Death and survival prompt lively conversations in the world of art
Iended last week’s column by suggesting that while SA and global audiences listening to Nixon in Agony on the Virtual National Arts Festival programme might feel a glimmer of sympathy for an embattled (and slightly deranged) US president wrangling over his resignation speech, in 40 years’ time there will not be many people with similar feelings in response to a portrayal of Donald Trump.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, once Trump is dead and his misdeeds have become part of the historical record, natural human curiosity — or rather, morbid fascination
— will render him an intriguing artistic subject.
Either way, though it is a truism that the arts increase our capacity to empathise and to imagine ourselves in the position of the other, I don’t think that this energy is productively channelled into depictions of loathsome contemporary political figures.
Better that they remain simulacra on news streams, and that we tackle the real-world consequences of their words and policies rather than make an effort to “understand” them. There will be time for that when they’re dead.
I almost made an exception when I discovered Larchview ,a riveting monologue in the National Theatre of Scotland’s excellent series of Covid-19 short films, Scenes for Survival.
Mark Bonnar plays a senior scientific adviser to the government trying to film an apology for breaking lockdown rules and visiting his mother in a care home.
Larchview brilliantly captures the poignant human dynamics in this scenario, drawing us into the quietly tortured world of a professor whose actions — because he was drunk, and lonely, and desperate, and wanted his mum — have led to a number of deaths. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think of Boris Johnson ’ s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who flagrantly ignored lockdown restrictions.
As it turns out, writer Rob Drummond did have a public figure in mind: Scotland’s chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, who resigned after a similar breach. Cummings is a much less likable figure than either Calderwood or Bonnar’s character. He undoubtedly has sociopathic tendencies, which make him an ideal adviser to the present Tory government.
Drummond was quick to accept that his script would be misunderstood as a response to the Cummings scandal: “That’s not a problem ... the piece is not directly about anyone at all. It’s more about the idea of authority, truth, hypocrisy and public scrutiny. Should those in charge be held to different standards than the rest of us?
“Do we want to hear the truth and how would we even know if we had heard it?”
People speak the truth when they are close to death — their own or that of a loved one. Certainly, Drummond and Bonnar’s denialist professor eventually owns up to the truth when he confronts mortality.
Returning to the content of the Virtual National Arts Festival programme after watching Larchview, I was attuned to the ways in which death brings out certain profound truths.
Death is the often-unspoken centre of James Cuningham and Iain “Ewok” Robinson’s Jigsaw, a perfectly pitched live digital performance directed by Sylvaine Strike. Two old friends, Simon and Paul, reconnect via Zoom or an equivalent platform. Over the course of various conversations, they veer from awkwardness to anger, from profound philosophising to playful flippancy. Their interaction is punctuated by animations and voice-overs, with visual and verbal poetry tackling all of life’s Big Questions. And why? Because Simon thinks he may have a brain tumour, and Paul is still mourning the loss of his father.
Death is discussed with less art but more punch in Death and Birth in My Life, a series of staged conversations conceived by Swiss artist Mats Staub. Two interlocutors allow one another (and us as the audience) to share their most intimate, vulnerable moments. Their recollections are life-affirming, but they do not shy away from grief.
These dialogues — halting, eloquent, earnest — take on an exemplary quality. They are the honest discussions for which we all hunger at this time when death seems to hover around us: an uninvited guest who forces us to speak plainly.