Writer's retreat.

I am at my Dad's in Leicestershire, on my version of a writer's retreat.  Wilbur has come too.  We're finishing the first draft of DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN - on a deadline, set by the show's fantastic dramaturg Ellie Horne, of tomorrow.  (I think we're going to make it, Ellie).

I wake up early in the morning to write - if I'm awake by 5am, then I'll be started by around 5.45am (some breakfast and a bit of faffing).  They live next door to a dog kennel & cattery, and there's a huge roar of barking at around 8/8.30am when they give breakfast to the doggos.  Unfortunately the fence is too high for me to see this great pupper feeding, but this is the time I know to stop for a while.  

If I'm in London, this is the time I'd go to the gym.  But, here, I'll take Wilbur for a walk.  Listen to a podcast (unfortunately it'll be too early for that day's daily podcasts, so maybe something from yesterday's Today show or yesterday's Baseball Tonight).  Hang out with my Dad and his wife.

There'll be another writing session in the afternoon - not nearly as long.  Most of the day's work would be done in that early morning session.

It's different to London - and, weirdly, a little more difficult to concentrate.  Maybe I miss that morning exercise session.  But, also, the countryside has never been my home.  I grew up by the sea in Folkestone.  And I've lived in a city for 8 years now.  So this little village doesn't give me old home comforts or anything like that.  

If I do another retreat, maybe I need to do it by the sea.

MUSIC: The 15.08.18 episode of YESTERDAY'S NEWS on NTS

Buckhaven.

I’m currently on a train from London to Edinburgh Waverley, where I will change trains and get another train to Markinch.  From there I’ll get a taxi to nearby Buckhaven, where there’s a small old rep theatre.  There’s a very old foyer with 70s living room decor (the only things it reminds me of is the foyer of the Jungendtheaterwerkstatt in Spandau & a novelty hot chocolate cafe in Munich), and dot matrix printed posters of an old production of Private Lives with tickets priced at £2.  There’s also a chapel adjacent to the foyer, which I think only gets used at Easter and Christmas.  The auditorium itself is fantastic - about 100 seats, shaped like a big cube, and an enormous stage for a theatre of that size.  Collision Youth Theatre (a youth theatre working with young people from all over Central Scotland) are based there - they’ve made a fantastic production of Brad Birch’s new play for teenagers ‘The Blue Electric Wind’ that I’m helping to transfer to the Dorfman Theatre at the end of June.  The production is visually and conceptually bold, influenced by Stranger Things and The Goonies, and beginning with a movement sequence set to the Top Gun theme tune.

I also visited last Monday - at the end of the rehearsal, I was the last person out of the auditorium (because I had two bags).  And it feels full of ghosts: dodgy shows past and happy audiences in those seats.  But when the stage is full - when the young people are warming up, led by their 19 year old assistant choreographer, currently studying dance at university, it feels alive.  Full of nerves, awkward glances, and giggling.  This is the only theatre company left in the area, but they’ve got imagination and bravery.

The Blue Electric Wind by Brad Birch, Fri 29th June 8.30pm Dorfman Theatre

CURRENTLY LISTENING: ‘Left Hand’ - Vital Idles (Upset the Rhythm)

216 likes.

I'm going through a period recently where I feel a bit like I'll never fit in with the theatre culture in which I exist.  Where you feel like your value system and priorities are completely out of whack with everyone else's.  Because if you all hate that show - and I think it's brilliant - or vice versa, then isn't it fair to think that we're off on a difficult foot?  

I feel it's important to mark those moments.  To remember when you feel differently.  And to lay the beacon for anyone who might feel similarly.

There is a tweet today that made me feel this acutely:

216 likes!  less than 12 hours!

Liked and retweeted and replied to by many friends and people I respect.

I mean, there is pretentiousness here - and, without knowing who it is - I can imagine the voice and it being pretty irritating.

But - gulp - I dunno if there's anything wrong with the content of what's spoken here.

Lemme explain.

Luke (who I've briefly met once or twice, who has always been very nice, and who I believe to be a very fine playwright) says that he didn't understand a show and - probably from generosity and curiosity - asked the director what the idea and vision was behind it.  To me, this implies that a show needs to be able to be explained in order to be any good.  The ask for the idea feels suspiciously close to 'message theory', in which an audience's job is to decode whatever signs are put in front of them in order to read the show's message.  Spectating becomes exclusively an intellectual, rather than visceral, exercise.  The clearest way this has been described to me is that the experience of watching The Wizard of Oz (the film) is so much more than 'There's no place like home'.  It's for this reason why I'm suspicious of that mainstay of contemporary British directing education - describe the production in one sentence, and organise all scenic elements around that single sentence.  

But, there's more, why wouldn't an audience want to 'read their own truth'?  Again I dunno if I'd put it like that, but why would you want to explain everything to an audience?  They're always going to be active audience members regardless of what you put in front of them, so why wouldn't you want them to make leaps in logic, to imagine speculative connections, to allow it to resonate in their lives in their own way, and then to have a lively debate about their experience afterwards?  Sebastian Nübling - one of my biggest influences - often says that things are too "Hollywood" when they are spelt out too clearly.  Have a bit of a faith in the audience.

