Chapter 5 Belief Bias and Common Humanity - Meditations on Playwriting

The Anarchic, Outlaw, Dirty-faced Art Form -

Collaboration and Negotiation in Theatre

“How many friends do you have?” barked Skidmore down the telephone one evening.  Skidmore is a young chap I run into from time to time in bars and cafes. He wears tight trousers and, I regret to say, his baseball cap back to front. I’m not sure how many friends Skidmore has but he always seems to be hanging out with a different group every time I meet him. 

I replied that, for me, at the last count it was well over 600.  Thank you very much.

“I don’t mean Facebook Friends, I mean actual, flesh and blood face to face friends. Playwrights! That’s the trouble with you old fogeys.  You think the world revolves around Facebook.  If I didn’t phone you from time to time you wouldn’t have any friends at all. You need to get out more.”

I declined Skidmore’s invitation to accompany him to a lap-dance club and, no doubt, to pick up the tab.  I had been considering cutting Skidmore from my social card (ie my Facebook Friends list) for some time.  He always seemed to want to drag me off somewhere or take part in some mad scheme.  I’m too old for all that now but I had a surreptitious glance through my contacts list to see how many people I can actually call face to face friends.  And that reminded me of a piece of research by a professor Allen who discovered that the more often people meet each other face to face, the more likely they are to phone each other.  He came up with a graph which became known as the Allen Curve demonstrating that the closer we are to our peers physically the more we will share communication and information with them.

We do not keep separate sets of people, some of which we communicate in one medium and some by another. The more often we see someone face-to-face, the more likely it is that we will telephone the person or communicate in some other medium."

And when I considered Skidmore’s original broadside I suppose the answer might better be, “How many friends do you think I need?

 In his book that asks that very question (“How Many Friends Does One Person Need?”) Professor Robin Dunbar puts the number of others that we can comfortably interact with at somewhere between 100 and 250, probably about 150.  This is the size of the tribe or working group.   And surprisingly enough if I count family and friends and theatre contacts that’s approximately the number of folk I do keep up with.    And Skidmore himself. So, for once I fit into the “normal” category and, if he hadn’t run off to do whatever it was he wanted to do with tonight’s gang I should have phoned Skidmore back and told him.

But the kind of friends I have and the places I go to socialise are changing.

A few years ago Robert D. Putnam in his book “Bowling Alone” advanced the theory that in America at least, “Social capital” was being undermined by TV and video games (“Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community”) And I do have a nagging feeling that there is something in what Skidmore says.  I do perceive a disengagement from the larger social life as I might once have had.  Maybe, Margaret Thatcher was right after all. “There is no such thing as society.” Or maybe it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Either way, for the health of us all we need to audit our social capital.   

Actually, on looking in to the matter a bit further I find that Putnam’s ideas are not borne out by research.  It seems that, although the idea is very popular, he has been widely criticised as merely rehearsing ideas that were common about the advent of radio in the 1930’s and which even then were not supported by actual contemporary research.  Contrary to his stated belief it appears that Americans are still participating enthusiastically in various social enterprises; it is just that those enterprises are different from the ones from those of the original research. Indeed, I see this very situation where I live. The old places of social interaction are becoming empty and closing down, churches, pubs, working men’s clubs but many other social venues are taking their places, coffee bars, night clubs.  Exactly the sort of places where Skidmore spends his time and his (or other people’s) money.

However, we do seem to be losing out in the rough and tumble of face to face discourse and reasoned argument that we might once have been fought out within union meeting or political rallies.  Real conversation.  And if we follow the Allen Curve the truth still remains that we are social beings and we need physical contact to function effectively as human beings. Perhaps I should have accepted Skidmore’s invitation after all and got into some sort of dialectic with the lap dancers.  Perhaps not. Nevertheless, this whole area is part of the role that live theatre has given away too easily and needs to regain.  Live theatre can be a forum for debate and argument as well as providing the ritual experiences that we all crave and, for many, has been lost with the disappearance of the religious service or political rally.

Theatre is where we can go to engage with real human beings doing real human things and thinking real human thoughts.  It is a human scale activity engaged in by groups of people for people about people.

So, am I social animal or a stay-at-home curmudgeon?  I need to know because, like it or not, theatre must be one of the most socially focused activities undertaken by human beings both in the production and the experience.

Let me think.

Social interaction is a neat strategy for survival and it begins with the birth of a baby which is so utterly helpless that it requires complete devotion from its parents.  And if they are not available then others will come to its aid and nurture it through its helpless few years.  This substitute parenting is not unusual and the instinct is so strong, so built in, we see it many other species and across species boundaries from elephants to cats and dogs if Facebook is to be believed. At the same time, we cannot dismiss the fact that in many species, including the higher apes, babies can be killed by an adult male wanting to protect his own gene line. This doesn’t get as much airtime on social network sites but it is still a fact, but in the main we still shudder at this behaviour and instinctively consider nurturing to be the higher good.

Biologists have suggested that this initial, nurturing, grooming phase of our lives where we are so utterly dependent on others is the origin of our capacity for language. The language that incorporates touch, smell, sound as well as words.

