_1215_fine_art_catalogue

Resurrecting Spectres
from World War II in an
Intensely Private Drama
by Chris Welton
Reality flickered strangely as the scruffy rag tag
assortment of naval ratings disembarked from the
World War II military truck and trudged through the
cold February drizzle up the muddy track. Watching
them stand to attention, shivering in their period
uniforms and duffle coats, mumbling complaints
whilst the flag was raised at HMS Standard, a
recreated 1942 British naval camp, it all felt uncannily
real. And over the next 24 hours this strange sense
of time-shift became increasingly acute for me.
I don’t know whether it was the remoteness of the
location (mobile phones stop working long before
you set off on the half hour, five mile, drive along
unpaved tracks into the heart of Kielder, Europe’s
largest man-made forest), or artist Matt Stokes’
attention to detail, but I’ve participated in reenactments
before and nothing has ever come even
close to the displacement felt of my sense of
personal identity.
Matt Stokes’ interests revolve around history,
subcultures and their connected socio-political
effects. A focus of his research lies in challenging
stereotypes, often via large-scale collaborations with
people, groups or communities to stage closed
performances or fluid events, that result in films,
archives or actual visceral moments. He recently
produced In Absence of the Smoky God (2014), a
collaborative vocal composition inspired by Barry
Hines’ 1984 BBC apocalyptic docu-drama Threads.
The composition and connected video, based on
dystopian worlds and ideas of the revision of
language, evolved through workshops that
incorporated the LARP (live action role play)
ensemble techniques that the Stone Frigate project
was exploring.
Recalling the Stone Frigate experience I still feel
strange emotions rising up inside me. The whole
concept of a remote military psychiatric
Could more than memories have been resurrected in Matt Stokes’
reenactment?
rehabilitation camp, established as the Royal Navy’s
answer to mental illness and insubordination in its
ranks during World War II, felt uncomfortable even
before we arrived at the event. To participate in the
role of the Commanding Officer of the base,
charged with the responsibility of identifying the
genuinely sick and weeding out the duplicitous, put
me at the heart of an institution that in today’s terms
felt akin to the electro convulsive therapy and
lobotomies of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over a
Cuckoos Nest.
Matt had positioned Stone Frigate as a realistic
psychological live action role play, recalling an
almost forgotten detail of war history, drawing on
historical records and evidence from relatives of
those who were there to make it as realistic as
possible. The LARP was designed for 30-40 players,
focusing on themes of social stigma, control and fear
in the relationships between inmates and camp
staff, who ultimately held the inmates’ future in their
hands. LARP events use a well-established range of
specially developed interaction techniques and the
participants for this event were drawn from far and
[picture by Sally Atkinson Lockey]
wide, both experienced ‘larpers’ from Scandinavia
and the UK, and LARP first-timers like myself as
Camp Commander, together with fellow
Northumbria fine art student George Unthank, who
took on the role of the camp’s Chaplain.
If reality had blurred at the inmates’ arrival at the
camp it was lost on many occasions for me after –
whether it was when discussing inmate case notes
with the camp’s medical officer; giving instructions
for dealing with insubordination to my junior
officers; eating the period mess food; or lying in my
crude steel frame wartime bed in a chilly communal
dormitory in Kielder Castle, genuinely wanting an
uncomfortable experience to end.
As a real-time performance, where you only ever
witness your personal ‘scenes’, you can’t help
wondering what the other participants were
experiencing at the same time. But, like life itself, the
LARP format is in essence a deeply private drama in
which you play one of the lead roles in your creation
of the event.
I had wondered at the inclusion of a lengthy debrief
session, designed by Kevin Burns, a counsellor
trained in Integrative Psychosynthesis, scheduled on
the Sunday afternoon, to ‘bring players’ out of their
playing characters and back to present day reality.
But, recalling the complete mental meltdown of a
young Irish sailor called Peter O’Connel, tormented
by his own identity crisis late on the Saturday
evening, which months later still feels like a
disturbingly authentic memory, has allowed me to
understand the real potential for the players to
begin to lose their own sense of identity over such a
prolonged role-play. At points the experience
definitely crossed some invisible mental boundary,
to take the players into a new and compulsive
phantom reality that it felt difficult to break free
from.
As the event closed, with the whole company
standing in the barrack hut with snow beginning to
fall outside and the Chaplain singing a plaintiff
unaccompanied rendition of Matt McGinn’s Depth
of my Ego, it felt like in that wild forgotten place we
had managed to conjure up spectres of something
very sad that had taken place there over 60 years
before; and the only word that could adequately
describe the emotion that I felt was ‘haunted’.
The Stone Frigate LARP took place 27th February – 1st
March 2015
It was created by North East-based artist Matt Stokes
supported by Calvert Trust, Kielder; The Forestry
Commission; Kielder Water & Forest Park Development
Trust; with financial support from Arts Council England.
For further details go to:
www.stonefrigate.wix.com/1942
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