Enacted Offstage Images, Reported Onstage Action, and Parallel Fictional Worlds in Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) and Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019)

Abstract

This essay addresses how the collision of image, text, and speech in contemporary scripted performances discloses something significant about both being in and thinking about the theatre. It examines cases wherein recent examples of theatre practice disrupt long-standing expectations about the form and function of reported offstage action. While Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019) literalises the relationship between text and performance by putting the play script in the hands of the audience and employing illustrations as a means of reporting that inverts established ekphrastic modes, Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) literalises offstage presence through the audio narration of a figure named as ‘The Director’. These acts of staging literally key conceptual and practical challenges of theatrical representation work in both cases to reveal instances of mimetic disjuncture. Audiences are not sure which version of each performance to invest in: the staged action or illustrated text of Terrestrial Salvation and the onstage adaptation or The Director’s critical reporting in Chekhov’s First Play. By making available different versions of the same theatrical event, each production connects resonantly to a cultural moment wherein we are often exposed to alternative narratives but may not always recognise or acknowledge these alternate perspectives. Reviewed together, these two productions present a wide-ranging sensorial problematising of theatrical representation. They construct points of meaningful divergence through unscripted performances and the disaggregation of actor and character. Methodologically, this essay works to address these questions of representational multiplicity through a form of discursive practice that reports between the two case study examples. This approach serves to reveal the discourse of theatre and performance studies as frequently grounded in ekphrastic reportings that recount theatrical images no longer available to view. The argument marks out first how reported action and other forms of ekphrastic representation have historically been about what cannot be staged in order to propose that what comes to be unrepresentable in these examples – even as it is the means of representation – is theatrical performance itself. The essay then traces how these metatheatrical questions related to the representational affordance of these performances – in this case to do with impossibility of representing the theatre itself – ripple into wider consequences that can have substantial implications related to race, freedom, and collective endeavour.

Keywords:

• Tim Crouch
• Dead Centre
• reported action
• theatricality
• representation

Notes

1. Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav, Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (London: Oberon Books, 2019), back cover. The show continued to tour to the Dublin Theatre Festival, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton, and Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon in Autumn 2019.

2. Georgina Guy. ‘From Visible Object to Reported Action: The Performance of Verbal Images in Visual Art Museums’. Theatre Journal 69, no. 3 (2017): 339–359 (340).

3. Chekhov’s First Play toured extensively from 2016 to 2019 to international venues including Schaubühne, Berlin, Theatre Vidy, Lausanne, Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, Northern Stage, Newcastle, and Liverpool Playhouse, as well as festivals in Brisbane, Helsinki, Modena, Bucharest, and Hong Kong. I attended the production at Battersea Arts Centre, London in 2018. Post-syndemic, Chekhov’s First Play has been performed at Mess Festival, Sarajevo in 2021.

4. Karen Quigley, Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 101.

5. Ju Yon Kim, ‘Between Paper and Performance: Suspicion, Race, and Casting in The Piano Teacher’, Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020); 127–153.

6. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (London: Oberon Books, 2016), 13.

7. Ibid., 17.

8. Dead Centre, ‘Chekhov’s First Play’, https://www.deadcentre.org/chekhovs-first-play-1. (accessed December 14, 2022).

9. Quigley, Performing the Unstageable, 7.

10. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, xv.

11. Ibid.

12. Dead Center, Chekhov’s First Play, 21.

13. Ibid. 23.

14. Ibid. 13.

15. Ibid. 29.

16. Ibid. 22.

17. Quigley, Performing the Unstageable, 5.

18. Ibid.

19. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 12.

20. Ibid., 11.

21. J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9.

22. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 23.

23. Miller, Illustration, 67.

24. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 29.

25. Miller, Illustration, 67.

26. Tim Crouch, ‘Note for this edition’, Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (London: Oberon Books, 2019), xiii.

27. Tim Crouch, ‘Parallel Worlds’, Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (London: Oberon Books, 2019), xii.

28. Stephen Scott-Bottoms, ‘Authorizing the Audience: The conceptual drama of Tim Crouch’. Performance Research 14, no 1. (2019): 65–76 (67 and 74).

29. Dan Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses: Or, what do we see when we see a play?’, Performance Research 14, no 1, (2009): 17–28 (17).

30. Ibid., 22.

31. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 20 and 24.

32. Ibid., 26.

33. Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses’, 22.

34. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–2.

35. Alan Read, The Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 53–54.

36. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 31.

37. Crouch, Tim. ‘Note for this edition’, xiii.

38. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 30.

39. Ibid., 80.

40. Ibid., 56.

41. Ibid., 56 and backpage.

42. Ibid., 94.

43. Ridout, Stage Fright, 70–71.

44. Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses’, 18.

45. Ibid., 25.

46. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 38.

47. Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses’, 25.

48. Ibid.

49. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 31.

50. Crouch, Tim. ‘Note for this edition’, xiii.

51. Stephen Scott-Bottoms, ‘Playing in the Dark: Tim Crouch’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation’, In Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre. eds. Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (London, Bloomsbury, 2022), 193–208 (200).

52. Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses’, 22.

53. Kim, ‘Between Paper and Performance’, 127.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid. Italics in original.

56. Ibid, 141.

57. Ibid, 144.

58. Ibid.

59. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 84.

60. Ibid., 86.

61. Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses’, 18.

62. Crouch, Tim. ‘Parallel Worlds’, xii.

63. Crouch and Jadhav, Terrestrial Salvation, 76.

64. Ibid., 112.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Georgina Guy

Georgina Guy is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-editor of this Special Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review 33.4 on ‘Hear Tell: Describing, Reporting, Narrating’. Her book Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation (2016) was shortlisted for the TaPRA Early Career Research Prize and formed the basis for a research-led evening course at Tate Modern, London exploring theatrical approaches to curation and how performance is collected by art museums. This essay is part of a larger project concerned with ‘reported action’ and tracing a shift from visual to verbal and sonic images across contemporary art, museal, and performance practices.