The tweet's imagined utopian theatre experience is a room of people, having an encounter with a performance with an idea (a vision, not visions!), and for some people to get that idea and for some people to not get that idea.  That all feels literary, intellectual, like a university seminar, and it isn't for me.

I dunno what the show was.  A show that creates the experience of 'I don't understand this' in its audience is often doing something wrong (often, conversely, by creating a tension in the audience that there is a message that they are not getting - rather than allowing them to relax into the experience).  

And I have nothing invested in making Luke or anyone else change their mind.  I don't think that I'm right - I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that there are people who think differently about theatre to me.

But the universalisation of that one experience into a set of aesthetic guidelines - liked by 216 people and joked with loads of gifs - makes me feel like I'm having a completely different conversation to a massive section of my peers & the theatre audience.  

And that's pretty effin' lonely.

DAS ERBE
dir. Ersan Mondtag, stage. Rainer Casper, costume. Teresa Vergho, light. Rainer Casper

The punk space.

Since completing THREE KINGDOMS back in March, I have been pursuing a series of conversations with different people about my own work.  I've been making my own work for 5ish years now & it's useful to take a step back & think about what it is I have been doing.  But also, what I have not been doing.  What I'm not thinking about.

One such conversation has been with the always-brilliant Philippa Neels - a champion creative producer & all-round beautiful mind.  I find chats with Pip fascinating & challenging in equal measure, because she thinks about theatre & art & music in a different way to me.  Whereas I tend to think about my work in terms of texts, actors, design etc, she thinks about it as a total experience - what do I offer audience members and participants?  

My natural (unconscious) tendency is to think "I offer them a good story & they will/will not enjoy it & might get a bit excited" - which, firstly, is not good enough for those funding applications but, secondly, is such a limiting and limited way of thinking about it.  Whereas Pip says amazing things like "you create spaces where THIS happens and THIS happens!"

One way that I've found helpful to think through Pip's provocations - and as a way to begin a short series of blogs about punk rock - is in the definition of the punk spaces that I attended and occupied.  

(A side note: some people would object to these spaces being defined as punk, but that's not especially important for this discussion.  I'm not interested in terminology here.  We defined it as DIY punk, and that's what's important here.)

Cardinals Cap, Canterbury - before it was renovated.

I remember a gig at Canterbury's Cardinals Cap (a classic Kent punk space - tiny pub, bands every Friday & Saturday, zero interest in the age of gig goers, closed and turned into a wine bar sometime at the beginning of the new millennium) headlined by Glaswegian band Ex-Cathedra. It was absolute carnage in there - boozy kids & adults banging into each other, running on and off the stage, knocking equipment over and pushing the sax player away from the microphone for the sixtieth time.  I loved it.  I also remember a conversation about the gig in the following week with a friend who was more into proper rock & metal (I remember he liked A Perfect Circle), describing it to him with huge excitement, and him just saying "um, doesn't that mean the music kind of sucks?".  And I remember thinking, yeah, I guess, but that's the point - it's less about the perfect performance of music, more about the energy created in the room.

Ex-Cathedra!

So the actual performance of music, in this example, was a key component, but it was about the whole experience created in the space.  Ex-Cathedra, on that night in Canterbury, for that performance for those 40-50 odd people, created a genuinely anarchic space - no rules whatsoever, almost no hierarchical distinction between the musicians and the audience - it was about that interplay between musicians and audience.  They created a space - theoretically safe, sometimes not in practice - where it was possible to dance & let off steam, to shout slogans and choruses, to drink and have fun.  I can remember similar spaces at the Stripes Club in Folkestone (which I helped create and will write about shortly), the Union Bar in Maidstone, the Forum in Tunbridge Wells, the Scout Hut in Canterbury and - one time at least - the Planet Lazer in Canterbury.

Gigs and theatre are different (and let's not talk about 'gig-theatre' mmkay?), but those qualities remain with me in the work I create & want to create today.  Where the overall energy of the work is more important than the specific precision of it.  Where the feeling created in the room has a bodily, rather than an intellectual, effect on the audience.  A space where a band of outcasts and misfits turn up and make something happen.   

Punker Bunker.

Two weeks ago, I walked past the Punker Bunker in Brighton - a record shop I used to visit whenever I was in the city.  I last went there a couple of years ago, when I was in town for a stag party, for the first time in 8 or 9 years - Buz at the counter was, very nonchalantly, just like "How's Folkestone? How's your brother?".

I found this short video online this week.

I want to write a few blogs over the next week or two about punk rock, and about this subculture.  The association most people have is with spitting, massive mohicans, and a period of about 9 months in the 1970s.  My experience of it was - and is - really different, and it affects how I live and work up to today.  

I'll pick that apart a little bit in a few posts.  I don't want to it to be too nostalgic - mainly because the scenes still exist today (although a bit smaller, and I'm not involved any more).