Chapter 12 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

Filling the Empty Space

Skidmore and I were having a drink in a bar one evening after attending a performance of some dire piece of performance work masquerading as drama when he suddenly said “I’ve written a few pieces for the magazine at Uni, I think I’ll have a go at writing a play next.  How do I go about it? What sort of story is best for a play?  How long should it be?”  And suddenly everything goes all wobbly and the room spins round and round as in an old episode of Doctor Who.  Mind you I had been drinking home brewed scrumpy all evening but I did think this was one of those portals into those time loops where our actions are repeated over and over again for ever and I had had this conversation so many times before.

I asked, as I do every time “Why do you want to write a play?  Why not a novel or a short story or a poem?”

“There’s a competition I’d like to enter.  I definitely think I could win it.  All I want is an idea and I’ll give it a go.”

Well, that’s an answer I suppose.  Not one I wanted to hear.  Perhaps I should have phrased it differently.  “What is the idea you have that can only be expressed as a play?  What are the particular attributes of the narrative that make it so that it can only be expressed in a play?  Plays are hard work and if you could express yourself in a short story or even a haiku, you’d have a lot less heart-ache.”

But this time our young hopeful is not to be put off. “It can’t be that difficult.  You write them all the time.”

Well, yes, I couldn’t disagree.  There is no actual law against anyone having a go at such an undertaking.  And in answer to his initial enquiry I had to admit there are no actual rules about how much and what subject. And I never, ever advise people about how they should write. But I liked Skidmore for all his rather callow, erratic, exuberant approach to the world and I didn’t want him to get involved in something that might make him unhappy so I thought I might try and guide him with a few pearls.

All right, I say “How much experience do you have of theatre?  How much do you know about that unique relationship between actors and audiences?  What do you know and expect of your own relationship with the audience?”

“I don’t think I need to go into that too much.  That’s for the director to sort out.”

That is also true.  Up to a point.  Directors need to be given freedom to explore the subject and don’t need to be told how to direct a play.  Particularly by someone like Skidmore.  But that’s not what I’m driving at, either.

“So you’re saying that you don’t need to engage with the audience yourself?  You place your work before them and they like it or lump it.  A tiny bit arrogant, don’t you think?”

Skidmore frowned at that.  I don’t think he’d ever been called arrogant before.  Then he brightened as he always does in adversity. “I think you’re deliberately misunderstanding me. Anyway, the play is just the words.  I leave the gubbins to the techies.”

Now there you are wrong, young Skidmore.  Comprehensively irredeemably wrong.  Plays are not works of literature.  They are one part of a huge collaborative effort by actors, directors, lighting people, audiences, cleaners, ice-cream sellers.  That’s why I say to all new writers who have to listen to me ranting on from my stool in the corner of the bar: “Before you put pen to paper you must get to know theatre and the way it works.  You need to have all that firmly planted in your mind, the smell of sawdust and of paint, the sounds of rehearsals in a draughty hall somewhere, the anxiety of the producer that the thing is about to work.  You need to know all this because a play needs to come from the theatre and is not bolted onto it.  Have you read Peer Brook’s “The Empty Space”?”  But when I looked up, Skidmore had ceased listening and was attending to his I-phone.

The answer I should have given right from the start was, “If you want to write plays then start by getting stuck into theatre.”  I really was getting worked up.  This was a subject I had decided views on and I wasn’t going to be ignored.  “Now listen here, young fellow.  It doesn’t really matter whether it’s professional or amateur but you must understand theatre as a living, breathing organism before you can begin to think about delivering the instructions that will prod this leviathan into motion.  It also doesn’t really matter what you are going to do within the theatre.  Just be somewhere where you can observe and learn.  When I got thrown out of school I hitch-hiked to London and not knowing anything better, I went from stage door to stage door asking if there was any work to be had.  By some extraordinary fluke heard of a job as a stage hand.  It was from the vantage point of the side of the stage that I was able to watch great actors and theatre makers at work.  Later, I became a very junior stage manager in the North West of England.  It was sitting in on rehearsals in freezing cold rehearsal rooms, marking up prompt copies with coloured pencils held in shaking gloved hands that I learnt how the hidden mechanisms of plays actually work.  What paths the directors and actors took through the intricacies of scripts, how they came to understand what a play was about and how best to serve the script…”  I tailed off because Skidmore had lost interest in my c.v. altogether and had wandered off to drink tequilas with some old buddies from Uni. Leaving me to carry on musing about the subject.

Theatre is the oldest expression of some of the deepest human instincts.  The playwright’s job is to lead the complex process of thought that leads to that expression.  Yet in the twenty-first century many of the enormous possibilities of drama have been lost to a superficial welter of acrobatics, music and visual effect while the skills of playwriting, character construction and dialogue have been downgraded to that of mere pen holder for other theatre makers. For three thousand years, theatre has provided a crucible of thought and argument.  It has challenged the status quo and reflected on the great changes in society and watched civilizations come and go.  It has mocked the privileged and epicene and it has raised to our consciousness those who are oppressed and down trodden.  It has provided relief in the times of crisis and serious dialogue when things were going smoothly.  It can be both ridiculously funny and jarringly emotional.  It provides high ritual and low cunning.  But because playwriting is seen as something of a dilletante pass time, the subject of many university theses, it has lost its heart and soul.  Aspiring playwrights like Skidmore are encouraged to write ten minute sketches for competitions instead of committing the years of work necessary for real drama.

“What you want to do Young Skidmore, is devote yourself to cutting through all the obfuscation and razzamatazz and get back to the heart and soul of the thing…  Read Peter Brook… Skidmore…  Skidmore!

