Blood in the performing arts is always the wrong colour. It’s never dark enough. The benchmark for film blood used to be a concoction known as Kensington Gore. (This is a pun: Kensington Gore is the name of a number of connected streets that run around the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, adjacent to Hyde Park on its south side.) I am indebted to tvtropes and Everything2 for locating an original recipe:

“… this is a name for fake blood, especially the sticky, edible sort in old British horror films. Everything2 gives the recipe as:

• 2 cups of corn syrup (for viscosity and color)
• 1 cup of water (for balancing viscosity)
• 10 table spoons of corn (maize) flour (for making the blood less translucent)
• 10 tea spoons red food coloring (for color)
• 10 drops blue food coloring (for color)
• A few drops concentrated mint (for taste - optional)

The blood is sticky, thick and bright red (crimson in fact). The original Kensington Gore was a specific brand of proprietary stage blood manufactured by retired pharmacist John Tynegate in the ’60s and ’70s. It can be seen in a lot of old horror films, especially the Hammer Horror series.”

While the ingredients above are fairly standard, it’s all in the mix. The old school Gore had a letter box hue that was far too bright and light. The recipe does stress viscosity, however - a crucial but entirely controllable consideration. This is where the corn syrup (treacle is easier to get in the UK) comes in. The value of corn flour is debatable - it can make the mix irreversibly lumpy. Translucency can be countered with careful and cautious administration of food colouring. In film, it should be noted, the blood can be refreshed between takes. In live performance one is looking for an effect that does not dissipate as time passes.

In the Dash Dash Dash array five out of the six shows featured gratuitous bloodshed:

• In the Bosom of Roy: when Angela spits it, possibly consumptively, in Alex’s face, twice.
• The Flutters: when Grace returns from murdering the man who had been cutting to Roy in his place of work it emerges that she has shagged the culprit and then cut his cock off. She carries the detached penis in a neat, penis-sized package and her chest is smeared with blood.
• The Fastness: Dan has returned, thanks to breakthroughs in time travel technology, from Golgotha, where he was able to film the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, in colour, using a small camera concealed in his chest cavity. His companions, Ann, Tod and Pat, wearing appropriate surgical scrubs, cut into his upper body to retrieve the device, in the course of which Dan inadvertently emits plumes of blood from, we imagine, severed arteries and other vascular components. His resourceful team members are drenched.
• Gulch: Betty, Hector, Frank and Trudy leave the house and return several times, as if there were assignments that had to be completed. With the exception of Hector, all are bloodstained on their return. When Betty re-enters, her face and arms glisten with dark gore. The high window, its sills snowed up, silently seeps blood that drips to the table below, bathing the pearl-handled pistols.
• Sleet: no blood is shed in Sleet.
• Gush: Roy is beneath a bucket of blood. Gina, searching for biscuits, is copiously blued. Dean, wishing to make cupcakes, is enfloured (not a liquid but producing a pleasing halo effect when backlit). Roy, beaten with sticks, stamped upon and having his testicles bitten off, is yellowed. Nina, seeking to restrain the reddened, maddened and yellowed Roy, is, while grappling with him, blackened.

We have, therefore, five sets of requirements:
• the blood that is spat must be non-toxic and thinnish but not too thin or else, on the face, it goes pink and translucent within a matter of seconds.
• the blood that adheres to the skin must not run from its original site of placement. If it runs it will mottle. It must be particularly sticky and is daubed rather than wiped on.
• the blood that spurts from the body must be thicker than that which is spat but not so thick that it blocks the washing-up liquid bottles from which it is squirted or so thin that it soaks within seconds into the fabric of the scrub leaving a stain that is pale and half-hearted.
• the blood that bleeds from the window passes through pipes then soaks into salt. It needs to be thick but must not clog.
• the blood that drops from the sky, as with the blue and the yellow and the black, must, as it falls, form cords in the air, hitting the deck with a splat and splashing the walls as it utterly masks the features of those underneath.

All these bloods can be made on a table with buckets and bowls, stirrers and spoons.

