There are circles within circles of inquiries in Martin Crimp’s drama. Or is it non-drama? It is certainly an inquisition of story, authorship, theatre and reality that seeks to expose, maybe dismantle, the means of production within storytelling: how a story is delivered, who delivers it and how it is received in this theatrical space.
Not One of These People is directed and designed by Christian Lapointe and performed by Crimp himself. We receive most of it through a screen surrounded by camera equipment – somewhat appropriate for a play conceived during lockdown.
Deep-fake technology is used to animate almost 300 photographed faces on the screen, which are not real but created by artificial intelligence. The images are first accompanied by a male voiceover – revealed to be Crimp, who casually walks on stage, reads from a script, walks off again – and then animated by technology that maps Crimp’s voice and facial movements on to theirs.
The central concerns are of authorship and appropriation: the static pictures blink awake creepily and the playwright is exposed as a technological puppet-master pulling their strings. The faces make comments, big and inconsequential, about the world around them. They discuss race and the patriarchy. There are secret confessions, talk of love, violence, incest, sex and identity. There is humour, intrigue and shock in their words; it could be a series of starting points for a story but deliberately resists the gathering force of a cohesive narrative. In the last phase we see Crimp behind the now transparent screen in what looks like a study. He reads, writes and listens to music, the faces speaking all the while as if they are fictional voices jostling inside his head.
While this point is effectively made, it is dramatised without much development, which comes to feel hypnotic and banal. The more interesting questions float around this central one. Is this film a piece of theatre, for instance? It is staged in a theatrical space, but it is also meta-theatre, turning over the concept of what a story is and exposing the playwright’s relationship to its staging.
Another question hovers over the characters and their “humanness”. The nuggets of thought and snatches of experiences are delivered by machines yet they sound and feel human. But this line of inquiry is not developed and is far more penetratingly explored in David Farr’s A Dead Body in Taos, currently on tour.
It seems, in style, like a video installation that might be found in a backroom of the Tate on a perpetual loop (Crimp has a passing resemblance to Warhol too), and there is a repetition to the exercise, which does not try to hide the fact that it is conceptual, deconstructive, cerebral and undramatic.
But it also offers a reset for the audience. Crimp does not allow us to passively receive a story and there are questions about what we expect of, and accept as, theatre. It shows too how we collaborate to make the story: I find myself trying to join the dots, find themes, connect with these bite-size comments to make a bigger whole. Ultimately, it is the most unusual thing I have seen in the theatre for a long time but its force, as a play of ideas, does not quite get under the skin.
At the Royal Court, London, until 5 November.
