Liveness, community, and the creative imagination are what distinguish theatre performance from the mindless motor activity engineered by the new digitised media's cultural transmissions, in which "press send" and "playback" elevate jumps and shifts of controlled desire to the rank of creativity. Our postmodern world of facsimile and simulacra legitimises management and marketing as the raison d'etre of public arts activity, and not just its means. Technology is making an assault on our social activities and spaces, as consumption of culture becomes increasingly more private but less present and real.
Kustow, a mover and shaker of UK theatre and television for the past three decades, writes, from the inside, a polemical cry for the return of the real amidst all this simulation. His aim is to help us rediscover the power of the rag doll of theatre for our stimulation, education and imagination, which he believes has been lost to the virtual, pre-programmed activities of the Nintendo generation.
Writing from the inside of mainstream cultural activities might seem, at first, to be a cry of pain from the child whose play toy is under threat. In fact the first section, which charts Kustow's failing attempt to raise capital for a John Barton/Peter Hall 12-play, 18-hour Tantalus project highlights the unwillingness of market-led institutions to invest in high culture which defies current "leisure" trends. As his sales pitches fall on deaf ears his prose becomes embittered, taking sideswipes at cultural elephants such as London's Millennium dome. He writes: "Theatre thrives in city centres, in the press and conviviality of work, residence and pleasure, not in a reclaimed industrial site far from the city centre."
He goes on in later sections to stamp with approval theatre practices which defy homogenisation and product standardisation (the work of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine inter alia) ignoring the fact that both have deliberately chosen to work in reclaimed spaces far from the centre. But such a temporary lapse is the prerogative of this seductive and thought-provoking, anecdotal romp from a hustler of high culture with a heart, in search of truthfulness of representation and the political and social agency of theatre.
Favoured actors, directors, playwrights and managers bear witness to Kustow's altruistic project, including Simon McBurney, Robert Lepage, Fiona Shaw, Mark Ravenhill, Tony Harrison and Peter Hall. But of all the anecdotes, two stand out because of the danger and acuity of their representation. He tells of how Jewish/ Afrikaaner transvestite satirist, Peter Dirk Uys, was accosted by three plain-clothes Afrikaaner policemen in the underground car park of the Pretoria State Opera House after a performance (and asked for an autograph!), and of the irony of Tony Harrison's 1995 Kaisers of Carnuntum in a Roman arena outside Vienna just after Jorg Haider's election victory.
Via these and other tales he returns to reveal that, finally, his Tantalus project was bailed out by an "angel" from Denver. But reading about it as his memoir before the production even exists is about as postmodern as you can get. His sales pitches, quoted at length, might be useful templates for would-be theatre producers, but also inspiring manifestos for us all. Kustow's own motivation and drive in a society of facile transactions is that the "unique selling point" of theatre offers "a precious site of the self in the company of others".
Brian Singleton lectures in the School of Drama, Trinity College, Dublin.