Evening pop-pickers. Now, though I normally lord-it around all magisterial-like, spouting off my bizarre ideas about West End theatre like I was auditioning for a chair on Loose Women, I have to admit that I am somewhat in a pickle over a recent theatrical trend. Can you help? Ready? What the flaming doo-dah is the point of site-specific theatre?

Site-specific theatre, you will recall, is the new fashion for staging plays in the exact environment in which they are set. You may remember the new play Caravan, for example, which was staged outside the Royal Court in — yes, you guessed it — a caravan. The play was about the flooding of 48,000 homes across England in the summer of 2007 and was designed to give the audience a sense of the atmosphere that the newly-made refugees had to inhabit – some for over a year. Restrictions on the size of the performance space meant that a maximum of eight people could watch the play at any one time.

Picture: David Masters @ flickr

Another site-specific play that attracted big news was the drama Container, staged in — yep, got it again — a metal container. Re-enacting the desperate journey of a lorry-load of illegal immigrants, Clare Bayley’s production was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival and was so successful that Amnesty International pitched in to help stage it in the capital. The cramped lorry container allowed 28 audience members to watch the dark and claustrophobic drama unravel and featured the human cargo squabble over scraps of food, jealously guard their few valuables and listen to each other vomit and defecate in the cloying darkness. Basically, it was like watching the live Big Brother feed.

The question thus remains: just what is the point of site-specific theatre? Because (and I may be wrong here) it sounds to me a little like the sort of guff boring types who wear black roll-neck sweaters prattle on about while musing the power of performance. You know the sort I mean, humourless director types who insist on talking about “energy” and “transformation” and the amount of levels that the latest Tango advert works on.

I suppose the supporters of site-specific or outdoor theatre insist it’s a way of immersing the audience in the world of the play.

Though, does that sound a little bit like a cheat to anyone else? Surely carefully rendering the atmosphere of a setting should be down to a thoughtful and nuanced script? Just cramming the audience into a shoebox does seem to take the shine off a little bit, doesn’t it?

And, I mean, I do have an imagination: okay, I may be no William Blake, but all those hours on Doom 3 haven’t totally hollowed out my juicy brainbox. I can imagine an island in the South Pacific, I don’t need to be jetted off there to watch something by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Look, I’m imagining one right now… nice sun, nice sea – arrgh! What are these zombies doing here! Where’s my grenade launcher! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!

Sorry about that.

Let’s take another example, what about the recent stink kicked up over 17-year-old Harry Mitchell’s efforts to stage Waiting for Godot in a toilet at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. The Beckett estate, who strictly control the performance rights to all the playwright’s work, refused to grant permission for the play to be used in such a fashion. When asked why he wanted to stage Beckett’s masterpiece in a toilet, Harry giggled, “It just seemed perfect”.

Righto.

Undeterred, young Harry, son of Notting Hill director Roger Mitchell, has written his own play called Still Waiting for Godot and is going to stage it in the toilets outside John Lewis in Edinburgh between 25-30 August.

If nothing else it is a lesson to us all not to let our dreams die. The young chap clearly likes the idea of staging something in a lavatory, good luck to him. But really, is this the future of theatre? Or just the theatrical equivalent of the minidisc?

Those virtually thumbing through the online copy of The Times this morning may have seen the news that playwright Mark Ravenhill’s latest Edinburgh project has a little talent show twist.

This is what was going on in my dusty brain-box as I read the article:

SCENE ONE: (Grainy black and white footage: A plain-looking office. Our hero scans the article from his computer screen. The faint tinkle of roadworks can be heard in the distance.)

ME: (Reading from The Times online) “Here’s the script. Fancy being in my play tonight?”

(Aside) Sorry what’s that?! Ol’ Ravers is thinking of using guest performers to perform in his new play A Life in Three Acts?

“Mark Ravenhill intends to use special guests to enact segments of the dialogue, though he has no idea who they will be.”

(Aside) Woah, woah, woah — hold the fax machine! He’s going to get people up on stage and he hasn’t decided who they are yet?

“This is it. Finally. My big break at last! All I have to do is find out where the plays are being staged and hang around outside the theatre for hours until I’m noticed. Perfect! Edinburgh, here I come!”

(Fanfare. Music kicks in. Dancing girls come on for big finale finish. Da da dum da, da DAAAHHHH)

LE FIN

Hmmm… maybe not.

The plays in question stem from a series of interviews Ravenhill conducted with avant-garde performer Bette Bourne. Famed for his work with the Bloolips cabaret, Bette Bourne is a pioneer from the underground drag scene who totally re-invented the genre 20 years ago with his “stately homo” persona. Anyway, as Ravers puts it: “I’m in Parky’s chair… looking plain, asking the questions, nodding a lot. It’s Bette that makes it so interesting. His life is amazing.”

Anyone else thinking Frost/Nixon?

Oh wait. On closer inspection, they’re not just letting anyone be in the play. They’re looking for famous comic names. “I’ll be shoving a script under Stewart Lee’s door” Mark explains, “or Fenella Fielding, maybe.”

Oh well, I don’t think he has my address. Maybe I’d better take all my stuff off eBay and not move to Scotland after all.

