Spring has sprung in Easterhouse, and the sun is shining through the windows of Platform, the space-age arts centre that forms the heart of The Bridge, a much bigger building that’s part leisure centre, part library and part social hub. It’s the perfect venue for Suspect Culture to rehearse their new show, Futurology, which bridges the gap between the conference circuit and cabaret turns in a bid to explore exactly how the future’s going to turn out.
Or rather, Platform would be the perfect venue if director Graham Eatough and his cast of actors, acrobats and clowns weren’t spending 14-hour days in a blacked-out, air-free room prior to moving to the even more ginormous Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. Not that such arrangements make getting the core members of Suspect Culture’s creative team in the same room any easier these days. While Eatough is resident in Platform, Greig is at home in Edinburgh tending to other projects. Company associate and Futurology dramaturg Dan Reballato is back in London following a stint working with Greig on the script in Scotland.
Getting all parties together via an all too appropriate conference call is mooted, but even this is deemed unworkable. In the end, Greig is seconded in Starbucks beside Haymarket station, Reballato grabbed in a hasty phone call prior to him running for the Tube, and Eatough finally collared over lunch in a brief moment of respite from technical rehearsals. Such a geographical spread of personnel is a reflection of Futurology’s own construction, which came together in what the company describe as ‘The Newspaper Moment.’
“There’s this great disjuncture between sitting on a sunny day drinking your Starbucks,” Greig observes, “and turning a page and reading that by 2050 we’re all going to be dead. It really reminds me of the nuclear thing when we were growing up, and it plonks a giant question mark above us that’s really scary. There was a story like that a couple of weeks ago, which on one page was saying that if the world warms up by eight degrees, people will be incinerated where they stand. On the next was an advert for holidays to The Maldives. You don’t know how to respond to that, and someone in the band says it makes you want to go out and shag.”
The result of this is a show that imagines a UN style conference called to discuss very human reactions to such possibly apocalyptic scenarios, but which is leavened by a series of song and dance routines that suggest the ultimate party at the end of the world. Dating back to ideas first hatched half a decade ago, the world climate on every level has changed dramatically since then.
“Every time we met,” Greig says, “it struck all of us that global economics and global warming was getting higher and higher up the agenda. The last four or five weeks I’ve never seen so much stuff about climate change. What freaks us out is that when we started working on this, it was more a case of is it happening or isn’t it. Now it’s moved right up to the top of the agenda, to the extent that we’ve had to change the play. I described it to someone as surfing the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is a really big wave, and if you knock into it, you have to change things. I that way we’ve had to lose five or six of our big acts.”
A co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and Brighton Festival, Futurology is Suspect Culture’s biggest show to date. For those who have mistakenly viewed the company as purveyors of empty post-modernism, a show with such direct political engagement might come as a surprise. In truth, Suspect Culture have always reflected the zeitgeist.
Coming from a generation who grew up during the Thatcher years, when protest against a clear enemy was as much a rites of passage as it was idealistic faith in the prospect of a better society, the ideological confusions of the 1990s saw the company embark on a series of works that questioned personal affairs left floundering within a fractured system. The revival of political activism in the wake of Iraq has focussed Suspect Culture’s generation into questioning global systems with equal inquisitiveness.
“All of the people involved in Futurology are quite politically involved,” Reballato points out, “and while all of us believe in certain things, want to do something that will put those ideas under scrutiny. So while we want to be positive, we also have to recognise the disillusionment that’s happened too. If it works, it will be a very original way of addressing politics in a way that’s both art theatre and popular theatre.”
Make no mistake, though. Futurology is no piece of knee-jerk agit-prop pushing a particular party line. Rather, its intentions are as intelligent and as opaque as previous outings. Eatough is at pains too, to point out that its presence should not be necessarily construed as being a pro Green play, and that things, as ever, are far more complicated than any presumptions made by a liberal consensus Suspect Culture are presumed – largely, it has to be said, by the media - to be representing.
“The idea that a theatre company should be criticised for using some forms of technology to talk about climate change and energy saving or whatever is a bit of a red herring,” Eatough maintains. “It’s like the old socialist in a suit argument, which is a line of inquiry that makes so many wrong assumptions that it just becomes lazy, and is actually a real Tory argument, and a way of denying what we’re really about. It assumes we believe in Green politics, but we’ve never said that. We’re doing a play about human responses to a certain set of situations. An attitude like that also implies a resistance to doing anything on the part of the questioner. I think we need a more sophisticated argument than that.”
