ENGLAND: too much money has made it heartless

The last time "Tim Crouch":http://www.newsfromnowhere.net/ came to Vancouver for the "PuSh Festival":http://pushfestival.ca/index.php?mpage=home he stirred my soul about the potential of theatre. On that occasion, he performed two productions: _my arm_ and _an oak tree_ (a piece which famously involved a different local actor every night). To my mind, *ENGLAND* forms a sort of trilogy with those shows. They are not linked by events or characters (well, unless, you think of Crouch as a character, I guess) but rather in the themes they explore. Crouch’s work is about reconfiguring the relationship between performer and audience; between performer and performance; and testing notions of what exactly constitutes performance.

Like all artists, Crouch has his obsessions, but what is so exciting about this unofficial trilogy is that each production remains a wholly unique experience informed by a specific point of view or conceit. Of the three, *ENGLAND*, performed in the Vancouver Art Gallery, is perhaps the most challenging to come to terms with. Initially it seems as if the two performers – Crouch and Hannah Ringham – are about to lead us on a tour of the gallery. We are even given a short history of the hilariously described “Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver” (deftly showing our spectacular inability to imbue our public institutions with any romance, BC Place, the Oak Street Bridge – who’s responsible for all this literalness?).

Standing among the crowd – who have neatly gathered in a circle in the rotunda of the Art Gallery – Crouch and Ringham establish a sort of call and response until it begins to dawn on the audience that the performers are in fact speaking with a sort of unified voice (I won’t make a full commitment to this statement, as one of themes in the show is translation and I would have to experience the production again to make sure that during the first half Crouch wasn’t giving longer descriptions that were then shortened by Ringham; if this is true, it is then switched around in the second half). Effectively, for the first half at least, there is a single narrative voice – it might be “Crouch’s” or it might be “Ringham’s” – and this person lives in a converted jam factory in Southwark, an area in south London, with his/her international art dealing boyfriend. Over the length of the first half, we learn that the narrator has a fatal heart-condition.

There is a spare poetry to the text with key phrases repeated within different contexts, for example “x saved my life” which starts with the ridiculous (the Vancouver Art Gallery saving Crouch and Ringham) to the sublime of someone’s (perhaps stolen) heart giving life to another. The text is also punctuated by the repeated refrain of “look”, sometimes at the things that surround us, sometimes by the invisible details of the narrated life. For the first half of the show, the audience is led through the gallery, stopping in a couple of rooms. I can’t recall any direct connection between the actual works on display and the text (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong). Practically, this makes sense as Crouch and Ringham are currently touring ENGLAND, so it has been “installed” in a number of galleries around the world. At first the use of the gallery felt like a bit of a gimmick but gradually I began to appreciate that the piece is very much about allusion. It is also about confusion and an inability to actually see or appreciate. Somehow having characters talk about art and use a physical location but not really acknowledge it, or experience it, makes sense.

So location – as the title would indicate – is important. What is the England of ENGLAND? The first half of the play takes place in “Southwark”. Perhaps nowhere in London has been more transformed through the years of gross excess of the Blair years. Ironically, this transformation has as its fulcrum an art gallery: Tate Modern – a partially disused power station that now houses a restaurant serving small portions of expensive food, a gigantic hall that hosts jumbo-sized cultural events and crowded rooms upstairs filled with modern art. From Tate Modern, the transformation of this part of London stretches west along the Thames towards the “revitalized” South Bank Centre and the London Eye and east towards the new City Hall. The area is unrecognizable from even ten years ago. Although certainly impressive, it is also sterile – think of Coal Harbour if people actually lived there and the promised arts centre had been built instead of that monstrous convention centre. Southwark used to be Dickensian and grimy. Now it is thronged with tourists. Every nook of the South Bank Centre has had an upscale eatery crammed into it with (at least before the middle of last year) braying Hooray Henrys ordering more bottles of Bolly.

I’m sorry to go on about this, but I can’t help but feel that this is central to understanding ENGLAND. The ruination – in my opinion – of the Tate Gallery is somehow emblematic of a sad transformation that has occurred more widely in the capital and more broadly in the country. The original Tate was quirky, housing as it did both English and modern art. To the left you had Gainsborough and his ilk, to the right Picasso and Miro. It was strange. I was never clear why these two disparate schools were lumped together but it worked. It also had a reasonably priced café in the basement. I suspect Crouch is about my age and the London I remember was defined, for better or worse, in the eighties when I first moved there. It was the time of Thatcher, intense young men hawking the Socialist Worker, grime, Routemaster buses, soot in your eyes and bad coffee. Except for the first and last, I can’t help but long for those times. It might be age, but London has lost its heart. It has been branded and commodified. It is probably more cosmopolitan than it was twenty years ago but despite those people coming from all corners of the planet, they in themselves are generic: they wear the same suits, eat the same food and care only about money. They also love Tate Modern and like to bray in upscale eateries (that often used to be local pubs). They live in a place called London but I don’t think they really experience London: a bit like the way the characters in ENGLAND are in an art gallery that they don’t truly experience.

London has lost its heart.

Hearts are an important symbol in ENGLAND (the poster image is of a heart-shaped art object). But it is far more complex than a country being made heartless by greedy bankers. The second half (which, while still in the gallery, takes place with the audience seated) is set in a hotel room in an unnamed, Muslim country. The narrator – now firmly Ringham – has undergone a heart transplant. She is visiting with the widow of the man whose heart now keeps her alive. It is unclear whether the man – who was injured in a bomb blast – was sacrificed for the Westerner, if his heart had actually been purchased for her. Not only is the narrator now healthy, another switch has taken place. She has gone from low-status, to suddenly high-status. I haven’t mentioned, but Ringham speaks with a Thames Estuary accent in the slow, deliberate way of someone who has “arrived”. Ironically, she is as much out of place in the jam factory as she is in the unnamed Muslim country. But, still, we see that in this foreign country, she is a powerful woman who has had the resources to purchase a man’s heart. The apparently unified speaking voice of the first half is gone with Crouch acting as some sort of local translator. Ringham’s nuanced questions and comments are reduced to their basic – and strangely unfriendly – essentials. As a sign of gratitude and to compensate for the loss of her husband, Ringham offers the widow a valuable piece of art which she can either keep or sell. The ultimate value of the art lies in its financial worth.

The heart has been ripped out of London. The heart has been ripped out of the bomb victim. The value of art – and literally of a man’s heart – can be measured in financial terms. I think ENGLAND is ultimately about the impact of too much money.

How these things inter-relate needs further reflection. But this is already the longest review I’ve ever written.

_ENGLAND by Tim Crouch, part of the 2009 PuSh Festival; Co-direction Karl James and a smith; Sound design Dan Jones; Performers Tim Crouch and Hannah Ringham; Technical Manager Chris Umney. For more information jet_ "here":http://pushfestival.ca/index.php?mpage=shows&spage=main&id=75#show