. Thrown around as if they were worthless, almost as if a pound coin only has value because we believe it has…
I do wonder if this will be the last show I ever see where a bouncer is required for insurance reasons as well. Nothing like a heavy in the room to add to the gravitas of the situation. The stats and figures the show gave towards the end might also be one of the most haunting things I have seen in a theatre… that’s numbers for you.

The second show I want to talk about is Fevered SleepsAbove Me The Wide Blue Sky. I recently had the good fortune of doing a workshop with Kaite O’Reilly on Alternative Dramaturgies (she has a splendid blog if you aren’t aware of it) and one of the many things I found interesting from the workshop was how she spoke about work: the rhythm of it, the repetitions, the movement, the sound – far more in terms of qualities of music than maybe I would myself. It was in this mindset that I really engaged with Above Me The Wide Blue Sky. Like how my mind might wander at a concert, my mind wandered during this show. I found myself reflecting on its themes, looking for the repetitions, trying to find patterns and rhythms. My mind would drift and suddenly snap back at an image envoked by the performer that clearly struck something in my brain.
I think when we go to the theatre (especially in the 21st Century with the way TV has wired us up) we have expectations to be engaged, constantly stimulated and that we are going to be ‘active’ throughout a whole show as it take us on a (narrative) journey. It was refreshing to see a show that did not do this, but instead worked in the same way a classical concert might. It allowed the mind to wander – and that was okay, not some fatal flaw in its dramaturgy. The ‘feel’ of this show has stuck with me far more than anything else – a feel of calmness but also loss. A lament for nature. This show has affected me more as if it were a song, which I find myself humming every so often.

The final production I find myself writing about is dreamthinkspeak’s In the Beginning Was The End. I do love a bit of promenade site specific. Wandering around a building and delving underground – in a space I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. That was satisfying in its self. But this show really provided some powerful images, and the level of detail achieved for such a big project was really impressive. The main image that stuck with me was all the Customer Service workers shedding their clothes, and looking down from atop a spiral staircase at the audience looking up. This worked on so many levels for me. Firstly, there was the cycle of the workers leaving work, shedding their clothes and always going back – always going back to work. That repetition that necessity wouldn’t let them escape. But then there was the audience reactions themselves and how they fed in to it. After all, was had naked people. In front of us. Thus student girls were laughing and pointing at male bits, student guys were either being blokey or looking embarrassed. And that was just the student crowd. You had every audience reaction you could expect and, whilst the audience were looking up at them, gathered around a spiral staircase, the naked performers are looking down. Aware of this reaction and looking all the more sad for it. And then they go back to work, repeat the same process and wait for the next set of wandering audience to react in the same predictable manner. I watched this happen a couple of times.
I reckon I’m going to struggle to find another image this year quite so powerful and though provoking, without a single word being uttered.

Charlie of WBN


As Charlie WBN would say: Crumbs 1

So, erm, didn’t quite expect the (lovely, slightly overwhelming) response which the love letter got. I’m still trying to find time to respond to everyone who contacted me but, needless to say, you’re all wonderful. And to everyone who tweeted, re-tweeted, blogged, commented, emailed – thank you.

One of the results of all of this is that I have about a squillion new blogs (see, that A in GCSE maths didn’t go to waste) to add to the blog roll. I’m in the midst of writing a play at the moment so have forbidden myself anything I recognise as being procrastination but I intend to schedule in a slot in the next week to do the updating. So, feel free to wave manically in my direction if you’ve got a blog I should be reading.

As a final piece of housekeeping, I should say for those who are visiting here for the first time that I also blog about theatrey-things over on my personal blog (only, I swear a bit more and tell marginally embarrassing stories over there).


On Why It’s Time To Listen (or a love letter to theatre bloggers) 14

I’m going to write down a date. Friday the 10th of September 2010. One day everyone who has ever written – or read – a theatre blog might want to remember it. The day that the Royal Opera House not so much poked themselves in the eye as repeatedly bludgeoned themselves with a heavy instrument (an instrument which, in the subsequent health and safety report, they spelt incorrectly). The wonderful irony to the whole thing being that whilst the storm was raging the ROH’s Head of Digital Marketing, Rachel Coldicutt, was at The Media Festival Arts talking about the importance of open data. It is indeed all in the timing.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account (or analysis) of the events because you can read them first hand on Intermezzo’s blog, with the legal view here and the marketing view here. I also feel it needs pointing out that there were two distinct issues that got tangled up on Friday, issues which should be separated out:

1. The specific case and what it shows about theatre bloggers, blogging and theatres.
2. The perception of the ROH within the arts community (which is bundled up with the issue of funding and the level of fear that is – justly – prevalent in much of the arts community about what the Autumn funding cuts will look like).
I’ve lots to say on the latter subject but, for today at least, I’m going to stick firmly to the former.

