Stovepipe

Stovepipe

It’s all too easy to remain detached from the subject of Iraq. Stovepipe aims to pick us up off the sidelines and deposit us bodily into the midst of the relief effort.

Matt Boothman
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It’s all too easy to remain detached from the subject of Iraq. It’s thousands of miles away, it no longer makes daily headlines and the combined British and American military is gradually washing its hands of the place.

Stovepipe aims to pick us up off the sidelines and deposit us bodily into the midst of the relief effort. Based out of the Bush Theatre’s new bar venue, Unit 18, the production transforms the boiler rooms and dead spaces below the West 12 shopping complex into a promenade performance space.

Designer takis’s sets are nothing short of lavish – and little wonder, with Hightide, the Bush and the National Theatre all backing the play in some capacity. There’s a conference centre, a hotel room, a café bar, a war-torn city street and more, and every new environment is further evidence of high production values and attention to detail. With the audience free to roam, everything – from the posters promoting fictional investors in the rebuilding programme to the papers in the office in-tray – must stand up to close scrutiny, and it does.

The performances, too, are consistently convincing and engaging. Shaun Dooley doesn’t quite reconcile British mercenary Alan’s caring and violent sides into a unified character, but as our guide it’s important he remain sympathetic, and keeping the lid on the violence helps achieve that. Eleanor Matsuura, meanwhile, infuses every female character in the show with distinct but equally potent varieties of strength, independence and (occasionally) warmth, in the hands-down best performance of the night. As Sargon Yelda’s Arabic interpreter puts it, “the Americans have a phrase: ball-breaker.”

So why does Stovepipe still fail to suck the audience in?

Maybe it’s because the design is too slick. The bar and office furniture looks like it was bought yesterday, brand new. Maybe it’s because the one time we actually visit Iraq is the one time the staging is necessarily representative rather than realistic, and the rest of our time is spent in Amman, Jordan, a staging post for forays into Iraq; like Alan, we feel like we’re between places, waiting for the real action to begin.

Or maybe it’s because of the play’s scattergun chronology, which flashes backwards and forwards with nearly every scene and offers very few narrative signposts to help us find our place in Alan’s story. Trusting the audience’s intelligence rather than patronising them is always the right call, but in this case the complexity of the plot requires us to keep disengaging from the moment in order to look at the bigger picture and see where the latest piece slots in – and getting lost in the moment is what allows us to care.

Katia Hilel

I sort of see your point about the complexity of the plot as a possible source of distraction, but aren't tight plots and detailed narratives the stuff of proscenium plays?

How do you reconcile fragmented narrative and the real time nature of a promenade show where events are happening in different locations simultaneously? Perhaps it's not so much the complexity of the plot but more the clarity of each scene that determines the success of a promenade show?

I don't know, but whenever I go to a promenade/participatory production I instinctively get into 'serendipity mode'. I dip in and out of things and expect a loose narrative, it then becomes the process of piecing things together rather than untangling the onslaught of information that your receive in a 'straight' play...(hate that term but you get the gist)
Matt Boothman

Events aren't happening in different locations simultaneously in Stovepipe - sorry if I gave that impression in the review. It's nothing like a Punchdrunk show, where you can wander as you please (and is not conceived or advertised as such, so that isn't a criticism, just a clarification). You're shepherded to an area, the scene plays, you're herded to the next area, another scene plays. In that sense the plot is strictly linear.

The problem I had was that when the play flashed back, it wasn't clear that's what had happened. It opens at a conference in Amman; there's a security alert, and Alan shepherds his VIP away. Then he's in a hotel room in Amman, with his mate Eddy, preparing for a mission in Baghdad. Then Alan, Eddy and Grif are on a mission in Baghdad, safeguarding a convoy along Route Irish. That seemed like a fairly logical plot progression to me, which is why I was a bit thrown to discover that the chronology runs in the exact opposite direction. Perhaps I was imposing my own sense on the scenes instead of letting them wash over me, but I don't think I can be blamed for thinking the mission-in-Baghdad scene comes after the preparing-for-the-mission-in-Baghdad scene. (It turns out Alan and Eddy are preparing for a completely different Baghdad mission. The fact that neither ever makes it back to Iraq seemed to reinforce my assumption that the Route Irish mission is the one being talked about in the hotel room. I hope I'm communicating my confusion effectively...)
Phil Clark

I saw it on Saturday night and would not want to be too critical. The writing and acting were exemplary. However I share a few of your misgivings about audience engagement. For me this was partly down to crowd management and to the audience itself, some of whom were pretty rude and objectionable. Shuffling from scene to scene became a bit of a headache, which obviously lessened the dramatic effect. Ideally there should have been less numbers but I understand they have to cover costs.
It's hard not to compare this production with the work of the peerles Punchdrunk company http://www.punchdrunk.org.uk/. In this group's work you feel as if you become part of the performance rather than a spectator. Stovepipe succeeded on many levels, but not on this one.
Matt Boothman

I actually thought the crowd management was top notch - they took advantage of herd mentality, ushered a few people and trusted the rest to follow, which worked without being too intrusive or interrupted my engagement with the story. I was lucky not to have any noticeably troublesome audience members, so that could just be good luck on my part (or bad luck on yours).

My quarrel wasn't with the level of audience participation - the production was advertised as promenade, and to me that means moving from one area to another without being asked to interact or take part, which I was perfectly happy with. I'm a huge fan of total, immersive, environmental and participatory theatre experiences, but I wasn't expecting a Punchdrunk experience from Stovepipe, and I think to do so would be unfair to the production, which had no aspirations in that direction.

What I do expect from promenade is to feel like I'm there - not necessarily part of the action, but located in the environment. The initial conference setup and the climactic face-off in the alley were the only times I really managed that, for a variety of reasons I've mentioned above.

On a possibly related note, Adam Brace was apparently "borderline fucked off" when he heard his play was going to be staged as promenade - it seems he didn't write it that way.