Berkoff’s ‘Londons’: Staging Psycho-geographies of the John Keefe
Introduction
In this paper, I wish to look at certain aspects of his ‘London plays’, drawing on East, Greek, Decadence and West. Through the approach to theatre that elsewhere I have called ‘physical theatres’, I suggest Berkoff ‘physicalises’ London (or ‘Londons’ as I shall argue). He plays with London ‘with all available means’ as sites of the body, sites of memory, sites of seduction. These playings become ‘agons’ of real- and psycho-geographies of the feared and the ecstatic.
The Literary; compare and contrast
Here, House writes of Dickens’ ‘persons and scenes’ as ‘one almost hallucinatory experience succeeded by another’ (ibid: xiii). This hallucinatory sense also marks Eliot’s vision of a dead or at least semi-necromantic London as an ‘unreal city’ where,
Such sites of memory and invoking of the fallen, such ‘airs of death’ become actualities of death. The incident during the recent G20 demonstrations; in the stabbings, shootings and other violence reported weekly and monthly; the accidents of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists; and the simple deaths of everyday life. <3> Such hallucinations turn into physicalised nightmares and horrors; different sets and flows of humanity.
Such writing as Dickens and Eliot is evocative, resonant, appealing to the literary imagination by invoking London as setting, as character, as vision. In a similar way, Sinclair’s evocations of London, whether Hackney, the Olympic site, or the concrete-tarmac ring that now marks and ‘gates’ London many miles beyond the original walls appeal to certain forms of poetic imagination.But, simply because it is theatre, Berkoff’s ‘total theatre’ is visceral; not only describing London but also physicalising the parts and layers of London through the bodies of his actors, the word- and body-scapes they draw, the knowing spectator who blends real and imagined experiences. <4> Thus the grey prisoners and sullen crowds become phantasmagoric flows of rats taking over that despised London just as the plague takes over Thebes. Familiar streets and locations are mapped as nightmare, as mean streets; become ‘urban noirs’ that have a particular and peculiar effect on us as citizens and spectators.
But by their nature, such traces and multiples cannot act on a singular London but on the plurality of London; that is, properly speaking, ‘Londons’.
With his own rewriting and reworking of traces, histories and events for the stage Berkoff mythologises the plural city that we recognise and fear and are thrilled by. We are given not a London, but ‘Londons’ through concrete and cultural topographies (marks on the ground), and phantasmagoric psycho-geographies (marks of the mind and imagination); ‘Londons’ that both repel and seduce.
The Bodies of ‘Londons’ not London
<5> So, Ackroyd opens his biography with the striking image of London as ‘the city as body’. Here the ‘byways resemble veins’ and the parks it’s lungs (1). Its size is monstrous and disproportionate. This dystopic ‘wen’ chimes with Berkoff’s own dyspeptic and nightmarish real imaginings. But whilst Berkoff plays with this same image, he does so in terms of the theatrical and the performative; putting the body (as it is in all theatres) as the ambiguous, doubly present centre of his stage playing, showing us the bodies that inhabit his Londons. <6> Such theatre demands to be acted out; I will do what I can with Berkoff’s words –- dialogue and didascalia
It is perhaps in the great fights that Berkoff releases images of a delirium that both appal and appeal. Epic battles are staged between ‘Colossi who bestride the Commercial Road’ behind the Whitechapel cinema, between Eddy and his rival in a greasy café in Hounslow. <7> Razors flash, iron splits skulls, ‘ribs splinter’, ‘eyes gouged’; two pages of word-pictures giving us a fight club of the Hackney Marshes. But the stage directions for the body hold the centre of all these evocations: ‘They mime fight’ (Decadence) and ‘Mike acts the battle’ (West).Or again: ‘he destroys everything on the table… the table and contents become a metaphor for the battle of Cable Street’. (East) These become a physicalising of these ‘Londons’. Of choreographies of stylised movement and words that rest on the transforming body of the actor, perhaps on a promiscuity of energy, on the spectator’s imagination. <8>
These scenes are enacted across the ‘Londons’ of Berkoff’s wastelands. These stretch from Bethnal Green to Hackney, from East Cheam to WC2 and Giovanni’s, from Tufnell Park to an unspecified ‘paradise’ that is somewhere ’west’. We follow through streets and tube journeys as stage narratives map conflicts and work and lovings that are real and sur-real.But they are also embodied narratives of lived and wished for histories, narratives of real and mythic landscapes. Of what Sinclair calls, in one of his more resonant terms, ‘memory-terrains’ (Sinclair, 2009: 8) here presented as theatres.
