Psychological proximity and the riveting moment
What Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem and the Belarus Free Theatre's Burning Doors have in common
After the standing ovations, first for Mark Rylance and the rest of the Jerusalem cast and then for Jez Butterworth, I found myself drawn to the stage door like a moth to light. I'd never done that before, stood outside the stage door and waited for... I wasn't quite sure what. I had decided within seconds of blackout that this had been the best performance I'd ever seen, along with Burning Doors by the Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) in 2017. As I stood there, waiting for something, I tried to figure out why these two performances in particular, about as formally different as any two could be, left such an impression.
With the closing moments of Jerusalem still smoldering in my skull I thought back to the moment by which I remember Burning Doors (a seemingly devised piece somewhere between documentary, physical, and epic theatres). The image I still see is a line of performers sprinting full tilt directly at me, getting so close I could have reached out to touch them, then at the last second violently snapping back the length of the stage against the wall, yanked by the bungee cords attached to each of them, leaving only a spectral mist of sweat. I don't know if I was actually sitting in the front row, but I remember the experience as if I was. The moment that will stay with me from Jerusalem is the climactic sequence of Rylance's Rooster Byron crumpled, spitting up blood, then delivering a nearly Shakespearean speech while beating a drum meant to summon giants to defend his woodland home.
As I thought back on these moments, I noticed a woman and her friends slowly moving down the sidewalk and through the street nearby. I realized, unbelievably, the woman was in fact Natalia Koliada, the artistic director of the BFT, and her friends performers from the company. I took this bizarre synchronicity as a sign that I was correct to feel that Jerusalem would live on in my mind alongside Burning Doors, which has stuck there for five years now.
Reflecting weeks later, I feel that what unites my experience with both of these plays is the sense of being riveted. This seems obvious, and some further explanation is in order. By riveted I do not mean entranced, the way in which Brecht characterizes the effect on audiences of the 'culinary' theatre of his day. I do not mean that the audience forgets themselves and falls into a trance of empathy where they feel that what's happening to the characters is happening to themselves, or forget the actor and see only the character on stage, a total transformation. No, by riveted I mean a state of heightened focus, of the activation of mental faculties in addition to emotional. Riveted by the final moments of Jerusalem, I was fully focused not just on Rooster Byron and the dramatic situation, but also on Rylance, Butterworth's writing, and the scenography - on the whole moment itself both emotionally and critically. In 2017, in the same way, I was riveted into an engagement with the BFT actors sprinting toward me - an awareness of the physical feat of it, the viscerality of emotion created by the interplay between action and dramatic situation, the documentary layer of 'realness', and an awareness of how all this was transforming my personal horizon of theatrical possibility. Not entranced, not distanced, riveted. Focused. How did these performances achieve this effect?
Earlier in April I had attended a performance of Ivo van Hove and Jan Versweyveld's version of the Cocteau monodrama The Human Voice, starring Ruth Wilson. These are three of the world's best theatre-makers, yet I felt the production was one of the worst I've seen this year. The most I could come up with as to why this might have been was that the performance had been staged in the wrong venue. A large box with a glass window separating it from the audience, an abstraction of the character's high-rise apartment, had been constructed on the stage of the antique Harold Pinter Theatre. I felt totally unable to connect with Wilson's admirable performance because I was essentially watching someone perform in an aquarium tank from a hundred feet away. I concluded that the factor missing from The Human Voice was proximity. It would have been great in a black box.
The Apollo theatre, where Jerusalem is running, is even larger than the Pinter - yet there was more proximity in five minutes of that show than in the whole of The Human Voice. I was sat almost as far up as was possible in the Apollo, but emotionally, I might as well have been as close as I was for Burning Doors. In an archetypal example of British writer's theatre, Jerusalem's text enabled Rylance's titanic central performance to create this effect of proximity despite the grand venue's physical distancing. In Seattle's relatively small On The Boards theatre, proximity was a given for Burning Doors. But still, every element of the performance was geared toward creating further proximity through physicality, intensity, and interrogation (sometimes literally) of the audience.
So physical proximity is only one of the means by which psychological proximity can be created, and psychological proximity is the grounds on which riveting moments are built. To clarify, it is almost impossible for an entire 90 minute performance to be riveting - it is extremely difficult for people to maintain such an intense mental posture for that long without involvement beyond what is typical for a proscenium theatre audience (let alone for artists to create an experience that provides consistent psychological proximity for that long). What great performances have are riveting moments. The more the better. And the longer stretches in which a performance creates psychological proximity, the more likely it is for a riveting moment to occur.
The more individual theatrical elements are creating proximity, the more intensely that proximity will be felt. If only one element of a performance is creating proximity it is still possible for the audience to feel it. For example if a great play-text is manifested by badly performing actors, an uninformed scenography, and a lazy director, it is still possible for for an audience member (or a handful, or maybe even more) to feel proximity, but it is unlikely. And proximity does not guarantee riveting moments, it only makes them likelier.
So there are no guarantees, and the most a production can do is ensure that as many of its elements as possible are creating proximity, that all cylinders are firing - the dramaturgy, the scenography, the acting, the performance space itself. But even then, a show can fire on all cylinders, each element creating proximity, and still not create riveting moments. The elements cannot only be creating proximity independently, they must form a gestalt.
This gestalt, a form of proximity which no one element can create alone, is a requirement for riveting moments, the ground on which they are built. All elements must be creating proximity, and must be in conversation with each other, must pull new dynamics from one another that would not be felt in isolation. The more dynamics the elements pull from each other, the stronger the gestalt, the likelier that riveting moments will occur - and the stronger and more frequent the riveting moments, the greater the piece of theatre.
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