Web Resources

There are some useful resources for looking at Suspect Culture on the web.

• First and foremost is the company's own website, which has a real wealth of information on all of their activities. There are sections outlining the history and personnel of the company, photos, music, notes, commentaries and reviews of all their past shows, outlines of their future projects, and records of their annual interdisciplinary theatre conference series, 'Strange Behaviour'.
• There are some reviews and other resources scattered across the web which you can google for yourself, but their entry on the British Council site is a quick way of finding out about their most recent shows.
• Then you might be interested to look at some other companies who have had an influence on Suspect Culture, have been influenced by them, or offer useful points for comparison; for example, Forced Entertainment, DV8, Stan's Cafe, La Fura Dels Baus, The Wooster Group, Pina Bausch, Howard Barker and The Wrestling School, and Complicite.
• There are some useful websites that look at Scottish theatre, or British theatre more generally; for example, the critic Mark Fisher's website, the Federation of Scottish Theatre site, the new and promising Scottish Theatre site, the International Journal of Scottish Theatre, the theatreVOICE site (which hosts streaming audio of conversation between critics on new productions), the more polemical Encore Theatre Magazine, and the reliable news site, the British Theatre Guide.

If you find any useful links, please post them on this site.

Suspect Culture: Chronology

1990
Company formed by David Greig and Graham Eatough, in association with Nick Powell. The abortive early company name is 'Art is Nice TC', but that is replaced by Suspect Culture for their first show:
April. Savage Reminiscence, (Hen and Chickens Theatre, Bristol and tour). [Unless otherwise stated, all Suspect Culture productions are written by Greig and directed by Eatough, and usually have music by Nick Powell.]

1992
August. SC take several shows to the Edinburgh Festival including Stalinland, And the Opera House Remained Unbuilt, Life after Life, and The Garden (Theatre Zoo: Roman Eagle Lodge & St Columba's by the Castle, and tour).Stalinland wins a Scotsman Fringe First and The Garden is adapted as a BBC TV film, under the title Nightlife, in 1996. Also in Edinburgh under the SC banner is Sarah Kane, performing her own monologues.

1994
July. Stations on the Border and Petra's Explanation [double bill] (The Arches, Glasgow).

1995
SC begin to receive project funding from the Scottish Arts Council.
February. One Way Street (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh) . This production marks the beginning of the company's professional life.

1996
June. Airport (Traverse 2, Edinburgh, and tour). This was jointly commissioned by the Tramway, Glasgow, and the Traverse, Edinburgh, in association with the British Council and the Cuarta Pared Theatre in Madrid. It was initially workshopped in Madrid with a mixture of Scottish and Spanish actors.
Ian Scott worked on Airport as a designer and was soon invited to join as a permanent member of the core artistic team.

1997
SC steadily building international reputation. One Way Street tours Germany. A version of Airport is given in Milan as part of Scotfest.
August. Timeless (Gateway, Edinburgh)

1998
For the first time, the company starts receiving 'revenue funding' from the Scottish Arts Council.
March. Timeless tours to the Donmar, London, for a short run.
May-June. Airport tours the Basque country in Spain.
May. Local (Tramway, Glasgow) Devised text, dramaturgical work by Greig.

1999
February. Mainstream (MacRobert Theatre, Stirling, and tour). This production will eventually tour widely in Europe.

2000
March. Candide 2000 (Old Fruit Market, Glasgow, and tour)
December. The Golden Ass, devised from the story by Roman writer Apuleius, co-directed by Mauricio Paroni De Castro and Graham Eatough, design by Laura Trevisan (Tron Theatre, Glasgow).

2001
February. Casanova (Tron, Glasgow, and tour)

2002
April. Lament (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh)

2003
August. One Two (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh). Text devised and written by the company. 

2004
January. 8000m (Tramway, Glasgow)

Airport (1996)

"Summer. Mountains and a cold blue lake. Grass and a tree for shade. A small boat. My father in a boat in the middle of the lake."

Suspect Culture's 1996 show Airport built on the success of the previous year's One Way Street, and was the result of a co-commission by the Tramway Glasgow, the Traverse Edinburgh, the British Council and the Cuarta Pared Theatre in Madrid. It was workshopped in Madrid and the eventual production had Spanish and Scottish cast members and scenes in English and Castillian.

The story focuses on a group of characters passing through - or, more often, permanently resident in - an airport. We meet Gordon, a man pathologically unable to catch his flight, several pilots sharing their knowledge of hijack situations, an advertising executive searching for the perfect image of travel, a woman who has never told anyone else her real name, and many more. In the first of these pictures, you can see the inept Gordon trying to prove that he is Scottish to the check-in staff by demonstrating a highland fling.

The show was important for Suspect Culture for a number of reasons:

• It was the first to demonstrate the company's international perspective in form as well as content.
• The director, Graham Eatough, made extensive use of gestures, which would come to be a signature motif of their work. Gestural movement had been first seriously developed in One Way Street but here it becomes a physical score that runs alongside the verbal text. These gestures were important in bringing together the different nationalities among the cast and characters. They also suggested various kinds of thematic concerns that Suspect Culture will continue to probe in the course of their next few shows: failed contact, the desire for honesty, the dynamics of greeting and parting, the ambiguities of love and aggression.
• It is the first of their shows that is unambiguously contemporary, and marks the beginning of an informal trilogy, set in modern culture's anonymous transit spaces, completed by the trendy bar of Timeless, and the interview room and hotel spaces of Mainstream. I have written about the significance of Suspect Culture's use of these spaces, and to prompt further thinking on this you might find useful Marc Augé's book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Translated by John Howe, London: Verso, 1995.
• It was a very successful show, touring internationally, and confirming their artistic importance. This attention would culminate two years later in their being awarded revenue funding by the Scottish Arts Council.

