2Complicite has thus developed a distinctive style of theatre, in which boundaries between animate and inanimate bodies are frequently questioned, and the direct iconic relation of things to the dramatic world is disrupted (Elam 25). The Street of Crocodiles, produced at the National Theatre in 1992, provides one of the most striking examples of their transformative use of things on stage. Like most of Complicite’s work, The Street of Crocodiles is a collectively devised piece inspired by non-dramatic texts: in this case the letters, essays and short stories of Polish writer Bruno Schulz, written in the 1930s. It belongs to a series of pieces in which the company has used physical forms of expression to investigate relations between the living and the dead and the shaping of memories and histories, from the early comic piece A Minute Too Late (1984) to more recent work such as The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994), Mnemonic (1999), or A Disappearing Number (2007). Although each show draws from very different sources, the company has consistently sought to create physical, embodied forms of connection to the past, complementing verbal expressions of history with a living materialization of memory. This study draws on a detailed analysis of The Street of Crocodiles as an example through which to define the role of things in Complicite’s highly innovative scenic language, and to highlight the company’s interest in a certain reification of the past, particularly in their recent work.

3The Street of Crocodiles revolves around the fragmented memories of its main character Joseph, in which the “transmogrification” of objects is a driving force, whereas people, including Joseph himself, are increasingly reified and mechanized. The exploration of memory is thus characterized by a certain tension between animation and reification, which is both typical of Complicite’s theatrical style and a strong feature of Bruno Schulz’s short stories. Schulz’s fiction reflects his concern with a changing world and an increasingly commercialized society in the first decades of the twentieth century: his stories are set in the small Polish town of his childhood, Drohobycz, and the “Street of Crocodiles” represents the modern, commercial area of the town, in which “[t]he ubiquitous ‘crocodiles’ are the new merchant breed” of inhabitants (Banks 97). His prose thus contains both a fascination for the metaphorical potential of things and a modernist horror of commodified objects and the mechanized society which produces them. On the other hand Complicite’s interest in things can be considered part of a postdramatic style of theatre, in which human action no longer provides the core of theatrical creation, and material aspects of performance are foregrounded.

4The Street of Crocodiles should therefore be considered as a combination of different aesthetic strategies, and this study focuses first of all on the way in which Schulz’s poetics of living matter is enhanced and transformed by Complicite’s search for non-verbal scenic languages. Objects become hybrid signs, both metaphorical and material presence, and their transformation contributes to a postdramatic style of theatre in which memory is anchored in physical reality rather than in the logical progression of plot and action. This dynamic is then contrasted with the reification of humanity and history at work in The Street of Crocodiles, which suggests that the life of things is part of a resistance to fixed narrative forms in the theatre. Finally this analysis is extended to a more general definition of Complicite’s theatrical language.

5Complicite’s Street of Crocodiles is framed by a prologue, in which Joseph is sorting books in a warehouse, and an epilogue, in which he is shot. This frame indicates that Joseph’s character is based on Bruno Schulz himself, for both scenes are set in“[a] warehouse on the outskirts of Drohobycz in Poland. 19 November 1942” (Complicite 9), and these indications correspond to the day and place of Bruno Schulz’s death. From 1941 onwards Drohobycz was under German occupation, and although he was initially protected by a Nazi officer and employed to catalogue books for destruction or export to Germany, Schulz was killed, along with many other Jews, in 1942. The prologue and the epilogue therefore refer to the historical event of his death, but between these two scenes a very different world unfolds from Joseph’s memories, based on the life of his small town at the dawn of the 20^th century. The text is composed of disjointed scenes in which he recalls the places and people of his life: the classroom in which he taught, the family shop, his father’s exotic birds, the family dinners and picnics. . . In addition to these childhood memories, his mind also conjures up imaginary places, such as a “sanatorium” in which time is reversed and an older Joseph meets his dead father. Although there is no obvious plot, the succession of scenes is structured by repetition: they fall roughly into two halves, and the second half repeats the initial scenes of social and family ritual, deforming them into a grotesque parody of themselves. The atmosphere thereby becomes increasingly nightmarish and threatening as the epilogue approaches.