In a migrating herd of buffalo or antelope we can see social groupings numbering in the thousands.  This is a strategy for protection from predators where the sick or wounded may be safe amongst the crowd.  At the same time complex social behaviours can grow up as hunting strategies for packs of hyenas or wolves. 

Hunting is necessarily a social behaviour for homo sapiens because the human frame is so much weaker and slower than its prey. And this strength and speed differential probably gave us the capacity to develop language and abstract thought to a high level. To survive we needed to outwit our prey. What we couldn't do with individual physical strength alone, we needed to do together. And these capacities for strategic, communal thinking led on to other sophisticated behaviours such as farming and city building.  And here comes the next development, that of specialisation.  One human being has not the time in its life to master all the skills necessary for an urban lifestyle.  Initially this meant that there would need to be flint workers, metal workers, miners, archers as well as farmers and growers. And now we depend on a complex web of bus drivers, bricklayers, electricians, computer engineers, designers, playwrights and so on and so on to enable us to live.  Like it or not we are part of a huge web of interactions and trades in ideas and things. So hunted or hunting, social dependence and working together, seems to be the way to go.  And as a species we can be both.

In an article in New Scientist, Dan Jones reasons that our main driving force is that of argument.  He quotes the work of Mercier and Sperber who put forward the idea that our brains are designed to argue a point of view, right or wrong.  The thing being that, through argument within a group we arrive at a proper consensus for action.

So that forum for discourse and debate is an essential part of our humanity. And that leads us to a central mechanism of human interaction, that of negotiation and persuasion. 

Any new parent will tell you that babies learn the art of negotiation from a very early age. They enter a world in which relationships and networks are already formed.  Now, somehow, they have to worm their way into this complex web and assert their own place within it. They have to learn how to get their own way, to be fed when hungry or changed when uncomfortable.  At first a simple wail and associated facial contortions will do the job but eventually parents and carers will get wise to any overuse of this tactic.  The babe then comes back with the smile and the simper.  This, too, works for a while and then the novelty wears off that and so the Babe acquires a series of tactics which develop into that of full blown strategy of language.  And from then on the Individual has to spend the rest of his or her life negotiating by means of threats, cajoling, smiles and bribes to navigate their way through the web of society.

There’s an old story about an enthusiastic bridge player whose grandfather left him a small rosewood box with a note saying that it contained the secret of winning at bridge.  Our man went on to become a professional and could beat anyone in the world.  Everywhere he went he placed the small box on the table and when the going got tough he would open it and peer inside. When he died a wealthy man his son in his turn opened the box to see what the secret was.  It contained a small slip of paper which just said “Pass.”

I have no idea what the significance of that story is as I’ve never played bridge.  I’ll take it up with Skidmore because I know he likes to frequent casinos (Do they play bridge in casinos?). I take it that it’s something vaguely to do with bargaining and negotiation. Some years ago I took a university business management course and we were all given a handy little plastic card with tips on sales negotiation.  It’s proved really useful in all walks of life and I’ve kept it in my wallet to refer to at any time just as the bridge player did with his rosewood box.  The difference is though that my plastic card has got some really useful tactics on it and how to reply to them. They include The Vice (“You’ll have to do better than that.”) the reply being “exactly how much better?”, Salami slicing, Knocking product, Split the Difference and The Nibble. The course was a long time ago but if whoever came up with the list would like to come forward I’ll credit them in future editions of this book.  I’ve used these tips in all sorts of ways over the years and they tend to work. You could say that sales techniques reflect the way we interact in our day to day lives as we buy and sell ideas.

 

In short we are thinking and aware, we are individuals.  Our DNA is always proving us to be ourselves and to manifest our differences. But, at the same time, we are by nature a social species. And, as such, we can only operate as individuals within a social framework.  We may see that social scaffolding as family, tribe, nation or species but it always draws us from individual action to something more complex, considered, strategic.  We need to work together to create ends that are far bigger than one single idea.  Imagination has to be cranked up by our interactions.  We argue and negotiate. We haggle and reason and strike bargains.  And eventually it all turns into aspirations and ambitions.  Strategic planning comes as the result of specialised knowledge and above all concerted action is the result of negotiations.   All that manifested in and achieved by a rich metaphor laden language.  For a playwright, this awareness is a treasure trove that can be plundered in the creation and following of credible, sympathetic characters.

Here is a picture of Ned Kelly - leader of the notorious Kelly Gang

Theatre itself is an anarchic, outlaw, dirty faced and, in its truest sense, vulgar art-form.  It belongs to no one artist because it is not the work of one person. 

Theatre is the coming together of a disreputable band of actors, designers, makers of all descriptions, clever technicians, and above all, an audience.  Theatre is unique in its need for this great collaboration and for its essential ephemerality.  For a short while these many people with all their skills come together and then it is over and gone and lost forever.  There may be film or video of the performance or the script may be published but this is only a record not the moment itself.  

