Once upon a time…For the last few years I’ve been envious of the beginnings of theatre companies like Forced Entertainment. It seems so romantic from the outside: finish university in the mid 80s, head a few hundred miles north with your mates where it’s grittier and where your middle class parents aren’t around to nag you about getting a proper job. Then you ‘just get on with being poor’ like everyone else, whilst as incognito interlopers, you pick up litter, road names and traffic cones in the street and piece together a new kind of performance from them. With all night parties, cheap booze and drugs (one supposes) to aid discussions on what theatre is or could be, it really doesn’t matter whether the rest of the world agrees with you. How very rock n’ roll. How refreshingly un-theatre. If the Arts Council somewhere down the line threatens to withdraw funding you can dismiss their criticisms of poor quality as judging you within a framework you never subscribed to: Brilliant.
Alternatively…
It’s the late noughties, you come to, er… Cheltenham… on your own… and you’re on the brink of turning 40. You quickly realise you’re living in a town where Su Pollard Does Grease is the staple theatrical diet and where experimental work is ignored, dismissed or – if you’re lucky – labelled as poor quality.
Lord.
What do you do?
a. Give up all thoughts of your creative practice
b. Search between the cracks to find potential kindred spirits (who were en route to a big city but took a wrong turn off the M5 and somehow forgot their way back)
c. Compromise the work you want to make to suit the audience that already exists (think twists on Shakespeare, Noel Coward and Panto)
d. Consider moving your focus to Bristol where a host of funky young things are creating their own brand of contemporary performance; (bearing in mind the man from the Arts Council says: ‘If you move to Bristol nothing will change here.’)
And if you stay nothing will change here either?
Do you make work for your audience or do you make work for yourself? Hopefully both. Theatre that doesn’t make some kind of connection clearly is pointless, but to create work as an act of philanthropy is to creatively castrate oneself. If you want to make people happy become a children’s entertainer or go and work on the sweet counter in your local post office and spend the day talking to lonely old ladies.
In addition it takes a degree of arrogance and oversimplification to think you know exactly what your audience wants and needs. Playing it safe could be seen as a form of underestimation, a form of deadly theatre, stagnation. But bums are hard to get on seats… some bums anyway.
After a show I did at the Everyman last year an old lady filled in a complaint form saying that there should be a warning if something was going to be ‘weird’.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Please prepare yourselves for the weirdness of this show. If you don't close your eyes at certain points you might get really weirded-out. The answer is perhaps to be subtly subversive: Get married, have a baby, maybe start going to WI meetings or even wearing tweed. Do little experiments, get to know the place. Don’t rest easy with your assumptions; try and find out what’s happening beneath, or at least on the surface.
Seriously though, take a walk through Whaddon...I like walking through Whaddon. With its red brick (ex) council houses, broken fences and parked shopping trolleys in driveways it could almost be Leeds (but not the street I nearly moved to in Armley where they still hang washing across the road and gangs set fire to dustbins on street corners). I push the pram through Whaddon on the way to the park and the cast-offs of people’s lives, the waste from scenes already played out lie about the streets and pavements:
A blackcurrant fruit shoot bottle left on a wall
One strand of foliage from a bunch of flowers, leaves still green, lying in the middle of the road
An empty packet of Richmond cigarettes
A corner of a big white piece of paper, wrinkle-less and blank, smoothed on to a manhole cover
A split plastic bottle
A can of Old Jamaica Ginger Beer up-ended on a railing
An empty packet of Lambert and Butler
A green plastic bottle top
A polystyrene fast-food container, open, face-down
An empty packet of Malboro
A cardboard box with Scottish Swedes printed in big blue lettering
Another flattened cardboard box with a label reading Complete Solution
White napkins and chop sticks (damp) wrapped in a clear plastic tube, lying in the gutter
A piece of white A4 plain paper, folded with to daddy luf james written in pencil on it
Shattered glass
A blue scratch card, scratched
My next piece of theatre (if I make one) will look at appearing and disappearing. Litter is only the beginning. I’ll be collecting epitaphs, imprints, plaques and shadows, things people display in their windows or leave in their gardens; the way people grow to invade your every waking moment or slowly fade from view…
There are only three things I remember about my paternal grandfather:
1. He once wrote down on a piece of cardboard:
11 was a racehorse 22 was 12 1111 race and 22112.
He passed it to me and said ‘Can you make sense of that then?’
2. He taught me about filling out cheques and that to write ‘thirty pounds ONLY’ didn’t mean you were being tight or insinuating the recipient wanted more than thirty pounds and would add in extra pence as soon as your back was turned (but the banks might).
3. He used to stand with his backside to the fire and jingle the change in his pockets, particularly if he was feeling impatient and wanted to go home.
Apart from these things he’s pretty much disappeared, which might not be surprising as he’s been dead for twenty-seven years. Looking at it this way, there must be thousands of missing or deceased people who are more present to their loved ones than some of us are to people who see us every day.
It’s a thought.
