ENGLAND - Art for art’s sake?

At first glance, England, ‘a play for galleries’, appears to deliberately set out to bewilder and bemuse it’s audience. This is perhaps attributable, however, to Tim Crouch’s preoccupation with blurring the lines between theatre and conceptual art; England is suitably ‘staged’ (if I can use such a term) in the Mead Gallery. As the performance began, a litany of questions were immediately posed, if not expressly asked by the audience (like the couple stood behind me): “where is this supposed to be?”, “who’s speaking?”, even, “why are we in a gallery, I thought we were going to the theatre?” The confusion continues as two actors (Crouch and Hannah Ringman) narrate the first act by both speaking for the same character, maintaining fixed grins throughout and gazing at the audience with eyes as vacant as their smiles. Although initially disquieting (why are the English so bad at holding eye contact?), I found that the impression produced was strangely beguiling, coupled as it was with simple and honest dialogue.

It initially appears that there is a complete absence of staging, however, it soon becomes obvious that the art which already fills the space, namely, sculptures by Phyllida Barlow, serves to mould our responses to the performance, as well as providing the immediate setting of an art gallery. For instance, the blank banners that fill one corner seem to bolster the politics, both personal and global in scale, that are at the centre of England. Certainly, the audience is left to infer and make assumptions throughout the narrative that spans the globe, as the character struggles to recover from heart disease, culminating in a meeting with the widow of his/her eventual donor (whom we presume lived in an Arab country, though we are never told for sure). The piece as a whole demands an active engagement with the questions that are posed and the performers implore us to “LOOK!” at what is in front of us. What we see, however, is often far from pretty.

The exploration of the role of art in today’s frequently messy, ugly, dishonest world (some rather unsavoury details emerge as to the possible circumstances under which a replacement heart was procured) is what I found most fascinating when watching the play. “This is art”, we are told. However, precisely what ‘this’ is is never made explicit. At one point the character proudly asserts that “my boyfriend says that art is universal”, but then only minutes later, proclaims: “my boyfriend says good art is art that sells”, and seems just as satisfied with this particular edict as the last. Certainly, more questions are asked than answers offered. Is a certain level of cultural intimacy required for genuine communication to take place? Is art truly universal, or only culturally specific? Amusingly, we are told to look at the “clean lines” of the art that surrounds us whilst the character simultaneously observes her/his American boyfriend, who sells art to international clients, speaking in Dutch, on a telephone line that stretches 4000 miles.

However, the idea that art can no longer act as a common language in world riddled with such vast inequalities is forcibly communicated in the second act, when the character visits the grieving widow of his/her donor. She/He offers “a gift! A work of art, from England!”, ‘valuable’ no doubt, yet contemptible in its inadequacy compared to a lost husband whom the widow believes to have been murdered. The painting becomes an unfeeling abstraction from the realities of her hash, day-to-day existence: “we have nothing”, and art is rendered bogus and obtuse. Both the character and the audience are left feeling helpless and frustrated at their inability to communicate with the widow: “How am I to have a conversation when I can’t see her face?”, the character protests, alluding to the Islamic veil, but also indicating the extent of the widow’s revulsion at her gift as she physically turns away.

Ultimately, I found England to be an intensely layered, almost sculpted piece of work. In fact, if anything, there are perhaps too many ideas clamouring for attention, particularly in a piece that is barely an hour long. However, the world we live in today is far from simple and England succeeds in presenting what amounts to a very human account of the problems we often refuse to face.

England is at Warwick Arts Centre in the Mead Gallery until Saturday 15th November.