And for me it is this sense of collaboration, of this coming together of a family devoted to this one production, almost like a workshop manufacturing a great machine, that fascinates and beguiles me to want to experience this process over and over again even though it can be exhausting, annoying, frustrating and can drive you sick and mad.  And I have experienced pretty well every role within that family.  I have been an actor, director, stage hand, electrician, writer so I know what it’s like to be an unnoticed cog in that particular machine.  And I have learnt something of the psychology and management skill that is required to turn that unruly mob of talented individuals into a coherent working group with a common aim and output of great beauty and emotional force.

At various times, particular individuals or skills are in the ascendancy; audiences may be drawn by the work of a particular actor, director, designer or writer but the thing itself is still an overall collaboration in which every single part contributes to the whole.  

Here is what composer Roderick Skeaping says about the collaborative effort that goes into music making within his group Le Collectif International des Improvisateurs:

Within this performance genre it is considered courteous to show acknowledgement of the ideas of other performers – at the very least to listen to them, not that one is obliged to take an interest. If they do interest you, it can lead to better outcomes if you support the idea to magnify its impact and make it more meaningful and powerful. Ownership or authorship is not an issue here – it’s what everyone does with the idea that generates an exciting occurrence or not. If you are trying to inject an idea of your own into a texture that doesn’t already contain it, don’t be surprised or upset to have it rejected. A few strong, supported ideas will be more effective than lots of separate ones all competing for first place! If you really know your idea is great, still be prepared to abandon it for the greater good if it doesn’t take. In improvisation, a useful approach to new ideas is: Don’t block them, - rather say an inner ‘Yes’ to them. If you can add something of your own to enrich them, then this approach becomes ‘Yes...And’. If everyone is supporting everyone else, you too will be very well supported and your performance will yield a rich platter of food for thought and conversation – all part of the social process that interests us ...."

And the most shocking idea of all, In the world of ideas, using the rules and rituals of performance Le Collectif's Live Creation means that we are able to create in just such an analogous way to the uncertainty principle which allows A quantum fluctuation that gives the temporary appearance of energetic particles out of empty space. 

At a conference recently I was interested to hear how one writer approaches this collaborative effort.  Chris is clearly someone of great skill and imagination. He wrote a very successful serial for the television and has just written the first new work for a regional playhouse for ten years.  He has a long background in theatre so he is worth listening to. For him the collaborative process involved actually writing during the rehearsals themselves.  A couple of scenes would be run through with the actors, discussions would ensue and then he would go home and rewrite accordingly.  The next day these two scenes would be rehearsed and the next two scenes examined and subsequently rewritten.  This is a total collaboration in which the actors and the director have a direct input on the writing process.

For me the process is different.  I love the cut and thrust of the rehearsal room and the lurching towards an understanding of the meaning or working of the play. I respect the skills of the actors and director but I expect them to respect my work accordingly.  I claim the right to maintain the artistic integrity of the piece, I have spent at least six months creating these characters and their interactions, and I have mapped out the emotional journey that I want the audience to take. I have chosen exactly the order and structure of the story and the interactions that will demonstrate.  For me, the crucial debate is between the playwright and his or her audience. I believe it is important to understand fully one’s role in a collaboration. I believe theatre works best when within a collaboration respect is accorded equally. Cuts and edits and even reordering may take place as the actors explore the piece and reach an interpretation of it but, for me, there is no rewriting. The playwright should lead and guide and should be prepared to take that role.  It is the writer who has made the map, after all.

The audience and the actors and other members of the playmaking team play a game together.  They collaborate on suspension of disbelief, imagination and use of conventions to produce a social interaction that is understandable and satisfying to all in the room. 

Chapter 4 Belief, Bias and Common Humanity - Meditations on playwriting

I know it's all bollocks but... Suspension of Disbelief

"Perhaps the conspiracy world is an updated version of ancient myths, where monsters and the gods of Olympus and Valhalla have been replaced by aliens and the Illuminati of Washington and Buckingham Palace."  Thom Burnett in the Conspiracy Encyclopaedia using the German term Verschwörungsmythos meaning "Conspiracy Myth"

But all this about conspiracy theories, hoaxes, scams, year zero and kittens is still not the weirdest thing.  Or even the most frightening.  It is, rather, the casual, deliberate way we all as writers originate and promulgate these untruths.  We deliberately set out to mislead the peoples of the world with lies and deceptions. We create myths and untruths and spew them out willy nilly with no thought to the consequences of our irresponsible and reckless behaviour.  We collude with the hoaxers with lies and deliberate sleight of the pen.  We set out to create worlds that do not exist and the more we can deceive our audiences, the closer we can approach verisimilitude, the more gleeful we are.

I love Science Fiction and I love the way it can consider the what-ifs of the world in a controlled and entertaining way.  But somehow you get the impression that there are people out there who believe, not only that this could be the future but that it actually is the present.  So you get Star Trek fans learning Klingon and, wait for it, people registering their religious beliefs as Jedi or, maddest of all, Scientologist.  OK, if you're doing it in a Santa Claus sort of tongue in cheek way, but, no, these folk are serious.  I mean Scientology is a pyramid selling scheme.  How can you worship a pyramid selling scheme?

