Too clever for its own good: Adler & Gibb at the Royal Court

By B. Evans

Adler & Gibb is daringly experimental, and I applaud that. The people involved are clearly intelligent, skilled creatives. I believe they are making art with integrity – because they believe in it, and they have something to say. The piece is not cynical, lazy, or without talent. It is complex and stimulating and they have clearly worked very hard on it for a long time. I would love to get into a room with the writer and co-director, Tim Crouch, and pick his brain; I think it would be enjoyable and enlightening. So I am disappointed to admit that I didn’t really like his latest play. There were good moments and intriguing ideas, but as a whole, in the end, it left me unmoved. However, there is a lot to talk about, and in aid of a thorough discussion, spoilers abound. (If that really bothers you, skip to the final paragraph, and come back after you’ve seen it.)

The most striking and note-worthy feature of the production is its form. The way in which the story is told massively overshadows the story itself. As the audience enters, there are two young children colouring and relaxing on a bare stage, a props table and stage manager clearly visible against the back brick wall. Throughout the first half of the play, these children (instructed via headphones) silently hand props to the adult actors, move set, and even stand in (neutral, expressionless) for a deer, a dog and a dead body. In his recent article for The Guardian, Tim Crouch quotes the performance artist Abramovic saying ‘Theatre is fake… the knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real.’ This is true, and there is something refreshingly honest about depicting a woman beating a dog to death by having the actor repeatedly hit a small child with an inflatable club. In his article, Crouch draws a comparison with Matisse responding to a complaint that he’d got the arm of a female figure wrong by saying, "but this is not a woman. This is a painting." ‘Art's power,’ Crouch claims, ‘is its ability to contain the idea of one thing inside something else. If we work too hard to make everything look like the thing we say it is, then we're also removing any sense of the game of art.’ Crouch is playing with us. The moment with the dog/child is silly at the same time as being disturbing. There is the potential for huge power in making an audience inhabit contradiction in this way – how thrilling to be laughing and horrified simultaneously. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite pull it off. Everything about the piece up until this point was so surreal that this didn’t surprise me enough to provoke unbridled laughter, and I didn’t believe it enough to feel disgust. I was intellectually aware of the potential for both feelings, without actually experiencing either. This proved to be a recurring feature of my response to the play throughout. I consistently thought I ought to be more engaged than I felt.

Crouch tells us in his article: ‘The old showbiz dictum of never working with children or animals is not because they're uncontrollable. It's because they're too real… And when you're an actor giving your realistic all, there's nothing more undermining than performing it next to something real.’ So it seems Crouch is intentionally undermining the performances of his actors by presenting them alongside real children, and, at one point, a real dog. I don’t understand why he would want to do this. Surely the form of a play should support the story being told by the actors, not undermine it? I guess the justification is that undermining the performances of the actors illustrates an important point. In an interview on the Royal Court website, Crouch says Adler & Gibb is ‘about the attempt by one person to become another person’. The point he seems to be making is that this is impossible. Karl James (one of the co-directors and a long-time collaborator of Crouch’s) follows up by saying that often when people are rehearsing a play or a film, a lot of energy goes into trying to make something “real”, and this play is ‘about challenging that word, ‘real’.’ Perhaps one purpose of highlighting the inability of the actors onstage to really become their characters is to mirror the inability of the character in the play, who is also an actor, to become the person she is obsessively preparing to play in a film. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is.

I get the feeling that Crouch and his co-directors are so deep in this work, that they may have lost sight of how an audience member with no prior knowledge of his oeuvre, and who doesn’t work in theatre, may struggle with it. The audience accepts the prop-moving children quite quickly (and enjoys the occasional humour they unwittingly provide) but we are still not sure what is going on. In the foreground, on a level with the stalls, a student presents a lecture on a conceptual artist, Adler (and her partner and collaborator, Gibb). Behind her, on the raised stage, two actors stand in their underwear, facing out. When the student utters, ‘slide please’ and turns towards them, they speak dialogue, but remain almost motionless and expressionless. We have no idea who they are, and their conversation must be impenetrable to anyone not familiar with the Meisner repetition exercise (briefly: a game in which actors make and repeat observations about each other). The opening line, ‘You’re wearing a blue blouse’ and its response, ‘I’m wearing a blue blouse’ are repeated 5 times, and the actor isn’t even wearing a blue blouse! Gradually we figure out that the two people are an actor preparing to play Adler in a biopic, and her acting coach. Eventually, it becomes clear that the actor is also the student who is giving the presentation, Louise, 10 years later. Crouch has said that ‘the audience can expect a piece that invites, to some extent, their role as co-authors’. I liked the sound of this. I believe that all art happens in the space between artist and audience. In Adler & Gibb, the audience is indeed required to be active – to interpret the abstracted form. But to me, it felt more like a challenge than an invitation – it felt a little exclusive, a bit heavy on the actor in-jokes. A significant number of people left at the interval, and I suspect it was because the form alienated them. I think Crouch intended to wink at them and welcome them to join in, but I fear he misjudged it, and instead left them feeling that they didn’t belong.