6In the absence of narrative progress, the “constant fermentation” of matter (Complicite 39) provides the driving force of the play, and Joseph’s father the shopkeeper frequently claims that the “lifelessness” of things is only an illusion. In Schulz’s writing, this fascination with a life hidden in everyday objects constitutes a form of resistance to the consumer society developing around him: it can be understood as part of what Jameson calls the “reactive stance” of modernism towards “the omnipresence of the commodity form” (Jameson 1979, 134–135). As Brian R. Banks has pointed out, Schulz’s stories oppose two modes of relation to the world of objects—on the one hand the commercial realm of mass consumption, represented by the modern Street of Crocodiles, and on the other the old-fashioned appreciation of unique objects, represented by “‘cinnamon shops’, old but vanishing ‘truly noble’ bazaar-like shops with dimly-lit interiors amid pungent aromas of panel varnish and incense from distant lands, open late to exhibit the rare and exotic rather than piles of tawdry mass-produced goods” (Banks 96). Joseph’s father, whose shop belongs to this older realm, thus represents a world in which the life of matter is allowed to go unfettered and “the fabric of life can be found within the weave of a cloth” (Complicite 28). Schulz’s fascination for things is, however, not precisely the interest in solid objects which can be observed in English or American modernist writing, which Douglas Mao has described as an “admiration for an object world beyond the manipulations of consciousness” (Mao 11). Schulz’s style is infused with simile and metaphor, and the things he describes do not offer up any resistance to the gaze of the narrator, but are freely activated as symbols and outer images of his mind.

8The most striking result of this dynamic treatment of props is that the objects involved become hybrid signs which resist transparent reading. In addition to their normal function as metonymies of the dramatic world (Ubersfeld 146), these objects perform metaphorical functions within the dramatic world, some of which rely on clichés (books connoting freedom turn into birds) and others are less obvious (the wood becomes a metaphor for the unruly children). According to Simon McBurney, “[t]he world of The Street of Crocodiles is that of the unconscious and the imagination” (Complicite ix): the signs of the play thus follow the textual structure of dreams, condensing and displacing meaning. The objects shift between literal and figurative functions, and these two levels are both present in the thing on stage, as for example when a tap starts pouring milk because the fascinating maid Adela has touched it, thereby becoming a metaphor of her body. Since the literal signified of the object-sign does not disappear, these images cannot be reduced to simple signs, where the signifier “book” would represent the signified “bird”, or “tap” would signify “breast”. They are best understood within the interactive view of metaphor proposed by Max Black, according to whom the primary and secondary subjects of a metaphor interact, as both the focus and the frame are present and transformed by the metaphorical relation (Black 19–43).

9This semiotic hybridity is characteristic of Complicite’s scenic language, in which objects are both saturated with metaphorical and symbolic meanings and yet always emphasized as material presence. The company’s style of devising relies on an emphasis on the materiality of performance, in which the usual hierarchy of signs is disrupted. This emphasis can be considered a postdramatic feature of their theatre, since according to H.-T. Lehmann, “postdramatic theatre establishes the possibility of dissolving the logocentric hierarchy and assigning the dominant role to elements other than dramatic logos and language” (Lehmann 93), and a mistrust of “dramatic logos” is indeed visible in the way Complicite’s plays redirect acts of memory away from ordered narrative towards physical embodiment. In The Street of Crocodiles the physical reality of objects is emphasized by the absence of scenery (the play was first performed within the bare walls of the Cottesloe at the National Theatre), and by a pervading sensuality which awakens their figurative and mnemonic function. Most of the transformations within the play are thus introduced by the senses, when Joseph smells his books and touches his family’s coats, which “emit sounds of their previous owners” (Complicite 22), or when his father invites him to look at the dinner table through a magnifying glass, and to observe that “[m]atter can change in an instant” (Complicite 39). As the idea of a “fermentation of matter” suggests, the metaphorical potential of objects paradoxically lies in their very materiality. Conversely, the poetics of matter visible throughout The Street of Crocodiles also highlights the materiality of texts and words, in the many books and ledgers visible on stage. According to the director Simon McBurney, Schulz “has created a language which renders words as malleable as clay” (McBurney), and the adapted text thus becomes a material amongst others, in which words are often employed for their connotative value or even for purely phonetic reasons. This de-semanticization is strengthened by the fact that the text includes a considerable number of lines spoken in foreign languages—inserted by the foreign actors of the company—and thereby encourages the audience to focus on the texture of speech rather than its logical meaning.