I have first-hand knowledge of Scientology so I can explain my reaction.  I was travelling by train down Italy and happened to share a compartment with a young Swedish guy.  He was affable and easy going but for some reason he felt compelled to show me the contents of his suitcase.  It was literally stuffed full of bank notes.  He happily explained how he had sold everything he owned and was taking the cash to join a group in Corfu, the then headquarters of the Scientology movement.  I knew nothing about Scientology and he persuaded me to meet up with him on the island and he would show me round.  As it turned out the headquarters was a large rusting hulk moored in the harbour.  The acolytes, having handed over all their worldly possessions were living and eating in communal dormitories in fairly Spartan conditions.  Nothing strange there.  There was any number of weird cults living communal lives at that time.  Except that the “Clears” the officers or priests or whatever they were, seemed to have a high old time frequenting the bars and taverns of the town and the founder of the cult, the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard was living further down the quayside in a large white motor yacht draped with bikini-clad lovelies. Cognitive dissonance on the grandest of grandiose scales. I declined the opportunity to throw in my lot with them.

And the same applies to the Nigerian Princess scam and other hoaxes.  Apparently the far-fetched nature of the narrative is designed to eliminate all but the most gullible.  The scammers want to weed out anyone who might cause trouble but for the poor unfortunate who falls for the scheme they will be drawn gradually into a web of intrigue.  Once you have parted with your details or even the thousand dollars the Princess needs to pay bribes you are hooked and you will put aside your doubts because you are now afraid of losing your first investment or even from fear that you will be made to look stupid by not following up on the deal. The deeper in we get, the more we earnestly believe and the harder it is for rational thinking to apply.

But let’s not judge these people too harshly; after all cognitive dissonance, the ability to hold two or more entirely contradictory beliefs at once, is the basis of all art.  And theatre could not function without it.  Here we call it Suspension of Disbelief.

 

I was enjoying a programme called Mystery Maps on television some time ago (I do occasionally get to watch TV) in which the presenter Ben Shephard mentioned the role of "Suspension of disbelief" in people who see ghosts or witness UFOs and suppose them to be aliens. Their readiness to believe is heightened by being in a suitably spooky environment such as a dark wood and, having recently seen a film about aliens, even the most innocent of sightings of a light will be interpreted as something other worldly. In other words, they have been primed to believe what they are about to experience and so they do. The term "Suspension of disbelief" was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 as a necessary condition for any narrative be it film, novel, play or even just a nursery tale. When we engage with a narrative we have to disregard the fact that we are actually only seeing flickering images on a screen or reading some very abridged description of the world, or even that we are hearing something utterly preposterous.  In the theatre world suspension of disbelief is our stock in trade; audience members are required to believe that this is not a stage but the battlements of a Danish castle, that this person is not an actor but is Hamlet Prince of Denmark, that he is experiencing genuine emotions not that he is just reciting lines of text.  Some people find suspension of disbelief a tricky idea and for them the whole narrative structure becomes a puzzle, but for the vast majority of people it is a perfectly natural process.  From my experience, I would go as far as to say it is an inherent capacity in the human make up.

 For some reason most of us have been gifted with this strange ability to believe two quite contradictory things at once.  The truth of what we see does not obliterate our deep held interior belief.  In the same way we can be deceived by our eyes when we know perfectly well that what we are seeing is an illusion.

I was directing a quite serious version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It was written by a very clever playwright, Jem Barnes and the recollection of what happened during one particular scene still astonishes me to this day.  In the particular scene I am thinking of, Doctor Frankenstein is in his laboratory.  He has just animated the creature which is still lying on the experiment table.  Suddenly, there is a knock at the door.  Not wanting anyone to see this abomination, the Doctor covers the creature with a sheet before going to open the door. It is his old friend Henry Clerval who wants to know what Frankenstein is up to.  Frankenstein is loath to tell him.  Eventually, in frustration, Clerval goes to the table and snatches up the sheet but the creature has now vanished. At this point there was always a gasp from the audience and after the show people would ask how the disappearance was engineered.

Here's how it worked.  We were a small company of four actors and so everyone had to play several parts. In order that these changes of character didn't appear comical, they were done in full view of the audience. No clever lighting effects, just actors changing roles.  In this scene the same actor was playing the creature and Clerval.  He was lying on the table when Frankenstein covered him with a sheet. There is a knock at the door. The actor then stands up in full view of the audience, replaces the sheet and walks round the set to enter from the other side as Clerval.  It is then he who crosses to the table and shows astonishment when there is nothing there.  The point is that the audience became so used to the convention of role swapping that somehow they edited it out of their consciousness.  They genuinely had not seen what happened in front of their eyes. They had immersed themselves in the story and their suspension of disbelief was total.

In other words the audience had chosen to follow the artificial narrative and disregard the patent, obvious truth that the actor had just walked from one place to another.  It seems that there is a parallel effect at work with sightings of UFOs and ghosts.  We see what we choose to see or what our brain tells us to see at that time in that place. It is still a genuine experience; we really have seen a ghost but the reality is that of a narrative not of the measurable everyday world.  And that’s enough of a reasonable explanation as far as I'm concerned. And that's from someone who has seen a ghost in a theatre.  But that's another story altogether.

