Non, je ne regrette rien.

In it’s wake theatre leaves images and emotions held in one intense moment of memory. There is so much teeming out there, so much richness and wonder. For a brief moment I held a beauty up to the light. In the chattering night a butterfly lands on your hand, a sparkling electric blue; long, sharp tails; midnight body. This is theatre, and all art in that moment when it strikes you and makes you understand the world anew. This butterfly is very cold, very still, precise, unragged and almost unreal, strangely detached. This butterfly is the fourty to fifty minutes created by the hours of effort from six people – you know who you are if you’re reading this, Angeline, Aurore, West, Edmund and our very own Newtonian master of light – you were this fragile insect in the forest, as were all of you who saw this, who honoured me with your interest. Cherish the sheen of colour, the gleam and shimmer on it’s wings, turn them over in your mind and know that they are gone now and that they were magnificent. I am out to catch another.

‘…delight in changing reality.’

Complicite’s ‘A Disappearing Number’

End of 2007 in the London Barbican. This stands out as the beginning of my theatrical revolution. Conceptually bold, the production interwove the lives of a young couple trying, failing, succeeding to conceive, to understand their lives, with the life of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his connection to G. H. Hardy. The dedication and self-destruction inherent in the drive to create unites the two, interwove human struggle into one, to the point where the very concept of the Riemann zeta function, incarnated as the fear that more can only create less, became physically embodied as an invisible force destroying both Ramanujan and the mother, striking down through the actors, through the theatre like lightning brought to life by imagination. The chaos of mathematical concepts became the chaos of the flesh and blood world; the division between living and dead, between generations, between east and west, bound together as one in a way that only theatre can. Visually and technically vast to the level of epic there was something in Complicite’s production that created an unrelenting force, that exposed the power of a united theatre.

Tim Supple’s ‘Dream’

Early 2008 in a London theatre I cannot remember. A multi-lingual version of Shakespeare’s work featuring heavily the native Indian languages of the actors. Yet not one subtly was lost and new patterns of meaning evolved in the power relationships, hidden emotional power was exposed and fore grounded, the raw emotion evident without the artifice of language. And this raw, deeply human quality was central to the piece, embodied in a stage of wood and earth, of paper and rope with arterial scarlet swaths of cloth that in their simplicity held more regal scared reverence than the outmoded iconography of kingship and the ridiculed of politics could ever convey. The physical energy and passion, the violence of obsession, an inability to understand the demands of the animal-self framed as primal magic: all the core empowering elements of the play so maligned and ignored by classical western interpretations. Breathing, naked flesh, lit by oil aflame.

‘The Masque of Red Death’

Early 2008 in the Battersea Arts Centre. In this case the location is both the most important and most irrelevant information. Punchdrunk Theatre Company is the forefront of Promenade theatre at this point and Masque of Red Death was, in hindsight, their performance that lifted them to the global stage. There is really no way to describe briefly the madness of those few hours except to say that to take the mask you were offered at the door was to walk into another world, and that on returning to reality it left every person I spoke to with the bright-eyed joy of sheer liberation, the freedom and the beauty of chaos and uncertainty.

‘La Clique’

May 2009, London Hippodrome. Pure unadulterated Cabaret, joyful dedication to the absurd without pretense or agenda done to standards higher than anything I had ever hoped for. Theatre tripped down and at it’s most honest done to it’s very best. A stage, a circle, a hundred hapless humans and a dosen who know the secret of everyday magic.

There are other moments in my love affair with theatre that stand out – experimenting with Artaud to create Marat/Sade’s Herald; Jos Huben’s one man show ‘The Art of Laughter’; Thumper and I drunkenly tearing ourselves to pieces in Paris over bringing ‘The Spurt of Blood’ to life; working, however briefly, with Bruce Myers and glimpsing a world in which, “It doesn’t really matter. I’ve done so many things…” ; Cheek By Jowl’s terrifying, precise, near-perfect, ‘Andromaque’; the masterful clowning of Spymonkey; the dark freedom of ‘Mr. Kolpert’; and most recently Knott’s essay on the absurd and the grotesque in theatre.