Most of the people I know say that one of the toughest tasks they ever faced in a long life was learning to control their bodily functions. Before the Law was introduced, life was endlessly forgiving. In fact, the very concept of ‘forgiving’ was inapt. What was to forgive? You could do what you wanted, where you wanted. For a while, this looked likely to be the general setup.
Then a reward system was introduced and you knew something was up because before that they didn’t need to reward you because everything was so dandy in the first place. The purity & danger economy (see here and here (p. 150 et seq)) prevailed, however, and it was only natural that there arose a great nostalgia for the golden days of incontinence. This was a fraught state of affairs insofar as attempts to invoke such a return risked a possibly terminal social exclusion.

The clowns of the Zuni and the Yaqui and other Native American tribes had devised antidotes to such pomp that were a corrective to lifetimes of muscle control. The practice of ‘filth-eating’ by the clowns drew startled responses from the 1930s anthropologists who ‘discovered’ them:
“These masked men teased one another…they simulated eating and drinking the excreta they would pretend to catch from their wooden machete from the body of passing burro or horse or man or woman, even of one kneeling in prayer.” (The Sacred Clowns of the Pueblo and Mayo-Yaqui Indians. Elsie Clews Parsons & Ralph L. Beals. American Anthropologist, Vol 36, No. 4. 1934.)

Another commentator finds that the practices were not merely pantomime:
“The scatalogical practices among some of the clown societies of the Pueblo Indians, particularly the Zuni, are notorious examples of this clownish capacity for pointing to and containing the total human condition. One is initiated into the Zuni Ne’wekwe by a ritual of filth-eating - a strange sort of Eucharist indeed. Mud and excrement are smeared on the body for the clown performance, and parts of the performance may consist of sporting with excreta, smearing and daubing it, or drinking urine and pouring it on one another. Among the Hopi, a group of males known as ’singers’ play about with vulva-shaped sticks during initiation ceremonies, singing taunting and obscene songs to the women and running after them to ‘bless them’ with filth. The women, in turn, being well-prepared, douse the singers with foul water or urine.” (The Spirituality of Comedy: Comic Heroism in a Tragic World. M. Conrad Hyers. 2008)

The clown, with his pants falling down, recycles in the name of pure symmetry:
“Ne’wekwe knowledge not only cures stomach aches but also enables clowns to eat any kind, or amount, of food or garbage, including human excrement, and to engage in outrageous human behaviour without feeling shame.” (The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians. Barbara Tedlock. 1992)

The business of running a tight outfit is onerous. The pants, and the hair, must be let down from time to time. Even under the patched and fraying canvas of the British travelling circus those big-shoed figures at whom the public (quite understandably) rarely laughs any more will enact great rituals of incontinence that reach the parts that the ironic quip cannot reach. In dashes Bonkers closely followed by Skanky and Roderigo. They are carrying ladders, planks, brushes and pots of paint. They are going to decorate something. Up go the ladders, between them go the planks. Skanky goes aloft with the pot and oh no…! Five minutes later they’re covered! What a mess! A veritable shit-storm!

The indispensable voidances passed from the circus as it waned and the variety halls and pantomimes as they gave way to black and white TV where, on Saturday night in the 50s with your Mum and Dad on either side, the diminutive redhead slapstick artiste Charlie Drake (catchphrase: Hello My Darlings! (you had to be there)) would take up employment in a pie, chocolate or, indeed, paint factory and, with complete inevitability, over the course of four or five minutes, move with polished incompetence to a condition of fully glazed muckiness. I wept with glee and, had I not sensed at some obscure level that the viewings were precisely designed to tone rather than relax the muscular clenching without which one cannot step forth into polite society, I would have wet myself.

In the sixth Dash show, ‘Gush’, is the funniest thing you ever saw. A man comes into a room and torrents of blood fall on him from above. Later on a woman takes the lid off a tin up on a high shelf and is covered in blue paint. Then a man is being kicked and beaten fiercely and yellow paint falls down on him. Then a woman tries to stop a man attacking her with a bottle and black paint falls on them both.