Chapter 11 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

Secrets and Lies – Inner dialogue

Some liars are so expert they deceive themselves.   -Austin O’Malley

People tell lies.  That might come as a bit of a shock to you having lived your life in your sheltered, honest-to-goodness tell-it-like-it-is neighbourhood.  But let me assure you that some people are capable of ejecting absolute eye-popping, heart-stopping, teacup-dropping humdingers of lies.  In fact, some people are so given to telling whoppers that they can’t tell where truth ends and lies begin.  And, sadly for us, neither can we.  Sometimes we find we have lived right next door to someone who has been living their whole life as a lie.  And when the police call to ask us if we suspected anything of our serial killer neighbour we say with hand on heart “We didn’t have the slightest clue, officer.  Not a whisper.  The chap was the quietest, kindest, nicest church-goer you could ever have the pleasure of sharing your gardening implements with.  Mind you, there was the time the shears came back with suspicious stains all over the blades and he said he had pricked his thumb on a rose thorn.”  And so on and so forth.  And we wonder about the clean living vegan on the other side who borrowed the electric drill once...

 What I mean to say is that we all have an inner life very little of which we share with other people.  And sometimes we find out about it and sometimes even the owner of the inner life is not aware of it.  But for an actor studying a character they are to play, it is the inner, secret life that is not written in the dialogue that they will sniff out like a truffle hound.  In the gaps that your dialogue allows, the actor will try to find the actual words that remain unspoken but which motivate and drive the character forward.  In most cases it is the secret inward dialogue that the character has with him or her self that is more important than your actual words on the page.  This is a secret world that the actor inhabits from curtain up to the final climax.  It is the place where all the debate and decision takes place.  What happens in the pauses in a play by Pinter?  The dramas, the actual material drama happens in the pauses.

The great neurologist and theatre director Jonathan Miller says   We must allow for the way in which the unconscious works and guides our speech quite unwittingly.  This doesn’t just mean the Freudian slip but the way in which our unconscious brains are working on problems that we may have quite forgotten about.  How often do we retreat into that secret world until our partner says: “You’re quiet.  What are you thinking about?”  To which our answer is usually “Nothing”.

Now here is an interesting conundrum for the playwright: how do you write something invisible and unstated? Something that the character herself has no awareness of?  The inexperienced playwright may include stage–directions.  “He crosses to the table, furrowing his brow and looking anguished.”  Well, forget that sort of thing.  The actor finds that demeaning.  It is the actor’s job in association with the director to worm out the inner dialogue.  Even less do you want to write the inner dialogue into the text.  “You look worried Harry.”  “Yes I am suffering fearful flashbacks about that car-accident in which that young girl was killed by my stupidity last year.”  “Oh dear, I hope you’re not going to brood about that over dinner.” “I probably will, although I shall attempt to put a cheery face on it.” What you must do as a writer is to make sure that you have the inner dialogue with the character yourself.  You must examine thoroughly the psyche of the character and make sure that they behave entirely truly to both their inward and outward dialogues.  There will be tiny nuances .  He or she might alter their speech by just one word to give a little hint to the outside world of the inner world.  What was it we used to say in church?  “The outer visible sign of an inward invisible force.”  Because it is surely the inner force that drives the character through the play. Think about a play like “Cat on Hot Tin Roof” where the whole structure of the play is driven by the lies that the protagonists hold close to them. This drives the characters towards the inevitable climax. This is fine detail work and requires close inspection of every single word you have written in the later drafts.

The unseen and unspoken topics that are never uttered are usually to do with shame, guilt embarrassment. They touch on status and emotional engagement.  Intentions in these areas must never be referred to directly. What’s more characters must be careful to engage in such a way to indicate whether they want to discuss these ideas or not.   The idea of opening or closing is well known to actors and improvisors.  An open question leads to a thoughtful and, possibly, lengthy reply.  “What did you think of the pas de deux in Act 2?”  Leads to a fuller discussion than the closed question: “Did you like it?” The closed question encourages a “yes” or “no” answer while an open question leads on to greater things.

I read an interesting piece in which some teacher suggested that playwrights should never employ questions as part of dialogue writing.  I think I see what she is driving at but you still have to deploy an interrogation at some point.  Obviously the clever playwright will imply the questions but we still want our interlocutor to ask “Well, did you murder Celia?” in some way or other.

Some thoughts about Status

For most people the huge self examination that goes on throughout all interactions is that of status. As soon as we walk into a room of strangers we are weighing up the appearance, speech and manners of everyone else in order to establish our place in the pecking order.  Status is vital to our understanding of the world but it is not as straightforward as whether one speaks with a cultivated accent or has polished shoes, though these outward signs do play an important part.  And status is itself can be fluid and mutable.  I walk into the room and at once I am on my guard, ready for an opportunity to exhibit my knowledge or wealth. I must preserve my status at all times and, where and when possible, increase it.  This is more than just getting one over on your adversary.  One can increase one’s status whilst appearing to lose it.  Thus you can make what appears to be a gross error in manners in the eyes of one person but it may result in admiration from others.

Consider opening and closing questions in the following dialogue.  And how are Andrew and Barry asserting status through their use. Thus:

Andrew:            Cup of tea?

Barry:               Not if it’s a problem.

Andrew:            No problem.

Barry:               Are you making one for yourself?

Andrew:            Earl Grey or Typhoo?

Barry:               What are you having?

Andrew:            I’ve got both.

Barry:               Can you still get Ty-phoo?

Andrew:            I got some in for when the vicar called.

Barry:               That might be nice.

Andrew:            Last year. It’s at the back of the cupboard.

Barry:               Don’t go to any fuss.  Earl Grey would be fine.

And so on.

Andrew asks “Would you like a cup of tea?” in as off hand way as possible. Barry must never reply “Yes” or “No”. These are forceful, closing words which represent a status assertion and, as such, serve to reduce one’s own status.  (The answer “yes” Implying something like: “You are too stupid to recognise that is why I am here” and “No” implying “I wouldn’t drink that gnat’s piss you served up last time.”) Thus Barry must reply with a status neutral question: “Are you making one for yourself?” and so throwing the status problem back to Andrew who must reply with a further question: “Do you prefer Earl Grey or Typhoo?” Barry’s answer: “Can you still get Typhoo?” is nearly a status assertion in itself.  “I may have some in the back of the cupboard.” Is a winning stroke. Yet notice how long Barry can hold out without every giving a direct answer to the original question.

I’m not certain how this operates in other parts of the world but in the UK this is typical of a complex status interaction in which both speakers are fencing to an unwritten but well understood set of rules.  There are similar rules to follow in interactions concerning the weather which are really coded for one’s emotional engagement with the world and must be kept carefully guarded at all times.

