Dickie Beau’s Camera Lucida (image Richard Davenport)
“Hello, everybody on the other side,” a voice booms. “Can you break through?”
This is one of the recordings deployed in Dickie Beau’s new show Camera Lucida, which opens at the Barbican tonight (October 28 2014). It’s also a line that encapsulates something of the spirit of the piece. Camera Lucida uses Beau’s trademark technique of precision lip-synching to spoken-word audio – drawn from archive holdings, original interviews and online forgaging – but takes it in new directions and arguably to new conceptual heights.
“I think it’s the closest thing I’ve done to what I’m trying to do,” Beau tells me in his characteristically considered way.
I visit the production a week ahead of opening night to see a Monday-morning rehearsal-room run-through of the show, whose production in the Barbican’s Pit theatre space is part of Beau’s prize for winning this year’s Oxford Samuel Beckett Trust Theatre Award. Beforehand, I join the cast – Mason Ball (aka the Double R Club’s Benjamin Louche), Matthew Floyd Jones (aka Mannish from Frisky & Mannish), Miranda Floy and Paddy Glynn – as they check out the Pit for the first time. It’s full of activity, with cherry-pickers beeping and drills buzzing, the floor half-covered in stacked electrical leads and lighting arrays. Ten little tables are dotted across the stage and a small platform stands at its rear.
“That will be covered in peach fun fur,” Beau notes of the platform. On it will be a table “painted with phosphorescent green paint” facing towards the rear of the stage, which will open onto a large, bright, unseen space – the great beyond, perhaps, or “another audience”. Its palette will be neon. “That will be quite alluring, hopefully. This world here” – he gestures to the main stage area where the small tables are arranged – “is a messy technical space, slightly evocative of a technician’s box in a theatre. Cables everywhere. Monochrome.”
Matthew Floyd Jones, Miranda Floy and Mason Ball in Camera Lucida (image Richard Davenport)
There’s talk of an “infrasound pipe” and discussion of the costumes, which will be all black, though their exact style is yet to be decided. Perhaps turtlenecks, “so there’s a sense of them being disembodied,” Beau says. Other ideas included giant shoulderpads, or faces painted in one colour with small boxes framing the actors’ mouths in another colour.
“At one point,” Ball recalls, “we were all going to have breasts…”
Funny, poignant and uncanny, Beau’s work has always been about channelling voices from beyond, whether that’s short pieces for cabaret nights using the words of Judy Garland and Kenneth Williams, or full-length shows like Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols at Soho Theatre, which used unheard recordings of Marilyn Monroe, and Lost in Trans at the Southbank Centre, a futuristic exploration of gender, technology and identity.
(Full disclosure: I’ve also collaborated with Beau on the film This Is Not a Dream, and he’s performed at my nights BURN and Come With Me If You Want To Live.)
Dickie Beau (image Simon Harris)
Beau’s ability to put his whole body to use as a conduit for his source material, which he shrewdly edits himself, is compelling, uncanny and transporting. As Sarah Angliss noted recently at The Wire, he muddies the line between ventriloquist and dummy. Impeccable as the technique is, though, it’s the humour and emotion that make Beau’s performances so vivid and unforgettable.
Judging by the run-through I saw, Camera Lucida, his first official directorial effort, puts the business of channelling front and centre. Those ten small tables, suitable for both laptops and séances, stake out the terrain: a kind of call-centre limbo, an eerie and absurd liminal space in which the cast endure I.T.-enabled possessions, faces lit from below by computer screens, hands splayed as if on keyboards or summoning the spirit world, bodies contorting, writhing and gibbering.
Through them flow the words of writers Virginia Woolf and William Burroughs, philosopher and psychonaut Terence McKenna, Houdini’s widow Bess and radio-show listeners who call in to talk about contacting the dead, going off-grid, experiencing ecstasy and anst or taking a body to the beach.
A key text in Beau’s development of the show was Roland Barthes’s 1980 book Camera Lucida, about photography’s elusive relationship to language and culture, and mourning. Like Blackouts and Lost in Trans, the show’s structural feels musical as much as narrative, marked less by plot points than by loops, refrains and carefully balanced tonal shifts, following a familiar trajectory from weird through funny to deeply moving.
Paddy Glynn in Dickie Beau’s Camera Lucida (image Richard Davenport)
More than anything else Beau has done, it’s explicitly about the attempt to communicate, asking whether language is inevitably inadequate or our only hope – or both. It’s about what the dead mean to the living and whether images have lives of their own. It’s about how technology enables intimacy and delusion. It’s about the presence of absence and noisy silence.
And this time, rather than Beau channelling his material, the production channels Beau: he appears only on video, while his cast deploy his characteristic technique in the service of his vision, lip-synching from beginning to end of the 75-minute production.
“It’s a really clear way of being present but not,” Beau explains of his decision to appear only on screen. “At the beginning [of the process], I wasn’t going to be on stage at all, then I was going to be on stage among them, then I had this idea that I could be there but not there through video.”
Ball, Floyd Jones and Floy, meanwhile, are onstage throughout. Rather than embodying characters, though, they offer bodily vehicles for messages demanding passage.
Learning the Beau technique was a considerable challenge for the cast, not least physically. “My only experience of lip-synching is doing songs, which I’ve done a lot,” says Ball – who, as Benjamin Louche, opens each Double R Club event with a creepy-suave bit of playback. “This is very, very different because you don’t have the music backing you. It’s a case of getting the breath right and the shape of the mouth and things like that.”
As the cast were learning the ropes, Floyd Jones recalls, Beau “would just stand and watch and then say, ‘Okay, you’re not observing breaths’ or ‘You’re making this shape when you should be [making a different one]’. And we began by doing it out loud so you realise what you have to do to make the right sound. ‘Oh, I have to actually do something with my body!’”
Matthew Floyd Jones and Miranda Floy in Dickie Beau’s Camera Lucida (image Richard Davenport)
The fact that they were less characters than conduits was an additional challenge. “It was very much that this isn’t something you’re thinking, it’s a sound and a shape that you’re catching and transmitting through your mouth,” says Floyd Jones. “It’s really hard not to feel like you’re giving a speech to the audience. But it’s not addressing, it’s channelling.”
“Barthes says something about how in a certain sense the photograph can think,” Beau says, “so I’m transposing that idea. The show is thinking – not necessarily the characters within in but the show is a thinking thing… It’s a corner of my brain, really, this show.”
In the Pit, we watch and listen as it tries to break through.
Camera Lucida runs at the Pit at the Barbican Centre from October 28 to November 8 2014. More information here.
