Sorcha Dallas

Killing Time is a collaboration between Graham Fagen, a visual artist, and Graham Eatough, a theatre director.  Between them, they have created a new form that is part installation, part performance, part film, and a work that questions the nature of each.

In the first gallery, there are five video screens on which a loose ­narrative plays out.  The story, if you can call it that, begins in front of a red theatre curtain, with a spotlight trained on a microphone.  Before too long, a man appears, dressed in an ill-fitting harlequin costume, which he soon removes.  Quick as a flash, the former harlequin appears on a different screen, now a doctor visiting a pokey little bedsit.  Handed a noose, he drops into another scene, a hill of mulch topped with a barren tree, where a man sits, emptying stones from his boots.  Next he is in the garden of country house as a servant, then joins a companion in a claustrophobic basement, where the two idle on sheetless beds, a dumb waiter between them.

Access to the next gallery is through an opening which leads into the bedsit seen on the second video screen, and the gallery visitor takes on the role of the harlequin, free to roam through the five sets on which the just-seen video was filmed.  And free, too, to interact with actors – throughout this exhibition’s run, members of the cast can be found in the gallery, or on the stage; living components of an installation, or actors in an unending play.

On y visit, a woman wandered the spaces between the sets, blowing tunelessly on a harmonica before settling down where she belonged, in front of the country house, and busying herself stitching needlepoint.  In the far corner of the room, a man lay restless on a bed, occasionally rising to inspect the hatch of the dumb waiter beside him.

The sets are familiar.  The tree-topped hillock of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and the basement room of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter are instantly recognizable, the anonymous bedsit setting of Osborne’s Look Back In Anger and the country estate of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard perhaps less so.  All four plays, though, underpin the theme around which Killing Time is built:  waiting.  Waiting for something over which those waiting have no control, waiting for something to happen.

What Fagen and Eatough have done is distil these four plays, stripping away the words, and the action, until all is left is an elongated pause.  And just as the aimless aristocrats of The Cherry Orchard await impotently the auction of their property, or Ben and Gus of The Dumb Waiter quarrel in advance of their final order to kill, the visitor wandering the DCA’s gallery-theatre labors under the weight of a sort of listless panic.  This effect begins in the video room, where each screen is placed in such a way that the viewer must scamper around in a bid to follow the action.  In among the sets, the sense that the action of the filmed section is about to happen is inescapable and, once again, it is hard to avoid rushing to catch an actor doing nothing much at all.

On one level, Killing Time is built on existing plays, a metatextual analysis of four dramatic works that looks to the heart of each and teases out a common theme, but it is more than that: Killing Time is a work that examines itself, and, in fusing visual art, theatre and filmed performance, reveals much about each medium.

The process begins with that layered title – the actors are killing time in the colloquial sense, each of the plays, to varying degrees, are concerned with change over time, but what Eatough and Fagen are doing here is killing time as it usually applies to visiting a gallery, attending a performance or watching a film.  In a gallery, one has a tempered freedom – freedom to glance at a work for a moment or study it for hours – but for the theatre patron or film buff, time is controlled, the experience of a work contained in a predetermined span.  But here in the first gallery space, the art has a beginning and an end, while in the interlinking theatre sets of the second space, the performance is ongoing, timeless.

There is, too, a breaking down of expected behaviors.  In the video room, visitors roam around during the captured performance, physically moving from scene to scene, acting to watch the action.  In among the sets, viewers lean in to inspect an aspect of the installation, only to find themselves watching a performance.  And, sitting down in front of the red curtain to take some notes, I found myself being watched closely by a family, an accidental performer.

Killing Time, then, is made of powerful stuff.  It illuminates four well-known plays, and it will change the way you think about art, performance and the space between the two.