Other Possible Worlds Onstage

Besides, You Lose Your Soul or The History of Western Civilization, directed and written by Julia Lee Barclay, performed and created by Bill Aitchison, Zoe Bouras, Rachel Ellis, and Birthe Jorgenson. Camden People’s Theatre, London, February 11–March 1, 2009.

Besides, You Lose Your Soul or the History of Western Civilization presents itself as a forensic investigation into the place of the soul in theatre, philosophy, civilization, and the West. It is inspired by the work of Foreman, Cage, Burroughs, and Gysin, while integrating director and writer Julia Lee Barclay’s personal diaries and notes, as well as narratives, gestures, and language rules created by the co-creators in their Apocryphal Theatre lab work. Cut-outs from the canon of western philosophy (Descartes, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Beauvoir) undermine the notion that language is a natural function, and that theatre is a repeatable thing, foregrounding instead the improvisatory and aleatory quality of performance. This yields uncannily meaningful nonsense phrases, wild and at times deliberately far-fetched combinations juxtaposing high and low art, anecdote and metaphysics, in eye- and ear-“popping” nuggets of lucid speculation about the nature of language, the universe, and the self.

The stage space that audience members walk into is strewn with books—hundreds that were all, or almost all, written prior to 1945, the point at which Barclay claims irony became unthinkable. The books make up the near-totality of the stage set. The only other items of furniture include a long, boardroom-like table propped up on stacks of books, alternately used to suggest a war-room and a podium; two large platforms; handwritten scrawls in chalk on the four walls outlining each performer’s “score”; and a few bits of costume hanging on pegs. The actors are clad in an array of suits loosely suggesting both philosopher and detective. Chairs placed ad hoc around the space offer audience members the opportunity to view the show from multiple perspectives—and, indeed, to change perspectives during the show by getting up and moving around. The invitation to disrupt—and be part of the show—is suggested explicitly by Barclay, who makes an announcement at the start inviting audience members to move around and to look at the books. All of these, one notices, have something to do with history, philosophy, law, or theatre. They also tend to deal with language, war, imperialism and, indirectly, obsolescence—themes that recur throughout the performance, as the improvised labor of deconstruction takes us beyond the set play into a world of live invention: gestures and cut-ups of the texts surrounding the themes of truth, history, detective-work, lies, and civilization offer the audience a mixture of scripted and unscripted moments that tell a story about how stories are told.

The projection of the script itself onto one side of the space turns it into yet another “document of civilization,” along with the books and other piece of paper strewn about the stage and pasted on the walls, while Barclay, in a black dress, Kantor-like at her station in a corner of the space (appropriately surrounded by books) with her laptop, performs the part of the playwright/director, while actively participating in the real-time work of rewriting the script with “Track Changes.” As actors misspeak lines or invent their own, she integrates these as well as audience comments into the projected play text. In this way, she foregrounds the script—and textuality—by underscoring the choices made by each, and their autonomous responses to her playwright-author’s “sacred” written word. This highlights the text’s changeability while enabling performers (and audience) to play with her language, and claim, Pirandello-like, their authority. Audience interaction took various forms: when I shouted out to one of the performers that she was “doing a good job,” after she claimed to be out of her waters with all this heady philosophy, my intervention appeared on the wall in “Track Changes.” Similarly, when I started to sing the Marseilleise as another performer held up a book of French revolutionary history, this was taken up by some of the performers, and a...