It used to be axiomatic that in polite society one avoided conversing about religion, sex and politics.  In our dialogue here, of course, these are the only safe topics of conversation.

And whether this particular case is especially British or not, I’m willing to bet there will be similar sets of unwritten rules throughout the world.

Some thoughts on Irony

We all know about Dramatic Irony.  It’s a stock in trade for most playwrights wherein we let the audience in on a secret that the protagonist in the play is unaware of.  It’s where the audience nudges each other and says “he’s riding for a fall.”  Greek Drama is chock full of ironic situations because the audience should be well acquainted with the story in advance.  The best place to see it in action is in pantomime with a thousand kids screaming “It’s behind you.”  As the Dame is cheerfully unaware of the ghost creeping up behind her.

Irony is our way of distancing ourselves from problems or problematic people.  It gives us an outside view. It prevents us getting angry.  In order to be ironic about something we need to be detached or held apart from the source of our irritation.  And irony is also a signal to others who may be our allies.  Sending out an ironic smoke signal allows those who agree with our point of view to sidle up closer to us with a knowing wink without always raising the suspicions of those who are the target for the irony in the first place.  Irony sets us apart but also joins us together.  The knowing versus the ignorant.  The Insiders against the outsiders.  And here we’re stepping on dangerous territory.  As soon as we have defined an otherness then we are as guilty of shredding the network we are so wanting to build. 

So we need to be careful with an ironical inner dialogue that it’s not the playwright speaking directly to the audience over the heads of the characters in the play.

And here is another fascinating aspect.  You the playwright are in conversation with the actor and director about the inner dialogue through the words you have written, but how much do you want to reveal to the audience and at what point?  Do you want to let them into the secret at the beginning so they can watch the two levels of the play at once, or leave it to the end as a grand deus ex machine reveal?  More likely you will want to leave a little trail of clues throughout the piece that, if you are clever, they arrive at the truth at the moment the other characters discover it. It’s clever if you can pull it off.  I always find it annoying when as an audient you have realised the truth of a character in act 1 while the characters on stage don’t see it until two acts later.  You’re almost climbing out of your seat to shout “Can’t you see?  He did it?”

You, the playwright need to understand what your characters are not saying.  What topic is known by one or all of them and is being ignored?  What is, as they say, the elephant in the room?  And what sort of code are your protagonists using to avoid mentioning it?

Chapter 6 Belief, Bias and Common Humanity. Meditation on Playwriting

Créativité, l'inspiration et Genius    Comment fonctionne l'improvisation

Skidmore is indubitably the most annoying person I’ve ever met.  Apart from his habit of trying to borrow money off me, he is nearing the end of a part time creative writing course at Bournemouth University so he imagines that it behoves him to question every aspect of my life as a writer.  The annoying thing is that sometimes he entangles me into that sort of wrangle that gets under my skin and has me lying awake at two o’clock in the morning trying to justify my existence.  The even more annoying thing being that at that time he is probably just getting into his stride at the poker table and couldn’t give a toss for what I’m worrying about.

 “What’s the big deal about being an artist, then?  This whole writing thing is a piece of cake.  Why have I just spent all this dosh just to find out that any Tom Dick or Harriet can be a genius?” He said with a dismissive wave and disappeared to meet up with his current floozy in some bar or other.

This is my answer to him.  Of course, it would have been better if he’d been there to hear it.

Absolutely. Creativity is part of every human’s makeup and Everybody is blessed with genius. Creativity is the ability we all have to gather a few bits and pieces and make something that might be pleasing or useful to ourselves and, possibly, to others.  Those bits and pieces may be words or pencil marks or pebbles or something altogether grander and more robust making use of tonnes of concrete, timber, steel or aluminium.  The creation itself may have explosive qualities, it may save a life or serve some other function or it may just exist.  In other words, creativity is the spark that motivates pretty well everything we do or make anew.  So, let’s admit it, there is nothing magical or out of the ordinary about creativity.  It is the ability to create that, given the right conditions, we all have.  Children are always mucking about with stuff and everything they do or make is entirely new to them.  Give a child a muddy puddle and some twigs and leaves and they will create a whole world. But this capacity doesn’t leave us suddenly when we reach adulthood.  We may just have to look for it deeper within ourselves.

In a similar way, genius refers to the attendant spirit that is allocated to everyone at birth.  Originally it meant an actual God or angel who presided over our destiny in life.  It became a tutelary spirit. The word itself is associated with the Arabic Jinn or Genie (of which more later).  From this is derived the idea of one’s natural character or tendency.  A person is not A genius but possesses a genius or has genius within them.  That genius can be looked on as unusual and remarkable or it can comprise some perfectly natural ability or inclination that is generally taken for granted.     In other words, I’m using the term “genius” to imply some sort of personal inclination or particular ability. I am not trying to measure or value one manifestation of genius against another.  Einstein (why do we always use Einstein when talking about genius?) had a particular genius for visualising problems but he did not (as far as I know) have a genius for playing the banjo. (I bet somebody lambasts me on Twitter for not knowing about Einstein’s blue-grass skills) You may have a genius for personal relationships, caring for someone or fixing shelves. Or in Skidmore’s case for rubbing me up the wrong way.

The trick, of course, is recognising your personal genius and using it and, certainly, practising it so that it grows and develops. 

What’s more We actually do musicians or architects or cooks a severe disservice when we call them geniuses.  This implies that they are mere celebrities that have been gifted with a weird ability.  It's as though their skill and craft is something they have no control over. But genius in itself achieves nothing. In fact, these people have taken the genius that is within them and worked hard with it to create a conduit for their particular style of creativity, a vehicle for the novel Idea that we all applaud. Genius may be particular to the individual and is the product of their self awareness and practice of it but we all have it.

The other two terms I’m using, Improvisation and inspiration are instrumental.  They are the means by which we create or exhibit our genius.  They are the ways in which our creative genius manifests itself.  And they work closely together.