Have you seen video of the way a hunter hunts on the savannahs of Africa?  How he stops, sniffs the air, touches the ground where his prey has passed.  Using his hands in delicate movements to trace the tracks. Making the shape of the animal with his arms, thinking himself into the animal itself.  Connecting with it so that even as the creature gains ground and surges ahead, our hunter knows where it will have gone, which way it will have turned in the scrub. He breathes as the animal breathes. He attunes himself to the animal so that even out of sight, he knows when the creature is flagging and wishes for the end. For the duration of the hunt he enters an ecstatic state in which he becomes the quarry so much so that, when, at last, the creature falls, the hunter mourns him as a brother, strokes him, and thanks him for giving up his breath to him.  The theatre of the hunt is no sciolous posturing but a genuine transformation of the self into a second reality where the outcome is that of winning food and providing life for the tribe for another few days.

There is no leap of imagination required to see how this hunting theatre transfers to a re-enactment of the hunt to those at home, and to an abstracted performance ritual that demonstrates the technique to young hunters and welds the spirits of the hunters and prey into one to guarantee future success.  The theatre of the hunt shows us how our theatre can be as central to the understanding of our lives how the adoption of character needs to be as total and believed as that of the hunter and his prey.

Somehow suspension of disbelief is a social act that enables us to share experiences and even to have views in common.  It’s a sort of mechanism that enables us to pass information to each other in a short hand way, automatically editing out the elements that are not germane to the exposition. To leap from this place to that without having to explain the long and tedious journey in between.  At the same time, we have an instinct to believe what we are told.  Somebody arriving in our village in obvious terror saying he is being chased by a pack of wolves is liable to be given the benefit of the doubt unless we have time to check out his story.  In this case we don’t.  His terror communicates itself into the rest of us and we all take appropriate action.

Where this becomes interesting is when there is no pack of wolves and our man is lying to us.  If we know he is lying, we can ignore him.  But sometimes we can go on acting as if there are wolves even when we know full well there are not.  We may do this because we want to rehearse what we would do when the wolves come.  We may enjoy the sensation of fear and want to repeat it.  We may be remembering a past event.  It may have become a ritual we carry out on a Sunday morning for fun.  Whatever the case we enjoy the game of “let’s pretend” so much so that it is built into our makeup.

Later on, I’ll talk about how this even affects the way we talk to each other and actually find ourselves saying things we don’t in any way believe.

We conspire with each other in following a narrative, setting aside our differences and perceptions of the world around.  We agree to follow the lead of the narrator or story-teller.  The narrator becomes a shamen with magic powers. We put our trust in her and allow ourselves to follow her footsteps.

So the two conditions for suspension of disbelief are firstly a carefully crafted lie, a wholly believable narrative perpetrated by the story-teller and secondly a willingness of the watchers to participate.  They must see the need for this hoax and to dive into it wholeheartedly.  As a great writer once said: “we should strive for authenticity in emotion and credibility in performance.”  And if they didn’t, they should have done.

All children play “Let’s pretend” and it’s quite clearly a way of learning about the world and coming to terms with it through experiment and rehearsal.  In children it’s called “play”.  It can also be called “lying”. Apparently we lose the ability to play as we get older but for most of us it’s still buried there waiting for some excuse for expression.  Hence the rise of computer games, virtual reality creations and tipsy dressing up nights.  It’s not that we actually lose the ability to pretend, rather that we acquire more and more ways of blocking it out. It gets overtaken by the reality of day to day existence and lost to the necessity of engaging with the world at work and only occasionally creeping out when we spend precious minutes at our desk daydreaming.  For some people the urge to play and pretend remains so strong that it becomes subverted into actual conflict with the real world hence the conspiracy theories and so on. The children’s play-lying can become pathological in adults. The necessity of floating off to a less engaged level can fuel drink and drug escapes. Theatre is the natural place to express this necessary desire for play to stop it becoming pathological.

If reality is constructed in our brains from the electro-chemical messages delivered from the senses, then belief in that constructed world grows as our knowledge of it grows and reinforces what we perceive already.  Thus as we get older it is more difficult to dislodge belief.  But what if something occurs to challenge this world view?  Science is doing this all the time and bit by bit our reality shifts to accommodate the new information.  But sometimes that new reality is too swift, too dramatic.  We cannot handle that but perhaps we want still to explore that new idea.  So suspension of disbelief comes into play.  We know and believe this world but we put it on hold temporarily whilst we come to terms with the other.  And for many people that results in the situation exactly analogous to that of The White Queen.

Theatre is the ultimate virtual reality simulation.  For this version of let’s pretend we have living and breathing actors only a few feet away from us performing a fantasy version of the real world.  It’s up to us as playwrights to give that fantasy experience depth and consistency.  To lure the audience in to our vision of the world so completely that they will willingly but thoughtfully journey with us to the end.