Word and Body and Spectator
Whilst acknowledging his relishing of an Artaudian rhetoric, Berkoff’s version of ‘sharing the breath’ remains that of the stage, not the ritual, whilst drawing on a ritualised energy. To borrow from de Certeau, Berkoff’s theatre is a staging of the relationship between talk, language and action; not in everyday life but in pictures of everyday life, whether experienced, feared, dreamed of or as ecstasies and frissons of desire.Thus, because of theatre’s inherent synchretic nature, it is also an orgy of the actor’s body. Because of theatre’s dialectical nature it is also an orgy of the spectators body and his/hers embodied knowing imagination. The actors and the spectator share the body as text, as referent and signifier. As I watch and listen, I share that which the actor is representing; I feel ideas, think about feelings. Berkoff’s theatres are epic narratives set in grotesque, carnivalesque, sur-real, embodied landscapes of decay, plunder, blood, sex, violence, bigotry. But Berkoff also gives a promiscuous sensuality to these horrors, an attracting vividness that carries its own seductions as I enter these narratives and journey across landscapes of the urban margins of all kinds, (those ‘urban noirs’ referred to earlier). <10> These are not the romanticised, foppish meanderings of the flâneur; rather odysseys through and across such marginalised ‘Londons’. Nor are they the hallucinatory journeys of a Nadja; the solipsistic, self-concerned wanderings of a surrealism in which I lose my way. Rather these are journeys of the sur-real, yet rooted in the political and cultural truths that is the ‘Londons’ that I live in and have lived in. This is a rejection of the ennui of the flâneur and Nadja in favour of the raw vitality of the city; an energy arising from the streets and wastelands.These are not journeys and phantasmagorias of fears and ecstasies that, pace Nic Ridout, cause me embarrassment as the plays address me directly and indirectly. Rather, I enjoy (perhaps guiltily as I squirm at the prejudices and bigotries and uncomfortable truths expressed) the involvement and engagement that is common to all theatres. These become journeys and deep maps of the ‘agons’ of real- and psycho-geographies, and thus of fear and ecstasy and seduction. I journey in worlds that are familiar (through memory that remembers and mythologises and alters what is remembered), strange or unknown but vaguely recognised and so becoming palimpsests of the layers and traces of ‘Londons’. <11> Memory is a threshold into conflicting experiences and emotions:
A memory that puts a patina of soft nostalgia over harsh realities placed to one side. Or:
A differently painted nostalgia of marks and nightmares and, perhaps, memories that are one-sided (as they always are?). A nostalgia that is bleak and scabrous and vicarious in its playing with a fear as well as a thrill of what we recognise.
Of Fear and Ecstasy
<13> These are psychological states; matters of belief, of how the world is viewed and framed and claimed. But I would suggest that such fear and the ‘other’ itself has an obverse face, other viewing. We know others as others know us – as outlined above, we live in states of habitus and structures of feeling and mutual recognition. That is, cultural and psychological events and states acting on each other.
Berkoff confronts us with our desire to look and be looked at as we see his characters ‘eying’ each other, ‘clocking’ each other, share Les’ reverie about ‘snatch on the 38 bus’ (East, sc. 11). We are drawn vicariously into this world of desiring and dangerous looking. By such drawing–in, Berkoff shows us an unwinding fear of what we recognise in ourselves, that we recoil from in its manifest energy of raw sex and violence but which we are also attracted to, seduced by as enacted before us. This is the psychology of the ecstatic. <14> We may associate the ecstatic with a visionary or heightened state; what Mannheim formulated as a necessary occasional ‘severing’ from the here-and-now (Ennis, 1967: 40); a counterpart to everyday life. But I would argue there is an alternative to this view. In the context of this paper’s subjects, I would prefer to adapt I.A. Richard’s notion of the ecstatic as a heightened, ‘densely packed version’ of the events of a ‘shared common humanity’ (ibid: 42); in other words, of the shared habitus and structures of feeling by which we live. What is shared in Berkoff’s worlds may seem of limited value to the respectable citizen, or not shared at all. <15> As with other characters of the social margins (Sandford’s Cathy Come Home, 1966/1976; Bond’s Saved, 1965/1966; Kane’s Blasted, 1995), we are shown that we would want to shy away from or prefer to ignore. What we fear. But, of course, as contrary creatures we are also drawn to what we fear; we wish to experience directly but at a distance. We wish to experience the ecstasy of the vicarious thrill when our shared humanity is taken to uncommon heights. <16> Fear may be regarded as a form of ‘necessary occasional severing’ but within the right circumstances –- zones of safety –- fear becomes the root of thrilling, vicarious pleasure; the safety of the frisson as a shared, embodied experience. Here shared and entered through (the sort-of-safety-of) Berkoff’s densely packed, embodied theatres and journeys of word-scapes and body-scapes. Journeys of (psycho-)geographies as we are taken across the real landscapes of recognised ‘Londons’ and the semiotic landscapes of envisioned ‘Londons’. Journeys at their most venal as aging movie stars cruise the M1 looking for rough trade (East: 39) or Helen enacts the orgasmic qualities of the hunt as she rides Steve-as-horse (Decadence: 12). <17> Journeys seen at their most ecstatic perhaps in Eddy’s rejection of Oedipal taboo and the feared as he embraces his paradise in the west:
And we become seduced by these journeys of fear and ecstasy. Of course, emotions and psychologies such as fear and ecstasy are unstable, may take us to places we do not enjoy. On the other hand, fear and ecstasy are stimulants to further awareness. We come back to the function of theatre. We place ourselves and are taken into the frames of embodied mise-en-scènes of a nature that we would normally turn away from; in the case of Berkoff, memory-terrains of violence and sex that repel and seduce and enlighten.
