Mark Ravenhill's Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat: A Treasure Hunt in London

Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is a series of short by the acclaimed British playwright Mark Ravenhill (b. 1966), author of texts such as Shopping and Fucking (1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and The Cut (2006). Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat opened at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 with the working title Ravenhill for Breakfast and was performed over sixteen mornings at the Traverse Theatre, where breakfast rolls were served to the audience. Winner of the Fringe First Award, the project was produced by Paines Plough, the new writing theatre company, that commissioned Ravenhill to write one short play for every day of the Edinburgh Festival. The entire cycle investigates the effects of war, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other regions of the Middle-East, on our domestic everyday life. Ravenhill also examines the West's urge to export its trademark goods of freedom and democracy; while at home, live in gated communities and withdraw into more and more fearfully isolated groups (Ravenhill, My Near Death Period). Each play takes its title from a classic such asParadise Lost and The Odyssey. The collection consists of sixteen short of twenty minutes each. A seventeenth play, Paradise Regained, was commissioned by the Golden Mask Festival in Moscow and presented at the Royal Court in September 2008. Altogether the would make a six-hour marathon if performed one after the other. In April 2008, the sixteen original were produce by different companies, including Paines Plough and Out of Joint, and presented across London at various venues such as the National Theatre, The Gate Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, Village Underground in Shoreditch, and on BBC Radio 3. Ravenhill and Dominic Cooke (the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre) felt that, had the cycle been presented as a single continuous piece, the audience would have been confronted with too great a burden. This is a pity, considering that Canadian director Robert Lepage managed to gather a considerable number of Londoners for a nine-hour run of his latest production Lipsynch at the Barbican Theatre in September 2008. However, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat does contain a high degree of violence, which is perhaps why it might be best assimilated in small pieces. In the author's own description, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is an epic cycle of short plays (Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat 5), the title of which refers to videogame terminology, suggesting an interactive quest for a by the audience. Ravenhill was told by an expert that every videogame quest can be reduced to the phrase shoot, get the and repeat. Inspired by this description and feeling that it well described the relationship he wanted the audience to have with the fragmented performance in London, he changed the initial title to encourage participation by the audience. Combining theatre with videogame, the spectators now became players in search of treasures. But what exactly were they looking for? Far from being a heterogeneous collage, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat should be conceived as a fragmented whole in which it is possible for members of the audience to piece together a bigger (Ravenhill, My Near Death Period) and to be an active meaning hunter by drawing connections between the plays. Perhaps this is the treasure that Ravenhill wanted the audience to get. The contradictory structure of Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat-monumental and concise at the same time-is conceptualized by the author as an depiction of our times, a sort of formal realism: I didn't want this to have a grand narrative with linking plot and characters. I wanted this global theme to be glimpsed through 16 fragments, individual moments that could be watched singly but that would resonate and grow the more fragments each audience member saw. I felt this would be an honest reflection of the world we live in. It's a world in which we are more aware than ever of our global connections, and in which we still hunger for the grand narratives of the Lord of the Rings or Shakespeare's History plays. …

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