Theatre blogging is a niche pursuit. But then going to sit in a darkened auditorium and watch people speak – or in the case of opera, sing – someone else’s words multiple times a month (or some times a week) is also a niche pursuit. The internet, in all its multifaceted joy, allows a niche to flourish. Like attracts like (or compels like). It not only cements tendencies (that of reading about theatre, of continuing going, of knowing more than you could ever keep in your head), it also allows tendencies to grow. Knowing there is a community of people out there doing the same thing – theatre-going is a tribe as much as anyone else. Of course not all repeat theatre goers blog but, in 2010 with the ease of google, I’d be surprised to find a repeat theatre-goer (who wasn’t directly involved in the industry*) who had never read a theatre blog. These people – the people whose names might otherwise be simply one in a marketing database – should be hugely valued (and respected). And if not now, then when? As we get ready to batten down the hatches and weather the oncoming storm Theatres should be respecting these people more than ever.

Theatre blogging, like all individual blogging, is massively democratic. A “name” will only get you so far. But you can make yourself a name within the community. There are many, many ways to do this – most are a niche within a niche, either because of their predilection to certain types of theatre or because of their locality – but what unites theatre bloggers is their dedication (have you tried going to see multiple shows and then coming home and writing them – without being paid to do so? It’s bloody hard work when, frankly, you’d rather be in bed). Every single one of them, even the most world weary or caustically brilliant (you know who I’m looking at), love of what they write. They want theatres to succeed, they want the next show they see to be the best thing they have ever seen, they want to share their excitement (or, as it may be, disappointment).

Recently the Guardian Theatre Blog made me want to put my fist through my computer. From the moment I saw the title of the article – Five stars in their eyes: can you trust unpaid theatre critics? – I knew it was most likely going to result in my feeling the need to jab a knitting needle in my eye. Theatre bloggers, with their wordpress and blogspot accounts, are unpaid. Some might occasionally get free tickets but by and large they pay for the privilege of sitting in a theatre’s seat (or standing as the case may be) and then come home and write about it for free. I was genuinely pained when I saw that the article had caused Jake Orr, who founded the – excuse me for the expletive – fucking important A Younger Theatre, say that he was “somewhat down heartened and questioning the value of what [he writes]”. No one comes out as a fully formed theatre critic. What you need is dedication, some degree of writing flair, a willingness to see a lot of theatre, the knowledge you can always learn (or re-learn) and a whole bundle of passion. Theatre bloggers in the UK have these characteristics in abundance. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be writing about theatre and people wouldn’t be reading them. For me a critic is only as good as my relationship with them. Through my reading – whether I visit their blog in a vaguely stalker-ish manner on a hourly basis or whether I drop in and out according to interest in what they’re reviewing – I know their biases, I know their specialisms, I know where I stand in relation to them. This is what matters. That they also entertain, inform and (sometimes) provoke me is all part of the package.

What blogs create – something which Twitter’s popularity amongst the art-prone has intensified and broadened** – is a web of community. Forget six degrees of separation, I’d decrease it to one degree for the online arts enthusiasts. What role you play in this community can be as diverse as any real-life community might be (whether you see yourself as the Mayor in waiting, the person drawing graffiti on the bridges or occasional tourist who wants to see the major attractions). Words spread (with some voices, as in any community, being louder). In the offline world I’m often asked about shows people should see and I clocked recently that my default response is to fall back on what the “buzz” is on the theatre blogs. Theatre bloggers are word-of-mouth amongst friends magnified – because anyone who can access the internet can be their “friend”. If you under estimate the scale of this community and its ability to communicate – well, then you end up with the Royal Opera House on Friday.

As Intermezzo says on her latest post on the subject theatre blogging is here to stay. I first blogged about theatre-going in 2001, I first bought a theatre ticket directly because of something I’d read on a blog back in April 2007 (when I didn’t even live in London) because of this. It’s laughable that it’s 2010 and many of our major arts institutions haven’t realised that blogging exists as more than a vague concept (or something that someone in their marketing department does in a half-arsed, vaguely inept manner). The theatre companies who have embraced social media (and embrace means more than just being there with your twitter account RTs of positive comments and Facebook page of official photos) are largely the ones without buildings (there is a notable exception up in Stratford). When you’re filling spaces with hundreds of seats every night it’s easy to forget the individual theatre goer sitting in E23 up in the Amphitheatre. When every person you engage with your work matters – as it does for many small and medium sized companies – you don’t forget the individual. That ticket sale – those future ticket sales – matter. That’s why these companies understand that “social” goes both ways.