But first, let us talk about the thing itself, the artwork, the piece of architecture, the scientific discovery, the new way of thinking.  In the same way a baby is created by the coming together of two cells, the new invention or idea is formed by the coming together of two previous ideas.  The baby has characteristics utterly unique but which derive from both parents.  And in the same way that a baby is the product of its parent cells. The new idea is never completely novel but derived from generations of ideas stretching back through the centuries.  And the more distant the original ideas from each other the stronger and more powerful the progeny.  This is in some way analogous to the natural world in which, if two distant plant species can be encouraged to breed together, the outcome can exhibit an extraordinary strength called hybrid vigour.

The success or failure of this creative flow of tender hybrid ideas is the ability of the gardener to discriminate, to pick out those plants which will have this hybrid vigour and which will produce the most pleasing or useful result.  This ability to discriminate is crucial.  It is the exercise of choice which gives value to a creation. The human services thinker John O’Brien says “Choice defines and expresses individual identity”. The process we call art is the exercise of choice and it is, again, open to everyone.  The choices we make define us as people and what we are as people defines the choices we make.

Art is choice.  Every artwork is the result of a series of choices made by the artist.  These choices range far beyond what particular colour a painter uses on his or her palette.  What aspect of the subject do they choose, what mood, what does she include and what does she leave out?  Why does she make a mark just here and not over there? And so on with every other form of artistic endeavour.  In a play, what particular moments in a narrative does the writer select to dramatise?  What characters and what characteristics do they exhibit that makes them part of the story?  The artist is consciously or subconsciously making choices continually.  They are asking the questions who?  where? what? how?  why?  And the finished work is the unique result of those choices.  That is why no artwork can be like any other because the myriad of choices can only lead to what's known as "a deterministic chaos pattern" - the butterfly effect.

Often we cannot consciously account for the choices we make.  These unconscious choice makers we call “inspiration”. Style and choice are inextricably intertwined.  It is our unique style that enables us to make the choices we do.  The choices we make are seen by the outside world as our style. It’s probably a bit of a let off for the philosopher to be able to define “inspiration” as “a breath from God” but your style both as an artist and as a person are at the heart of what makes you an individual and different from the rest of the seven and a bit billion on the planet but whatever subconscious drivers these inspirations may derive from, they are still valid.   For me, this mysterious breath is indeed a marker of who I am as an artist.  I can judge it from that point when I am writing a play and the characters I have created suddenly take on a life of their own and head off in directions I could never have forecast. When inspiration rushes by all I can do is to hang on to my hat and follow it wherever it leads me

I love those random events and decisions that pepper our lives. Those unintended and unexpected consequences of decisions that are made on the spur of the moment or as a result of sudden twists of circumstance.  Here are three of my favourites from famous studio recording sessions:

1) Raphael Ravenscroft, booked to play a tiny part on the Gerry Rafferty “Baker Street” session, tries out the guitar part on the out of tune saxophone that he hurriedly fetches from his car.  

2) Session musicians are paid by the number of instruments they play so Herbie Flowers needing to get an extra few quid doubles his electric bass with string bass on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”

3) Al Kooper realises his guitar playing is not as good as Mike Bloomfield, so slips unnoticed into the studio to play the Hammond organ but, as he is not a natural organ player, he follows the rest of the musicians a semiquaver behind in an effort to keep up with the chords the others were playing.  They are recording “Like a Rolling Stone” with Bob Dylan.  The studio manager is not impressed but on playback Dylan insists he “Turn the organ up.”

Listen to these tracks again and marvel at the power of serendipity and improvisation.  The trick is in the artist, the person who had to make the final choices of the mix, hearing those chance occurrences and to make use of them.  To seize the random happening and make it part of the whole. 

“There are people who prefer to say 'yes' and there are people who prefer to say 'no'. Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
― Keith Johnstone

Improvisation is the art of creating in the moment.  Ex tempore, unplanned, at this time, in the here and now.  There is no forward planning or backward assessment.  The artist and his or her audience live in this moment with no idea of what is about to happen or where or how.  Each moment is a surprise and the reaction is new every time.  But how do we achieve that result?  That state of bliss that enables us to think or speak beyond ourselves?

There is a second meaning to improvisation, the idea of making do with whatever is at hand.  the process of devising a solution to a requirement by making-do, despite absence of resources that might be expected to produce a solution   this meaning goes a great deal deeper.  Improvisation can be seen as the process of creation itself.  it is the deliberate drawing together of two otherwise unrelated ideas to create something new.  We are back to the idea of the child playing in the muddy puddle oblivious to the world beyond.

That child playing in a puddle will make use of mud and twigs and leaves to create dams and castles and so on.  They will improvise on the theme of mud in just such a way as an electrical engineer will improvise connections with whatever materials may be to hand when needed.  This idea of making do leads to some of the fundamentals of improvisation.  Use what is to hand.  Accept what you have to work with and look to see what is possible within the limitations.  The trick here seems to be able to think iconically.  In other words, to let one thing or idea to stand for another thing.  In improvisation two levels of reality operate, the reality of thing itself and what it stands for or could be.  It becomes a metaphor.  And through metaphor we see new possibilities and different connections.

So if creativity, genius and inspiration are already there within us, is it possible to hurry this process, to make it work for us, to turn it to our advantage?  Can we encourage the discriminatory powers without becoming self-conscious and maybe self-parodying?  Can we indeed uncork the bottle and let the genie of our unselfconscious creativity out upon the world?

 In theatre, music or other performance arts there can be rules for improvisation which draw the attention of the performer to a channel leading to a new idea.  The Inspired artist will be able to spot these new channels and choose the ones that lead to a fruitful outcome. The best improvised outcomes come from a series where the choices are reduced either by necessity or by artificial rules.  Thus someone making an Improvised Explosive device uses whatever is at hand while a performer will limit the possibilities by enforcing some apparently artificial rules.  For the performer, these artificially imposed limitations are underpinned by the idea of acceptance.  Whatever happens is good and must be incorporated within the growing piece.  Ideas cannot be rejected and conscious discrimination is put on hold for a moment. This is the creative act performed ex tempore.  At this time. In the here and now.  There is no forward planning or backward assessment.  In an improvisation we live ex tempore: outside time.  And that applies just as much to the audience as to the artist.  They have no idea what is to happen next or where or how.  Each moment is a surprise and they react anew every time something occurs.

