A lot
has happened since Two Destination Language first toured an early version of
Manpower in 2015. It was the day the result of the Brexit referendum came in
when the international performance company’s core duo of Alister Lownie and
Katherina Radeva decided to take stock of a show which had originally been
about gender and what might now be dubbed toxic masculinity.
“We
knew we had to re-write it,” says Radeva, the Bulgarian artist who formed Two
Destination Language with Lownie in 2010. “We were in Portugal making another
show, and we knew we were touring Manpower, and then when the result of Brexit
came in, it seemed connected somehow.”
By a
quirk of scheduling, the opening night of Lownie and Radeva’s revised take on
Manpower happened to fall in January 2017 on the day after Donald Trump was
elected as 45th president of the United States. Again, while this
was an accident of timing, the resonances of Two Destination Language’s show
couldn’t have been more current.
“You
could feel that everyone was completely shocked about what happened,” Radeva
remembers. “It was the same after Brexit. People didn’t expect it.”
Manpower
begins in 1975, the year of the UK referendum to decide whether it should stay
in the European Community, then known as the Common Market, which the
Conservative government under prime minister Ted Heath had led the country into
two years before. With each decade that follows sound-tracked by records from
their era played on vinyl, Lownie’s character indulges in manual labour while
Radeva’s shares her observations of the British white male.
Out
of this comes a gradual history of industrial decline and the calculated destruction
of old certainties regarding full employment. This collapse resulted in strikes,
mass unemployment and a brutal ideological response from those in power who
closed down anything unprofitable, destroying entire communities as they went.
“When
industrial work like mining and ship-building was taken away from men, a lot of
them lost a sense of belonging and sense of purpose,” Radeva observes. “Out of
that came various parts of the population who feel that they don’t belong, and
who feel threatened by immigrants.
“These
men feel like they’ve got to find a new sense of purpose, and that’s not easy.
I don’t even think the government thought about that. Even with Tony Blair,
that was all about making money in the City, but at the same time there was a
whole load of people ending up on benefits who felt undervalued and had no
place to turn.”
Manpower
also charts a rise in eastern European migrants who are all too often
scape-goated as taking jobs from men born in the UK. Rather than beat people over
the head with angry polemics, Lownie and Radeva serve up a more playful
response.
“I
play this dumb east European who declares that she came to Britain to find a
good man,” says Radeva. “She thinks she knows everything because of what she
reads in various newspapers, and she now thinks she’s British because she’s
been here twenty years, and that Brexit won’t affect her.
“When
we were writing Manpower we very much wanted to juxtapose this east European
woman with a British man who goes on about taking back our country and believes
all the scare-mongering about immigration.”
The
response to this has been different depending on the age of the audience.
“People
aged thirty-six and over really get the scepticism in the work,” says Radeva,
“but sometimes younger people aren’t quite sure if we’re being serious or not.”
The
current tour of Manpower will be the second show by Two Destination Language to
appear in Scotland this year. The first, Fallen Fruit, was seen on the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe, and looked at Bulgaria in the 1980s and 1990s and parallels
with today in the EU following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Previous shows have similarly focused on how nations and cultures interact in
ways that favour visual playfulness over polemic. For the Scottish dates of the
current Manpower tour, Lownie and Radeva have tweaked their show some more.
“We’ve
inserted something which acknowledges that the majority of people who voted in
Scotland did so to remain in Europe,” says Radeva. “Even so, the closer you get
to March 2019 when the UK leaves Europe the more desperate and uncomfortable it
feels, because so much about what will happen is still unknown, but it feels
more real every day.”
Beyond
Brexit, as Two Destination Language set out on their current tour of Manpower,
things continue to happen. Radeva mentions how the show’s brief run in Edinburgh
a couple of weeks ago coincided with the hearing in relation to Brett Kavanaugh’s
nomination for the US Supreme Court in which accusations of serious sexual
assault were levelled against him.
Closer
to home, last weekend on the streets of London, a march by the so-called
Democratic Football Lads Alliance, a group that appears to be largely made up
of white middle-aged men who say they are protesting against all form of
extremism, descended into violence. Meanwhile, some commentators have taken
issue with the appointment of a woman, both as the new Dr Who and as the new
host of BBC Radio 2’s coveted Breakfast Show slot. Just this week, actor Daniel
Craig’s masculinity was loudly challenged by Piers Morgan simply for carrying
his baby in a papoose.
“The
whole Kavanaugh thing was going on,” says Radeva, “and it just felt like
everything Manpower was talking about was being played out at the same time.”
As
Radeva makes clear, however, there is an all-too human side to the conflicts
depicted in Manpower that highlights some of their absurdities.
“It’s
not only about the politics,” she says. “Politics is the base of it, but
there’s a lot of fun that comes from the ridiculous relationship between these
two people, and that’s something we can all relate to.”
Manpower,
Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, October 24; Platform, Glasgow, October 25; Square
Chapel Arts centre, Halifax, November 8; Attenburgh Arts, Leicester, November
9; The Civic, Barnsley, November 10; Cambridge Junction, November 21; Eastgate
Theatre, Peebles, November 28.
The Herald, October 18th 2018
ends
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