Children’s games are whole worlds, made with a few words. These worlds are controlled and maintained by the children who describe them, but also by those who consent to those descriptions.

In Clare Simon’s observational documentary Récréations (1998) the camera follows a group of young children as they roam around their school playground. The three acts of the film each follow a single game, played by a cast of children over break time. The children variously take up archetypal roles as leaders, followers, narrators, the chorus, heroes, villains or jesters.

Simon shows the mercilessness of the children as they battle to control the narrative of the games. The self-appointed narrators fight for creative control, and the other players decide which stories they want to believe in. As Simon says, ‘The children, they’re like script writers, they want a story that works.’ (Rendall, 2017)

Each act is a tiny morality play in which we see the best and worst of human behaviour, with acts of kindness and cruelty often taking place in the same moment. The Spinoza quote that Simon uses for her introduction suggests that we read the film as being about what happens when human beings are enslaved by their emotions, but in this text I’ll use the first act to think about the power of performative language, how it can be used to dominate and control the behaviour of others in order to create temporary hierarchies.

The Rise and Fall of Fat Thomas

The kids pile out of the school and our protagonist, who we later find out is called Thomas, hustles a tiny boy over to the corner of the playground. Thomas is big, bulky, and has a commanding voice. The other boy is compliant and apparently willing to be shoved around as part of the game they are playing. Thomas tells the boy that he is in the barber’s and that Thomas is cutting his hair. They go behind some steel gates and Thomas plays roughly at cutting the boy’s hair. Two other boys arrive. Thomas gets all three to line up and asks them who wants a haircut. They all put their hands up and Thomas tells them who gets their haircut first.

But then one of the boys sticks his hands through the bars of the steel gates and says a new game: look he says, this is a prison; he’s in prison. Other children run into view and start shouting that they - Thomas and his customers - are in prison. Thomas senses that he’s losing control of the game. The world in which they are in prison is more exciting than the world in which he is the barber. The prison scenario ironically offers a chance for the other boys to have more active roles in the narrative and they are immediately animated in a way that they were not in the barber game. They shout for others to help them escape, they jostle around and put their hands through the bars.

At first Thomas tries to refuse the new game - no, they aren’t in prison, they are in the barbershop! But then he realises he needs to change his story to retain control. The other boys are in prison, so he becomes the prison guard. He informs the boys that their hands are cuffed and tied to a drainpipe running down the wall. He tells them that they are in prison, that he is a barber and a daddy. These roles: prison guard, barber, daddy, are maybe all the same role for Thomas. They are roles in which Thomas is dominant and the others submit to his will.

Then other boys arrive and tell Thomas that no, he is the one in prison. Thomas refuses to play along and respond as a prisoner. He makes gun sounds with his mouth, then proclaims that he has escaped. But this is a consensual world building exercise, and Thomas’s hasty claim has collapsed the world. The other boys, even his previous customers in the barbershop, realise that he is a bad playmate, and they all run away from Thomas, leaving him behind the steel gates.

 Thomas’s position is weak. He realises his mistake, he needs to play along so he enthusiastically adopts the role of the prisoner. He starts shouting to the other boys, asking them to help him because he is stuck in prison, hoping that they will now come to his aid. Just when it feels like it might be too little too late, a boy enters the shot and reluctantly releases Thomas from his confinement.

 A group discussion breaks out and interrupts the game. A girl has been hurt, either because Thomas hurt her when putting her in prison, or because she fell over when another girl pushed her, or because another child, Alex, hit her. The wound is proof of one of these stories, but only whichever one inspires the most compelling game. Thomas and some other boys decide to attack Alex in retaliation for hurting the girl. They run towards a wooden climbing frame. On the way, Thomas lurches off from the group to push away two little girls who want to run with them.

But things have changed by the time the camera reaches the climbing frame. Now three boys agree to attack Thomas, but they call him Fat Thomas. Fat Thomas is his new name, and attacking him is the new game. But this isn’t play fighting. The boys go for him, kicking him hard as he falls back on the climbing frame. He screams and scrambles backwards up the wooden panels. Some girls watching ask the boys why they are hurting him and they say it’s because Fat Thomas put them in prison. Fat Thomas screams and cries in terror and horror. The boys keep kicking until the bell rings and Fat Thomas, brought low, is led away to the classroom by the two little girls he earlier pushed away.