The show ran for about 95 minutes and was revived and revised for a Spanish tour in October 1996. It featured a cast of six. The original set, by Ian Scott, as you can make out from the second of these pictures, featured a rear screen often displaying a mock-universal image of idyllic holidayness. On the right and left of the playing area were two long conveyor belts, designed to resemble those on which your baggage is brought out after a flight. The cast occasionally were conveyed along these in certain sequences (see the second picture).

Nick Powell's music playfully used elements of muzak (of the kind one might hear in an airport lounge), mixed with curious circular structure, at times reminiscent of Michael Nyman's Peter Greenaway film scores. David Greig's text interwove the various stories and maintained a good tension between the lyricism and poetic imagery of the characters and the broad comedy of their encounters.

Further images:

• Hover the mouse over the thumbnails for more information.
• Click on the picture to enlarge the image.
  

Timeless (1997)

"My voice is not high.
My voice is not crackly.
Today God has reached down and pulled all the stupid words from my throat.
He's taken them to the beach we went to that one time.
And he's thrown them on that fire."

Timeless is one of Suspect Culture's indisputably great shows. It was a landmark for the company, as the piece was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival, an unusual honour for such a young company. The production was distinguished by the remarkable ambition of all involved; the spare, witty, aching text by David Greig; the sombre, majestic string quartets composed by Nick Powell; the grand and resonant sets provided by Ian Scott; a very strong cast who would make repeated appearances in future SC shows; the whole thing given haunting clarity by Graham Eatough's direction.

It has the simplest of themes - a reunion of four college friends - but it turns this simple story into a profound meditation on friendship, honesty, and time. The show's structure is extremely clear and yet it is not a structure that closes off interpretations or explains the action of the play. It is a structure that prompts emotional and intellectual questions to resound well after the performance is over.

• The first scene shows the four friends (Veronica, Stella, Ian, and Martin) meeting in a trendy bar after several years apart after college. They reminisce about old times, remembering a time in a bar when they all decided, on the spur of the moment, to get in a car and find a beach, where they bought Indian food and built a fire. A darker tone runs through the scene as we discover that one of the two women seems to have appeared in a pornographic magazine - a 'reader's wives' picture. However, we soon discover that this is not as it appears. ">
• The second scene takes us right back to those college days as we see the same four friends; they reminisce about the previous night, and we learn of some guilty secrets. We watch as the idea occurs to them to find a beach and as the scene ends we watch them going off to create memories.
• If the first scene is the present, and the second scene is the past, the third scene is the future. It's not as simple as a flash-forward; it seems that what we are seeing is a mixture of everyone's ideal projection of how they would appear to each other, and we watch them repeatedly entering the bar and trying to appear as cool as possible, say the kindest, rightest thing possible. They fail, but they try again. Eventually the four join together in their recollection of that now-mythical night on the beach.

The description sounds rather sombre but while there is a strain of melancholy that runs through the piece, it is also extremely funny, with some wickedly accurate observations of how friends behave together - and indeed how students behave together. Look for the wonderful scene where Martin instructs Ian in the art of seduction. There are also some wonderful observations about ageing - made most clear in a sadly hilarious scene where the friends in their 30s try to recapture the spontaneity of their youth.

A concern that underlies the whole production, and has continued to be central to Suspect Culture's work, is the idea of perfection. It is captured in the final scene where we watch all the characters attempt to be the ideal version of themselves. It is also there in the images of perfect moments, perfect memories, and the way these moments can get trampled in the retelling, even in the remembering. The motif of 'reaching out' became an important key to the gestural language developed for this production. The nervousness and awkwardness of the bar reunion was captured beautifully in a series of gestural motifs based around flinching, apologising, covering your face (see the picture above); but underneath this slyly observed social comedy, there was a persistent affirmation of the desire to reach out, not to apologise. It's given its most delicate and beautiful expression in scene three as Martin imagines Veronica crying, and he imagines how he'll react:

Don't cry.
Please don't cry Veronica.
I'm here now.
You don't have to cry.
You can stop.
(I reach out my hand, with a kind of infinite slowness,
And say the perfect thing.)
He reaches out his hand.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

... because, of course, we can't say the perfect thing; as the rest of the show suggests, the very act of representing perfection somehow renders it imperfect. Like a photograph left out in the sun, the image fades. So perhaps we can only let these nonsense words stand in for it. But in a curious way, Suspect Culture are trying to represent this unprepresentable and that's a key to many of their later shows: the search for the perfect woman in Casanova, the ironic images of utopia on Candide 2000, the recognition of the degraded notion of all communication in Lament, and the moment of literally climactic sublimity in their most recent show 8000m.

The show is set in recognisable contemporary spaces and is written in an economical, lyrical but eminently accessible style. The show was a great success at the Edinburgh Festival and the production - in an altered version (the original third act was less poetic than the second) - was toured, including a brief run at the Donmar Warehouse in London. (This was in fact the first of their shows to be performed professionally in London.)

Further images:

• Hover the mouse over the thumbnails for more information.
• Click on the picture to enlarge the image.

Vote!

Using freeblogpoll, I've put a little poll on the site where you can vote for your favourite Suspect Culture show. You should be able to see it between the heading 'democracy' and the 'I power Blogger' button. But sometimes, the site doesn't respond well when this page opens, and it may not actually show up. If that's the case try going straight to to the horse's mouth and click on this link. Happy voting?