A Small Town Anywhere

Yikes, I’m scared. We’re all scared, but I’m letting it show. And with good reason: it turns out I’m a convicted criminal. Worse still, I’ve no recollection of my crimes and nobody seems willing to enlighten me. It’s like I’m trapped in one of those room escape puzzle games where you wake up, covered in blood, facing a race to clear yourself of crimes you probably didn’t commit.

It’s like that, apart from the fact I’m in a Pizza Express near Clapham Junction, sipping a nice cool Peroni with the butcher and the baker – a final drink before my fate is revealed. What will the community think? Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life rotting in my own filth (admittedly, not a massive lifestyle upheaval)? Or does something far worse await me? Yikes, indeed.

“God, you’ll be fine”, says my fiancée, the baker. “Stop going on about it”. She sounds irritated: my impending exile has come between her and a cakehole full of Pollo Pancetta. The baker has her own shit to deal with right now. She’s meeting the mysterious Henri Georges in an hour; an evening of intense baking beckons. The butcher chips in: “I wonder whether I’ll get a meat cleaver”. My own concerns pale into comparison. I mouth a guilty ‘sorry’.

 So ok, I haven’t really committed a crime (unless you count pirating Betamax films in the 80’s). But the fear – the fear is real enough. We’re on our way, see, to visit A Small Town Anywhere at the Battersea Arts Centre. It’s been devised by Coney who describe themselves as an agency “of adventure and play, founded on principles of adventure, loveliness, and reciprocity”. They’re an enigmatic bunch. They have a leader who goes by the name of Rabbit and the rather admirable aim of bringing play and fun to the sometimes po-faced world of theatre. It’s a fairly unusual piece of theatre at that: there’s no script and the audience take on the key roles.

This is the part that really scares me. I haven’t done any amateur dramatics since GCSE Expressive Arts (not, according to the baker, a ‘proper’ GCSE). In fact, I’m so socially backward, speaking to other people in real life sends me into a crazed panic: my eyes dart around uncontrollably, I start waving my arms like I’m communicating horse odds, and occasionally resort to punching the other person in the face just to get the whole sorry incident over with as quickly as possible. Public speaking is worse. I carry a glass-encased scalpel which I’ll crack open to cut out my own tongue if anyone ever tries to make me do it.

We arrive early at the BAC, the baker nervously toddling off for her secret meeting with Henri. In fact, this is not our first encounter with Monsieur Georges: all week we’ve enjoyed intriguing correspondence with the Small Town’s cryptic historian. E-mailing Henri is highly recommended. In exchange for the revelation of a few ‘personal’ secrets you’ll be rewarded with snippets from the town’s archives and gently nudged into taking on a role within its emerging history. Tonight, I am Le Prisoner. I know nothing of my crimes, only that a shadowy character known as ‘the Raven’ may have been responsible for my incarceration. Beware inky claws, I am told.

Pre-show googling suggests that A Small Town Anywhere is heavily inspired by Henri Georges Clouzotí’s 1943 film Le Corbeau (the Raven), in which a small French community is torn apart by a series of anonymous poison-pen letters. The letters in the film are signed simply Le Corbeau. The film raises questions about how clearly we can define right and wrong. Sod that. An unshakeable backstory has developed in my mind, subtly egged on by our own Henri: this ‘Raven’ character is pure evil and needs to be taught a lesson; as a morally reformed convict, it’s my job to take him down.

After being issued with hats and badges by the only proper actor we encounter all evening, we’re ushered into the Small Town itself – a single room, with representation of the town’s architecture not much more elaborate than in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. A voiceover guides us to our locations and takes us through a typical day: sunrise and the delivery of the town’s post, afternoon gossiping, and a meeting in the town hall perhaps (or maybe a sermon at the local church) before evening drinks at the pub. Gossiping aside, it seems our ‘days’ will be punctuated with lots of letter writing – we have our own post office and a rugged looking ‘postmistress’ unconcerned with current picket lines. A pen and paper are the only things I find in my ‘cell’. No matter. Time to stir up a shitstorm.

 Even if our ‘game’ doesn’t quite do justice to the playful build-up, what follows are an absorbing couple of hours’ fun. My fears of being forced to act prove unfounded. With no audience in the traditional sense you become immersed in the flow of events and interactions as though its everyday life – albeit everyday life in a very different social reality. Age-old questions are raised about a range of issues: the performative nature of everyday social existence, inter-community tensions and the banality of power and corruption. As someone familiar with the (in)famous Stanford Prison experiments, I’m surprised at how quickly I come to quietly despise my jailers, presuming their role selection to be based on some latent fascistic/authoritarian tendencies.

 I furiously scribble notes to the town’s journalist casting aspersions on the character of the police chief and the local undertaker (I’ve received notes, which I’m all to ready to accept, identifying the undertaker as the source of an ugly rumour about me). I let out an evil cackle: an unfortunate incident with a banana; ha ha ha, that ought to do it.

Later, after we’ve been forced to make a number of icky moral decisions, I pay a visit to the butcher and the baker. The butcher’s annoyed – somebody has stolen a tin of spam – and the baker is trying to convince the postmistress that the black stains on her hands are from cake icing. Cake icing. Cake icing? Wait: she hasn’t even made any cakes. Wha-? Could it be? The baker…my baker…my trusted, loving, lying-through-her-beaky-Raven faced fiancée?

Beware inky claws.

Tags: BAC; Theatre; Coney; Review; Battersea Arts Centre; London; Fun; Participatory;