PJ Harvey gave England a great shaking at the Royal Albert Hall over Halloween.

It was an extraordinary event, Harvey decked out in black with a great crow-feather headdress and looking, my friend said, like a Crimean war widow. We were sat down in the well of the great hall and the air was thick with smoke and as she sang it felt like being in the centre of a maelstrom of grief, love and fury.

Her songs about England, its wars and its imperial legacy resounded around that monstrous monument to Imperial Britain; it was a widow’s elegy for her country and made more distinctly outrageous by the setting. It was a poised spare sort of performance art with an economy of gesture in the perfect location – a lesson in the site specific. 

I’m more and more hardened against the fashion for site specific theatre and the show I saw at the weekend didn’t help. We were herded around an old house to take in the tired old ghoulish tropes of Halloween, the inevitable Victoriana, set to Tom Waits music, and we then dutifully and mutely gathered in the garden to watch some poor actors showing off around a totem pole. Someone behind me said it reminded him of a Norfolk fete. None of us was able to surrender our Englishness or middle class diffidence. And then dinner was served. 

All the site specific shows I’ve seen have left me cold. The storytelling seems fragmented and half-arsed and I can never understand the impulse behind the shows, beyond the childish excitement of dressing up and turning abandoned spaces into spooky fairground rides. Victoriana is the constant and it suggests they are just nostalgic circus acts with broad acting and no philosophical or political drive.

I can’t help thinking they are also a bastardisation of the ’90s free party culture, a safe co-option of the rave culture that took over abandoned spaces and filled them with sounds and lights never known before. The locations – squatted and abandoned buildings – were central to the politics and philosophy of the parties. The aesthetics were shocking in their newness and people came away from the parties having risen beyond spectatorship – to be there was a subversive act and despite their decadence they left me with inerasable memories and profound questions in my mind about my place in society and the kind of art I believed in. Bonds were dangerously loosened and some people lost their minds.

They were actually risky adventures. Free parties were a combination of communitarianism, English radicalism and Artaudian theatre of cruelty and they possessed a genuine air of fright that make site specific theatre look like fancy dress – weak and childish am-dram concoctions given backing by the gross hand of sponsorship. Free parties were outlawed by the Criminal Justice act of 1994. Site-specific theatre has been blessed by Louis Vuitton and hired for its parties.

I can’t see where it’s going.

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Image: Adam Kesher by djenvert, available under a CC BY-NC-ND license.