Tables, legs, chairs

Wednesday starts properly for me with a phone call from Cara Verkerk at 13:48 inviting me to a performance she’s taking part in that night as part of her theatre dissertation; a dinner party in the Capital Centre studio. I ask what they’re hoping to achieve and she says something about direct engagement with an audience. They’ve tried an aggressive, interrogative approach so far, now they want to create something friendly, drunken, easy.

I guess university courses like to pretend to be practical creatures; if not vocational, at least quantifiable, assessable – I suppose, ‘academic’: theoretical, ungrounded, but rooted solidly onto something and based on the assumption that if you can’t see what that something is then you’re not clever enough, or not thinking hard enough.

And to fuck that right up, four Warwick students seem to be putting on a dinner party, in a studio – incidentally (though not coincidentally) a place where food and drink are banned, and which is meant to be shut at this time of night – for their dissertation; so who’s marking this? And how? And I suppose, what does it mean? What does it do? How does it work? Is anyone even doing any work? Isn’t this, you know, wank (taxpayers money and all that)? So I think it’s justified, and can I justify my thinking without vaguely saying things like: it was brilliant, hilarious, incredibly uncomfortable, at times not at all enjoyable, quite scary in fact, made me think about things I maybe didn’t want to think about, blurred a lot of things together in my head; that I don’t really know how to describe to you because it doesn’t want to be described.

Can I say that? Bertrand Lesca fills my glass endlessly, the four guests worry up and down the table because they feel at any moment that the performance will begin; the space is completely dark except for the lamps on the table, two classroom tables next to each other covered in a cloth, the wine is decanted in teapots – as if I’d ever even decanted wine into anything before! I only found out what decanted meant the other day – I come away wishing I didn’t know what decanted meant, I suppose – the food is really good, but this isn’t a restaurant review – for a bit we talk about plays because it’s almost something we have in common; nothing seems weird except that everything is so normal, everyone’s so expectant, people are being so polite, we pull crackers that contain jokes and some of the pieces of paper are notably bigger than others – and someone can’t find their glass, someone else loses the dice in their cracker – they talk about dancing, nobody dances yet, but a creaky old record player plays Gershwin and Bowie through most of the meal – Bertrand seems the most like a director, always forcing more drink into me, pushing people to be more theatrical – people ask confusing questions like ‘what do people do at dinner parties’ – dessert arrives and suddenly one of the guests, Ben Canning, starts to act strangely, weirdly passive aggressive, making it clear he wants to leave, that he considers the exercise pointless.

Then Jesse Meadows – a guest, not a performer, taps a glass, gets up and makes a complimentary speech about Bertrand; she gets more and more distressed throughout the speech – astonishing acting, completely indistinguishable from the general mood – then Carl Cerny, another guest, stands up, and begins a series of confessions regarding what he has stolen during the course of the meal – missing cutlery, crockery, wine bottles, toys from crackers, cushions, throws – and each item is flung onto the table with Carl saying I stole this – and then we dance to Gershwin until I accidentally unplug the lights with my foot, and everyone shouts in the dark.