Knott talks of how ‘Tragedy is the theatre of priests, the grotesque, the absurd, is theatre of clowns.’ The clown is defiance in a harder hasher world without trapdoors or a get-out clause. But not one without beauty. If we see everything as theatre then the theatre of politics, of commerce, of religion, of tradition, of the everyday – that is the theatre of what is and what has been. The theatre that stands outside of this and comments like a Shakespearian Fool on the rest, that at its best drags the audience physically into this new perspective – that is the theatre of what may be. I chose the brief four words from Brecht’s ‘Art of Theatre’ that are this entry’s title because they may be a description of what the theatre does, of what the theatre is, of what I feel in this physicalisation of ideas
or even a command.

Spitting smoke and flame

In the first post on here I discussed 3plays I had written or was in the process of writng – ‘Apocalpse Elegies’, an adaption of ‘Faust’ and a piece I felt was unformed and unlikely to succeed entitled ‘Soleil dans la cave’. I will be directing that play with hard fought funding from the university’s DramaSociety next year in the last week of January. Strange how things turn out. I have two new plays burning at the back of my mind, flaring when the concepts meet and strike together. I’m writing so much at the moment; I feel on fire.

The first is called ‘Bepo the Clown’s whistlestop tour of Modern Warfare’ which, apart from utilising my deep long-standing interest in the clown character and their potential to induce revelation, I want to really involve the audience – I have ideas about placing audience members at either end of a firing squad without letting the victim know, use of silence and placards etc. The second is currently called ‘Just Enough Rope’ and centres around an idea I’ve been interested in for a long time. In a medieval and earlier practise, during fights to the death opponents would be tied togeter at the waist. The rope was sacred – you might die with a blade in your hand but you did not cut the rope. That was such a striking visual image it’s stayed with me. Now I have ideas to base a script and a staging around it – in the round, 6 characters, 3 joined couples, a central point which they are all bound to, golden underwear, black jackets and masks. In my notes I’ve written ‘ungendered musings on lust, life and loyalty.’ My current feeling is that the later will take form much more easily – but as past experience tells you, my guess at this paticular point is as good as yours.

Theatre fills so much of my life. I cannot write a novel in the life-style I live now. Short stories are always echoes of whoever I currently admire – no doubt if I tried to create one now you could wouldn’t have to wait long for Raymond Carver to emerge. Poetry is a solitary practise, something that perhaps I’ll talk about on here one day. Over the last two year I’ve experienced theatre that reached that pinacle of unspeakable understanding that changes the world, just a little. I’m going to describe a few of the productions that have remained with me in the next entry here.

‘I am a sick man… I am an angry man. I am an unattrative man. I think there is something wrong with my liver…’

I have experienced the worst illness I’ve ever had over the last two weeks. I am lucky, it was nothing in comparison to something truly damaging, but it was relentless and seemingly unending and new. I’ve always been interested on the effect of those much more perfect organisms than us on our electrified carcasses. So I collected up a few scraps to see if I could explain the experience. Maybe you care, maybe you don’t. Maybe you think I’m trying to be some kind of martyr. I’m not, this is just what I do. I am reminded of something Thumper once said: ‘Sickness is a very human weakness Tom, I expected better.’ Indeed.
I wrote the first paragraph here, previously in another post just over a week ago. The second are scrawled ideas I didn’t want to lose but for the most part did. The third I wrote yesterday in my first message to a dear friend since it began.

‘…the burning man is the colour of the end of days…’
Now here is something to consider. I have been violently ill for nearly a week now. Nothing incapacitates the human body like sudden illness. There can be no preparation, no slow build up to hell. Instead we are plunged directly into the abyss without warning. We simply burn. Yet every time I step onto those boards, into that theatre of the mind, it all changes. Nothing alters physically, but it no longer matters. I am magnificent in my purgatory, all of us are. That is how it feels. To bring thought to life however you can. To be the laughing man alight.