Having been a long time blog reader I’m happy to say that theatre blogging in the UK is more exciting than it has ever been. It’s also expanding at a faster rate than I’ve ever seen before. Am I surprised that Friday happened? Absolutely not. Maybe the ROH is lucky that it happened now and not six (or twelve months) later, just as the Tricycle is lucky that this happened in 2008. It’s time, however, not just for (if an organisation is lucky) having one person in a marketing department who knows what a theatre blogger is. All it takes is a clear policy, a lightness of touch, and the humility to remember that these people buy tickets to your shows.

Remember that love I mentioned earlier? That love is for your industry, your venue, your show. Embrace it, don’t stamp all over it in steel-capped boots. Why shouldn’t press photos be available to bloggers as long as they’re properly credited? Given that you have charged them money for your product why shouldn’t bloggers review show whilst they’re in previews? Talk to us. We’re bloggers, we love a conversation. But – and here’s the big lesson – bloggers will not bend to you. Five years ago, maybe, but not now. This community – it’s too big and vocal, for that. You need to adapt and respond to us, not the other way around. Change, innovate, blaze a trail. You might even learn something.

*I’m constantly shocked when people inside the industry can’t name a theatre blogger.

**Not every tweeter blogs but I’d guess 97% of bloggers tweet.


Latitude & Everything Else: Day One

Last year my Latitude journey started with a rush across South London (halfway through which I realised I’d forgotten my oyster card), complete with bags, tent and over-sized Cath Kidston roll mat in order to deliver the major component of not mine, but someone else’s, MA. After that, this year was going to be blissful and stress-free and, crucially, devoid of me swearing at a Goldsmiths College printer.

Or that was the plan.

Now it is raining in Suffolk, the trees are beginning to bend from the wind and I have been sat on a non-moving train somewhere in Essex for almost one hour. And it’s not that I’m stressed – I’m sitting down and not hitting a printer – but more that I’m stuck here whilst the teenage girls on the seats in front of me have begun hitting each other with their roll mats. Then – at the point when I’m considering mild physical violence – we’re unceremoniously dumped off of the train at Colchester station. Overhead line failure! Chaos! Teenagers bound for Latitude!

It continues in this manner for twenty minutes or so, but with added incomprehensible tannoy announcements that go something along the lines of “Baaaaaah…shufffle…rustle…THERE ARE NO TRAINS…rustle…shuffle”, before I’m back on a train with someone else’s luggage in my ear. Thankfully for both you and me (really, do you want another paragraph of my travel woe and increasing need to use exclamation marks?) pretty much the next thing I know I’m on a shuttle bus to the site (luggage taken out of ear), the sun is shining and all that is left is for myself and @cat_elliott to voice our not inconsiderable opinions on the changes that (from the online map) have been made to the Latitude site. For, yes, attendance at three out of five possible Latitudes has filled me with many opinions and views, of which I am not reluctant to share. Because – did anyone else notice that they’ve moved the comedy tent?

Aherm.

Flash forward to arrival and, being a two mallett campsite (smug, us? Well, yes), our neighbours have borrowed my mallett and we’re sat on the grass drinking Pim’s. Which is how any Latitude should begin. Albeit next year I’m going to make sure I check exactly how many of my tent pegs I’ve destroyed before arrival at a windswept campsite.

After the preliminary wander around the site – did I mention that someone moved the comedy tent?, the annual don’t look down toilet trip and a trip to the hog roast van (other than maybe Early Edition and blue splashback jokes, nothing says Latitude to me more than a hog roast. Which probably proves I should spend my time at Latitude eating less pig) it was time, in true WBN form, to check out the theatre tent. Which also has been moved! And only has one entrance! And a queue being marshalled by stewards as opposed to a random free-for-all survival of the fittest. If I could use the word without sounding like a numpty (and believe, I have tried) I’d say awesome.

We’re just in time for Les Enfants Terribles‘s The Vaudevillians which combines song, a murder mystery and pyschopathic puppet. Now before you read on here you should note two things: i)I spent the first half of this show standing at the top of the raked seating (more uncomfortable than it sounds) and ii)it is only partly in jest that a WBN catchphrase for new writing is “cut the first 15 pages!”. As @cat_elliott rather asutely noted the opening monologue of this show sounds like one of those vaguely poetic McDonalds adverts and though it is all very competently done I can’t help but feel that The Vaudevillians spends a lot of time circling before it gets to its point. If I were being flippant I’d say something like SHOW ME THE MONEY here. There are some lovely touches – the mime artist has the kind of pay off that must have made the company squeal with delight when it was realised (and if they didn’t squeal with delight then they should have, it’s good) – but touches can’t disguise a show which is a good twenty minutes longer than it should have been (I’m being a little bit polite here, at one point I thought it might go on forever and I’d have to spend all my Latitude watching it). Plus, and again this is a particular rant of mine, the show was being played on a thrust stage but had clearly been directed for an end-on audience. Not good.

