Arches Live! - Music as a force in theatre
Once regarded as 'the twelfth best club in the world', the Arches' status as a world class music venue is hard to ignore. And music is a dominant force in much of the work that makes up Arches Live.
Midland Street takes you into the club while Pullover throws you out; Stadium Rock's Cable inhabits the rehearsal space just as Pirate Radio takes you into the studio, and Naomi and Thom's Night Out is just what it sounds like. The Arches is ideally situated to explore the space between theatre and music, and the result is a technicolour dreamcoat of quasi musical theatre, without the jazz hands.
Paul Vickers and The Leg's Itchy Grumble is perhaps the most direct example of this, essentially a rock gig billed as an opera. It's worth noting at this point that if you just don't like punk or metal, if you never owned a Slipknot CD as a youngster, this might not be your thing. But the Leg do well to stress the elements which make the genre accessible and interesting to a wider audience than the mad-at-mum teenager.
The percussive element is one of the strengths of a format that tends to lose vocals and melody in the ensuing cacophony, and The Leg capitalise on this tradition with a medley of woodblocks, glockenspiel, and detuned guitar crunches, while a cello used for both strings and bass provided a welcome variation in tone. Masks, costume changes and a sketch of the concept narrative in the program went some way to creating the promised opera experience while remaining faithful to punk's low-fi D.I.Y ethos.
As live music becomes increasingly prevalent in the post MP3 file sharing age, it was a timely reminder of the theatricality of certain music genres and the possibility that this offers for the gig as an all encompassing spectacle, rather than the tedious endurance test that watching four guys jangle guitars for ninety minutes can be.
That this ritual continues is curious and may have something to do with the stress on individuality, on being all you can be, that characterises modern life. The rock-star is emblematic of a heroic defiance which might explain why thousands regularly file into cramped dungeons around the country to gaze upon and identify with the anointed front man or woman.
What I enjoyed about Eggshells, Sweetheart was its readiness to tackle the disconnect between this vision of the liberated self, and the actual social and domestic constraints that daily life brings - in writer Lucy Gaizely's case, her role as a mother. At times she can satisfy her vanity, idealising her own motherhood by relishing the failings of others, or declaring herself chosen and unique in childbirth to the tune of Amazing Grace.
Dispensing cuddles with a disconcerting sweetness, Gaizely manipulates her audience into the role of infants, but the fantasy of the mother as locus of adoration is steadily eroded as the eroticism of stripping off layers of underwear slips into the humiliation of picking up dirty laundry, provoking the outburst 'Yes I am still present.'
The sense of crisis is cemented by the closing scene: Gaizely as widow, mother and rockstar Courtney Love - dishevelled and naked save one Doc Martin - swaying to her own nihilistic anthem in front of a hundred thousand people days after her husband's suicide. It was a spectacle. Here's hoping the next gig I see is too.