10This emphasis on material presence weakens the dramatic nature of performance insofar as human action no longer forms the core of the theatre piece. In the first half of the play, each scene is triggered by Joseph’s contact with an object, and is structured by family rituals around this object (teaching, shopping, dining, pick-nicking. . .). Narrative is no longer produced by humans but by matter itself: in the first scene Joseph’s father evokes the “make-believe of matter” (Complicite 12), and this idea is echoed in the second scene, when Joseph’s mother describes the narrative fertility of springtime. This passage is particularly speaking if we compare the prose which inspired it to the result in the play text. In Bruno Schulz’s lines, which are quoted in the printed version of The Street of Crocodiles, “[t]ree roots want to speak, freshly starched underskirts rustle on park benches, and stories are rejuvenated and start their plots again.” (Complicite 12). In the play, Mother declares that “[t]he tree roots want to speak, memories awake, ah Joseph, freshly starched underskirts and new silk stockings rustle on park benches, their stories are rejuvenated and start their plots again” (Complicite 14, emphasis mine). Whereas Schulz merely spoke of stories, Complicite’s insertion of a possessive pronoun attributes them to the “underskirts” and “stockings”. This shift reflects what McBurney refers to as the domination of objects:

. . . in this rehearsal the objects began to dominate. They took over the room, filling pockets and the insides of the actors’ hats, or under their tables. Umbrellas, books sprouting feathers, boots, glasses and cutlery. In retrospect I realised that Shulz’s vision, which evokes the transforming power of the child’s eye, necessarily meant that objects and their transmogrification would be central to the process. But when we were in it, they seemed to take over the whole process without permission, beyond our control. (Irvin 80)

11Objects “dominate” and “take over”, they are “beyond our control”: these terms reflect the tension at work in Complicite’s sign-system, and the resulting de- dramatization of performance, since, as Lehman remarks, in a theatre which gives pre-eminence to objects “[t]he hierarchy vital for drama vanishes, a hierarchy in which everything (and every thing) revolves around human action, the things being mere props” (Lehman 73).

13The S t reet of Crocodiles is in fact structured by a progressive reversal: throughout the first half the inanimate comes to life, but in the second half human beings become increasingly mechanized and rigid. Since the play is framed by the context of German occupation and moves towards the final murder of Joseph, the confusion of things and beings functions first as a counterpoint and then as a prolepsis of the Nazis’ discursive and literal reification of human beings. The individual process of memory thereby becomes a collective link to a common past, and the turning-point is provided by a central scene in which the maid Adela, exasperated by the mess made by Father’s exotic birds, decides to get rid of them:

Adela (grabs Father’s egg): Enough is enough! (She takes the egg from Father and breaks it into a plate.) I have had it up to here! (She storms DSL to the tap.)
Father (mournfully holding up the running egg yolk): I knew a certain sea- captain who had in his cabin a lamp made by Malayan embalmers from the body of his murdered mistress. (Complicite 46)

14Although Father’s egg initially represents a tension between the animate and the inanimate (both thing and being), Adela breaks the ambiguity by turning it into an object. Moreover, the evocation of a human lamp announces the reification of the human, but also the shift from personal memory into collective history, since this image has a strong resonance in the context of the Holocaust. After this symbolic killing, Father is represented by a “grotesquely assembled lifesize marionette” in the sanatorium and then wheeled in on a trolley for a repetition of the dinner scene, “immobile, in a black coat, like a waxwork.” This rigidity gradually extends to the other characters, as former scenes are repeated and deformed: the shop scene is repeated three times, but cannot “work” because the goods have disappeared. Human action is mechanized by repetition, and the characters turn into grotesque puppets. In the final scenes they are blown about by a strong wind, no longer capable of action, until a trap opens in the floor and “[e]verybody and everything in the cloth gradually slides into the trap and disappears extremely slowly” (Complicite 68). Finally, Joseph’s reification is confirmed in the epilogue, in which he is first shot and then cradled by his characters, “passed all the way along the line of actors” (Complicite 70). The stage directions indicate that he “looks like a pieta”, and his final reification is thus both physical and aesthetic, as he has become both a corpse and a conventional image of sacrifice.

15This return to a metanarrative finally highlights the other crucial reification at work in the play: that of memory. Joseph’ name and interest in “woodwork” already suggested the possibility of a Biblical narrative, and in the second half of the play this suggestion becomes explicit: an increasingly delirious Father raves about “godliness”, Joseph’s shop is invaded by shoppers singing “Worthy is the Lamb” from Handel’s Messiah, their singing clearly equating him with “the Lamb that was slain” (Complicite 66), and Joseph quotes from Exodus (32:19), “And when Moses saw this, his anger burned within him. . .” (Complicite 68). Whereas memory had been materialized and detached from any structuring narrative, it is finally incorporated—literally, by Joseph’s body—into a metanarrative. This ending draws from images present in Schulz’s writing, which contains many figures and situations drawn from the Old Testament, but the structure of Complicite’s play and the contrast with the former “life of matter” highlight the reification at work in this mode of representation. Indeed the whole second half of the play emphasizes the transformation of living memory into dead text, as Joseph desperately tries to recreate previous scenes but only manages to turn his memories into mechanisms and puppets repeating their former lines over and over again.