The pre-condition for this suspension of disbelief is that we trust the narrator.  We trust that they have made the journey before and that they know the twists and turns in the path that would otherwise baulk us.

So do we have any responsibility for the tricks we play on our unsuspecting audiences?  Does Ayn Rand have any responsibility for the practical demise of Western democracy or L. Ron Hubbard for the vast sums of money extracted from his unwitting followers?  What responsibility do I have for the nonsense I write?  I suppose I could say that I am unlikely ever to have the sort of mass world-wide following of these two.  My words are generally heard by folks who have some idea of me and what I’m getting at.  In other words, I could say that I have no intention to defraud or misrepresent.  I want to generate discussion and debate with my world of what-ifs and perhapses but not to send people out to form a new religion.  But that’s a rather mealy mouthed way of saying that I have no responsibility for my words once they have left my computer screen.  And after all I want a complete immersion from my audiences.  I want them to come as close to inhabiting my world as their disbelief will allow because that is how they will understand my ideas fully.  I want them to go away with this possible reality running through them as though they had actually experienced it.  But I am also wanting them to wake from it as though from a lucid dream and to be able to question it.  One of the other differences is that both Rand and Hubbard set out to extend their ideas beyond their fiction into the real world.  Hubbard was instrumental in actually setting up his religion (whether he believed it himself is another matter).  Rand did believe in what she wrote and actually promoted it as a real world philosophy.  But then she was a very troubled person and the confusion between reality and fiction became blurred in her own mind.

Writers have a responsibility to embrace audiences and to challenge them at the same time.  And we should remember that the power of theatre lies in its bringing people together rather than creating divisions because the essence of theatre is in collaboration and negotiation.

Chapter 3 Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

Fairy stories, Conspiracies and Cognitive Bias.  The art of Engagement

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

Thomas Hardy – Afterwards

What I noticed today was the sudden waft of resin as I walked under the pines. This isn't the gluey chemical smell you might associate with washing up liquid or bathroom cleaner. This was bigger, more complex, resonant with meaning. It conjured up two quite different memories. The first was sitting at a small table in the almost pitch black night of Corfu drinking a flask of piney retsina, "The beaded bubbles winking at the brim." At the same time, I recall trudging through silent northern pine forests quite alone and with a heavy yellow sky overhead pregnant with snow. I hope you find something to notice today.

I like to notice things.  I like to pick up bits and bobs I notice in the world around and squirrel them away until I can make something of them. I walk slow and try to listen and look but I don’t think I’m quite so good at noticing things about myself. In the last chapter I suggested that, in order for the playwright to be able to create an authentic, visceral narrative, he or she needs to discover and adopt an authentic voice and stance.  In that case it’s important for me to understand what it is I am and what drives me. I need to know who I am, where I’ve come from and, most of all, exactly what does all that museum of rubbish rattling about in my skull amount to.  What are the beliefs and irrational parts of my character? How do I twist things out of shape to represent them back to the world?  If I had any time for therapy I guess I would be finding out about my cognitive biases. This is the idea that I am right because... well, I believe I'm right.  What I believe is right and what you believe to the contrary is wrong. 

Art, history, politics, psychology, pine trees, the sea, my relationships and family they're all one thing. They make up my personality and whatever I write, comedy, drama, pantomime, murder mystery, they all reveal who I am in some small way.

It's impossible to be divorced from your work and, however you try to hide yourself, your work is a transparent window into your inner self. So be prepared to be open about what goes on inside and how it drives you. And the wilder your imaginative leaps and far flung projections, the closer they will become to you. You may want to hide behind your words but by the very act of writing, there you are, like it or not, exposed for all the world to see, trousers round your metaphorical ankles.

So why is so much of my time spent on making up lies and trying to pass them off as the truth?  And how on earth can I keep passing them off despite my pleas for authenticity and realism?  Why do I choose one narrative over another in my record of my noticings?  What narratives do other people employ and are mine any more right than theirs?

Ok, let’s talk about the bogus stuff that’s out there. Let me think about some of the narratives that others have created and which, I think need challenging.  Let me map out some of the ways I think we are being diverted from the authentic, the plausible and the genuine and led into a sham world where issues are beyond our grasp. Let me, for an example, consider the plethora of conspiracy theories and hoaxes I see promoted on the Internet.  Why do we get so worked up about them?  These are flung about and consumed with the same zeal as Coca Cola and Macdonalds or Dom Perignon and Heston Blumental’s snail porage and with the same disregard to nutrition.  And despite any evidence to the contrary, conspiracy theorists will cling on to these ideas like drowning sailors to a piece of driftwood or politicians to their scrap of power so that no-one can prise their fingers therefrom.

I ask myself: Why did NASA spend so much time and effort faking the moon landings when it would have been twenty times simpler to have gone to the moon in the first place?  All these planes leaving trails of poison across the sky, how do they fit in the passengers and luggage among all the tanks of chemicals?  Why haven’t the all-powerful Illuminati fixed the pot-holes in my street?