Well worth doing, I promise you. Murder to rig, though. The liquids, two litres at a time, were delivered from buckets suspended way up in the grid, where the lights hang. Each bucket was tipped by cords pulled from backstage. If the actors were more than an inch out of position the liquids dropped right beside or behind them without marking them in the least. Such was the volume of screaming, howling, banging and infernal 170 bpm Dutch gabber that the backstage crew couldn’t hear their cues and, until reliable systems were eventually devised, the actors had to shout key words repeatedly (’Yellow!’ was one such cry) in order to get coloured in.

Fittingly, after having become a site for the unabashed display of fluid wastes, three of the figures on stage are garrotted by a psychopath. They let themselves go - what did they expect?

photo from ‘Gush’ by Ed Telling

There is, however, much to be pleased with. The project was premised on my writing and directing a 25 minute show once a month for six months. The shows had no narrative connection to each other but a number of shared themes bound them into an inter-related collection. I was not producing episodes in a serial but elements that, when combined, would display unobtrusive affinities and be more than the sum of their parts.

I was also keen to avoid story-telling and the presentation of fictional characters. Certainly the figures who ended up on stage were different from each other but not by dint of personality traits that would invariably be reflected in their speech and behaviour. They were physically reliable insofar as they didn’t change shape in the course of a scene (something they might have achieved in an animated film) but other than that their periods of consistency were shortlived, like particles forming then disappearing in a cloud chamber. They were not, however, vehicles for random utterance. That’s too easy.

While there are plenty of diagnostic justifications available for formless babbling - madness, brain damage, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, too much crystal meth and so forth - the use of such speech in performance has a very short shelf-life and tests its audience unnecessarily. The Surrealists, for example, tired quite quickly of the pure products of automatic writing and sought ways to tweak the recipe in order to generate a higher strike rate, while those writers taken with the cutup technique (Tzara in the 1920s, Gysin then Burroughs in the late 50s and early 60s) were in the habit, from the start, of winnowing out the nonpoetic dross from the serendipitous gemlines in simple recognition of an inevitable mathematical deadness that would otherwise reliably extinguish the spirit of the whole experiment.

Nevertheless, in one of the short shows (Show 3: ‘The Fastness’), I wanted a scene in which the figures on stage would be seized with a babbling mania of an intensity that defied all logic and continuity.

DAN Hello everybody I’ve succeeded in painting the town red in a very direct and lively manner.
ANN I disagree. It is time for unrelenting and pitiless war.
TOD Who’d like a delicious cuppa? I would. Thank you.
PAT This afternoon I’m going to strip the 444 down and see if we can’t get it to run about a bit.
DAN You could take it down the town. Which is so colourful.
ANN Yes. I’ve got people coming in from all over roundabout these parts in effect.
TOD Which is a monster plus. By Jiminy.
PAT By crikey.
ANN By fuck.
DAN Hoorah to all that.
PAT Right then! Let’s!

I wrote about 40 lines in this manner. While there is certainly a baton being passed at times, for much of the episode the lights are just popping on and off all over the neighbourhood. In order to make the scene work at all the actors had to invest it with enormous and cartoonish manic energy, simply to elevate the material from a condition of disposable random to one in which it could be said that the figures are, at least, sharing a disconcerting and uncontrollable impulsion. On a number of occasions I considered cutting the scene altogether but my gifted and indefatigable actors proved able to pull it out of the bag on a nightly basis.

Pure random utterance has no spirit. On the other hand, the delicacies of the well-written and psychologically substantial character did not interest me. Inconsistent character had to be deployed in such a way that it would act as evidence of a socially pervasive inner disconnection.

DEAN Nina is an interior decorator.
ROY How’s it going?
NINA It’s tremendous.
ROY It must be very satisfying to have an interior.
NINA Are you not of fixed abode, Roy?
ROY I find them labour intensive.
(Show 6: ‘Gush’)

What I hoped to produce, across the whole of Dash Dash Dash, was the speech of figures whose insides had melted. This would not be evidence of the personal psychiatric condition of unfortunate individuals so much as a concentration of responses to an extreme and widely distributed social fragmentation.

photos from ‘Gush’ by Ed Telling

to be continued…

Other commentators have efficiently disparaged ‘Avatar’s GCSE econarrative leaving the way clear for a consideration of the business of ecstatic technologies and how they interlace in this pioneering product. The movie, obviously, has at its narrative hub a prosthetic virtual sensorium that doesn’t deliver movies or out of the body experiences so much as a totally alien point of view, wherein the ‘alien’ is not on another planet but, more or less exotically, can be located in the person sitting next to you. The trainee transpersonators could just as easily plug into each other’s experience as they could into that of an extraterrestrial. Instead of going to the pub with a friend you could, presumably, go in him or her. The question of who would be the designated driver is interesting: if you’re going for a ride in another person then your host is the driver. If you are able to overrule your ride then you are the driver.

