As the west end creaks on, stuffing ever more musicals into the increasingly inadequate rectangle of the proscenium arch, theatre companies are venturing beyond the foyer to find new places to perform. "Site-specific theatre" has flourished in recent years. The National Theatre has set up home in a warehouse in Wapping; the Barbican Centre has allowed performers to make strange journeys on foot and bicycle through its complex; at this year's Edinburgh fringe, the Traverse Theatre staged an award-winning piece in an art gallery; and the National Theatre of Scotland has put on shows in drill halls, ballrooms and factories.
This September, Punchdrunk, a company specialising in site-specific work, will perform a new piece entitled The Masque of the Red Death, inspired by the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The play will take place at the Battersea Arts Centre in south London, but rather than being confined to the main stage it will transform the entire building—an old town hall—into a gothic fantasy world. Set up in 2000, Punchdrunk have become one of the best-known exponents of site-specific theatre, thanks to the massive success of their recent show Faust. Part performance and part installation, Faust took place in an abandoned warehouse in Wapping; on arriving, the audience were handed masks and told to explore the building as the show unfolded around them. The play sold an astonishing 29,000 tickets and had its initial five-week run extended by four months.
Faust was produced in collaboration with the National Theatre, and followed on from the National's work with another site-specific company, Shunt. No doubt the National's association has contributed to the success of this kind of theatre. Meanwhile, across the Thames, the Barbican is getting in on the act. It recently commissioned the company Lone Twin to create Spiral. Over a week, two performers tried to navigate the labyrinthine Barbican complex—not just the arts centre—in as perfect a spiral as possible, ending up in the dead centre. Anyone who happened to be in the vicinity could find themselves caught up in the act. The performers' explorations took them through churches, offices and even a drama lesson at a girls' school.
A piece like Spiral has more in common with certain types of visual art than it does with conventional theatre. The emphasis on the relationship between man and his urban environment has parallels, for example, with Antony Gormley's current South Bank installation Event Horizon. But the transformation of the relationship between audience and space is just one element of the novelty of site-specific theatre. It is also designed to upset the normal relationship between audience and performers. Conventional theatre depends on erecting an invisible "fourth wall" dividing the stage from the auditorium, meaning that communication is entirely one-way.
The attempt to open up that traditional actor-audience relationship was apparent in the ICA's recent production Fallujah. Set in an abandoned brewery on Brick Lane, it told the story of the American assault on the city in 2004. The audience were free to explore their industrial surroundings as scenes took place among and around them. This staging sought to bind the audience into—and therefore make them feel responsible for—the events depicted. By performing in Brick Lane, a largely Muslim area, the ICA ensured that the play reached a more diverse audience than it otherwise would have done.
But Fallujah also revealed some of the pitfalls of the genre. The roaming audience lacked a focus. Some scenes were obscured by the mass of people surrounding them. And it was questionable whether the play—which depicted various atrocities and the response to them by politicians and generals—really needed the unusual staging it was given. The freedom granted to an audience in site-specific theatre can be double-edged: it can seduce performers away from the job of telling a story.
Although site-specific theatre has proved a big hit in London, it has its deepest roots in Scotland. The Edinburgh-based company Grid Iron, set up in 1995, has achieved renown for staging plays in hotel rooms, airport lounges and underground vaults. And crucially, when the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) was created two years ago, it was decided not to give it its own theatre building. As Vicky Featherstone, the company's artistic director, says: "We have no building, which means we can create theatre without walls." The company's launch show in 2006, Home, took place in ten different locations simultaneously around Scotland. Different plays were performed in shops and tenement buildings, ferries and factories. The point was that wherever Scottish people were, the NTS would go.
The NTS has been responsible for perhaps the most spectacular contemporary example of site-specific theatre, Black Watch. Based on interviews with members of the Black Watch infantry regiment, the show told the history of the regiment and its last tour of Iraq before it was controversially disbanded in 2006. When it premiered at last year's Edinburgh fringe festival, it won six awards and a string of rave reviews. The piece was staged in the city's cavernous old army drill hall and the narrative was intercut with sequences of drill, marching songs and combat exercises, thus creating the feel of a military tattoo. Thus the play acted as a kind of critical commentary on the official spectacle occurring a few hundred metres away in Edinburgh Castle.
This staging affected not only how the show spoke to its audience, but also who the audience was. It was designed to create an environment familiar to soldiers and their families—people who might not often go to the theatre. And it succeeded: one soldier even phoned to book tickets from Iraq. The play's director, John Tiffany, has written of the importance to him of the director and playwright John McGrath, and his influence on Black Watch is clear. McGrath himself did not actually create site-specific work. But as the founder, in 1971, of the Marxist theatre company 7:84, he aimed to reach ordinary people and modelled much of his own work on the entertainment available in 1960s and 1970s working men's clubs. The idea of using performance spaces that will be familiar to an audience is an extension of this idea.
The director Peter Brook once wrote: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged." Site-specific work is the embodiment of this insight. All theatre is, ultimately, about people and their relationships. By taking the art of performance and storytelling and plunging it directly into the places where we live and work, these groups are proving that you don't need a catchy tune or a star lead in order to stick up "house full" signs outside the warehouse or factory in which you are performing.