In a complicated world of cock up and chaos, most conspiracy theories require far too much in the way of organisational skill, money, resources and the bending of the laws of physics to make any sense at all.  They are simply too complicated to work without someone somewhere spilling the beans or inadvertently revealing the hidden truth.  Similarly, with the hoaxes and scams we’ve all been subject to.  We all know about a Nigerian Princess who would gladly give us all her treasure if only we would send our bank details.  Interestingly, that particular hoax began long before email and the internet was invented and first surfaced in the eighteenth century when the poor soul so imprisoned in her country was Spanish and delivered her impassioned plea by letter.  But it has continued to flourish and nets the perpetrators millions of pounds a year. We all know that if something seems too good to be true then it generally is but we fall headlong for these hoaxes and scams again and again.  What is it that makes us so vulnerable to them?

Conspiracists can always point to the Black Knight as proof of their theories.  In 1954, some years before anyone had the capacity to send objects into orbit, newspapers reported that there were one or two artificial satellites orbiting the earth.  These stories continued until 1960 when irrefutable proof in the shape of a strange object was photographed.  At last, they thought, our beliefs are proved to be true.

I think it’s something to do with my strong belief in a rational and trustable world.  Even if that rationale is sometimes well hidden.  You could probably say that I am a sceptic of the first water. OK, a cynic, then. The law that the simplest answer is usually the right one was dreamt up 700 years ago by a monk called William from Occam or Ockham near Guildford.    Most conspiracies and hoaxes have to be built on a teetering foundation of supposition, rumour and fear.  We suppose what we don’t know.  We believe there must be something more than just chance guiding the world otherwise why are we so poor while others have so much wealth? In the world of ignorance rumours abound and are fuelled by the ease of dissemination by social media.  If we never speak and debate face to face, we believe.  Most of all we live in fear that whatever malevolent force is out there, be it the Devil or the Government or the Illuminati and that they must necessarily mean us harm. In the end, everything we are: that is, all our possessions and accumulated junk will somehow be denied us and we will be left alone and exposed.  Times journalist David Aaronovitch says “We like the idea that there is an explanation for everything but we also like the idea that there is a hidden explanation as well.”

We sup with the Devil with the shortest spoon possible so that we can believe him to be our friend and that he will pour his random acid of evil on someone else.

Cut this all away as if with a razor and you will get something closer to the truth.  But still the conspiracy theorists and the White Queens ("Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.") will go on believing in a way the big books call cognitive bias and suffering the consequent discomfort they refer to as cognitive dissonance. And weirder still, the more the evidence is stacked against the conspiracy the more the belief is reinforced and the blunter Occam’s Razor becomes.

Let me tell you a fairy story.  There was once a wicked witch in the West. Originally she was from the East where she had been taught that everything that mattered could be weighed and measured and there was no need for any of the airy fairy flim flam that so many mortals worried about. But she had a rather beastly time in the East so she transported herself to the West where she developed a grudge against the gooey, sticky parts of mortal life that made her feel unhappy and she came to want to destroy everything that could not be weighed and measured.  She thought that everybody else should shut themselves in a cupboard and just go away. But nobody would listen to her silly ideas so she wrote all her grievances in a little book.   And then she died and with her last breath she cursed the world and wished that all mortals be turned to stone because in that way they could be weighed and measured. At first, anybody who read her book laughed at it because it was very silly and childish.  (And very badly written.) But one day some greedy and selfish crooks thought that they would do better out of the world if greed and selfishness were the made the things to be, so they took the wicked witch’s silly book and said to all their friends that this book had magic powers and would change the world as they wanted.  And gradually the book was passed around and, because these men said that the book was true, it was believed and slowly, slowly, the magic spell began to work and a dark shadow was unleashed upon the whole world because everybody believed that this was true and, what’s more, how things had to be.  And faster and faster, all the good things that were in people’s hearts like love and friendship (because the wicked witch had said such things were unfeasibly gooey and sticky) were replaced by selfishness and greed and hate and fear and everybody felt unhappy but they didn’t know why.  And they began to blame everything that was good and speak out for the evil things that were now rampaging through the world even though they were making themselves more and more unhappy.  And one of these crooks whispered in the ear of another powerful witch from another country and she said that everything that had gone before was now to be forgotten and laughed at.  And so it was.  The darkness descended on the world like a thick choking fog.  And people had no way of defending themselves against it and they began to turn to stone because a stone is easily weighed and measured.

OK not a very good fairy story but the best I can do.  It’s here to illustrate the idea that ideas can be passed around and believed despite any evidence to the contrary.  This is called cognitive bias.  We are all cognitively biased one way or another.  There are many things we believe because… well, because we believe them.  And the unhappiness it causes when it clashes with the reality of what we see with our eyes is called cognitive dissonance.

If you haven’t guessed already, the originator of all this nonsense is Russian born pulp fiction writer, Ayn Rand.  In Ayn Rand’s grindingly awful world stability would be achieved by having no government and with all individuals concerned only with their own ends. Altruism would be discounted and only self-interest allowed. What is frightening is that her bonkers belief became widespread among people who became big players in Silicon Valley and, eventually, though Alan Greenspan right into the heart of US government where the ideas brought about the collapse of two world economies; that of South east Asia in the nineteen nineties and the whole western economy in 2008. We shudder at this nonsense, these bizarre ideas of individual isolation one from another which have so thoroughly soaked into contemporary society through the vectors of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the latter who famously said “There is no such thing as society”. Yes, it’s true, she did actually say that in an interview with Women’s Own Magazine on 31^st October 1987 and it was an idea directly channelled from Rand.

