To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship

Abstract

In January 2011, Small Hours, written by Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime and directed by Katie Mitchell, was staged in the Michael Frayn downstairs studio space at the Hampstead Theatre. It is a solo piece, about one hour long, with very few spoken words, where an insomniac young woman (Sandy McDade in the Hampstead production) struggles through the small hours of the night — hoovering her sofa, playing CDs at full volume, watching late-night shopping channels, listening to music on headphones, trying to book a cinema ticket, phoning her partner, wrestling with the answer machine, attempting to dance — while her new-born baby cries disconsolately in another room. Although the woman does go out twice to see to the baby, and returns once with a dirty nappy, mostly her reaction is to drown the wailing in a cacophony of other sounds and noises. The Hampstead studio space was turned by designer Alex Eales into a living-room and spectators — 25 per performance only — were first asked to take off their shoes and then invited to take seats on the chairs, sofas, armchairs and benches arranged around the edges of the room in a row just one person deep. The effect on spectators of the installationlike set and seating arrangement has been discussed in terms of intimacy by Mitchell herself — you were certainly close enough to the woman at times ‘to touch her, smell the perfume she sprays in the room and hear the tiny tap of plastic on wood as she puts the mascara down on her side table’ (Mitchell, 2011) — and of complete sensory immersion on the A Younger Theatre website (Orr, 2011) and the There Ought to Be Clowns blog (2011).