Losing the plot

I’ll admit now that this will not be unbiased. In the pub after watching Gecko’s Institute at Warwick Arts Centre, I may have been under the influence not only of alcohol, but also of the highly entertaining company kept by the members of the cast and crew. Before I was persuaded to join them for a drink and a chat, I was already questioning my ethics as a ‘traditional’ reviewer by attending the Q&A session directly after the performance. An ethical review, I thought, should be an honest depiction of my immediate and personal response, unadulterated by the opinions of others post-performance, especially those of the cast and crew. I reminded myself that I am easily confused by what most people consider basic plots – to give you an idea, watching Game of Thrones requires the simultaneous reading of the Wikipedia page – and that I respond positively to a lack of story such as I perceived in last week’s Gym Party. After watching Institute I felt that I could comment for hours on the visual and technical success of the piece, but also that I should probably attend the Q&A to clarify my confused understanding of the narrative that I believed to be the result of my self-diagnosed allergy to knowing what the hell is going on. My curiosity got the better of my ethics.

Aside from needing a drink to wash down the ingenuity of the staging and choreography that I had just witnessed, what brought me to the pub was the revelation in the Q&A that everyone in the audience had an utterly different interpretation of what the story was. Being used to, if not very good at, recognising stories and sometimes having to decipher their meaning, I could not believe that Gecko had created a completely blank slate that allowed audience members to overlay such a variety of meaning onto what they were watching. One woman was deeply touched that Gecko had managed to express her obsessive-compulsive disorder so accurately; another was politically empowered by what she saw as an assault on capitalism; yet another recognised her mother living in care within an expertly dancing French fifty-eight-year-old man in drag. While the audience was kaleidoscopically exploding with different ideas and sympathies to what was being shown on stage, I was desperately trying to make sense of the narrative, the stupidity of which is twofold: A) There clearly wasn’t one. B) That sort of thing doesn’t come to me naturally anyway.

I still cannot ignore the fact that when I was watching Institute, I was convinced that there was a story I was missing out on. It was obvious to me that the actors knew full well every detail of the narrative, and I could only not access it because they were either mumbling inaudibly or – painfully reminding me of my monoglot shame as an English native – speaking lines in French, German, Italian and Spanish. When I caught a phrase or two of the English, or managed to translate a snippet of one of the other languages, I would momentarily catch up with the story only to lose it again. Perhaps an obsession with complete narrative understanding runs in the family; my brother is a victim of the success of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man, the best selling piece of immersive theatre, having seen it about thirteen times and only now getting to grips with the plot after a lot of money and effort spent running desperately after actors, ruthlessly felling other audience members in the process. To let my big bro and I off the hook, perhaps the obsession with narrative runs not only in the theatrical – enthusiastic about plays but also generally quite dramatic – O’Brien family, but in society at large. The most popular stories and therefore the stories that we most exposed to are ones that leave no room for the imagination and creativity of their reader.

I wished I hadn’t seen a single other piece of theatre before watching Institute, a sentiment that depressed me initially, but was reconciled when I voiced it to Rich Rusk, Gecko’s Associate Director, who called the ‘greatest compliment they could receive’. If you can watch things without panicking about whether or not you will understand the plot, which most people seem to manage quite happily, you will love Institute. But it’s no problem if you are unfortunate enough to be like me; Rich the Associate Director convinced me over a pint that, now I have seen it once, if I came again I should and easily would leave my anxiety at the door. * This is an instruction I now wholeheartedly pass to you so that you can go and see Institute in peace. Maybe it worked out for the best that I was a little unethical in my approach to writing my first review for The Boar, because I have come to the conclusion that, essentially, you will love Institute.

* He is not Punchdrunking me into buying another ticket, I got the first one for free so I could write this.

Institute is has finished its run at Warwick Arts Centre and will now continue on its tour.