PRESENTER: Ah. Welcome back to the studio. Tonight on Alternative Sport we feature soccer - the Chelsea/Liverpool game live from Liverpool. Your commentators are Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud.
Cut to a football pitch - players running onto the field.
BRECHT (V/O): Good evening from a soggy Liverpool. You join us as the players are running onto the field.
Cut to commentator's box - Brecht and Artaud.
BRECHT: The Liverpool team are unchanged following their successful outing against Tottenham last weekend. A surprise change to the Chelsea line-up is the substitution as captain by underground beat-culture author William S. Burroughs. Antonin.
ARTAUD: Yes, a surprise move to say the least. But I feel that Burroughs could give the Chelsea team the ideological advantage they were lacking last week. As we all know, the way to the subconscious lies in visceral experience, something which the side has been lacking since the untimely illness of striker Jean Genet. What this means...
BRECHT: I'm sorry to interrupt there, Antonin, but I'm afraid that I must disagree with your central point. I feel that Burroughs has been included in the side because of his ability to create stark stream-of-consciousness prose unlike anything since James Joyce. Visceral experience is all very well, but what of a united bourgeoisie?
ARTAUD: A united working class is a valid proposition, and certainly on all the minds of the players here tonight, but I feel that Burroughs is unparalleled in his ability to alienate the crowd and thus induce the trancelike receptive state detailed [holds up a book] in my ground-breaking theatrical work The Theatre and its Double.
BRECHT: Oh bollocks. The Balinese Theatre? A load of crap. And I must say that your theories of passive reception and cathartic theatre experience leaves much to be desired.
ARTAUD: Excuse me, but my work has formed the basis of modern theatre. Look at Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Beck and Malina - the list is endless.
BRECHT: Perhaps. But what about their ability to sway an entire football crowd ? In my opinion, the greatest exponent of mass theatre was the Russian constructivist, Meyerhold. Oh, he could hold hooligans in the palm of his hand, his stark mechanical sets towering high into the grey English sky, his stylised, anti-Stanislawksian acting techniques would enthral even the most hardened of realists...
ARTAUD: I'm sorry to interrupt you there, but I see that play is about the begin. We can only wait and see whether Burroughs has been given instructions to use his almost hypnotic visceral appeal or, as Bertolt would have you believe, his stream-of-consciousness style to confound the Liverpool defenders.
Cut to the football pitch. The Chelsea players are in a huddle, William Burroughs is giving them last-minute advice.
BURROUGHS: Now, remember - exterminate all rational play.
They break for the kick-off. They line up correctly, but as soon as the whistle goes for the start, they run in all directions and perform ludicrous, absurd actions - tearing off clothes, beating members of the crowd, reading books upside-down, flagellating the goalie. Burroughs, meanwhile, has seated himself in the middle of the pitch to shoot up with bug powder. The Liverpool players, seemingly undaunted, pass the ball back and forth and finally score a goal. They cheer ecstatically. Cut to the commentary box.
ARTAUD: Well, it seems that we were both wrong. Burroughs has failed to galvanise the team into significant action.
BRECHT: Not only that, Antonin, but it seems that the Liverpool players were totally prepared for this strategy of irrational behaviour. The final score, then, Liverpool 73, Chelsea 0. Thank you for joining us on Alternative Sport.
Cue Credits