I was at the Royal Court to see a rehearsed reading of a play by Mike Bartlett called Thrown. My good friend and legendary sawist Nick Gill had composed the music, and put together a band of violin, ‘cello, double bass, musical saw and music box for the performance. Thrown was excellent, funny and disturbing, but I want to tell you about the ‘support play’ and how it demonstrated theatre’s reluctance to embrace the open nature of the internet.
Article 19
The Royal Court Theatre (of which, until recently, I was completely unaware) commissions work from talented and underappreciated playwrights, and is therefore brilliant. This particular play was called Article 19, and was written by Juan Mayorga (one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, of whom I was also completely unaware). From the programme:
We asked four leading contemporary playwrights to write a 10 minute play in response to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Mayorga’s play is a single 15-minute scene in which a mapmaker is being interrogated by a pair of authority figures. He has been making maps of Madrid on commission, each one illustrating a dataset of the patron’s choosing. Some are seemingly innocent, with titles like “the places I’ve kissed my girlfriend” and some are suspicious, most notably the map that shows where all the judges live.
Online mapping is nothing without human interpretation
My mind was racing trying to think of the real-life equivalents of the mapmakers fantastic creations: the mashup that mapped all the BNP members’ addresses, The Guardian’s Open Platform that lets people map the news, Dopplr and the rest. People now have the power to create and publish visualisations of almost anything, and visual representations can communicate a dry dataset to us in a more understandable, even emotional way.
But there was something more about this mapmaker that was making his interrogators scared, and I felt it too. I didn’t imagine his hand-drawn maps as glorified Google Maps with little info bubbles. The way they were described, these maps could simply and quickly communicate everything you need to know about the data. He was interpreting the data and picking out high-level patterns. And it’s the human interpretation that makes them so valuable and dangerous.
I’ve come across some great examples of personal data visualization and mapping recently, and since Mayorga’s play I’ve been bookmarking them:
Why I’m not allowed to talk about Article 19
I only have one complaint about this play. Why can’t I access it online? Am I crazy to think that publishing the script online would encourage more people to engage with it? I don’t mind if it’s only the Spanish version (assuming it was written originally in Spanish). I would love to be able to read the play again, and explore some of Mayorga’s other work. I would also have liked to use a couple of quotes, and included full attribution with a link so you could read it too. I tried to take a photo of the set before the actors arrived to give you an idea of how it looked. A member of the theatre staff blocked my view and told me photos weren’t allowed.
The Royal Court commissioned a play about the ‘freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. The play was a wonderful interpretation of this idea that not only entertained but also provoked discussion, thought and argument in the theatre bar. But frontiers were regarded, and media filtered. Presumably if I had a badge of some sort I would be allowed, even encouraged, to write a review of the play and publish it in a newspaper or magazine. But as a member of the audience note- and picture-taking was frowned upon, and I have no access to the script.
I love what the Royal Court is doing to support and encourage new writing. I think they could do so much more by supporting and encouraging online conversation about their work. Sometimes the artists are already engaged in this way (like Nick blogging about the writing process for Thrown) and just need to be amplified. For those that aren’t (and I realize that there is a generation of playwrights who are loath to use a computer, never mind a blog), there’s a lot the theatre could do on their behalf.
For the conversation to happen, the audience needs a social object around which to gather. For the short time they are in the theatre the performance fulfils that role. But you can’t hyperlink to a performance, so there needs to be something online: a recording of the performance, a script, photos, even a blog post. And better still, why not let the audience create some of that. Let me take a picture. I’ll be happy to tag it #royalcourt, release it under a Creative Commons license and let the theatre use it as part of the online performance.