End SdlC with Yawny at the Apocaypse. new growth – West with hands of earth, green shoot?
hohoho and away I go/ Without putting up even a fight/ Perhaps it’s true what they say/ my dear, and the cap, it fits too tight.
‘art lasts longer than people but neither can be without the other’
film Dostoy-Notes modern. in a shower in pounding water, press head against wall and fingers to ears: hear through neck. long shot approach down corridor,voiceover, always voiceover, never ever corrupt the words. after the girl? stays there, smoking, all story through flashback, writing uncared for, burning at the end?

So, what has happened since I last wrote to you? Well me and this room have got to know each other alot better. I got feverish to the foundations. It was absolutely vile until yesterday because I just could not clean it, I barely had the energy to get out of bed most of the time and by the time I realised what was happening to everything around me it was too late (and I’d evidently transformed into a J. G. Ballard character…) I still feel terrible, but a sane, lucid, coherent terrible that I can cope with, the kind I can drug and dose and sort out and make just fuck off. The kind of illness I’ve experienced before. The middle days of this week there were moments I came the closest I’ve ever come to hallucinations. Several of me, impossible quality of light, spacial distortion of corners in particular. My memory of what looking out the window was like makes me think of a favourite line from J. M. G. LeClezio – “At night, if one looked in the direction of the noise one saw a sort of halo of rosy light hovering over the sky, and one imagined abominable things.”
I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I always feel naturally intimate with you and I suppose this is a change to examine this strange facet of deformed memory, like a shard of malformed shrapnel. Or an utterly non-Newtonian prism. But I’m not going to erase it. I stand by what I said. “I am magnificent in my purgatory, all of us are.” And in any case, I like imagining abominable things. I understand why tribal cultures induced fever in their witch-doctors. When the shaman ingests he lets go, and of course they go deeper and madder than I did, but they let go willingly, and that makes all the difference.

‘hypermagical ultraomnipotence’

I do not pretend to be a mathematician. None the less, I do think it beautiful, something I have my father to thank for. I’ve been reading and listening to alot of explanation recently and, unusually, I’m going to talk about it.

‘Beauty is a very successful criteria for choosing the right theory’ – Murray Gell-Mann, December 2007.
Gell-Mann is a genuine asset to humanity, a wonderful individual whose laugh is so rich and genuine it makes me smile just to hear it. In his TED lecture he talks about the simplicity of universal mathematics, how the laws that work, the ones that appear again and again, are unchanging in any theoretical alteration of space, are simple and beautiful in that simplicity. That concept in itself is beautiful to me, especilly if you consider the implcations. This statement can only be true if most properties of the universe are emergent ones, ones that do not require anything but the fundermental laws. As Gell-Mann observes ‘life can emerge from Physics and Chemistry and alot of accidents’. One thing I should point out here is in a universe this size the probability of the right set of accidents happening somewhere is excepionaly high. This whole concept is about looking into the heart of the univerese. So we have a basic law – but why? One of the great questions in science at the moment is what will the the result of the Large Hadron Collider. The main concept put forward by the majority currently is Super String Theory (explained very elegantly by Brian Greene on TED). In contention with this is the E8 unified field ‘theory of everything’ by Garrett Lisi (also explained on TED). In fact Lisi’s talk is inspirational also because of the life style he has chosen – balancing his ‘three charge directions’ of love, mathmatics and surfing, living in beautiful places in the way he wants to live his life so that if his mathematics fails, a fact he humbley admits is very likely, his life has been worth something. Both of these theories are means of explaining what forced he universe to form the way it did, to form at all in fact. There are 20 basic numbers, any of which is adjusted at all and the universe fails to exist at all. This is how we find which theory works – based on what happens in the LHC over the next 5-10 years we see what the quark is made of. We know everything is atoms, all atoms are electrons, neutrions, protons and neutrons and these in turn are made of quarks. That’s the very basics of it, but really we are wandering on the very edge of the nebula here overall. Taking the data on the LHC’s reactions and feeding them through the beautiful mathematics of these ideas, may or may not generate the 20 basic numbers we know. If they don’t, we have some thinking to do, and if they do… we have some different thinking to do.
Go look these people up. I urge you, take 10 minutes of our time and watch the universe unfurl.

listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

Curtain rises

‘Blinding white light fills the stage, the auditorium, the audience’s world. Silence. In the darkness, a voice.’