Then again, it is the Edinburgh festival, where performers outnumber spectators 350-1, so perhaps there will be other audience participation slots that I can get involved with? It’s amazing that no one’s ever thought about this before!

Oh wait, yeah, they have thought about it before. Paul “That’s magic” Daniels has been doing that sort of thing for years. Bruce Forsythe’s Price is Right used a similar shatteringly post-modern casting method, too. Even Ravenhill’s done it before. In 2007 he did the same thing with his response to the Iraq War, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat.

Maybe this isn’t my big break at all then. (Sigh) Back to the computer screen. Wah, Wah, Waahh.

Mark Ravenhill’s A Life in Three Acts will play at the Traverse between 18 – 30 August.

Let’s take a look at Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch.

Meticulously researched, the action focuses on a specific regiment of the British Armed Forces serving in Iraq. The play is moulded around interviews conducted with real soldiers and builds to give a personal and detailed view of what it feels like to fight overseas in an unpopular war

The House of Commons

“That”, as Mr Punch might say, “is seemingly how one does it”. You focus on something relatively small and fine-tuned, like the attitudes of certain real-life individuals, and you let their story dictate the action. Political theatre at its best. Unfortunately, political theatre doesn’t always scrub up so well. In fact, more often than not, clear-headed storytelling gets shouted down by poorly-researched, fashionable, studenty, preachy, hammy, flaming nonsense.

Take, for example, last year’s Edinburgh Fringe where political correctness had its self-important tentacles slithering all over the place. At The Pleasance Courtyard, for example, they decided to stage The Badac Theatre Company’s controversial drama The Factory. I say drama, I’m not sure it was a drama. It was dramatic, certainly, but not really a drama in the way that the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice is a drama.

The Factory is all about the Holocaust and consisted of having the audience line up, file into a cramped little space while the actors shouted at them for an hour. Intermittently, the cheery cast would bang on some big steel shutters with truncheons until everyone’s ears rang. The object was, it seems, to give the audience a feel of “what Auschwitz was really like”.

Reader: What?

Me: Yep, that’s right, to give the audience a feel of what Auschwitz was really like.

Reader: (with extreme sarcasm) So by charging people £9.50 to stand in a room and get shouted at for a little over an hour they were going to show what it was like being at Auschwitz?

Me: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that was their intention. Look at what David Laing said about it in The List:

“We learn more as the journey [of the play] progresses, each step becoming filled with dread, representing as it does a step closer to the gas.”

Reader: Woah, woah woah, hang on; now, please stop me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this all, I don’t know… monstrously offensive? How is shouting at someone really loudly, I mean REALLY loudly, even mildly reminiscent of the freezing death camps of Eastern Europe?

Me: Well, I mean, exactly.

Curtain.

Anyway, Brian Logan for the Guardian was evidently less mystified and entranced by the production than David Laing. He described The Factory rather deftly as: “a theatrical atrocity”.

So, the chaps behind The Factory got it wrong that time, fair enough, but theirs is by no means the only political dog-doo in the park. In fact, everyone seems to be asking for a slice of the pie (oh crumbs, that does sound disgusting after what I just said that about doo-doo. Oh well.)

So desperate for a political piece was artistic director at the Tricycle Theatre Nicholas Kent, that he approached playwright Abi Morgan and asked her for: “A half-hour play as part of a season of work about the last 100 years of Afghan culture and history”. Morgan claims that the brief allowed her to write about whatever she wanted, “as long as it’s after 2001. And not NGOs [Because] Richard Bean’s got that covered.”

Hardly waiting for the Muse is it?

Luckily Morgan is a talented writer and managed to pull The Night’s Darkest Before the Dawn out of her pencil case, but it’s not exactly what you’d call organic. It’s like political playwriting by numbers or something.

Still, I suppose the biggest hoo-hah in PC at the minute is to do with this bizarre little piece. Who on earth thought this was going to be a good idea needs some sort of coup d’état on their own noggin. Ready?

An Israeli Defence Force song-and-dance troupe is to perform in London at a show to commemorate the founding of Israel.

For those that might not have been aware, the IDF have been accused by several humanitarian groups of committing war crimes during their three-week invasion of the Gaza Strip. In fact, the UN are investigating them right now over claims that they were involved in the deaths of 400 Palestinian children.

Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, Chris Doyle told the Guardian newspaper: “This is akin to singing and dancing on the graves of the 400 Palestinian children that the IDF was responsible for killing in January,” He continued: “We should not be permitting a dance troupe from an army currently under a UN investigation for possible war crimes to be coming to the United Kingdom. It is sick.”

That’s not even it; the event organisers are even likening the IDF troupe to the hotch-potch gang of soldiers from the 1970s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

A new gold standard has been reached in political sensitivity.

Political theatre can be some of the most staggering and moving modes of artistic expression. For centuries people have known that the communal aspect of seating people together at playhouses and the electric atmosphere of live performance can lead to politically-charged theatre. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Lorca, O’Casey, Brecht: done right it’s amazing.

But like playing bulldog in the schoolground, it’s a dangerous game; and one that far too many people misunderstand the rules of.