The cabaret element of Futurology – subtitled A Global Revue - isn’t intended as a light-entertainment add-on to tick the populist theatre box. Rather, it reflects how such a populist, often low-rent and always hedonistically-inclined art-form comes to the fore in times of political crisis. From the decadence of 1930s Weimar captured so brilliantly in Bob Fosse’s film, Cabaret, to the rise of London’s ‘alternative cabaret’ scene during Thatcher’s 1980s reign, when the nuclear threat felt most potent, speciality acts, be they innuendo-laden comics or possibility-displaying contortionists, have been society’s libidinous, anything-goes last-gasp.
“Cabaret is a great response to terror,” Greig says. “It’s decadent and abandoned and it’s all about living in the moment, no matter how bad everything else is.”
Eatough goes further. “The conference world has its own forms, protocols and performance styles, and can be seen as the rational response to these issues. But there’s a far more irrational, human and emotional response, which is just as valid, but is about people having sex and having a good time.”
Anyone who’s ever encountered regular delegates on the academic conference circuit might well recognise these apparent dichotomies as an already familiar extra-curricular, and often extra-marital, scenario.
On one level, Futurology can be viewed as an extension of Suspect Culture’s own real life symposiums, their annual Strange Behaviour event. Following previous explorations of the relationships between theatre and seemingly disparate subjects including Science and Mathematics, this year’s event, set to take place this coming Friday, will reflect Futurology’s concerns. Titled Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, it will showcase a dialogue on the role of creative thinking in the shape of things to come.
“The thing about the concept of futurology,” says Eatough, “by which I mean anyone who thinks about the future, is that by finding out what they think about the future actually says more about them now. So a free-market capitalist will have different views than a radical Green, but it will also say something about their political views now.”
Key speakers at Strange Behaviour will be Director of Glasgow School Of Art, Seona Reid and Gerry Hassan of think-tank DEMOS, who headed up Scotland 2020, a project exploring how citizens see cities of the future. Despite being named in a noticeably retrograde fashion after a Fleetwood Mac song, Don’t Stop thinking About Tomorrow promises some welcome intellectual stimuli. And, one hopes, some light relief.
“If you have a conference going on in your head,” says Greig, “you have to have a cabaret as well. Futurology may on one level be about fossil-fuels, but it’s Fosse-fuelled as well.”
Futurology: A Global Revue, SECC, Glasgow, Wed-Sat-then tours. Strange Behaviour symposium – Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, SECC, Fri 2-6pm
www.suspectculture.com
The Herald, April 10th 2007
ends
Or rather, Platform would be the perfect venue if director Graham Eatough and his cast of actors, acrobats and clowns weren’t spending 14-hour days in a blacked-out, air-free room prior to moving to the even more ginormous Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. Not that such arrangements make getting the core members of Suspect Culture’s creative team in the same room any easier these days. While Eatough is resident in Platform, Greig is at home in Edinburgh tending to other projects. Company associate and Futurology dramaturg Dan Reballato is back in London following a stint working with Greig on the script in Scotland.
Getting all parties together via an all too appropriate conference call is mooted, but even this is deemed unworkable. In the end, Greig is seconded in Starbucks beside Haymarket station, Reballato grabbed in a hasty phone call prior to him running for the Tube, and Eatough finally collared over lunch in a brief moment of respite from technical rehearsals. Such a geographical spread of personnel is a reflection of Futurology’s own construction, which came together in what the company describe as ‘The Newspaper Moment.’
“There’s this great disjuncture between sitting on a sunny day drinking your Starbucks,” Greig observes, “and turning a page and reading that by 2050 we’re all going to be dead. It really reminds me of the nuclear thing when we were growing up, and it plonks a giant question mark above us that’s really scary. There was a story like that a couple of weeks ago, which on one page was saying that if the world warms up by eight degrees, people will be incinerated where they stand. On the next was an advert for holidays to The Maldives. You don’t know how to respond to that, and someone in the band says it makes you want to go out and shag.”
The result of this is a show that imagines a UN style conference called to discuss very human reactions to such possibly apocalyptic scenarios, but which is leavened by a series of song and dance routines that suggest the ultimate party at the end of the world. Dating back to ideas first hatched half a decade ago, the world climate on every level has changed dramatically since then.
“Every time we met,” Greig says, “it struck all of us that global economics and global warming was getting higher and higher up the agenda. The last four or five weeks I’ve never seen so much stuff about climate change. What freaks us out is that when we started working on this, it was more a case of is it happening or isn’t it. Now it’s moved right up to the top of the agenda, to the extent that we’ve had to change the play. I described it to someone as surfing the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is a really big wave, and if you knock into it, you have to change things. I that way we’ve had to lose five or six of our big acts.”