I won. ‘Apocalypse Elegies’ will be performed at Kingston College in London in the week of the 29th of March. I heard from an answerphone message that came through crossing one of the bridges in my newly adopted city, giving Jacques Roux the grand tour. I’m glad he was there, it was good to have someone to go mad and joyous with, but I couldn’t deal with it in practical terms until he was gone. In the many voices that flitted though my mind over the next few hours one phrase was the spoken version of a thought I’d kept quietly to myself. D’Artagnan said it, and perhaps it was just his ever endearing exuberance but on the other hand… ‘This could be the start of something big!’ I’ll keep my far from idle side of the bargain, but it doesn’t just rely on me. Fancy a game, dear Lady Luck?

That was on the 29th of October. On the same day I found out I had a role in my first production since before summer. It’s a student written production, performed one night only with this university’s drama society, called ‘The Birdcage Slips’ – a sort of Kafkan twisted fairy tale, which as you can imagine I feel very at home in. We’ve been rehearsing demonically since we knew our parts, producing a full play in under a week. Monday, it’s all over. Wish me luck.

Waltz with the Rose of Tralee

I’m here. And the roar is loud. “The beat and the thunder of feet, the hunded thousand eyes and voices, arms and faces of the divine incarnation of Vishnu” flit about me. It’s not the Bhagavad-Gita, but rather what Emerson would call a “quasi-mechanical substitute for the true nectar”. And in the middle of all this animal intoxicaton I get to read wonders like that. Writers who open their orations to the world proclaiming “we are not the torch bearers, we are the children of the fire, made of it”, and I can feel it, I can hold it in hand, I can look back on my writing and know finally what I meant when I scrawled to myself that “underneath it all electric keeps on keeping on”. The accumulated knowedge of a society awaits. There is so much to explore; I feel like I’ve been given a library card to Alexandria.

And I get the feeling that there is no going back. I can already feel this first exhileration fading, because I am not drunk and dancing, stumbbling through the streets of a city I barely know, flaring the feathers I’ve found for myself. In the cold light of day things have changed, or rather I see the changes, and realise that though these newest ones are only in ultimately minor ways, they are ways that illuminate the alterations back across… I don’t know how long. As always Waits’ words speak for me, make me smile that secret smile we pull when all alone the revelation comes. This Rose of Tralee, like one of Cohen’s sisters of mercy, all darkness and strangeness and uncerainty, construction of a dosen words, the big black mariah of the night, of the future, curves her hand around your waist, her perfume in your nostrils, your hair rising in a static shiver, and

O how we danced and you whispered to me,
You’ll never be going back home…
Exit to accordian.

echolight

I type this in the white pale glow of my screen in an otherwise dark room at the ungodly hour of 00:39. I feel more focused and fresh than I have almost all day. I want to write something because I don’t want to waste the energy, the clarity, the mindset.

I want to talk about what it will be like not seeing The Devil, my lover, until December. Perhaps I should say my current lover, or one of my lovers. Perhaps not. But I know what it will be like. It will be strange and haunting moments like this in the middle of the night when I think of her. There is no way to capture the other kind of intensity that I’ve found so often being around her can be like unless it happens. I can talk about it, but unless it’s there, in me, in you dear reader, in this moment now, it’s empty. Perhaps that’s why I can feel so detached, this other strange intensity. I know one thing though – I will seek out that feeling wherever I can. We both will. It’s what we do. Seek out the best that we chemical scum have to offer in the electric light. Run screaming, howling, under stars, over slick, wet sand. Feel the water of the docks wash against naked skin. Reach out to others who live inside the madness of atoms and strip them back to apes with mouth and fingers, “because we know and we can say it now, we can say it now, because the sun is never ever coming up.”

