Containerhead

Bashful fan. Notebook groupie. Lovelorn reporter... Frey Kwa Hawking becomes a walking archive for the cult show Container

Alan Fielden, Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet perform Container at New Diorama Theatre, April 2025. Photo: Camilla Greenwell

By Frey Kwa Hawking

My notes from the first time I see Container include the phrase “(glasses crowd)”. Whether that applies to you or not, Container is for you.

Written by Alan Fielden, poet and winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award in 2018 as part of the collective JAMS, you can currently watch Container at the New Diorama Theatre in its first full theatrical run. It’s the show I’ve seen the most without working on it, so I think you should watch it too: it’s thrilling, compassionate, and direct – and a heartening piece of programming.

Here’s another go: Container is a non-narrative, mostly spoken, sometimes sung work, with five performers and little else. They speak to us through sentences we might say and ones we definitely wouldn’t, and sing us, shout us, and play us into really hearing them – often simultaneously, making some spontaneous choices each night around who speaks or sings what, alongside more choreographed passages.

Container’s concern is the love and suffering involved with the enforcing and crossing of borders of all kinds. One of its primary tools is the relationship between what we say and do to each other. It has the truth of speech in it without being verbatim, juxtaposing the seemingly directly personal and romantic alongside approaching threat, characteristic of Alan’s writing. Container slows you down to make you notice what speech does, how performance works through speech: even when seemingly stripped down, how full it is.

Container has Laurie Anderson’s instinct for when moments call for solely music or speech, and an appreciation for the voice as instrument. Though Alan’s writing doesn’t philosophise, it shares a fondness for the mundane, humour, and a fidgety sense of perspective with Robert Ashley’s TV operas Perfect Lives (1983), taking careful note of what repetition can do (“Short ideas repeated massage the brain.”)¹. There’s less story than in Perfect Lives: at one point we spend time hearing how narratives of disaster are constructed for TV news, and elsewhere phrases are taken to a logical, border-bellowing endpoint. Characters are temporarily inhabited, without anyone permanently limited to chorus.

Alan Fielden and Clara Potter-Sweet rehearse. Photo: NDT.

In the process of shaping Container and raising interest and funding, Alan and a company of deviser-performers (Jemima Yong of JAMS, Tim Cape of Bastard Assignments, Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet of Emergency Chorus, and in 2023-4, Nat Norland of why this sky) have tipped it out at performance evenings, mostly around London. This means that over one and a half years I’ve seen Container in six very different settings: two theatres, a cinema-performance space, a gallery event space, a church, and a library. I was hooked from the first.

Following Container around feels like being the groupie of a band not big enough to escape mutual embarrassed notice. Me again. It’s like looking through the windows of a house you want to live in every so often, and seeing the changes the family living there has made.


FIRST: THEATRE

16 September 2023 @ Camden People’s Theatre

Beginning the show with a list of words, the first shy laugh is on calcium.

I’m continually adjusting, trying to discern rules, mapping actions in my notes (“swapped with pianist”, “A stood back, appreciating liveness?”). I’m most struck by how present and springy they are, operating by glances, poised and casual. How do they know when to speak or sing or not? Who are they when they’re doing this? When do I think of them as actors, and when as an orchestra? It’s like an animating spirit grabs them: it bubbles up sometimes within one or a pair of them, or they conjure this thing all together.

Occupations are chanted into verbs. Towards the end, Nat and Alan speak us through a narrative, I and we, moving into the second person, like you’re sucked into the story. It’s present tense but not linear. Describing a film, an invasion? Things crack open along different seams repeatedly, are collaged or cut into each other. This first Container feels the most dreamy and roving: sweeping from the collective to the individual, its politics are still largely in the drawer.

We laugh more and more, though as things slow later, I cry in the dark as well. I tell my friend Charlotte I want to hear them do it again and again. What are rehearsals like? It’s contagious: it makes me want to be up there saying it with them too. You can see the pleasure of the words.

