The sophomore offering from avant-garde theatre collective Heads On Crooked Nosejob was a work-in-progress I caught back at the end of May. It was the best sort of night at Edinburgh’s Capital Theatre’s Studio — and it had its finger on the pulse of exciting thoughts in Edinburgh’s emerging theatre community.
Heads on Crooked chose to use Plaster Cast’s work-in-progress Perpetual Spirals as a curtain-raiser. The Company – formed by Lizard Morris and Ayden Brouwers, with projections designed by Dee Dixon – explored the fluctuating dichotomies of power and pleasure through all time. Based in an alternative cosmology, power and pleasure revolved around each other. In between were nods to palaeontology, and the early steps of humanity’s evolution. This was then transposed to a nightclub space which included pulsating music, experimental visuals which entranced and often turned Brouwers and Morris into blurs. It was hypnotic work, and deserves further development. I think there is something in Scotland’s capital now, that is not a school, nor a movement, not even a community — but is certainly a transition towards form-first work. Form-first, because it has become increasingly apparent to young theatremakers that the old forms — those of the 90s – have been left behind.
The work of the ‘in-yer-face’ tradition – which explores theatre which pushes audiences to confrontation with harrowing sentiments – is scintillating. In this day, it doesn’t reflect the political responsibilities we have forced ourselves to mantle, and necessarily so. We are no longer in the end of history, and above all of this is what Anton Jager has recently called ‘Hyperpolitics’, an “extreme politicisation without the consequences.” We are fundamentally libidinal beings driven by quick hits, but we are also staunchly moral. The subject now is not the hedonist at the limits of desire, but a hypocrite who plugs their brain into an algorithm.
In this context, the only logical theatre is that which emulates the data centre. Loosely connected informations or misinformations for an audience that trains themselves not to engage with a “total” work of art, but to create fast and loose connections around ideas.
What’s the relationship between noses, eugenics, Gogol, tech CEOs and an ancient Sumerian sword? We’re left to our own devices to figure that one out in Nosejob. Heads on Crooked have cracked the form here — but they are by no means the first. At last year’s Fringe, the exemplary Speakbeast portrayed similar in Someone Has Got to be John. At Capital Theatres last year, as part of the Gateway New Writing Festival, Jamie Watson’s A Stack of Chairs was a beat poetry fever dream that barely connected on a narrative level but functioned as excellent theatre — scenes only connected by through lines of leisure, work, dominance and submission. These works are mentioned because Heads on Crooked are not the only ones in their desire for form-first works in the city — these works exacerbate and feed into our relationships to short-form content, to screen.
In the work-in-progress version of Nosejob I watched, this form is tasked with occupying the narrative of Max Kovalyov and literally a nose (which is an utter feat by Skye Beautyman, what a costume!) who becomes perhaps a slightly too laid-on-thick Tech CEO who is every –ist you can possibly think of. In the rare moments that the Tech CEO is freed from the shackles of Heads on Crooked’s form, he spends them belittling, insulting or creepily flirting with his employees, drug dealers and members of the public. These other figures are played by two brilliantly constructed clowns, Brechtian in nature, that distance themselves from the audience by lying to them, and telling them how to react.
It is a feat that the cast of three (Estafany Perez, Hannah McGregor and Adam Edgar) make their performances hilarious — and an even more interesting feat that the hilarity is divided depending on the genre of joke. Heads on Crooked’s audience became a combination of our algorithmic divisions, bar a few belly laughs about the snorting of substances.
Their biggest achievement, though, was to immerse us into a world of confusion and disbelief. This was pretty fascinating and exposed a brutal fact to any 21st Century theatremaker — you might think you’re telling the truth, but the audience will accept your lie.
All this deviation, the relentless series of bits, the cruelty of the –isms brought two themes to the forefront of the evening. Meritocracy — perhaps the more ‘dramaturgical’ theme — came through in the sense that Max is a stupid juvenile nose that has no interest in humanity despite claiming to, legal systems are arbitrary and contradictory to courts of public opinion, and that one nose is more ‘beautiful’ and thus ‘good’ than another. These ideas are all told through tier listing noses to an audience. How and if this theme should be brought further into focus is a question the company should consider following the work-in-progress.
The second politicised theme is there is no such thing as Dada. Every single choice subtly reinforced blatantly problematic theories of the human that the algorithm thrives off making. Meme culture is racist, misogynist, and furthers right-wing political narratives — yet we accept it as nonsense. It was this precise contradiction that the company weaponised in an illuminating hour.
This was a work-in-progress, and Heads On Crooked had a decision to make. Do they dramaturg, or fragment and double down on their new ideas? It’s a dilemma presented to young theatremakers in general, I think. This generation’s instinct is to fragment, to splinter algorithmically. But the playwriting schools talk of units and plots. Perhaps these units don’t reflect our reality anymore.
This will undoubtedly be a Fringe highlight, either way the company chooses to go. And at least, this May, they contributed to our conversation — a theatre for the hyperpolitic generation, emerging in Edinburgh, now.
Image by Jed Bury/Jedshots (@jed.shots on Instagram)