Such a distinction, in ‘Avatar’, is blurred. Our sympathies with the Marine who ‘goes blue’ would be diminished if he seemed to emulate a parasitic brain-worm that munched out his host’s agency. That would be rather suggestive of American imperialism. Instead, paraplegic Jake runs his new alien body but the latter is a genetically engineered copy of a member of the alien race, not an alien who has ever had any experience. The copy is vacant until occupied by the transpersonator, who vitalises the zombie fleshcart. Cameron proposes the jockey mode or, more accurately, the centaur situation, in which the human element is both rider and ridden, driver and passenger.There is no timeshare option whereby two drivers might assume co-pilot status.

Presumably if Hobbits or technopixies had constructed the ecstatic apparatus it would be more readily accepted as empathy facilitation hardware. The software element must be regarded as still in beta, insofar as it can detach then transfer and implant consciousness but not effect the coveted mindmeld that would enable the passenger to sit in the cockpit next to the pilot and be as one with him in a hearts and minds kind of way, as distinct from merely being privileged to see how he does things.

As a cinema of the present offering a 3Dimensionalised window onto the possibilities of ecstatic technology the movie boasts of its own cinematic technofuture, promising a level of immersion that will bundle in the tactile, the olfactory and the gustatory alongside sight and sound. It’s only a matter of time, we are predictably assured. One can sympathise with James Cameron at this point: the cinema screen is such an intractable tissue. It’s actually made of finely punctured, beaded fabric but we cannot travel through the punctures and scamper about. In this respect a prosthetic imagination is a bit of a dumb animal - it can’t make things up. That’s what an artificial intelligence might do. One day (yeah yeah). When I was a kid I could climb through the frame, turn the corner and make up what I wanted. At the point where the cinema screen empties out - equivalent to Truman (of the eponymous Show) finding that the horizon of his world is a vast cyclorama screen - ‘Avatar’ offers a zipless body transfer when what we really need, especially if we want to migrate to an edenic virtual and never come back, is the reassurance of an authorship that enables us, in our new flesh, to adventure indefinitely. If the new flesh is merely an armchair with legs then we are at the mercy of book, comic, videogame or feature film parameters. The limitations are considerable: there are moments in ‘Avatar’ when Jake and others are simply unplugged by their human directors, at which point their blue alien giant falls insensibly to the ground. We have reached the limits of cinema. James will probably crack that if he can secure the GDP of a failing state for his next budget.

As a strategy for a life to be conducted within the tyrannical, luxurious embrace of hyperconsumerised capitalism, however, ‘Avatar’s prescription is dandy. Within ten or twenty years the problems of agency will be so pronounced that the objectless, uterine worlds of the gorgeous virtual will be much in demand from those of us seeking a final solution to the onerous business of driving an ever more eviscerated meatbuggy.

I was walking along the road the other day looking at the kerb and I thought “There’s dirt in the dimples in the kerbstones.”

Then I thought:

There is never dirt in any niche, crevice or depression in Virtual Reality (a popular idea from the mid 1980s). In ‘real’ Virtual Reality (the one with the goggles) you’re lucky if you get texture, let alone detritus. Even these days, when they can do hair really well (see CGI hair overview here) and texture has come along, nobody does dirt. It’s just too much work. They’ll do it as a laminate, of course, an aspect of surface, as in ’soiled garment’ or ‘begrimed window’, where it replaces rather than lies upon that to which it adheres. If it is there it’s because it’s a narrative requirement (see ‘Wall E’), not because it would be there anyway. In fact, and this is to jump the gun, its broad stroke depiction actually taunts the viewer, as if to say “Yeah, we have dirt but, like, do you really want it?”