Post The Vaudevillians there was a mass exodus (undoubtedly in a bid to not-quite-see Tom Jones play in the woods) whilst I staked my claim to a prime spot for the RSC’s The Thirteen Midnight Challenges of Angelus Diabolo.

[Interupting this broadcast for some backstory – I know, if I was dramturging this blog post I’d CUT it all: the RSC and I have some Latitude history of the not entirely pleasant kind. I came along to their 2008 show, ostensibly written by Anthony Neilson, fresh off the back of thinking that Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia was one of the most original, brilliant pieces of theatre I’d ever seen. It was midnight, my first Latitude and the RSC. I was expecting magic. And what I got instead were two actors wearing ill-fitting black leggings and reciting lines from Eastenders. By the time the zombies came out of the woods – the one moment when I thought theatrical magic might explode upon us – it was too late. I was filled with contempt that the RSC thought they could treat an audience in this manner just because we were at a festival. I raged at the most basic of misunderstandings. Cut to 2009 and the RSC did manage to pull it round slightly with a solid if not exactly spectacular midnight performance of witchcraft and witchburning that at least gave a nod to its Suffolk setting. Plus this was at least spooky enough that when I saw the lead actor in the foyer of the Globe a few weeks later I was sufficiently spooked by his presence to step backwards and hope he’d stopped the witch burning and all that]

Back to 2010, Angelus Diabolo is a reworking of the Faust story, with an under-talented but over-egotistical actor making a pact with the devil. And, you know what, I’m actually laughing. Proper, this aches slightly laughter. Whilst also cringing slightly for the poor audience member who is unexpectedly dragged on stage to have his bottom fondled. Plus as the play goes on I actually start to feel some of the huge emotional pull that the final minutes of the Faust story bring with it. But – and, oh I hate to have a but given how much more I enjoyed this than 2008’s effort – it still feels under-developed and, well, like the RSC aren’t taking their Latitude effort entirely seriously. Because this one could have been actually good (as opposed to ‘good for the RSC at Latitude’ which isn’t the tag they should be striving for) if they’d shaved off some of the audience indulgence and oh-we’re-the-RSC-we’re-going-to-lampoon-ourselves-for-being-serious-and-Shakespearean. Me, I’d have taken a real-time Angelus vs the Devil final confrontation (because the actor playing Diabolo was more than good enough for it) and had them thrill me to my core. Some times you really shouldn’t be scared of dropping the gimmicks and just being excellent.

And with that it was time to crawl back to the campsite to dream of actors having their fingers cut off…


Musings in more than 140 characters on Such Tweet Sorrow 3

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that in the British Theatre Blogosphere (yes, you may shoot me for using that word) Such Tweet Sorrow, the RSC’s twitter adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, has been as well received as a proverbial lead balloon. Or a Montague at a Capulet cabinet meeting if you want a more story-appropriate simile.

I confess – my problems with Such Tweet started quite early on. I’m going to quote Such Tweet‘s Director Roxanna Silbert from an interview that appeared on the Guardian site and see if you can spot where my problems started:

“I think [Shakespeare] would’ve loved it. All you’ve got on Twitter is the actor, the story and the audience. I’ve directed at the Globe where there aren’t lights, sound effects or much staging so in fact there’s something rather pure about this.”

Yep, that would be my highlighting (the academic in me almost put a ‘my emphasis’ note in there). Now twitter might be lots of things, but an actors medium? Really? The elephant in the room would be the word ‘writer’. I could (and will) continue on this point but since I’m here and Silbert has expended words that are so blatantly questionable I can’t help but look a little closer at the comparison between the Globe and twitter (not a sentence I would ever have thought I’d type). Not only is Silbert wrong in her perception of what does or doesn’t make a production at the Globe (need I go any further than Lucy Bailey’s current production of Macbeth to prove her assertion at best outdated, at worst lazy?) but twitter being ‘pure’? One of the joys of the medium is everything you can throw at it – all the twitpics, the audioboos, the YouTube links, the spotify playlists, the blog links, the RTs, the memes…and on and on until you get to doing that quiz to work out which member of NKOTB you should marry. Twitter is about the words – those 140 characters – but it’s also about the noise that goes with it. Coming in unaware – or in denial – of this is to fundamentally misunderstand your tools.