Serious Non-Seriousness

When the children speak their games into existence, they are engaged in the most fundamental kind of performativity in which by describing something, they create it. JL Austin called this illocution, in which the words spoken describe their effects.

When Thomas tells the boys they are in a barbershop, they are in a barbershop. But only if they submit to being in a barbershop. It’s a compelling enough vision, and they have no counter narrative, so they submit. But when the other children arrive and tell them that they are in prison, this overrides the barber story and Thomas hasn’t the imaginative capacity to sustain his world as one the others want to play within.

In Austin’s terms these performative claims are not serious. Just as when a performer on stage, or the narrator of a novel describes a fictional world, the children know that they aren’t ‘really’ in a barbershop or in prison. For Austin this makes these kinds of statements irrelevant to his theory of performativity of words as actions and therefore philosophically unimportant. Having a friend conduct a pretend wedding does not make you married, Austin says, and we can dismiss all non-serious performativity of this kind.

But although Récréations shows the children playing in a communally agreed framework of un-reality, there are two ways in which the film complicates this simple binary.

Firstly the words spoken by the children still have serious unreal effects according to certain rules. If you are in prison, then you have to act like a prisoner, staying cuffed to the drainpipe until you are released (or, until a new gameworld overwhelms the ties of the old). Things that happen, really happen in the game. To use Austin’s example of marriage, to get married in the game wouldn’t make you married in real life, but it would make you married in the game. (Though there is no chance that any of the boys in ​​Récréations would ever pretend to marry. When a girl comes to see if they want to play mummies, she is chased away.)

Secondly, there are also serious real effects of the game. When the boys attack Fat Thomas, they really attack him, kicking him with their feet, causing pain. The reason they give for their attack? Thomas put them in prison.

There is a kind of meta-game going on, played by the storytellers as they compete to create and sustain the most compelling world. The players’ roles are more stable, they just have to choose whose game they prefer. The storytellers are the rulers of the worlds they create, but this makes them vulnerable. They can be toppled, not just by others who want to rule, but by the players whose sustained attention they need to hold in order to populate and enchant their world. The rise and fall of Fat Thomas shows us how quickly those worlds can collapse.

It’s easy to think that the power relation between the storytellers and the players in the games is bluntly hierarchical. But though there is a hierarchy, it is also a kind of collaboration. There is domination and submission, there are leaders and followers, but both parties are active. Fealty can be withdrawn from one storyteller, and offered to another. The rulers need their subjects; the storytellers need their players. 

The Performance of Status

The children’s playground games are all improvised in the moment by the players. Though Fat Thomas’s attackers claim that they’re kicking him because he put them in prison, the audience gets the feeling that it was his ungenerous style of play that really made them angry. Fat Thomas’s mistake was his failure to improvise in a way that pleased the other children. 

In Impro, Keith Johnstone’s classic book on improvisational theatre, Johnstone lays out a method of improvisation based on what he calls ‘status transactions’. (Johnstone, 1979, p. 27) These transactions are not defined exclusively by social status - the rigid structures of class, race, gender and other marks of identity that peg us to a place in the hierarchy of our society - but more by the status we ‘play’ within a conversation or a situation. (Johnstone, 1979, p. 30)

Johnstone’s work has the practical aim of training students to successfully improvise on stage, and for him the point is that there is often more drama (or comedy) to be mined in the subtle bartering of status within an interaction than in direct conflict or the development of  narrative events. But alongside the practical advice on how to use status to perform, he serves up a theory of status as performance. It is something like a rudimentary version of Judith Butler’s later theory of gender performativity. For Johnstone there is a difference between the social status you have and the status you play, and in this gap there is the possibility of disruptive (and therefore compelling to an audience) shifts in who dominates or submits in a situation. (Johnstone, 1979, pp. 30–31) Johnstone gives us examples of the popularity of comedies in which servants subtly dominate their masters, or the boss becomes a tramp and vice versa. (Johnstone, 1979, p. 30) He tells us that comedians are paid to lower or raise their status or the status of others. (Johnstone, 1979, p. 33) And, he says that for people, ‘there is no fighting unless an attempt is being made to change the “pecking order”’. (Johnstone, 1979, p. 35)