16The life of things in the first half of the play can therefore be seen as a strategy of resistance to the fixation and paralysis of memory into narrative form. The semiotic instability of objects already suggested a process of decoding at work: the furniture and shop goods belong to the system of objects of bourgeois society, but their coming to life opens a space of nonsense and resistance within this code. Similarly, the books of the prologue belong to a system of objects ruled by Nazi discourse (they are being classified as useful or useless), and their metamorphosis produces a space of resistance within this discourse. This process is reflected in the dramatic movement, where it becomes a resistance to narrative structure. In all the early scenes, narrative progress is constantly delayed by a form of interaction between characters and objects which does not constitute significant action. Everyday behaviour—such as teaching, shopping or eating—is defeated. The class is interrupted by the children playing with the living wood, and in the shop the assistants prevent any form of action by diverting it into comic routines, in which they throw shop goods back and forth, play with hats, speak simultaneously and misunderstand orders until total confusion reigns (Complicite 25). This comic inaction can be compared to lazzi of the commedia dell’art e, where masked characters interrupt a scene with paraverbal episodes made of comic routines or improvisations and burlesque or clown-like behaviour (Pavis 190). As Simon Shepherd has pointed out, lazzi delay the action in the Aristotelian sense and temporarily interrupt the codes of the story and of dramatic performance: “[t]he episode of inaction is filled by a flow of energy—the elaboration could proliferate, producing more production, carrying on carrying on—but it is to be broken by the cue-line which returns us to the ‘signifying chain’ of the story” (Shepherd 67). This device is central in the first half of The Street of Crocodiles, as the narrative is constantly delayed each time objects provide opportunities for diversion of action from its course, in episodes which are always non-verbal. But rather than returning to the previous signifying chain, these episodes end with a switch to a new one (the classroom becomes a shop, the shop a dining-room, etc.), and the narrative structure is thus completely disrupted. Although the second half of the play brings a return to the narrative of sacrifice, dramatic action has been delayed within a bracketed time of anti- narrative theatricality. The interaction with objects thus provides a form of resistance to overarching narratives, and to the reification of memory which they bring.

17In many ways The Street of Crocodiles can be considered exemplary of Complicite’s distinctive style of theatre. The most striking feature of the company’s scenic language is the hybrid nature of signs within the performance text, and the remarkable fluidity with which objects are emphasized as material presence and yet acquire symbolic or metaphorical functions, from the flying books of The Street of Crocodiles to the mathematical abstractions of A Disappearing Number, in which shoes were used to illustrate number theory on stage. Perhaps the best example of such hybridity in their recent work can be found in Mnemonic, in which the company investigated the recent discovery of a Neolithic man frozen in the Alps, and the implications of this discovery on our collective memory. Throughout Mnemonic, a chair functioned as a central prop: after collapsing comically under the director in the prologue, it was later reused in its broken state to represent the frozen body of the Iceman, and manipulated as a Bunraku-style puppet by the company in a collective enactment of the Iceman’s dying moments. Here too, boundaries between the animate and the inanimate were blurred, and the metaphorical function of the object did not cancel out its material reality, but rather enhanced it, for the audience was aware throughout the scene that a collective effort was necessary to manipulate the awkward puppet—and thus to construct a common history. In Complicite’s theatre this tension between symbolic and material presence characterizes both the objects and the actors, and bodies are often emphasized both as readable signs and as centres of embodied experience.

18In both Mnemonic and The Street of Crocodiles, memory thus operates on two contrasting levels: living, physical connections to the past one the one hand, and shared narrative on the other. This tension between physical and narrative modes of representation is characteristic of Complicite’s most recent work, and the more recent Elephant Vanishes (2003) is another case in point, in which the strange behaviour of bodies is a central theme, and disappearing elephants and ravenously hungry humans resist rational explanation by the characters. These tensions are never quite resolved in Complicite’s work, for although these plays resist conventional dramatic structures, they are also characterised by a central drive towards stories and story-telling which complexify their postdramatic aspects. In Complicite’s theatre memory takes many forms, both material and textual, and it is above all the communal nature of this story-telling that defines their work, in which languages both physical and verbal are always the result of a collaborative effort.