Goodnight.

Brewery of Beggars

An eight minute jazz number by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Chaos from order and wonderous, beautiful madness. This is what I am waiting for.

I leave for university in just over a fortnight. Whenever I’m not in direct contact with someone restlessness takes hold of me by the throat. I feel as if the house is empty and I am inside that emptiness. Books lie half read, I add sporadic lines to my writing, I desperately seek human contact. It’s only been a few days since I felt more manicaly alive than ever. But I know this restlessness, I’ve been here before, and every time is worse. Perhaps I’m realising at last that my life will change. Or perhaps, and this I think more likely, I’m very aware of that, that in fact my life has been changing, I’ve been changing, and now this lull leaves me wanting it again.

What is more frightening? The thought that the world is chaos, background noise and fundermental madness? Or that there is a huge vast mathematical order to everything utterly beyond your control?
It doesn’t matter. Just let me get out there, I beg of you, and drink myself to death on all this life.

3plays

Mephisto: “In latin you are auspicious, the lucky one.”
Faust: “That is the past, and it is irrelevent. I will make my own luck.”
Mephisto: “In German you are a fist.”
Faust: “I know. And I will be the fist that reaches out beyond mere human grasp.”
Mephisto: “You cannot grasp with clenched fingers”
Faust: “Give me answers demon, not riddles! What will my name become? What will Faust become? Tell me!”
Mephisto: “Nothing. Nothing but empty words.”

I’m writing a new play. Two new plays. And ‘Fools’ which is a long, evolving work I dabble with whenever I sit down and consider it for a long time. I love it deeply and dearly and it takes much of my best ideas and folds them into itself. I promised myself from the outset (about a year ago now) that I would finish it at university. I’ve always been aware how long it will take to write. Smaller projects have been worked on and completed in the interim – I’ve just competed a one act peice of many scenes, places, times called ‘Apocalypse Elegies’ which I’ve entered into Kingston ACT competition. We’ll see what comes of that.
But my two new plays. The first I’ve just written an extract of above. It’s a reworking of Faust (Goethe’s version not the original or Marlowe’s) based on a few ideas. First came my belief that it would be perfect as a truely cut down sparse performnce; single sepia spotlight that defines the stage, a chalk circle, a location other than a traditional theatre (think abandoned warehouse or similar), Faust dressed in simple red gown and black trousers, Mephisto a black pillar trapped in the circle, his power given by his minimal movement. The potential physicality of the work is also to be exploited – I want to open with a duel of magic conducted simpley in gesture and physical theatre. I see Faust being thrown across the room, from side to side by Mephsto’s curt gestures. Second, that the relatonship between Mephisto and Faust becomes not one of master and slave or fool and deciever – rather that of very similar individuals on opposite sides. Think Crowley and Aziraphale in Good Omens. And thirdly the meaning of their names.
So. The second play. Much looser in content at the moment but I suspect it only feels that way since it isn’t based in one of the oldest story-telling traditions of western Europe. I want some of the play to be in French, both to leave the audience largley unaware of cerain exchanges, and because it is the best language to impress a sense of ‘cuture’. The central theme is their denial of their own guilt until they are forced at last to face it. It’s called “Soleil dans la cave” after a phrase used to describe a patcular wine. It translates as “Sun in the cellar”. I’ve decided to take this concept literally – someone has stolen the sun and in doing so has murdered the rest of the world for their pleasure. This person’s name is Angeline.

The audience are ushered into a pre-prepared room. The only light source and the dominating object in the room is the artificial sun that hangs above. Underneath it is a white free-standing bath tub. All else is blackness. Angeline relaxes in the tub. Aurore sits with her back to it, a white towel folded immaculately in her arms…