The dangerous seductions of theatre
<19> Whether on the street or in representations of the street we are voyeurs; toward life as real or as represented, we are voyeurs. Not in the obsessions and fetishes of a scoptophilia, but simply drawn to and enjoying looking and being looked at.
We turn such characters into sacred monsters, offering the fear as demanded and taking the ecstasy as offered. <20> We look and stare (and sometimes gaze) as part of being human in the world. Whether as spectators in the streets or in the theatre we are drawn to that we would not wish upon ourselves and-or others. But this is another uncomfortable truth about theatres and ourselves; how we as spectators become seduced by scenes of ‘other’ actions. Boltanski writes
Talking of ‘Shoah drama’, Schumacher argues that a ‘successful’ performance
Whilst respecting the particular circumstances of Schumacher’s argument, I can offer no solution to the spectatorial dilemma and perplexity that we should demand of all theatre. <21>
I can offer no answer to Boltanski’s paradox except that we accept and work with such paradox as a necessary concomitant of the fact of the spectator’s agency. Just as we are, to extend Boal’s coining, always ‘spect-actors’ so we are always agents; just as we accept the fiction as knowing spectators so we can accept or reject what the spectacle is showing. Any seduction is (maybe) in my gift to accept or refuse. This knowingness, this messy and complicated autonomy of the spectator is in tension with the same mechanisms of my ‘mirror neurons’ (Iacoboni, 2005) that trigger empathy with the most likely or unlikely subjects. In this, Berkoff follows the unavoidable tendencies of theatre; to raise both the bidden and unbidden responses of the embodied spectator to the embodied spectacle on stage. I suggest that he has a certain intention in this; not only to exorcise his demons, but to exorcise by thrilling our demons through fear and ecstasy. Hence the ‘orgiastic’ and ‘orgasmic’ quality of his style of body and word that plays with the recognisable terrains and psycho-geographies (the terrains of the imagination) of his (and our) ‘Londons’. In this, I can only accept the facts of agency and its resonances of unbidden empathies, of messy spectatorships. In other words, to engage with the seductions of Berkoff’s theatres whilst being wary of these; to enjoy the fear and ecstasy whilst still asking questions of what the spectacle is for, what it is saying to me and other spectators? Of where it leaves me and thus where I leave myself in relation to others.
Towards conclusions (of a kind)
<23> So with Berkoff whose own polyphonic word- and body-scapes remain in states of tension and double-ness that provoke me and seduce me. Berkoff’s real- and psycho-geographies become enchanted lands that are both familiar and unfamiliar; his bodies become contested sites of emotions and ideas and horrors, of ‘agons’ between kinds of loving and kinds of dread. Thus Phelan’s sense of the inherent impossibility of singular beginnings and endings of performance become a ‘Londons’ of plurality of performances. Performances of the real ‘city’ and by implication the wider and deeper ‘citys’:
Performances of the imagined ‘city’/’citys’ that have their roots in the experienced (both direct and indirect) ‘wilderness’:
Clearly it is neither of these alone, but the dialectical pluralities of both. <24> For Berkoff, ‘Londons’ of continuing despair and open possibilities of the feared and the ecstatic for characters and spectators alike. A kind of bleak ‘happy ever afters’ ...
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To Cite This Article:
John Keefe, 'Berkoff’s ‘Londons’: staging psycho-geographies of the feared and the ecstatic'. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 7 Number 2 (September 2009). Online at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2009/keefe.html.
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