Cracked Battery present: Untitled Party Project 5.3
Cracked Battery are new theatre-adjacent production company who, in their own words, seek to recharge and reanimate over used narratives in storytelling. The great minds behind this company are writer and director Clodagh Chapman and producer Hope White, two exciting creatives who are treating us with their debut production Untitled Party Project 5.3.
Their piece is part of Digitally Charged, Tramshed’s festival of online performance generated by young people. The festival is a response to the upheaval of the arts scene during the pandemic. One of the first attempts to navigate theatre productions post-COVID-19, Tramshed forms a platform for creative experimentation, producing ‘hybrid work that is neither theatre not film’. Chapman and White have taken up the challenge, and with the help of lighting designer Ben Orr, composer and electro-pop artist Seeva, and a dynamic cast of actors, they have produced a hybrid work which I urge you to experience for yourself.
Untitled: ‘a tipsy queer love-triangle for the digital epoch’. Caught in a carousel of ‘off-license tinnies, Instagram deep-dives and adolescent angst’, Adi is attending her first house party in the hope of impressing the girl she fancies. It is an urgent, alcohol-heavy part of life which many of us can still remember; the potential for mortification when approaching a crush is a unifying experience. Yet there is more nuance to Chapman’s interpretation of this house party trope than is found in the bland storylines of the (largely straight) rom-coms which have thus saturated popular culture. We have been fed a fraction of the lives and stories which exist, and this has left a craving for LGTBQ+ narratives, to which Untitled responds. The sharp accuracy of the fumblings of early romance is balanced with the charm of the characters and the evident feeling behind the script. For this is a complicated kind of romance, and Untitled’s sensitive narrative and exploration of queer dating is as touching as it is necessary.
I asked Chapman to share her inspiration for the piece: ‘It started out with a really specific desire to get at an experience that myself and a lot of LGTBQ+ people seem to have had, where you’re not-not-out but you’re not totally comfortable in your sexuality either’. Queer people historically haven’t been allowed to have those heartwarming coming-of-age stories, and Untitled creates a space for these narratives to be explored. The film is therefore rooted in ‘that specific brand of B-list coming-of-age romcom film’, in Chapman’s words ‘the kind that are objectively terrible but kind of heartwarming in their trashiness’. And Untitled certainly breaks the mould, not least for its new form - viewers have to ‘tune in’ to each of the characters’ Instagram story, beginning with Adi. Throughout the show we are able to explore the Instagram stories of four friends and discover their journeys on our own. This voyeuristic approach allows the viewer to piece together the narratives as they would viewing the stories of a friendship group on a night out: ‘because that’s how we consume a lot of our information nowadays - you can sort of piece together what happened via the detritus of a night out via socials’.
The Instagram format – and the fact that the characters’ insta stories appear alongside those of your friends - feeds into the sense of realism which makes the production so addictive to watch. It feels unnervingly real to trace each character’s evening to its beginning. ‘Aesthetically the look is quite homemade, handheld, grainy - the aim is that you can’t always tell exactly what is happening, and everything is slightly too filtered, and the lighting is too bright or too dim or both at once’. The lack of a concrete third-person perspective gives Untitled the edge over coming-of-age films because the world which we are watching is extremely candid. In fact, the only evidence of performance is the sound - the show is underscored by the talented London-based Seeva. This format allows for a more immersive theatre experience, a ‘hyper-saturated’ world which Chapman describes as ‘that kind of wide-eyed-first-year-of-uni feeling where everything is slightly too new and raw and weird, like someone came in and fiddled with the knobs on the back of the telly’.
Pragmatically, the Instagram story format worked as it enabled the cast and crew to adhere to social distance laws in the absence of theatre. However, the socially distanced creative process also allowed the designers, directors and actors to make creative choices they wouldn’t have made otherwise. The production was initially going to be scripted, but during the process it became clear that a more naturalistic form was needed. The actors were therefore encouraged to improvise around a loose script, which Chapman says turned out to be extremely fruitful: ‘actors are endlessly creative, especially when they’re given the freedom to work in a totally new way’.
I asked Chapman if she thought this new type of theatre experience was sustainable. The main difference between theatre on stage and on screen is that the actors cannot see their audience. I wondered if that changed the fabric of theatre, which attempts to close the distance between character and viewer. Chapman responded: ‘I think it does something interesting but I’d also argue it’s not theatre. I think the audience and cast being in the same physical space does something to the work that online work can’t get at. But maybe I’m just a cynic! For me it’s a theatre-adjacent way of telling stories, but I don’t think it’s a one-for-one replacement in the same way that I don’t think this particular story would work as a stage play – or at least not without some serious rethinks’.
Cracked Battery got half of their name from a Groucho Marx quotation ‘blessed be the cracked, for they let in the light’. Blessed be Cracked Battery, because I suspect this marks the advent of a very exciting voice in theatre.
Untitled Party Project 5.3 is part of Digitally Charged, Tramshed’s festival of online performance. All shows in the festival are free; support the artists by making a donation: https://www.tramshed.org/support-us
To book tickets for tonight’s performance, click here.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.