Location, Location, Location

It’s not all about Pimms and wellies: site-specific theatre can offer clever re-imaginings of what it means to be an audience member

Why watch Shakespeare at the Globe? Why traipse all the way to Bavaria to watch Wagner at Bayreuth? It adds to the experience, so we are told. But that’s woolly reasoning for splurging extra cash. Isn’t it?

And yet site-specific theatre—theatre tailored to a unique venue—manages to maintain its attraction and, following on from last year's surprise hit, The Container, looks to be popular again at this year’s Fringe. Fortunately in Edinburgh, a bus ride is as close to a long haul journey as most venues are likely to demand. Sure, a bit of a jolly down to Cornwall to watch The Merry Wives of Windsor in the beautiful outdoor setting of the Minac might prove a super day out, but a quick walk across to the Pleasance Under Grand—the setting for Badac Theatre’s The Factory—or to Look Left Look Right’s caravan for a performance of The Caravan might leave a little extra time for consideration of what these unorthodox theatre spaces really add to a performance.

Badac’s The Factory capitalises on the opening, for this year only, of a series of cellars under the Pleasance Courtyard, imagining the space as the terrifying sequence of rooms leading up to the Auchwitz gas chambers. Led by the Sonderkommando, an audience moves through each of the low vaults, edging inexorably, it seems, towards the gas chamber.

“It’s not me making the process up, it actually existed,” says actor and director Steve Lambert. “There was a process of pulling [the Jewish prisoners] through. [The Nazis] would take them into the building, they would be beaten in the building, they would have their possessions taken away, they would be put into the undressing room, they would be stripped, then they would be put into the gas chamber. So it’s not me developing the process. What I’m trying to do is recreate it in this building.”

For Lambert, the building is key to the success of the show: indeed, the production has been created specifically for the space. Undoubtedly the dank, dingy feel of the underground rooms, the exposed brickwork and long, dark vaults are intensely dramatic: “It’s mind-blowing. When I saw it my jaw just dropped. And then I was like yes, definitely, I’ll use it.”

But far more than just providing atmosphere, Lambert argues, the venue is integral to the idea of The Factory – an exploration of the near-industrial process of extermination developed by the Nazis in camps such as Auchwitz and Treblinka: “The play works really well in the space as you can divide it up. It’s naturally divided into rooms and so each room that you take the audience through becomes a different room, or a different part of the process.”

How, then, does this become drama and not just recreation; performance rather than reconstruction? Lambert responds: “Well, I suppose in a sense it is reconstruction, but you still have to find the human element of drama. Somebody walking towards their death, to me, is a dramatic situation. It’s creating moments of things which we don’t really understand but, to me, we should be exploring, really, to find essences of us in.

But new spaces require new styles and techniques of acting. In The Factory, Lambert faced the problem of how to express the violence of the beatings without resorting to the fine-tuned fakery of stage-fighting. “Because this is the factory and it’s about the industrial side of extermination we tried to give a very metallic feel to all the sounds and the movement and the violence actually, so we are using metal on metal to create the violence and the sound and the pain.” It’s this transformation of the human prisoners in to the materials of industry which sits at the heart of The Factory.

But for Look Left Look Right productions, the theatre space has been chosen specifically to emphasise the human cost of the 2007 floods which so badly affected great swathes of the UK. Directing their sights towards the fact that, 11 months on, 2,200 families are still living in caravans, the cast and an audience of five share, rather unusually, a caravan for half an hour.

As co-director Mimi Poskitt explains: “Site-specific theatre brings the audience into an unconventional space, and that space is always going to be engineered to create some kind of reaction from those people. Everyone has been in a caravan before and they will reminisce about a seaside trip or something. And obviously the context of the play works well with the space.”

Poskitt and her co-director Ben Freedman hit upon success with their previous show, Yesterday as a Weird Day: Reflections on July 7th 2005, and in The Caravan the company pursue their technique of using real interviews—this time with those victims of the flooding still living in caravans—and reproducing those interviews verbatim. Drawing upon their past experience as documentary makers, the pair find using the words of real people allows for a particularly fluid, current and incisive form of theatre. They term this “documentary theatre”.

It’s an odd paradox between closeness and distance: the audience are near enough to experience vividly and intensely, but distant enough to reflect. An anecdote from a previous performance is insightful here. Poskitt recalls: “one of the audience members said afterwards that during one of the interviews he had wanted to nod and respond and say, ‘yes I agree with you,’ because the usual theatre conventions of ‘I’m a performer and you are an audience’ were just completely broken down.”

And there’s the key: the audience member may have wanted to speak out, but he didn’t. Because, in spite of the intensity of these experiences, there’s a ticket stub in a pocket somewhere which serves as reminder that this is still a performance. Neither The Caravan nor The Factory ever stop being theatre, but the unconventional theatre spaces make the relationship between audience and performer much harder to define. As Steve Lambert points out: “sometimes we get caught up in this thing with theatre where we go in, we sit down, we look straight up and the people in front perform for us. And it becomes very ritualistic, in a sense. That’s what we always do. But if you then get the audience to come in and sit down, and you then get them to walk about somewhere, straight away you are heightening their senses, because they’re not quite sure what’s going on.”

So by breaking that theatrical ritual, site-specific theatre can re-define what is meant by theatre-going. That’s why Shakespeare’s globe is such a treat. The Factory and The Caravan ought to be so too. And put away those fears. I have, indeed, checked: no beatings or caravan holidays will actually be inflicted.