In the end, the object is the same, it is to distract the conscious mind in order to let the unconscious, inspired self go to work on the task in hand. We start to think iconically and speak metaphorically.

Inspiration can not only produce new ideas but also give us new approaches to established and often dull practices.  Done deliberately and in a structured manner, these sort of improvisations can add to performance by allowing in a more fluid, randomised element.  I saw a Shakespeare play by a company that were playing hidden impro games within the piece.  The game is to attach a clothes peg to another member of the cast on stage.  The performer, once they find the peg have to remove it and pass it on unseen. Obviously the company must have superb discipline and the improvisation must be entirely at the service of the piece.  In other words, no knowing winks or character drop outs.  For the audience the play was perfectly acted but there was a frisson about the performance that made the evening electric.  The impro game distracts the actor's conscious mind from the wobbly set, the spider hanging from the lighting bar, the member of the audience eating cheese and onion crisps.  The actor exists in the moment. The text and the delivery of it becomes at one with the subconscious where it allows a true emotional engagement with the words as they are uttered.

We are all aware of that sort of trance that ensues when we become fully and deeply engaged in an activity.  Time is suspended and we seem to have superhuman powers of creativity.  The genie is at work within us and the breath of God fills us so that the creative act pours from us like honey.

The improvised moment can direct us into that state by a set of games that we call rituals. We all understand the form and intention and we have confidence that every other participant is doing the same thing at the same time. The ritual guides us and pulls us so that we lose all sense of self and become the process, the conduit for divine inspiration.

In “The Archeology of Ritual” Evangelos Kyriakidis says that a ritual is a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used also by the insider or performer as an acknowledgement that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.  In other words, it includes and excludes at the same time.

Composer Roddy Skeaping says "With improvisation, however, we are involved in a process of creation going on right here and now, there is no one better or more informed about the emerging live m creation than those who are making it happen through their creative and critical faculties. In our own terminology we refer to this as ‘Live Creation’. Because Live Creation is a group effort, a performance is a social event, created through the merging of the sum total of the cultural background of all who participate. Further to this, there is no need for any undue reverence towards the thing created because it is designed to be enjoyed in the moment of creation, not as an art-object to be stored, reproduced or sold. Each event is therefore unique and you have to be there to appreciate it. Not there and you miss it. The great thing about improvised art installations of the Live Creation category is that if you like it you’ll come along and enter into the spirit of it and if you don’t you’ll vote with your feet and stay away. This way we hope to grow our audience through facilitating an event that is both fun and meaningful”.

PLATO

So do we give up our creativity to the Gods of chance entirely?  Do we merely find the finished piece rather than make it?  This is what I was banging on about in Chapter 3 when I was talking about engagement.  That is, engagement with the work we are making and with the world we are making it in.  We may not be able to envision the final product before we start out but we know the general direction we are taking to get there.  We have closed it round with some parameters of what we would like to see and feel at the end but the improvisation of the writing will carry us off into unexpected directions and we must exercise our choice as to whether those new circumstances are a complete dead end or an important waymark on where we want to get.  We throw ourselves into the sea and start swimming towards the horizon but the current will carry us at a tangent from our expected course and we surface on an island that may have interesting new monsters roaming on it.  This vague sense of direction that encompasses my work is usually represented by a stage picture, a certain style or, as I call it, a taste of what the finished piece will be like.   Perhaps I could explain that better by saying that I can visualise the gap in the cosmos that this piece will fill. It is almost a way of saying I know what use it will be put to.  For me the justification of a piece of art is that it fits neatly into space where nothing else will fit.  This is what brings joy to the creator and the watcher or listener. It is almost as though I start with a Platonic ideal or form of what the piece will be but it is only through the actions of creativity, genius, improvisation, outward intervention and choice that I can bring the ideal into Substantial reality.    In our writing we create a form of reality that gives an echo of the ideal we have been aiming for.

But the artwork is not yet finished when we have done with it.  An artwork only exists as a piece of art when it is seen by a viewer, a reader, a watcher and they have made a reaction to it.  The result of the choices the artist has made should elicit a response in a viewer and it can only be called an artwork when it has gained that response.  The response may not be entirely positive.  It may be tedium or disgust.  The viewer may be upset or unnerved but those are still valid responses and they make the work a piece of art.  One can argue that any made object that elicits a response is an artwork.  It may be bad artwork but it is still an artwork. 

Perhaps it's not appropriate to try and divide artwork into good and bad but we are conscious as a viewer that something is not right and it's worth trying to explain that unhappy feeling we get.   We can divine bad art because the maker has been too self-conscious.  It is too mannered, too well thought out.  The artist has not allowed for the random inspiration that gives it life and attractiveness.

The viewer or audient is also making choices.  Apart from the immediate emotional response to the artwork there is the matter of what angle to see it from, what part of the work to embrace first. With a piece of music, the listener may elect to follow a particular line or to concentrate on a particular part of the soundscape. Particular sounds will resonate with memories or emotions that belong to that listener alone. In the same way every artwork is infinitely different because of the artist’s choices in making it, then every viewing will be different because of the myriad changes in environment and the reactions of other viewers or listeners present, the number of times it has been viewed already and so on.

Roderick Skeaping’s music theatre company Le Collectif International des Improvisateurs (Le Collectif) encourages these different audience viewpoints by encouraging the use of cameras and phones to record and stream from the many points of view available to them.  Their many responses are recorded and fed back into the proceedings.  A particular audience member can thus influence the whole course of the event by drawing attention to details completely unseen by other audience members and even the performers. This can operate a sort of feedback loop where everyone can be drawn into entirely new and different responses to what is occurring.  Individual audience members are thus shaping the event as it progresses and adding to the deterministic chaos as much as the artist.  This inherent chaos means that we can never forecast the outcome of our performance.  The outcome must necessarily be uncontrollable and the process must take precedent over product.  The playwright in creating the basis for a piece of theatre will need to be the improvising creator but also making precise choices as to what is to be part of the finished plan and what left out. 

Chapter 2 Belief, Bias and Common Humanity. Lies and more lies.