I think many of my problems with Such Tweet stem from this starting point. The failure to address the fact that twitter is a writer’s medium became immediately apparent. Anyone can use twitter. As with anything, some use it better than others. Some people give information, some make me think, some make me smile. Some people use it brilliantly to create – or ape – character (I follow a Malcolm Tucker who is pretty much pitch perfect). Such Tweet, however, requires more than all that. It needs not only character but also story. Whether you’re writing, devising or improvising dialogue (for twitter is dialogue, in all the ways that something can be dialogue) it’s often not about what you say but what you don’t say. It’s the wants the characters feel they must hide or – and this is where it gets more difficult – the wants they don’t know that they have. It’s the much uttered show don’t tell. Don’t write on the nose. All the things that writers get told or learn or ignore and end up writing Days of Our Lives. The “I” form of twitter encourages on the nose writing. We all do it. The best tweeters just do it a lot less than the rest of us. But to be dramatically interesting – to build the connections and the interest that a play demands – Such Tweet should have created some warning system whereby if more than 10% of tweets were of the on the nose variety the actor typing them got a small electric shock.

I can only conclude that even a less cruel-to-actors system wasn’t in place. Had there been discussions about language? About cliché? About reversing audience expectation? About what you can do with the unsaid? In the same interview that Silbert suggested the Globe/Twitter parallel Charlotte Wakefield (Juliet) also said something that made my warning alarms go off:

“I’m nearly 20 so I would normally type in quite a sophisticated way, but a 15-year-old today will use a lot of text speak.”

If that statement were a bucket then it would have a lot of holes in it. Again I lay my prejudices down: if the Goldsmiths teaches you anything it is that a generalised statement in the place of accurate research is, quite frankly, not good enough. Maybe some teenagers do use lots of text speak. Maybe some don’t. But what about the specific teenager you’re portraying? The chances are that when a writer is praised for how accurate their language is they’re being anything but literal. Listen to how a conversation actually goes. Listen to how people communicate. Not only would it make pretty much no sense if it were directly copied down, it would also be incredibly dull (look at verbatim theatre, for every play of that genre that works and is pleasurable to watch/ read there’s at least ten which will make you fall asleep). You need the lexicon but beyond that you need imagination not reality. We’re adapting from Shakespeare  – if that doesn’t give you a license to engage your imagination then I don’t know what does. The blunt truth, however realistic or not, is that I (and I imagine others) do not want to read text speak.

It wasn’t until the list of credits that @SuchTweet tweeted today that I became aware that there were writers (plural) involved in the project. Their role (as far as has been declared) was to create the overall narrative and then the mission sheets which the actors were given each day. And here we have another problem. Such Tweet didn’t need a writer (if we take it that the actors are going to devise/ improvise the actual text) – Such Tweet needed a Dramaturg. It needed someone who not only planned the narrative but who dealt  with the structural problems that twitter brings with it. Someone who sat down and before a single tweet went live decided what the conventions of the piece should be. Depending on conventions we might accept that people burst into song (and know all the dance steps), that there is a narrator, or direct address, or Pinter pauses. Audiences will go places with you if you set your conventions – and then stick to them. How should the public/private oxymoron of twitter be addressed? Would characters respond (or not) to those outside the narrative? Would they respond to criticism within the play or ignore it? It seemed that no one had sat down and found an answer to these (hugely important) questions. Equally the huge change in tone – and lexicon – midway through from Romeo pointed to the distinct possibility that there hadn’t ever been a character tone (and how a tone might be created) meeting somewhere down the line.

I know I’ve chosen to analyse Such Tweet on its artistic rather than social or marketing merits. I think there is much to be said for how it has clearly engaged an audience (and proven that a twitter full length play might be a feasible prospect). I’m also aware that the project marks a significant experiment in form (of which no one, least of all me sat pontificating here, could have seen the ways it would develop or the problems which would arise). I do know though: I stopped properly following the story one week in. I dipped in and out of the @SuchTweet list for the rest of the project but with something approaching duty rather than real interest (Shakespeare. Twitter. New writing. I couldn’t ever abandon it entirely).

I wanted more. I wanted everything that a play can be. I wanted the RSC to have taken it seriously enough to have thought of all the stylistic/ narrative problems that it would inevitably encounter. I wanted it to not just be a gimmick.

I wanted the writing to be as innovative – and as exciting – as the concept itself was.