Attention paid, attention given

It’s long been a running joke among people who write about theatre that our favourite words in the English language are “the show runs 70 minutes with no interval”. But I’ve realised that another phrase delights me even more: “Performance will be followed by a post show Theatre Club”. This isn’t the explosion of ego it might seem, because that delight is specific to performances where someone else is hosting theatre club, and I haven’t organised a thing. 

I’ve been to two not-hosted-by-me post-show discussions in recent weeks, engaging in them like any other audience member (albeit talking wayyyyy too much). Even though my aim with Theatre Club is to facilitate with a very light touch, so that the conversation is non-hierarchical and questions are offered to what I like to call “every person’s expertise in being human”, I still feel a lot of responsibility for how the dialogue unfolds, especially when critical political topics or sensitive experiences are raised. 

There was plenty of that talking about Louise Orwin’s FAMEHUNGRY. It’s an excoriating show: scathing of the attention economy, the organisations and structures that exploit and capitalise on desires for recognition and connection, but self-scathing too, Louise recognising her own desires for celebrity and the harm she has experienced or created in pursuing them. So many fascinating questions pulse through this performance: what happens to the developing brain when confronted with the attention it’s possible to gain through social platforms such as TikTok? Why are so many people – be they performance artists or TikTokers – willing to debase and even abuse themselves for attention? What is the artistic or intellectual difference between licking a lollipop for an hour on TikTok and doing so on stage and calling it live art?  

These ideas are explored through multiple layers: what is seen live on TikTok is only a fraction of what’s seen on stage (just as social media presents a fragment of a life, not the full of it). Often what is shared via projection on the back screen is additional to what Louise is saying out loud; in that visual text she is able to be critical and curious, instead of pandering to the rules. Invigorating and provocative thinking like this will always have brains whirring, which is why I so appreciated the invitation to unpack the show in the company of others. 

What did we talk about? The pressure artists feel to be present on social media, selling themselves as commodities. The lack of funding for making work. The notion of show “business”, how important it is to have those skills in marketing as an artist – and how much energy that claims from other creative work. I shared two book recommendations: the first was Julia Bell’s Radical Attention, because I had recently seen her give a talk at an AI symposium organised by Hannah Silva, during which I thought again about what the implications of the phrase “to pay attention”, and the ways in which that can be exploited. (I haven’t used this construction for years now, preferring the possibilities present in some other languages, where one gives attention.) 

The second was Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, a galvanising and surprisingly easy read sharing seven essential changes of thought that need to occur to reorganise 21st century economics around ideas of justice, for humans and environment. Raworth also considers how human behaviour is impacted by language, how it is warped by the permutation of economic ideas into everyday speech. She points to an experiment that happened in the US which suggested that the words “profits”, “costs” and “growth” tended to make corporate executives behave with less empathy, and another experiment in which people who took part in a “consumer reaction study” identified more strongly with notions of wealth and status than people who responded to exactly the same questions presented as a “citizen reaction study”. 

Putting aside for the moment the ethical problems of the word citizen (how it categorises, how it excludes, how it excuses violence), Raworth sees danger in the shift that has happened since the 1970s, the word citizen being used much less than the word consumer (or, for that matter, customer or client). She quotes media analyst Justin Lewis to back up her argument: “Unlike the citizen, the consumer’s means of expression is limited: while citizens can address every aspect of cultural, social and economic life … consumers find expression only in the marketplace”.  

Or, as the same thought might be rephrased in relation to FAMEHUNGRY: when platforms like TikTok are so controlling of a) what users can do or say on their own accounts, b) the algorithms that delimit what users can see of others’ accounts, and c) people’s attention – Louise gets thousands more viewers on TikTok than she has had for all her performance work put together – what are the impacts on how humans are able to address and potentially change their cultural, social and economic life? 

One of the changes theatre-maker Adie Mueller is currently working towards is a shift in how people think and talk about end-of-life care and death: inevitable experiences each one of us must face, and yet so many of us avoid considering until forced to by illness, accident, age. Adie’s own mother died in Germany in the first months of the pandemic, and her show Another Goodbye relates how Adie witnessed not only the moment that life slipped from her mother’s body, but all the myriad ways in which her mother’s existence gradually faded from view.  

That sounds morbid and depressing because any discussion of death is considered morbid and depressing. In fact the work feels tender, generous, attentive to the life in the room: audience members are offered tea and blankets on their way to their seats; throughout the show Adie interrupts her narration to invite everyone listening to check in with their own breathing, their temperature, their senses, their skin.  

What makes the evening joyful and transformative, however, is that it ends with a discussion, the audience split into small groups of about eight, including a facilitator from a local hospice, to share their responses to the work – which inevitably means each person connecting the work to their personal experience of someone they love dying, or fears surrounding loved ones’ deaths. I’m always fascinated by those times when audience members become as distinctive as the performance itself; I will remember for a long time the story of the 13-day wake for the Gujarati grandmother, the man who found Christmas much easier since his mother, father and brother – all of whom experienced painful mental or physical illnesses – had died, the man whose parents had died when he was quite young, but was now contending with the illness of an ex-partner with whom he had remained close friends.  

By weird coincidence, the same day I saw Another Goodbye, I also watched A Tupperware of Ashes at the National Theatre, a play in which three siblings struggle to organise care for their mother, as she grows increasingly ill with Alzheimer's and ultimately dies. The juxtaposition of these two works reinforced for me why I much prefer performance that offers a dialogue with its audience to fourth-wall theatre that pretends its audience isn’t there, and why I prefer learning about human experience through conversation, rather than characters offering didactic explanations from the stage.  

The friend I saw A Tupperware of Ashes with also has a mother with Alzheimer’s; she messaged the next day to say: “I’m becoming slightly obsessed with mothers and death, but you can’t really ask someone to volunteer that information unless you know them very well.” The beauty of the post-show discussion for Another Goodbye was how everyone felt able to volunteer that information, based on having experienced the show together: it created a moment of closeness, in which Adie’s candour and kindness could be reciprocated with our own. It made the whole theatre event so much more meaningful and satisfying – an event in which we were more than just people who had bought a ticket (consumers), we were all people who had our own knowledges and understandings which we were keen to share with each other as experts in being human. 

I’m always hopeful that more theatres – all theatres! – will offer a theatre club to their audiences, which is why I was so delighted to discover that Theatre Royal Bury St Edmonds has started its own Theatre Club. “Blatant plagiarism!” cried a lovely friend, worried that “it steals the concept in some ways, definitely some of the copy and omits the ethics and care of your project”. Pushing aside how flattered I felt by this (I do try to work with ethics and care! I love that you phrased it like that, dear friend!), my response is: plagiarise to your heart's content, people! I stole the concept myself, from Lily Einhorn; and the idea that anyone “owns” any kind of open-access discussion format feels typical of divide-and-rule imperialism and the ways in which capitalism limits the scope of human ideas. 

“Unpacking each part of a show is so interesting, especially with others who may offer different insights and opinions!” says the copy for the Theatre Royal Theatre Club, and I couldn’t agree more. No wonder I’m so often mystified and disappointed (not to mention enraged) that the phrase “Performance will be followed by a post show Theatre Club” is one I encounter so very rarely.