Reality?  Is there such a thing in the Age of Untruth?  Authenticity in Narration

It’s all just stories - none of us knows the truth about anything. But stories are good. They are what we tell ourselves to keep fear at bay, to make sense of our lives, to see things as we want to see them so everything is skewed really. - Stephen Mangan The Times March 5th 2016.

“There’s always a story.  It’s all stories really.  The sun coming up every day is a story.  Everything’s got a story in it.  Change the story, change the world.”  - Terry Pratchett – A Hat Full of Sky.

 Do you sometimes feel that you’ve turned up in life just after the cop cars and the ambulances and the fire engines have just disappeared round the corner, the smashed glass has been swept away and there is nothing left to see? How much of life is lived just out of sight, just round the corner?  It sometimes feels to me as though I’m listening to the world through cotton wool, touching it with boxing gloves.  All I perceive is the shallow and shaky and occasional fleeting moments of experience instead of those big, defining events that everyone else seems to enjoy.

I guess that’s partly my fault.  My young friend Skidmore would sneer at me on his way to the casino or a day out bungee jumping and say  “You live your life second hand.  What do you expect? You only see the world through Facebook and Twitter, through mediated and filtered web sites. If you’ve got  a problem with the world, it’s your fault. You live in a bubble of shared opinion. You only see the world through a tiny knothole of the rotting woodwork of your front door.”

And yes, all sadly true, Skidders, Old Man.   As a writer I need to indulge in the reality of the world around and to provide an all-embracing experience for my audiences.  I want to record and comment on what it is like to be human.  I do it, not by an exact reproduction of the world around, a one to one scale model, but by observing and adapting what I see so that others may see my vision.  To agree or disagree as they see fit.  But at all events I must understand and report with veracity.  What I need is for my audience to trust me, to believe in the world, the ideas I put before them that they are willing to accompany me on my journey and not keep noticing the hollows and blank spaces I have been unable to fill. Where can I find the authentic, real and plausible in this world of the fakery and sham?

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon

“Anyway, we don’t do Truth anymore.  Truth is so… last year.”  says Skidmore warming in his opinion.

“What in God’s name “do you even mean when you  ramble on about authenticity and vomit up words  like “reality” or “plausibility”?  “Veracity?”  You make up stories.  You’re a professional liar.  What on earth do you know about truth?  What right do you have to criticise other people for not telling the Truth?”

Good point. I’m not a journalist.  I’m not out to record the details of car crashes or bank robberies.  Not the events themselves at any rate but I do believe I’m trying to capture an authentic human response to what’s going on in the world. 

I am, as I might have said to Skidmore if he’s hung around to listen, an observer. Even if I miss the car crash, somehow, I’ve got to observe the way people react to this sort of event. I’ve got to sniff the air and see which way humanity is heading.  And having got some sense of what’s going on I’ve then got to try to interpret and construct a narrative. Not necessarily about the big events and occurrences but about the little details, the way people react, how they change. 

I realise that as an artist, and more particularly as a playwright, I’m wrestling with two sorts of authenticity.  The authenticity of my response to the world around.  In other words, trying to relay what I see with minimum bullshit.  But I’m also faced with the task of providing an emotionally satisfying and gripping first-hand experience for my audiences that will draw them in and cause them to be engaged in the way that I am.

Before I write poetry or  fiction I need to understand what truth is.

“They’re all liars, cheats and fakes” says Skidmore.  “I wouldn’t vote for any of them”  An all too familiar line and largely accurate.   What is worrying, moreover is that these rogues and charlatans have learnt how to manipulate the press and social media and have discovered that lying and cheating is just as efficacious at moving opinion as a reasoned argument used to be.  But by abjuring from voting Skidmore has let the liars and cheats off the hook.  There is no possibility of the world being any different.   Not all politicians are self-serving and mendacious, but those who are will always have louder voices than those who are not. So, why is it when we seek out people of authenticity to be our representatives in government, do we almost always end up with the self-regarding, bullies, liars and cheats?

The culture of celebrity on television, the celebration of mountebanks by news media provide an ecology in which everyone is fake because we expect nothing else. We have lost trust in politicians and people in authority and thereby we have lost trust in humanity as a whole.  People who appear to be decent enough chaps in the pub we find are working for multinational companies and banking corporations.  They defend what they have to do by saying “We are forced into a course of action by our shareholders.  We are legally obliged to consider the interests of our investors first.”  Those at the bar have an uneasy feeling that this equates to “I was only following orders.” And we all know where that led.  Not only are we uncomfortable with this, it seems to require a form of doublethink way beyond mere hypocrisy.  Can we ever accept a pint from someone like this or trust them to drive our kids to school?

Can I as a playwright do anything to reverse that?  How can I show a more authentic view of humanity that would contribute in some small way to restoring everyone’s faith in the essential goodness of human nature without compromising the truth that people are, indeed, venal, grasping, selfish, prone to violence, self-centred and so on and so forth?

We give out medals for a single act of physical prowess.  How do we reward a lifetime of caring?

"Everything is relative. Stories are being made up all the time - there is no such thing as the truth. You can see how that has filtered its way indirectly into post-truth."  A.C. Grayling

At the same time, this yearning for authentic experience drives the apparent hunger for thrill laden activities and dangerous sports.  I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons that Skidmore spends so much of his time in casinos and bars. Or dangling by his feet from an elastic band over a waterfall. Our quotidian existence is so far from feeling any sort of natural engagement with the world that we must seek out experiences that are near to death. Or bankruptcy. We seek the outlandish, the dangerous, the bitter.  But our search for the authentic experience forces us closer and closer to the inauthentic.  We yearn to hike through authentic countryside, we long to eat authentic Mexican food.  And yet, the closer we get to them the less authentic the experience.  In reality the countryside is cold wet and muddy and entirely mundane. It is a working environment for those who live there and residents experience all sorts of discomforts and disadvantages such as non-existent public transport, thirty miles drives to the local hospital, intermittent phone and broadband and village shops, schools and pubs that close down leaving ghost communities.  The countryside is, frankly, tedious. It is no more than a factory floor with bushes. We do not want the authentic countryside, we want convenient car parks and defined footpaths with the brambles trimmed back.  We need easy access to viewpoints where we can look at the scenery for a few moments and let the dogs run after the sheep before driving back down to the authentic village pub run by a chain from London where we can order Authentic Chipotle straight from the freezer and microwave. We settle for a facsimile of the authentic. 