A co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and Brighton Festival, Futurology is Suspect Culture’s biggest show to date. For those who have mistakenly viewed the company as purveyors of empty post-modernism, a show with such direct political engagement might come as a surprise. In truth, Suspect Culture have always reflected the zeitgeist.
Coming from a generation who grew up during the Thatcher years, when protest against a clear enemy was as much a rites of passage as it was idealistic faith in the prospect of a better society, the ideological confusions of the 1990s saw the company embark on a series of works that questioned personal affairs left floundering within a fractured system. The revival of political activism in the wake of Iraq has focussed Suspect Culture’s generation into questioning global systems with equal inquisitiveness.
“All of the people involved in Futurology are quite politically involved,” Reballato points out, “and while all of us believe in certain things, want to do something that will put those ideas under scrutiny. So while we want to be positive, we also have to recognise the disillusionment that’s happened too. If it works, it will be a very original way of addressing politics in a way that’s both art theatre and popular theatre.”
Make no mistake, though. Futurology is no piece of knee-jerk agit-prop pushing a particular party line. Rather, its intentions are as intelligent and as opaque as previous outings. Eatough is at pains too, to point out that its presence should not be necessarily construed as being a pro Green play, and that things, as ever, are far more complicated than any presumptions made by a liberal consensus Suspect Culture are presumed – largely, it has to be said, by the media - to be representing.
“The idea that a theatre company should be criticised for using some forms of technology to talk about climate change and energy saving or whatever is a bit of a red herring,” Eatough maintains. “It’s like the old socialist in a suit argument, which is a line of inquiry that makes so many wrong assumptions that it just becomes lazy, and is actually a real Tory argument, and a way of denying what we’re really about. It assumes we believe in Green politics, but we’ve never said that. We’re doing a play about human responses to a certain set of situations. An attitude like that also implies a resistance to doing anything on the part of the questioner. I think we need a more sophisticated argument than that.”
The cabaret element of Futurology – subtitled A Global Revue - isn’t intended as a light-entertainment add-on to tick the populist theatre box. Rather, it reflects how such a populist, often low-rent and always hedonistically-inclined art-form comes to the fore in times of political crisis. From the decadence of 1930s Weimar captured so brilliantly in Bob Fosse’s film, Cabaret, to the rise of London’s ‘alternative cabaret’ scene during Thatcher’s 1980s reign, when the nuclear threat felt most potent, speciality acts, be they innuendo-laden comics or possibility-displaying contortionists, have been society’s libidinous, anything-goes last-gasp.
“Cabaret is a great response to terror,” Greig says. “It’s decadent and abandoned and it’s all about living in the moment, no matter how bad everything else is.”
Eatough goes further. “The conference world has its own forms, protocols and performance styles, and can be seen as the rational response to these issues. But there’s a far more irrational, human and emotional response, which is just as valid, but is about people having sex and having a good time.”
Anyone who’s ever encountered regular delegates on the academic conference circuit might well recognise these apparent dichotomies as an already familiar extra-curricular, and often extra-marital, scenario.
On one level, Futurology can be viewed as an extension of Suspect Culture’s own real life symposiums, their annual Strange Behaviour event. Following previous explorations of the relationships between theatre and seemingly disparate subjects including Science and Mathematics, this year’s event, set to take place this coming Friday, will reflect Futurology’s concerns. Titled Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, it will showcase a dialogue on the role of creative thinking in the shape of things to come.
“The thing about the concept of futurology,” says Eatough, “by which I mean anyone who thinks about the future, is that by finding out what they think about the future actually says more about them now. So a free-market capitalist will have different views than a radical Green, but it will also say something about their political views now.”
Key speakers at Strange Behaviour will be Director of Glasgow School Of Art, Seona Reid and Gerry Hassan of think-tank DEMOS, who headed up Scotland 2020, a project exploring how citizens see cities of the future. Despite being named in a noticeably retrograde fashion after a Fleetwood Mac song, Don’t Stop thinking About Tomorrow promises some welcome intellectual stimuli. And, one hopes, some light relief.
“If you have a conference going on in your head,” says Greig, “you have to have a cabaret as well. Futurology may on one level be about fossil-fuels, but it’s Fosse-fuelled as well.”
Futurology: A Global Revue, SECC, Glasgow, Wed-Sat-then tours. Strange Behaviour symposium – Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, SECC, Fri 2-6pm
www.suspectculture.com
The Herald, April 10th 2007
ends
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