Fat Thomas wants to play high status roles (the barber, the daddy) but ultimately cannot convince enough of the other children to lower themselves, to submit to the roles he gives them. Partly, this is a failure of direction: Fat Thomas gives little guidance how the other children should play at being customers in his barbershop. But it is also because even the most submissive children can see that the role of someone having their haircut doesn’t offer much in the way of action.

The prison gameworld asks players to be prisoners - a dominated role if ever there was one - it offers the players a more active role, even in their incarceration. They can shout for help, they can be handcuffed, they can escape. Playing low status doesn’t have to be boring, or quiet. Thomas fails to submit to the change in the pecking order when the new prison game is established, and he fails to successfully improvise within his new role, as a prisoner. He tries to play high status, by acting as the guard, or immediately escaping from prison.

Part of the reason many of us like to see the high brought low is because it's irritating that high status people think that being low status is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Most of us play low status some of the time, not because we think of ourselves as low status, but because it helps get us through the day. Being a good actor -  a good player - is not about maintaining a consistently high status.

The morality play of Fat Thomas is about his misguided desire to always play high status, even when it makes the game less fun for everyone else. It’s an unpleasant admission to have about a film that documents children, but part of the satisfaction of the first act of Récréations is watching Fat Thomas scream and cry as he is kicked. Yes, we think, he has his comeuppance. But the irony is that it proves Thomas’s worst fears right - it cements the connection in Thomas’s head that to be anything other than dominating is to be dominated.

Shame and Status

In a short piece from 2019, Judith Butler suggests that Donald Trump’s shamelessness as president was fuelled by his intense terror at the possibility of ever feeling shame. For Trump, shame equals death, and therefore it is the one state that must be avoided at all costs. 

If he is not shamed by the accusations against him, they do not ‘work’... At the same time ... Trump’s repeated and compulsive defiance of shame and rejection shows just how imperilling those spectres are for him. (Butler, 2019)

Shame is a low status performance. We act out shame, (no doubt some of Johnstone’s tips on how to play low status would help us here: lowered eyes, hands to face, head wobbling) and in doing so we lower ourselves in the eyes of others - perhaps because we feel the shame deeply, ‘inside’, but also because by lowering ourselves we hope to show that we acknowledge our actions as shameful, and to be absolved of our shame. This is the performativity of shame - it is the action that performing shame performs. It is only through this low status performance of shame and its resolution in absolution that the (a)shamed can resume their position in the social hierarchy. Maintaining our status in a group sometimes requires lowering our status in a particular moment. If we refuse to momentarily lower our status in order to maintain our longer term status, then we risk losing everything.

The shrieks of Fat Thomas as he is mercilessly kicked by his former playmates are a warning about what happens when you fear playing low status to the point of destabilising your position in the social hierarchy. It’s not hard to feel pity for Fat Thomas, but it’s hard to feel sympathy.

Notes to consider

1. I have not touched on the gendered nature of the power relations in the Fat Thomas scene which is certainly legible in the film and isn’t irrelevant here, but it would make the piece more about social status and power than about performed status. 

2. I also think there’s some racialised stuff going on (the little black boy at the start, the two black girls that Thomas pushes away, and then later they hold his hands) but perhaps that is outside the scope of what can be successfully written because I don’t think it’s ever clearly articulated in the film, which is a failing but also perhaps an accurate portrayal .

3. Do I need to go a bit easier on Fat Thomas? I feel like the ‘moral of the story’ is not kind to Thomas, and I don’t want to get too hand-wringing about the fact that he’s a kid and therefore shouldn’t be blamed. Like, he is blamed and punished in the film for his failure to maintain control of the gameworld, so that’s what I’m writing about, but I also recognise he’s a child and I wouldn’t personally beat him up.

4. Should I refer to him as Fat Thomas throughout, or use Thomas for the most part?