It is a shame that these people missed the second half, as they probably would have preferred it. During the first half, set has been brought onstage bit-by-bit, and the actors have gradually dressed and started to add a physical dimension to their performances. After the interval the form is what we recognise as traditionally theatrical – costumed actors move naturalistically, the space is shaped by flats, lit artistically, and the action is underscored with dramatic music. It is a relief – a reward for our hard work, to be indulged with these familiar crutches of the imagination. And yet it also feels strangely false; we cannot ignore the artifice, having seen it constructed before our eyes. This conflict is clearly Crouch’s intention. And it is rather a delicious discomfort if you share his fascination with the tension between the actor’s search for something ‘real’ and the unreal nature of their work. This transition is clever, and to an extent, it helps build momentum as the action intensifies.

Crouch claims that the play ‘tells a rattling good story, with characters, and dramatic action, and conflict’. The story takes centre-stage and reaches its climax in the second half. However, having spent the first half playing with form, the piece has failed to lay the emotional foundations necessary for full audience investment in the plot. The student’s role, being limited to a formal presentation, doesn’t allow us to get to know her, and there is a complete disconnect between her earnest enthusiasm and the ruthless ambition exhibited by the actor she apparently grows into. The absence of a journey here made the two Louises feel like two entirely separate people, neither of whom had enough depth to provoke empathy. The elder Louise’s behaviour is implausibly abhorrent. When she meets Gibb, whom she previously idolised, she shows her no compassion. She digs up the dead body of the woman she wants to become, violating her dignity with mocking words. Crouch argues that ‘an obsession with the real can sometimes feel like an acquisitive or even capitalistic act: a desire to own someone else's reality’. This fear is embodied in Louise. She is desperate to possess Adler’s reality. However, this is clearly absurd as an ambition, to the extent that for me, it does not ring true. There are parallels with celebrity culture, and the commodification of human life in a post-reality TV society, but these are concepts, not character traits. I had no sense of who this woman was, or how she had become so deranged, and so I didn’t believe her, despite a strong performance by Denise Gough. Crouch used a raft of techniques to remind me that Louise was not real, and it worked. The result was that I didn’t care what she did or what happened to her.

There were two moments in Adler & Gibb that I found moving. First, when Louise appears in Gibb’s home dressed as Adler, and briefly, the old woman (played by Amelda Brown) recognises her long-dead lover, restored to her youth, and is happy to see her again: ‘Oh, darling. Were you just upstairs? …Is that where you were, all this time?’ Her hope is heartbreaking. It reminded me of Joan Didion confessing in her autobiographical book The Year of Magical Thinking that she can’t bear to throw her dead husband’s shoes away, because he’ll need them if he comes back. The second was when Gibb revealed that Adler had been sick, and she had cared for her: ‘the last year of her was just cleaning, feeding and holding’. This reminded me of caring for someone I loved as they died. For me, the beauty of these moments lay in the fact that they depicted experiences that I recognised from real life in a way that captured a fundamental truth about human relationships. For me, it is by bringing these personal memories into the theatre, and enriching the reality that is presented to me, that I co-author the piece as Crouch invited me to.

That is what I want from theatre. Crouch fears an attempt to capture the real becoming acquisitive. But my craving for something real, both as an actor and an audience member, is driven by a desire for understanding, not ownership. I want to climb inside the minds of other people, so that I can see the world through their eyes. Of course this is impossible, but I think it is a positive thing to aspire towards complete empathy. And I believe we can get some of the way there, and it is important that we try. In fact, most deplorable human behaviour is rooted in a failure to do precisely that. Perhaps theatre cannot achieve absolute authenticity, but surely it can reflect parts of ourselves, and articulate some truths?

Crouch believes that ‘in the theatre… we still run the risk of judging quality by how close to a figurative representation of reality we can get’ and in this way, we are lagging behind other art forms, which long ago embraced non-figurative expression. I find this idea interesting, not least because I enjoy non-figurative art. However, I tend to judge the quality of art in all forms, from an abstract painting to a piece of music to a play, by how it makes me feel. Adler & Gibb made me think a lot, for which I am grateful. But it didn’t make me feel very much at all.

Adler & Gibb runs at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre until July 5th.

Performances start at 7:30pm (matinees 2:30pm).

Book tickets here.

@postscriptjour

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