Theatre review: Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation

Two years before the performance in the Royal Court Upstairs, Miles' son fell through the ice on a lake and drowned. Miles tried to save him but failed, and although he survived he ended up in a coma. In the present day, he regains consciousness, waking from dreams of the end of the world which he believes are premonitions; others believe him too, and follow him to the cult he sets up in a remote part of Bolivia. Fifteen years from now, the solar eclipse that portends the apocalypse is finally due, and Miles' estranged wife Anna (Susan Vidler) has flown out in a last-ditch attempt to get their daughter Sol (Shyvonne Ahmmad) away from his clutches. As with most plays, Sol's words and actions are pre-determined by the playwright's script. But the playwright in question is Tim Crouch, an experimental theatre-maker who regularly plays with the idea of how stories are told and who's in control of them, so Sol the character actually has a copy of the script in her hand.

So does the audience, or at least they have a version of the script: When the audience takes their seats in Rachana Jadhav's sparse in-the-round set, a green hardback is on everyone's chair, titled, like the play, Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation.

Crouch is playing with the idea of the playwright and cult leader as metaphors for each other - both controlling the story they tell their followers/audience, who are bound to go along with it more by a set of unspoken rules and conventions than anything else, and could theoretically break them at any time. Of course, when Miles finally appears on stage himself, he's inevitably played by the writer himself. Crouch writes regularly for the Royal Court, where playtext programmes are the norm, and I wonder how many times he's seen audience members skip ahead to the end of the play, and to what extent that inspired TICITS - Sol herself is aware from the start that she could skip to the end at any time, and that it would immediately answer the crucial question of whether her father is right about the apocalypse, but seems almost physically unable to.

Within the story, much of the tension between mother and daughter is about Anna trying to get Sol to do just that, and escape her father's control. Vidler and Ahmmad have some moving scenes together as Anna tries to get a human reaction out of her daughter: The style of Karl James and Andy Smith's production means Sol is for the most part robotically, slavishly reading the lines her father/creator has given her. I say the book (with illustrations by Jadhav that tell great chunks of the story very concisely) is merely a version of the script because some of the most powerful moments come when Anna manages to get her daughter to briefly deviate from what's written in front of us. But this is a kind of mindfuck of its own, because the book is only a tool in Crouch's chosen storytelling style, and the deviations from it are part of the play he's written as well.

You can't really accuse TICITS of being all form over substance when, as is so often the case with Crouch, the form is the substance: With the actors telling us when to turn the page and sometimes passing the job of reading the lines out loud to audience members*, it messes with the way you expect to experience a play, leaving you torn between reading the text and watching the actors perform it. There's a certain coldness to the play that comes inevitably from the layers of distance it puts between the story and the audience, and it's ironic that in a piece of live theatre a book should be the star performer; but it's certainly a unique experience, and intensely theatrical in its own way.

Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation by Tim Crouch is booking until the 21st of September at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through. (Plus, this is a "compulsory cloakroom for bags" show, and if you're familiar with the Royal Court's cloakroom you'll know that means plan for one train later than the one you think you can catch.)

Photo credit: Eoin Carey.

*it's interesting that all the promo material describes this as a "gentle invitation" to read; as some of these readings are affirmations of Miles' power and prophecy, it's hard not to see this as another deliberate parallel to cult leaders and their powers of gentle persuasion