In a review of Blasted, a play staged by the theatre company nineteen;twentynine in the Queen's Hotel in Leeds, Lyn Gardner said last week that "there are times when it just comes across like an unexpectedly violent episode of EastEnders", adding that "some plays are still better served by being performed in a theatre". The company's artistic director, Felix Mortimer, responds.
Hotel rooms are dens of vice and scandal; they smell of stale sex and indecency. My company prides itself on using outside spaces like this as inspiration for all its productions, from oak-lined private libraries to railway arches.
Thirteen years after the first performance of Blasted, now that the shock tactics of the 90s have worn off, we hoped to allow audiences to reassess the play. Staging it in a hotel provided a unique theatrical space within which the audience could kneel down and touch a dead baby and have a hotel room explode around them - experiential theatre of the highest degree.
Our performance has no beginning, middle or end - it could have started when you got off your train, and only ended when you checked out of the hotel. Lyn Gardner criticises our device of masking the audience [in white hoods] to increase a sense of distance. But masking the audience means that they can chart their own introspective journey through the narrative. The masks invoke a variety of artistic interpretations, from Magritte to Kubrick. It is when the audience see beyond their masks, when they are forced to contemplate the world unfolding around them, that the real exploration begins.
The question for theatre today is how to escape the shackles of auditoriums and present modern classics in new ways. Without experiments like this, we might never find out.