Which, to embrace the gun, is the nub. What’s the point of a simulated reality if it has bad things in it? I can get that just by going out. The point of virtual reality is you never have to go out again.

I was in Manchester twenty years ago to see some people about some television. I was in the canteen. Someone said “Stand on that chair and look out of the window.” So I did. There, right outside, was Coronation Street. I was near the end where the pub, The Rover’s Return, was located. It was very realistic. I remember looking at the kerb. No dirt. That’s why it was called The Rover’s Return. Because the Rover has seen enough dirt and now wants to go back to where there isn’t any. What’s the point of television if it has dirt in it? Come on!

The cleanest surfaces on television or, indeed, in their original cinema habitat, are to be found in cartoons, especially the short ones. Visit well-stocked showrooms from John Lewis to Richer Sounds and it is the cartoon channels whose wares radiate from most of the screens on display. Ask any salesperson and they will say this is because cartoons show the TV’s colours at their greatest intensity or brilliance or brightness or vibrancy, whatever it is. The sulphurous yellows and barely stable reds demonstrate that the television set is really good. At first such a yammering, ferocious palette may induce migraine or the involuntary tightening around the eye of its orbicularis oculi muscles, a sphincter set which acts to narrow the eye opening and close the orbit of the eye. The promise of a dirt-free environment, however, is generally sufficient to accelerate the process of adaptation, after which the nursery colour range will increasingly stand for the world at the same time as making its predecessor - the world - seem rather lacking in gaiety.

The only problem with this is sport. People know what grass should look like and there is a fundamental disparity between cartoon candy settings and those that render the football or cricket pitch credibly. Sport is the most popular TV salesroom display content after cartoons and the grass usually looks okay, suggesting that cartoons shown on the same apparatus may look…what? Lifelike? No - cartoons can’t look lifelike (unless they have CGI hair).

Anyway, behind all this lie the excitements of mania and its surly associate, depression. Take a look at Donald, Daffy, Porky, Sylvester or Stimpy - mood swings de luxe! It is as if the lack of dirt i.e. detail, is the most marvellous lightener of being. Untrammelled by detail, the little fellows experience minimal emotional traction and thus need never tarry in the grey scale. They move, like quantum particles, from light to shade and back without covering the space that is conventionally seen as separating two points.

The cartoon character, in his chronic bi-polarity, reminds us what a drag life is. It really ties you down.

In an earlier post, part of a series, Strength Weekly referred to the notion of the ’schizogenic society’ laid out by the anti-psychiatrist R.D.Laing. In his stirring and merciless new book ‘Capitalist Realism - is there any alternative?” Mark Fisher (blogging as k-punk) writes about psychological conditions that achieve wide social distribution in the context of particular economic systems:

‘With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational experience of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. (The term ‘economic depression’ is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.’

Fisher notes that other commentators have argued that ’schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism’ and goes on to assert that, if that is the case then ‘bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism.’

That cartoon characters, in the main, are emblems of capitalised mania and the risks pursuant to unanchored and tractable appetite, is not surprising nor, for that matter, is the notion that efficient communication is predicated on the winnowing out of detail. When I found myself musing on a dirty kerbstone, though, I did wonder if detail is under attrition in another way. In the the current glut of vampire entertainments, for example, analysis has been submitted hither and thither (here, for example) but the genre continues to offer a means of managing something that is not alien so much as enervating. Might this be related in some way to the death of detail?

Despite the rapacious and superhuman energies of the post-prandial vampire, he or she is also closely associated with pallor, listlessness and a suite of symptoms akin to chronic fatigue syndrome. This applies equally to the multiply pierced victim and their fanged immortal exsanguinator. Reduced affect, diminished detail - these effects are not tolerated in the everyday world where, if you give blood in a nice way, as a public-spirited donor, you get a delicious cup of sweet tea to build you up again afterwards. In this instance, however, sweetness is a reward for compliance in a transaction that otherwise leaves you languishing in lassitude. Extended to the world beyond the Blood Donor Centre, sweetness may also be proffered in the form of bright colours, bright ideas or bright opportunities which no longer stand for the world but simply provide high contrast, conjuring a world before and after detail in which contrast replaces content.

