Theatre, Architecture and Suicide: Let Slip discuss Machines for Living

Theatre, Architecture and Suicide: Let Slip discuss Machines for Living

18 June, 2012
by: Naima Khan

Naima Khan and Let Slip discuss the questions posed in Machines for Living before its run at Edinburgh. 

A while ago Spoonfed published London Architecture: Best of Brutalism, a list of staggeringly ugly structures that make up London’s skyline. You won't believe how many of them are theatres. A recent show at Blue Elephant Theatre by devising company Let Slip reminded me of that meeting of theatre and architecture but in their show, Machines for Living, they look at the relationship between social housing and the architects who design it. 

In this show, those archtiects are Roger and Wendy. The pair meet, fall in love and go about setting the world to rights with their blue-prints, all the wihle plagued by the mental presence of legendary designer Le Corbusier and a cacophony of ideas about community. Fraught with set backs, once their beloved tower block is erected and they've moved into it, the flaws in their mission become painfully apparent. 

“Most obviously,” suggests performer and deviser David Ralfe, “how do you plan for ‘people’ when ‘people’ are irrational, unpredictable and impossible to generalise about?”. It's a central question wrapped in many others. “To what extent are the buildings in which people have to live and raise their families merely a reflection of whatever happened to be trendy in architecture at the time?” he asks, “and are those trends created by a desire to design better homes or to outdo your professional rivals by making some kind of bold statement?”
In Machines for Living, this is explored through two central characters inspired in a small way by architect George Finch, who designed Lambeth Towers and Brixton Recreational Centre and his wife Kate Macintosh, designer of Dawson’s Heights  

“I was surprised by how political architecture was for them,” says David of meeting the couple. “George told us very simply, 'Kate and I were committed Socialists, so we knew we had to work for the Greater London Council.' They were only interested in designing buildings which contributed to communities and society and as George put it, 'We really thought we were designing a better world.' They would argue that Mrs Thatcher put a stop to that, with Right To Buy amongst other things; though of course there are others who say it was the architecture itself that was flawed.”

“Their passion surprised me” he continues “because we don’t talk about housing like that any more: it’s become depoliticised. ‘Council housing’ is for poor people and the rest we leave to the private sector, so government can wash their hands of it.”

This notion of attempting to change the world and failing, reoccurred in David's research (undertaken with fellow company members India Banks, Nicole Pschertz and Frode Gjerlow) and he mentions a YouTube video about the story of Brutalism that also inspired the show. The story begins with Socialist ideals in the context of the post-war housing shortage and continues through to Conservative condemnation of those buildings. “It made me think of Greek Tragedy,” he writes, “the huge ideals, the hubris, the towers as crumbling monuments and the residents as a chorus.”

Contrary to this image of Grecian dilapidation, the mostly monochrome design of Machines for Living reflects modernity in all its contradictory glory. “The aesthetic of the show plays with stripping back Brutalist buildings to mere design” writers the play's designer Christina Hardinge, “a visual interpretation of the architects utopian vision rather than the reality of how the buildings stand now. What happens when we white wash the urban decay of these structures and reduce the architecture back to its originally intended "clean lines and primary forms?" 

“We were also struck by how individual the drawing style and interpretation of each architect was” she continues. “Some went so far as to illustrate black ink caricatures of 1960s families living inside their council houses, with speech bubbles saying 'what a lovely view'. This black and white caricatured alter-reality can exist in the mind of the utopian architect as they design a building.”

A designer who created a larger-than-life character for himself is Le Corbusier (Frode Gjerlow), the man who pioneered tower block design and asserted that "the house is a machine for living in”. He is both an inspiration and a burden to Roger and Wendy as David writes: “even though he was from a previous generation, we felt his influence looming over all the buildings we researched and that translates onstage.” In Machines for Living, Corbusier sees Community as a flaky mass to be occupied by his work. He is imposing, patronising and the coldest, funniest character in this play. But caricaturing the man isn't something that worried Let Slip. 

“Le Corbusier caricatures himself in his own writing and enjoys every second of it!” says David who calls him the “most theatrical of all characters...He plays with all sorts of different voices in his writing, delighting in prophecy and proclamation. One moment he is godlike, damning the architecture he detests and 'eyes which do not see'. The next he is fawning at the altar of geometrical purity.” 

A direct challenge to Le Corbusier (though he takes quite a cavalier attitude to it) is Community (Nicole Pshcetz) who is at one point childlike and at another, a drunk and hazardous personification of our fallibility. Of this part, Nicole writes: “All we knew was that we wanted to have a character that somehow represented the soul of Wendy and Roger's building.” And so she does in a way that allows us to see her through the eyes of the architects.

But it's with this character that Let Slip miss a trick. In this architect-centric piece, we don't get to see Community react to the surroundings they've created for her, we only hear about the perpetual problems the building has failed to solve. And yet it's community that sparked at least one of the central questions of this show which, reflecting a widely circulated urban myth, sees an architect commit suicide.

“Why” asks David, “would a community come to believe or want to believe that the person responsible for where they lived had been punished and humiliated?” and crucially, how much responsibility do architects bear for the results of social housing?

In looking into the vast and spiraling questions they've come across in only 60 minutes Let Slip's show seemed to me like it had lost its focus a little when I saw it at Blue Elephant Theatre, But this is an already striking production from a promising company and being devised, it is changing constantly. With their striking starting point and their bold way of exploring it, I'd pay good money to see this again.

Machines for Living will run at Zoo from 3rd–27th August as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 


Image: India Banks, Nicole Pschetz, Frode Gjerlow and David Ralfe by Christina Hardinge.



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Naima Khan