A dark theatre, in the moments just after the welcome and warning to turn off electronic devices.
Offstage, out of the sight lines, a small group of musicians tunes up, and then stops.
Murmuring in the dark from the audience subsides.
“Autumn”–a string quartet and a piano–rings faintly through cold salt air.
The curtain opens on the cold, wintry Atlantic Ocean.
The sloped, polished, hardwood deck of a sinking ocean liner juts out of the stage like a knife in a fancy block.
A sharp wall of carved ice lies miles upstage.
Heads of varying sizes and at varying distances stick up through the wooden water.
The sinking ship groans and cracks. Screams and shouts from the ocean.
A well-turned-out matron in a maroon evening gown, replete with diamonds, pearls and a sable stole, tumbles down the tilted deck like an out-of-control child on a playground slide.
She disappears into the unseen ocean with a splash and a wooden thud.
“Autumn” melds, in an Ivesian fashion, into “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Other passengers follow: a gentleman wearing a tuxedo and a monocle, maintaining complete aplomb while he skis down the deck; a child’s ball, accompanied by two bouncing boys in knickers; a chef chasing an airborne London broil to a watery grave; a large knot of society women with tissues and compacts.
Random splashes and thuds punctuate the falls. We watch the empty deck. Screams and shouts from the ocean. The music stops.
The string quartet flops down as a tuxedo-clad group–all arms, legs, accidental notes, twanging and snapping strings–and hits the water.
We watch the empty deck. Screams and shouts from the ocean. A low, building rumble on the wood of the deck.
A grand piano thunders toward the sea. The pianist, with feet hooked around the legs of a piano bench, hangs on to the piano’s keyboard cover for dear life.
They hit the water with a cannonball splash and a crash of piano keys.
The piano, bench, and pianist splinter explosively, and then disappear when they strike the stage.
We watch the empty deck. Screams and shouts from the ocean.
Two life rings with ropes trailing behind them, two leashed dogs happily loosed from their owners, roll nonchalantly into the ocean.
Hydraulics roar; airplane cable shrieks; burly, bare-chested deckhands grunt and swear from the wings while they heave for all they’re worth on yards and yards of thick, braided manila lines. The theatre’s rigging and fly systems are stressed far beyond their tolerances.
The sloping deck is hauled by main force to a ninety-degree vertical. The broad curve of the stern crashes upward through the flies, and blasts through the trusses and roof of the theatre.
Plaster, fresco work from the shattered proscenium, metal beamwork, blocks, electrical conduit, and rigging litter the ocean below, as the stern half of the liner is lifted bodily away from the stage.
Engineering crewmen and poor steerage passengers fall through the air like pepper grinds from a mill.
Evening lights glitter outside, above the broken theatre. The remaining cables and guylines ping and crack like bullwhips.
The entire half of the ocean liner crashes down through the deck. The ocean geysers up around the wrecked ship.
As the water swallows the vessel, its internal power flickers, crackles and dies. Within seconds, the ship vanishes without a trace.
Cold fog rolls in and crosses the proscenium into the house.
Screams and shouts from the ocean. The entire theatre goes black.
CURTAIN
THE END
Thunderous applause in the dark peaks, and then trails off.
Random cell phones light random faces when the house lights fail to re-establish.
Far off, the lights from an approaching ship twinkle like dim stars. Rescue is miles in the distance.
Screams and shouts from the ocean.
In Act Three, Scene One of Lucy Prebble’s 2009 play Enron there is a restaging of the destruction of New York City’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Prebble’s text reads:
September 11th 2001.
They improvise their responses.
Eventually . . .
Ken Lay comes out to give a speech.[1]
This is how it went down in Rupert Goold’s staging of the play: there is a projection of the towers engulfed in smoke. A cloud of some glittery substance meant to index ashes and broken glass falls from the lighting rig. Several members of the suited ensemble stumble forwards in slow motion, miming leaps from 100 storey windows, flailing their arms slowly, mouths open in silent screams.
Famously, London loved Enron and New York City hated it. In an article in The Guardian, British theatre critic Michael Billington attributes its failure on Broadway to New York theatre’s “conservative instincts.”[2] But Nicole Gelinas, writing in City Journal, notes how audiences enjoyed the first half of the play, with its velociraptors and light sabers. Once the representation of 9/11 hit, “shocked audience members launched a quiet but seething strike”, withholding their laughter and applause.[3] Patrick Duggan writes that “because of the conditions of its operation—the encounter of live bodies that gaze upon each other, the theatre might be considered an ethically dense and complex space, especially when attending to questions and representations of trauma […].”[4] It strikes me that an audience’s withdrawal of affective labour upon the performance of a representation of historical trauma might indeed be a kind of ethical encounter. No, the New York audience said, this is too much. Or, this is not enough.
Is theatre ever up to the task of representing trauma? As Duggan’s body of research on contemporary trauma theory and performance has noted, trauma itself has a dimension of repetitive performance—trauma marks an original event that is only accessible through “delayed psychic returns.”[5] He identifies a subset of performances he calls “trauma-tragedy”, which reflect the structures of trauma, rather than the actual event. But Goold’s interpretation of Prebble’s stage direction “September 11 2001” is not in this camp. Like the sinking of the ship imagined in John Thornberry’s A Night to Remember, the material indexicality of the theatre—the way often shabby, flimsy things point to “real things”, like glitter pointing to the ashes of the Twin Towers—transforms trauma into burlesque.
Thornberry’s piece imagines a staging of the sinking of the Titanic (though the word is never used) within the confines of the proscenium arch. We first encounter a tumbling, sinkable Molly Brown: “A well-turned-out matron in a maroon evening gown, replete with diamonds, pearls and a sable stole, tumbles down the tilted deck like an out-of-control child on a playground slide.” The spectacle continues in this fashion with items and people tumbling into the sea, in a manner that reminds the reader of Buster Keaton and Lucille Ball’s encounters with the material world, and by extension, Henri Bergson’s work on laughter (provoked by something mechanical encrusted upon the organic). Like Goold’s attempt to represent 9/11, the representation soon begins to strain and push the theatre itself past its breaking point. The audience is submerged in the wooden ocean. But then again, in witnessing such an event, perhaps it was already too immersed to return to shore. Thornberry’s audience, unlike the New York audience witnessing Prebble’s Enron, cannot withhold their affective labour, they cannot go on strike. They can only scream for help.
[1] Lucy Prebble, Enron (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), p. 159.
[2] Michael Billington, “Enron’s failure shows Broadway’s flaws”, The Guardian, May 5, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/may/05/enron-broadway-close-early.
[3] Nicole Gelinas, “Why Enron couldn’t take Manhattan”, City Journal, May 13, 2010, https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-enron-couldn%E2%80%99t-take-manhattan-10729.html.
[4] Patrick Duggan, “Others, Spectatorship, and the Ethics of Verbatim Performance”, New Theatre Quarterly: NTQ, 29: 2 (2013), pp. 146-158 (p. 147).
[5] Patrick Duggan & Mick Wallis, “Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds”, Performance Research, 16:1 (2011), pp. 4-17 (p. 5).