In such a world transformation is instantaneous. There is no journey to be made, no interim state, you only have to wish. There are two ways of going about it: re-invent yourself or re-invent the world to suit yourself. Most of the difficulties previously associated with these operations have been significantly minimised thanks to the exsanguination of detail. Vampire narratives, from this perspective, offer an examination of the tribulations and rhapsodies that accompany the project either to increase or diminish detail. One bite delivers ecstasy. A few hours later you want another one.

You’d think that the world that delivers the box-set to your living room, the train timetable to your telephone and a comprehensive history of lighthouses to your computer screen would never run out of toothsome detail. Surely we live in a trainspotter’s paradise as far as detail goes. Even those with genuinely mild or benign attachments to particulars and specifics constantly run the risk of engulfment by small but enticing matters pertaining to their special interests. If bi-polarity is the psychopolitical disorder du jour then the manic could be sated and the depressed uplifted by a dose of train numbers. But it doesn’t work like that, it goes the other way.

That it is time-consuming to add dirt to the picture is accepted as a good enough technical excuse for the box-fresh look of animated imagery. What, however, if dirt were removed from the everyday, goggle-free world - so that this world started to acquire some of the characteristics of a manmade graphic artifact? Despite the superabundance of data made available by digital technology, it is increasingly the case that paralysis and anxiety are as likely to compound our reactions as an enriching, vitalising celebration of unbounded opportunity. It is the fact of inundation that generates the contemporary bi-polar malaise. It’s the vastness of it. The sheer smothering unmanageability induces either suffocation or ecstasy. There’s too much to dwell on.

It is conceivable, if not provable, that a depressed public consumes less than a manic one. The yearning to alleviate depression is all very well but not much use to the economy if the subject can’t be bothered to get up in the morning. Mania is fun and risks - to the wallet , for instance - tend to be overlooked. Strictly speaking, mania is depression, insofar as it is, by definition, a flame doomed to gutter, for ever and ever. That said, mania is harsh on detail - it doesn’t need it. Depression finds solace in detail, it gives traction on the slopes.

Detail has peaked and is now disappearing. Everything is simpler now. At the moment this is a rather haunting, ugly feeling. Soon it won’t be.

I invite the reader to savour the archive here, or by clicking on ‘Peachy- the Ads’ on the top bar of this page.

In an earlier post, ‘I, Healer‘, I suggested that theatre performance composed in an incoherent language might be suitable for the depiction of an incoherent world. When narrative in the real world comes to be viewed with the suspicion that it’s a cover-up of some sort, the alternatives are stark: nostalgic reversal or the homeopathic dose. While the strategy of the dilute dose is risible in its ‘medical’ context, there is something to be said for its application to the business of artistic representation. Just what might it constitute? A paradox begins to arise wherein we find ourselves effortlessly edging towards naturalism and mimesis again: the depiction of disorder by a vocabulary of disorder.

If all is disordered then the disordered depiction of it amounts to naturalism. Or it does if all that is to be presented is the appearance of disorder. If a vocabulary of disorder is employed then it will, by definition, be framed within an aesthetic of disorder - this is the language of the action movie or a play about war or tempestuous marriage. It will be perfectly recognisable. On the other hand, if a disordered vocabulary is used then there might be a chance.

The problem is that it’s seething, pervasive disorder that requires attention rather than the intermittent disruption of otherwise serviceable narratives. The current panoramic disorder is not there to be faithfully reproduced. It compels a reassessment of the means whereby it is to be represented. The imposition, for example, of narrative onto such fracture and confusion seems at best rather sweet and at worst forlornly misjudged.

Audiences are not gagging for these hot new fragments and fractures of which we speak. The unassailable popularity of bonneted drama and humiliating competitions on the television suggests, in both cases, that a subterranean current of hysteria is a must-have component of contemporary cultural consumption. Were the conventions of the bonnet and the rules of the competitions dissolved then the hystericised mechanisms beneath would be revealed and, presumably, found irresistible. In my dreams.

