Theater as a Moving Target

I went to the theater twice the other weekend and didn't set foot in a playhouse.

I could do this because of the ongoing interest in London in site-specific theater, as one might expect from a city whose higher-profile cultural entities include such deliberately peripatetic organizations as Shunt, Punchdrunk, and non zero one. How hopelessly bourgeois, British theater-makers seem to be telling us more and more these days, to be packed into rows of seats when we can be roaming about a particular dwelling or animating found spaces for ourselves: Let the environment itself contribute to the theater, not just the show itself -or so goes the unspoken message.

And so it was that I found myself on the first of two successive nights being herded on one occasion around a series of especially “dressed” offices in the Clerkenwell area of the capital, the building's various rooms given over to newspapers in piles of varying sizes and states of equilibrium. That was fol lowed 24 hours later by a Tennessee Williams triptych that took place not in a playhouse but in a central London hotel.

The first offering, “Enquirer,” running through Oct. 21 at a locale billed rather wonderfully as Mother at the Trampery, comes to us from the National Theatre of Scotland; its co-directors-functioning as co-editors, as well-are Vicky Featherstone, who next year assumes the artistic directorship of the Royal Court Theatre in London, and John Tiffany, who won a Tony in June for directing the (gorgeous) Broadway musical, “Once.”

Their topic here is the British press in all its tarnished and anxious despair. Whereas the U.S. possibly believes in at least some vestige of the power and passion inherent in the fourth estate that lead toward real-life tales of bravura chronicled in, say, “All the President's Men,” “Enquirer” is a verbatim piece that paints a baleful portrait of an industry in psychic and financial freefall.

America still does hold out the possibility of the journalist as a crusader for the greater good. But as played by an accomplished six-person cast in an evening that runs without an intermission, the British scribes (and their editors) are for the most part here seen to be self-doubting and clueless at best, venal and predatory at worst. Fleet Street's recent phone-hacking scandal has inevitably sent the profession's faltering reputation ever-downward, but “Enquirer” anatomizes a landscape in ceaseless thrall to psychological terrorism and fear. As someone is heard remarking of The Daily Mail, the influential middle-market British tabloid: “At least at The Mail, they stab you in the front.”

Exaggerated to prove a point? No doubt, and one wonders how many journalists beyond the 43 who were interviewed might have altogether different tales to tell. But as if possessing a nose of its own for a good story, “Enquirer” knows how to shape the “facts” of a research-in tensive piece into compelling stagecraft. I loved the sight of the actors asleep in so many cocoons of shredded paper â€" an image that gives new meaning to time-honored talk of putting a newspaper to bed. And I'm sure I'm not alone in relating to the increasingly nostalgic allure of a reader's physical relationship with the press, which of course is being lost in the prevailing shift online. Well, unless you get off on feeling up a monitor or laptop.

One can't imagine “Enquirer” working as well in a conventional setting. The ongoing hurlyburly described in the play needs its audience belting about from one locale to another. (Near the start, a performer says “let's get out of here,” and we're off.) And writing as one who has for a quarter-century or so toiled in this same profession myself, I found something immediately bracing about revisiting the conference rooms and coffee cups that feature among the details of the play, large and small.

“The Hotel Plays” is the collective name afforded three curiosities from no less a figure than Tennessee Williams, and their presence through Oct. 27 in the Grange Hotel, Holborn, adds to the sense of adventure that in this instance compensates for a shortfall in quality. The Defibrillator Theatre Company (another fab name!) has mounted the plays in three actual hotel rooms, each one atop the next, but only the third playlet, “Sunburst,” actually works in performance.

The other two require spectators (30 or so are allowed in each room) to be gamely herded from one to the next, positioning themselves where they can before the duologues unfold. The opener, “Green Eyes,” might be improved by actors who didn't look like drama students on a particularly over-earnest and off day, and some dud acting sold the presumably semi-autobiographical middle play short, as well. (Called “The Travelling Companion,” that one finds an aging, itinerant gay man making his way east from C alifornia with a reluctant young buck in tow.)

But I was glad to see plays set in hotels staged in one for a change, even if the décor at the Grange â€" those carpets! â€" would, I suspect, not be most people's idea of five-star splendor. What next? Arnold Wesker's “The Kitchen” staged at The Ivy, or Alan Ayckbourn's diptych, “House” and “Garden,” performed at an actual stately home? As site-specific theater implicitly asks of those who participate in it, watch this space.