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SHUTTERS: 11 PERIPHERAL SCENES AT
THE BACK SIDE OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE
Hamish Muir

The National Theatre, London, UK








‘Shutter is a play for voices that is set at the loading bay of the National Theatre, London. The bay is used for deliveries, loading materials, and waste disposal. Though the National Theatre was not designed to have a front and rear, this pavement area directs the almost bodily functions of the theatre away from the inviting promenade on the riverside.

My PhD research looks at waste generated by the theatre industry and uses a practice of playwriting to explore architectural, and design issues around waste (in its meaning, aesthetics and management). The choice of setting is not to critique the National Theatre as waste is symptomatic of every theatre and industry but rather to explore the factors specific to place that may give rise to waste. Shutter was an attempt to use the devices of dramatic writing to conjure a specific place where waste is generated through a blend of documentarian, fictional and abstracted voices that accumulate in layers of text.

Most playwriting focuses on voice (and specifically the human voice as it is an assumption that the performer has a mouth), the piece explores the awkwardness and limitations of creating a sense of place without visuals, space or materials and the resulting, obscured ‘place of waste’ produced through character, action, narrative, stage direction, and dialogue. In the piece, waste is characterised as a subversive, subconscious material that slowly reveals the character's hidden secrets and motivations, which they keep behind performative façades as a necessity to prove their worth.

If waste can be considered evidence of behaviour, then it can confront the characters with their own actions, which they may find uncomfortable. One of the final actions in the play is the entrance of a transparent disposal skip, which exposes all of the waste publicly.’

Hamish Muir
 

 

Echoes and Intersections is a collection of site-writings produced as part of the module Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing across the MA Architectural History, MA Situated Practice, and MA Historic Urban Environments dgree and PhD programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The featured works take the reader through fixed spatial locations and buildings, and on temporal journeys across ambiguous lands and waters. Written simultaneously across the globe, our situated writing offers diverse perspectives and narratives on plural geographies, landscapes and cities, through pieces interwoven with multiple, intersecting threads.

Many of the works occupy edgelands, peripheries or crossing points, writing the boundaries of buildings, states or bodies. They explore homelands, homes and selves that have been deconstructed, revealed and returned to. Echoing with memories, histories and absent others, the sites written carry the voices of place and voices displaced or fragmented, which resonate through the materials of the land - mud, sand, sky and rock.

These writings can be read in any order, allowing connections to emerge differently upon each reading.

Curatorial committee: Toby Blackman, Chia-Ying Chao, Kanza Leghari, Charlotte Morgan & Rasha Saffarini. 

With thanks to Polly Gould, Jane Rendell and David Roberts.


Bloomsbury Festival 2021

In October 2021, participants from the class read from their work on Bloomsbury Radio as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2021, alongside Polly Gould, Jane Rendell, David Roberts and participants from the class of 2020.

Find the recordings on Soundcloud here.