The avant-gardes have been here before, of course. In 1961, Martin Esslin in his book ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ wrote about a new sort of theatre that he had identified: ‘If a good play must have a cleverly constructed story, these have no story or plot to speak of; if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterisation and motivation, these are often without recognisable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets; if a good play has to have a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved, these often have neither a beginning or an end; if a good play is to hold the mirror up to nature and portray the manner and mannerisms of the age in finely observed sketches, these seem often to be reflections of dreams and nightmares; if a good play relies on on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, these often consist of incoherent babblings.’

Esslin indicts the usual suspects in his analysis: the decline of religion, the collapse of faith in ‘progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies’ in the aftermath of the Second World War. He quotes Camus: ‘A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.’

Almost forty years later, in 1999, Hans-Thies Lehmann published ‘Postdramatic Theatre’, seen in some circles as framing the theatrical products of our new century as convincingly as Esslin had for postwar drama up to the 60s. Among the many characteristics of the new theatre that Lehmann examines is a decentring of the text, wherein it is no longer the sole determinant of the expressive elements around it. He also comments on the intermittent, deliberate suspension of the closed fictive world of the performance that allows some element of ‘the real’ to break into the experience.

In the Dash Dash Dash shows I shall attempt to carry on the good work by insisting that six short shows, unrelated in terms of narrative, setting, milieu, pace, tone or style can somehow constitute the parts of a whole. We’ll see.

Moving to the late 20th century, Silver notes that ’science fiction has transmuted fairies to the small green men from outer space.’ She refers to Edmund Little’s suggestion (in ‘The Fantasts’ (1984)) that ‘the world of faerie industrialised and rendered technological becomes the realm of science fiction’ then observes that ‘contemporary UFOlogists argue that the fairies really are the little green men - alien creatures from outer space who have come to join us.’

While fairy stories or magical fantasy for children, in book form and CGI adaptation, present a picture of rude health, it would seem, at first glance, that adults have moved on. Fairies are just not tough enough. A closer look, however, persuasively supported by the book ‘Meet Mr Product’ - trailed below - makes it clear that, having disconsolately disengaged from their bluebell blooms and the comforting shelter offered by the foxglove, the tinkling creatures did not languish for long in their far flung island retreats before being lured into service by the advertising industry.

It’s odd that even today advertisements for all sorts of products are adorned with snappy, winsome little homunculi. They seem entirely anachronistic and fundamentally infantilising. More often than not these sirens from the nursery are captured in mid and urgent gesture, as if bearing not only a full bladder but bursting with magical news. In kids’ cartoons it is almost obligatory for the characters to radiate a restless, electrical readiness that will translate, within moments, into the manic fulfilment of desire or the bug-eyed evasion of annihilation. Regardless of whichever may prevail, the funny body will elasticate, atomise, petrify, desiccate or bounce off the walls. In fairyland ethereality preserves the bodies from the rigid indifference of Newtonian physics but some of the lesser denizens - I’m thinking of the goblins, brownies and pixies here - are more robust and had already lent some of their aspects to figures such as Outcault’s pioneering 1895 comic-strip character The Yellow Kid. The latter, a shaven-headed, gap-toothed slum-dwelling boy clad in an outsize yellow shirt has some of the mischievous simplicity and oddness of a creature moving between the worlds of the socialised and the wild. Ironically, the Kid was so hugely successful (for the ‘New York World’ then the ‘New York Journal American’) that his image soon came to adorn a wide range of products quite unrelated to the slum.

The fairies did get some of the plum jobs on offer (this one endorses a carbonated beverage) but their waftiness was too dreamily inward and abstracted for wide application. The little people - the goblins and their ilk - held on to their cunning and their spitefulness (although some of this was absorbed into computer games) but cashed in their helpfulness, their indefatigability, their childlike stature and their magicality. The deal was that at the level of the image some of the more wizened aspects would be shed and the more enlivening ones modelled onto a great range of spritely product mascots.

Were the fairies and their associates duped? Not at all - they merely shifted their allegiances from nature to cleaning products and comestibles. Products, after all, are magical. They have a special aura and they can change what you’re like as soon as you pay for them. If goblins were given vouchers and let into supermarkets and department stores they would certainly be delighted by the great range of choices and the transformative capacities - even for goblins - of the rich array.