This is the latest selling tactic for our Edinburgh show. Unknown writer, unknown cast, and not even funny, "Song" is the hard sell.
We started off with the standard Fringe line: the props list. A camel, a mallet and seven fat Elvis impersonator
s! We have none of these. We have a bath-tub. Come and see the bath-tub. Financially, I hope this is temptation enough. Artistically, not.
The problem is, people have got so used to laughing that performance has to be packaged as laughter in order to sell, from fringe drama to national theatre. As part of the Camden Fringe a Mauritian theatre company produced an amazingly intense presentation of Sartre's "The Flies", that is, until they added the jazz hands.Take also for example "The Revenger's Tragedy", playing at The National Theatre, a show so ashamed of itself that it collapsed into slapstick. I know Middleton's conclusion is abrupt, but it can also be weighty - where was the full force of the futility of revenge, the sense of wasted life?
Tragedy operates along the principle that life is valuable, and that can be done even with a high body count, indeed, by virtue of. Sometimes cinema gets it right. Take the final scene of the February release "In Bruge", shot from point of view of the anti-hero, after a catostrophic shoot-out in the city square. He is wheeled into an ambulance, the snow falls around him, and he hopes, more than anything, that he lives. Death may be everywhere, but life is still, always, valuable. And no matter how many people are dead by the end of the production, if at the root of it all life fails to matter, then there is just no point.
Let's face it, the comic treatment makes for easier viewing, but it is a cold kind of easiness. I would rather be uncomfortable, and feel. But it seems that this is easier said than done, when you are not only vying for audience's attention, but your own cast: "Why can't we do our play on a bouncy castle?" Comedy is fine and good in its place, and I think the world is all the richer for "Bouncy Dracula", and at the other end of the spectrum, comedy can also be a constructive medium, challenging, asking the right questions. But there are a million ways to ask the right questions, and comedy is just one of them. Drama can be, and should be used as, a separate resource, and dramatists have a duty to explore the difficult and the dark, to look discomfort in the face and embrace it. There is a strong temptation to walk away from the hard option. Today I encourage you to run towards it. Welcome to the revolution.
• Victoria Flood is a member of Broken Glass Drama Company, who perform Song at the Roxy Art House, 12.15pm, until 24 August.