*

It’s difficult, now, to remember that this was apparently a 45 minute work-in-progress. Container had prior voices and outings, but this was the most repeated line up, staying stable until the New Diorama run was announced.² At this performance, I only really knew Ben (an in-law of sorts as previous Exeunt regional reviews editor) and Nat, who I’ve grown closer to since. Now if I don’t understand something in my notes, I could probably ask any of them what they think I meant.

Though I hope it plays in further weird places to come, the NDT run feels closest to a definitive version. I think about gigs and setlists. There are bits of past Container that don’t appear in the Container at NDT now. I’ve got to do something with all of this inside me. I’m a repository of Container. I am a container full of Container.

Clara Potter-Sweet, Tim Cape and Jemima Yong in Container at NDT. Photo: Camilla Greenwell

SECOND: CINEMA

19 September 2023, part of Tough Sell #1 @ Cube Microplex

I can’t remember if I was going to visit my parents anyway or if that was my excuse to see Container in Bristol again three days later. It’s the inaugural Tough Sell night, put on by Ben with Lilith Wozniak (Exeunt contributor herself) and Keiran Woods, for Bristol’s Tough Sell zine.

Without Tim and Jemima, it’s brisker, different voices standing out. I’m not so discombobulated, able to see recurring sections. We’re in the Cube, Stokes Croft’s tiny cinema-event space, and people are more disposed to laugh; in response, the performances become more animated and amusing. Is my note “Laputa castle clattering frogs rain” about COIMS’ multi-instrumental accompaniment, stormily scoring them with only an hour’s rehearsal? “End of drumstick on cymbal” a bit more helpful. Over their percussion and guitar throb, Clara’s voice rings out describing families of taxidermied animals in little clothes, while Ben and Nat work harder to be heard. The four take a moment to watch COIMS sometimes. I’m too shy to give them much in the way of useful observations of the differences between these two performances. I’m an alert and bashful fan, an unasked lovelorn reporter.

*

COIMS’ participation dials up Container’s cacophony. At first I was unsure about Container’s use of instruments at all: present from the outset, they’re taken up by the company often and without ceremony. Doesn’t it muddy the waters, not sticking strictly to voice?

But Container isn’t just a formalist exercise in tone.³ It’s something more in the quality of our listening, the attitude of performance, that determines seemingly clear distinctions between voice and instrument, speech and music. There’s no real clean swap from one to the other. I come to see Container’s inclusion of instruments and more recognisable singing as something honest, owning up to speech’s inherent musicality. Why try to keep music out of it?

Has high-concept Shakespeare gone too far – or not far enough?

THIRD: GALLERY

20 July 2024, ‘runway’, part of blurt @ TACO!

The next summer, Container is in disguise as Runway, part of an evening called ‘blurt’ at gallery and event space TACO!, landing after other sonic text experiments (I quietly think it has more humour than the rest). No Tim and only Alan’s guitar, which I think is why it isn’t Container.

You can listen to the recording of this one. I’m in there somewhere, breathing, probably laughing. Listening again, I hear how sharp but restless it is. Since the previous year, Israel’s desolation of Gaza further charges the piece’s concerns. Without some of its songs, it’s barer, with less connective tissue. They go quicker into the TV news production bit, reeling off cameras going dead, talking business behind reporting disaster, and it lands more emphatically. A new song sounds quite ‘White Cliffs of Dover’: consolation from war. They end on these wordless aaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhings as Jemima and Nat ask goofy and plaintive questions, under Alan strumming.

I send a voice note of one stretch to my boyfriend. I want him to have a small part of it. I most love listening back to Clara screaming about how hungry they are, kicking around in the words, sounding red. I could eat a horse I could eat a lion.

*

At a much later Q&A after the library show, the first time I hear Container discussed outside of pub debriefs, they confirm their agency over who claims and how to deliver some lines, that some parts are more set than others. You hear that in the TACO! recording. They thicken and thin the chorus, becoming accordingly more brave, nervous, wistful. Replacing my memory of it slightly now, you can pick them out going for it, choosing when to make a play for a line, and their misalignments. The evening’s choices are pinned like a little specimen in this box.