But there is a dissatisfaction in this clearly hollow view of the world.  It has permeated the whole of 21^st century existence. And the more we are squeezed economically and socially, the more we demand to satisfy this emptiness.

Those who live their lives in extremis, who feel crushed by poverty or by a world they no longer feel part of, will lash out.  They will follow any narrative that offers them a glimmer of hope.  That narrative may be entirely fictitious.,  It may be a fantasy offering a pot of fairy gold at the end of a rainbow, but for those who have nothing it is everything.

An authentic experience is one validated by our senses.  Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight.  The more senses that are involved the more authentic an experience becomes. It can be brought into even sharper focus by having others experience it with us.  “Did you see that?” we ask and are happy is someone else witnessed it at the same time as we did.  Afterwards, we construct a narrative around the event so that it becomes a reality. It could be an hilarious dinner table story or a heart-stopping drama.  We encompass it and draw delight from the fact that we experienced something truthful at last. But it still doesn’t mean that an experience is true.  Truth, as we are constantly urged to believe, is conditional on context and frames of reference.  It may be possible to say that the authentic experience occurs within space – the here and now while the narrative about it occurs within and over time.  We stand on a clifftop and feel the wind in our face and hear the waves crashing below and smell and taste the salt on the air.  It is the punch in the face, the kick on the shins.  This is a moment of experience.  We need to be absolutely involved in the moment for it to be more than something fleeting and ephemeral. It requires total engagement. And later, the contemplation of that event, the story of that moment, becomes the narrative truth.  We sit in front of a roaring fire and recall that cold, the rain trickling down the back of our necks.  We may laugh about it whatever the shock and discomfort we felt at the time.

But not everyone has the time or the conditioning to go and stand on a clifftop gazing at the ocean waiting for some epiphany of the soul.  And not everyone has the capacity to capture that moment in a form that can be transmitted to others. Sometimes we need an intermediary, a playwright or other artist for instance, to draw our attention to that experience and give us a reason for paying it attention.  If we artists and writers do our job properly we can weave a narrative that carries the audience through the emotional landscape and gives a more accurate, fuller picture of humanity. Fiction or not.

It’s important to be able to understand both the ideas of authenticity of world view and authenticity of experience in order for the playwright to construct a narrative by drawing these two ways of experiencing a moment or an event together. 

Having observed the world and its people the playwright can construct a narrative bringing together elements that would never meet in real life.  Their prime function is to ask the question “What if…?” of the world and the people they observe.  “What if Donald Trump did meet Nelson Mandela?” “What is time travel is possible and we could go back to the beginning of 2016?”  The writer then applies their Imagination.  The creative narrator imagines themselves inside the mind of their character.   She gives it life and credibility and tries to examine what the possible outcome of the question is.  The writer inhabits the multiverse where all outcomes are possible, providing that we apply the rules of humanity and human nature.

John Le Carre, the eminent spy novelist makes a subtle distinction between “authenticity” and “plausibility” meaning, I believe, that merely to present our reality is not enough for a writer.  The world we create may be as far removed from the world we see through our window as we like; what is crucial is that we create a world that is so dense and thought out that the reader or audience never needs to question its veracity.  In just such a way that the work of great scenic designers and directors go unrecognised because they create an all-encompassing  world on the stage of such breadth that we never see round it. By creating such a total world and guiding our audiences through it, we are providing a totally immersive, authentic experience where we can explore issues and ideas that might sit uneasily with our own small experience but which in some way we can describe as True.

Music doesn’t have to be beautiful all the time.    It has to be True. It has to have meaning. It has to articulate something that’s important to be said. -  Natalie Clein Cellist.  BBC Front Row January 12^th 2017

Chapter 1. Belief, bias and common humanity. Blood and Bones. Anger and Frustration.

For me, poetry is the distillation of a moment.  A play is the distillation of a life.

There's a lot of weird stuff about.  It's only to be expected, I suppose.  With seven point odd billion individuals in the world dreaming their dreams and thinking their thoughts, a lot of stuff is bound to come out weird.   How is it that someone can invent a rather gruesome bunch of chemicals, pump it up with carbon dioxide and persuade the rest of the world to drink it?  How can they fry some pink animal derived mush, and persuade us to eat it as if it was food?  Perhaps the really weird thing here is how the rest of us let ourselves be persuaded that these things are good to eat and drink when we have much more palatable things on our kitchen shelves? Such as drain cleaner. And isn’t it interesting that the description I have just given could apply equally to a bottle of Dom Perignon as much as one of coca-cola and to a tartare aller-retour at Heston Blumental’s drive by establishment as to a Macdonald’s burger?

We seem to be living in a world completely out of joint. Trump, Brexit, Putin.  This is the age of irrationality; The Great Endarkenment. Reason and truth no longer have any meaning.   This is the world of hyper reality where we convince ourselves that what we know perfectly well to be Untruth is in fact the Truth. The world is mad and we are all mad in it.  And I'm the worst of the lot. Because I'm a writer working in the world of theatre.  A time waster at a useless piece of frippery that merely adds to the madness because it depends upon people pretending to be someone else uttering words they didn't think up in a stuffy black room that we're all kidding ourselves is the deck of a ship or a ballroom in eighteenth century Vienna or the surface of Mars.

