Project Arts Centre ****

Tim Crouch’s new play takes place within the audience, both physically and psychologically. Instead of a playing space we have two seating banks, facing each other in stark confrontation. Instead of action, we have words, and the imagery they create is planted directly in our minds. Asking the audience to consider its role in art and society is the central concern of this challenging, exposing and discomfiting piece of work. In an image-saturated culture of continuous watching, it suggests that a daily barrage of extremes become mundane through repetition, from terrorist atrocities to pornography, and art cannot transcend or transform them. “Can you see?” someone asks routinely, a leitmotif that invites a clearer view.

Crouch’s play details the story of another, imagined play, a controversial and explicitly violent drama about child abuse, which was intended to be an allegory but which corrupted its makers. The first person to speak, though, is an audience member, or a parody of one, excitably engaging people around him, and wondering how the playwright imagines him.

Not very well, it seems. Merrily invoking the “safety” of the theatre, the audience member recalls an in-yer-face history of baby stoning and baby eating, the “bumming and bombing” he has enjoyed without depth or consequence. Similarly the young actress, Esther, who plays the abuse victim, sounds just as self-contented when she encounters a genuine abuse survivor on which to model her character.

There is an acrid wit in Crouch’s writing, skewering artistic vanity and passive reception. But who identifies with such hollow figures? A piece about shock-value, which is itself deeply sceptical about the value of shock, it is instead compromised by its sourness. We remember these caustically conceived, uncritical figures are the author’s fictions; used and abandoned.

“Is that ok?” Crouch asks, heavy with double meaning, at the mention of familiar images of horror. The answer is obvious, of course, and you often get the feeling of being lectured, but the solution is not. We can always walk out or turn away, the production implies, but the lurid spectacle of the world won’t disappear. Art asks us not just to watch but to consider, make sense, maybe even change. At its best,

The Author

helps us see that.

Until Sunday