So how does this world madness manifest itself to me sitting at my desk overlooking the bay and distracted by kittens in hats on Facebook? I see people running along the clifftop earphones clamped to their ears completely cut off and unaware of some of the most beautiful sights and sounds in the world. I see it in conspiracy theories about chem. trails and faked moon landings on the internet, in an obtuse willingness to believe the unbelievable and in an urge to take unimportant things far too seriously while there is a disengagement from the things that really are important. I see it in our cowering before self aggrandising slobs who have muscle enough to transform gossip and down-right lies into some sort of ugly narrative for a bleak future in which they become the leaders and priests and only those few will have power to rape and pillage the world with impunity and I ask why we do not rise up to take back the world for ourselves? I see it in a totally bizarre world order that places accumulation of stuff before concern for our neighbour. A world where some are enabled and encouraged to accumulate more and more and more while others are screwed down by a form of austerity not seen for a hundred and fifty years. Where this pursuit of accumulation becomes as mindless as sucking on a mouth ulcer and diverts us from the more interesting things we could be doing with the one precious life we have been granted.  And where this pursuit of greed is being promoted to us as a common good in a relentless propaganda storm from those who already have more than enough. Where what we once all owned is being snatched away and sold off to the highest bidder so that we now have to pay some obscenely adipose feline for what is ours by right while the majority of us sink further and further into poverty. Where the whole fabric of our society is being deliberately ripped apart before our uncomprehending eyes.  And I ask myself how does this all relate to our existence as a story-telling, metaphor using species?  How is it, that the very thing that has made the human species rise up and achieve the possibility of a rich and fulfilled life for us all has been subverted through advertising and propaganda and downright lies into a strangulation of the soul to bring riches beyond comprehension to a very few and misery to so many?

And how is it that the people with the greatest influence in the world are the cheap pulp fiction writers like L. Ron Hubbard who I saw with my own eyes ripping off people in Corfu while he lounged on his motor yacht draped with bikini clad lovelies and Ayn Rand whose laughable, totally daft ideas are yet again echoing down the corridors of the White House and Wall Street and whose books are being promoted to shelves of every Republican politician and industrialist in America and, I bet, on many of the fifth formers at Slough Grammar school.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not for me to quibble about the work of other writers.  We all need to earn a bob or two and I have written a few pulpy pieces in my time and I do feel a warm glow when people say “Your play made me think differently about the world.” Where it all goes tits up is when this sort of fantasy becomes taken for a philosophy and people who should know better take it as some sort of truth.

When you have barricaded the doors and shuttered the windows against the marauding lawless mob and you sit in front of your smoky fire (You have stuffed up the chimney to avoid grenade attacks) with your arsenal of assault rifles and machine pistols What do you think about?  Who is your friend?  Because you will need a friend to talk to at least.  Perhaps you could find someone in another fortress who could trade you a parrot and you could teach that to recite “There is no such thing as society” over and over as you slowly starve to death. If you don't go mad first.

And we still see this facile fifth form fantasy ideology played out in contemporary politics despite the obvious flaws in the thinking. We cannot, in our crowded world, function alone.  The idea of retreating to a small cabin in the woods with a pile of gold and a shotgun to hold the rest of the world at bay would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. 

This seeping disengagement has caused some of the great human catastrophes of the twentieth century and on into our own, so why is it surprising that we writers should feel we are the ones with a duty to attempt to take back the only thing we still have in common: this language of poetry and metaphor and try and make it a tool for exploring the human experience and place it in a cockpit of the imagination where we can all use it to explore together what it is to be human and how we go about our humanity? In this era of stuff and accumulation of stuff and money for money’s sake and activity for activity’s sake where we yearn to blot out the reality of what is happening in the world with utter mountains of shit and we are so terrified of not having enough we go on accumulating and doing mindlessly until it becomes a habit, a psychosis, it is up to artists to try and cut through this fog of accumulation of junk and try to centre back on people.  Individuals.  Not individuals against the rest of the world- that nasty cut throat world of Ayn Rand or the individuals as mugs to be preyed on that L. Ron Hubbard would have us believe in, but individuals as part of the great interconnected network.  We need to put the spotlight on those individuals and their struggles.  We can use the full force of our imaginations to draw from what we know and place the evidence before our audiences.  We need to help people to speak to people about their hopes and fears, aspirations and disappointments.  We ought to help give a voice to those who are so trodden down by circumstance that they can only lash out in an unreasoned blind fury We need to sweep away all the bullshit of spectacle and superficial soap opera drama and try to explain to the world just what is going on.  We need to use our skills and imaginations to engage our audiences in new worlds of possibilities, new perspectives on this one. Nobody else is going to do it for us.  Not the newspapers or TV.  Not the bizarre world of the internet.  Not even the kittens.  Theatre is fantasy but it is fantasy concerning the real world.

If we writers were as bold as Hubbard and Rand we might be able to help turn the tide against a dreamt up fantasy world order to a more reasoned debate where we seek evidence before we believe and try to accord respect and understanding to our fellow human beings.  Not imposing something that has no basis in the world as it is.

And where once we might have satirised and railed against corrupt and venal governments and officials we now have to take on a great welling black cloud of hate, mistrust, and what I can only describe as a miasma of evil which seems to have no origin but which is suddenly pouring out as if from fissures and cracks in the very normality we see every day and every minute of every day.

Yet I see theatre reduced to an easy spectacle of acrobatics and effects. Somewhere where individuals can be defined only by the issues they represent instead of their inner immutable humanity. It is part of the distraction.  Playwriting has become reduced to the production of endless ten minute pieces for dodgy competitions judged by those who have no idea of what really constitutes theatre.  I see “Theatre makers” lauded who have never had the opportunity to explore and understand the true power of theatre.  The power of theatre that comes down to us in a shaky wavering line from the Greeks of classical antiquity and before that from a deep shamanistic desire to capture the world from our hunter-gatherer forebears.  A theatre that has encompassed Shakepeare, Racine, Behn, Goethe, Ibsen, Chekov. A theatre of Blood and Bones and sinew and Brains.  Big, deep theatre that requires not only an understanding of the world it lives in but, as importantly, a fundamental connection with the craft and skills of the stage and how it is a fundamental coming together of writer, director, technical staff, actor and audience.  It is us speaking together about the world. Theatre is power because it enables us to know things that others do not know and to visit places no one else has been and, because it is fleeting, that knowledge will be between us and no one else. Paradoxically, the illusion of theatre is no illusion. The magic of the theatre is real and enables us to experiment with the very fabric of reality that can only be achieved by those who have committed themselves unequivocally to its dark arts.

As my friend Skidmore would say "If you care that much about it, why don't you get off your arses and do something."