While these policies derived some intellectual underpinning from economists such as Friedman and Hayek, it was essentially Rand’s philosophy that was at the stony heart of the whole enterprise.

And when this philosophy was put into action it devolved power from governments to the banks.  And the banks had only one end in view – accumulating money. It was an extraordinary display of open and naked greed, a great slobbering banquet that continued for years until nearly every cupboard and fridge was empty whilst the rest of us looked on in horror.   This was Ayn Rand’s philosophy of self-interest written on a world scale.   And in the end it was the small person who was left with a monstrous bill for the beanfeast which he or she was absolutely and utterly unable to dispute. What’s more we are made to feel the guilty parties in this farrago.  We feel powerless before this swelling tide. We cannot cope so we turn our faces to the wall, reach for the remote control or pound, pound, pound mindlessly along the clifftop and in the end we do nothing at all about it.

But, hey!  Hang about!  You say.  Here you are banging on about not believing in conspiracy theories  of the world and you’ve just propounded one of the biggest.  The virtual collapse of Western Civilization brought about by a pulp fiction writer.  Well, OK.  You, of course, have me banged to rights.  How come I can believe in this and not the one about faked moonlandings or whatever? I would defend myself by saying that actually all of this is well known and documented.  The people involved are open and have discussed it.  What they did with the banks has been admitted to and the perpetrators speak freely about it with little remorse.  So this is a conspiracy that is actually happening now and is a proud part of modern economics.

The corollary of this is The idea of Year Zero. The clock of history is reset to begin anew and usually at a year and day impossibly long ago when the world was apparently a simpler and better place. A time in which we conveniently overlook the lack of medicine and hygiene and personal freedoms we take for granted now.  Year Zero  is a reaction to the extreme Randists.  It is a reaction of people who see no way to influence the downward slide of the world into chaos.  I see the concept of Year Zero in the Christian Fundamentalists deep in the backwoods of the USA.  I see it in the hardline Putin backwoodsmen in Russia.  But most of all I see it in the Taliban in Northern Pakistan, the ISIS movement in the Middle East and in Boko Haram in Nigeria and the surrounding states.

This is nothing new.  We have seen it in the past in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, we saw it in the Jones Sect in North and Central America, we saw it in the French Revolution and onwards and backwards throughout history.  Maybe there was more than a little taste of it in the hippy communes and back to Mother Earth movements I was part of in the sixties. The whole edifice of the Christian church itself is predicated on the fact that the world will end with a Second Coming.

And we can see why the idea of year Zero is so attractive.  If you are poor and dispossessed such that you have nothing left then a return to the woods and fields seems not only attractive but inevitable.

But there is an additional feature of the idea of Year Zero that makes it more than an amusing historical trope and that is the complete and utter disregard for the sanctity of human life it produces.  I am not a sociologist or anthropologist but I perceive in these millenarian tendencies something that seems to align the end of the present world with the utter necessity of killing and killing again on a vast scale. Why?  Why should the end of one era and the beginning of a new one require so much bloodletting?  The folk who have inhabited the planet up to now and their funny ways and habits and customs and ideas such as love and sociability must be eliminated so the world can be cleansed and can begin afresh somewhere in the thirteenth century. But if we Join all these movements together, the millenarians and the privileged wealth grabbers somehow they all blend one into another. We see an almost ritual requirement for ordinary people to be crushed. Common humanity recoils from this blood lust but we cannot let the common herd stand in the way of our truth, they say.  This herd, merely cattle to be sacrificed to the blood God.

Both the Year Zero mob and the No Society isolationists have a common cause in the suffocation of common human warmth, compassion and, dare I say it, love. I see their common interest described in virtual reality games peddled to us by the same forces that propagandise the poor, sick and generally Other. These dystopian images of a future where the human race is strangled by hate and fear and the only rule is that of the gun and the laser disintegrator.

And as I dig deeper into this morass I seem to see that what ties this all together and fuels its onward rampage is this disengagement I was talking about earlier.  Not only a disengagement from politics but from humanity itself.  All of these phenomena that I've touched on have their roots in a distancing from, not only the levers of power, but the actual machinery of common human existence.   The Conspiracy theorists, The Randists, the Scientologists, the Bankers, the Rhapsodists, the Capitalists and other hoaxers and scammers. Who can tell them apart?  They see a world so maddened that it can be driven for their own ends. And so they can disseminate their own stories, the conspiracies, the year zero, the religions, the accumulation of money - anything to give them some justification for their existence.  Their stories spread.  We desire an explanation for the entirely unearned misfortunes that befall us. It seems somehow easier to believe a complex lie than the simple truth. As Joseph Goebbels is often misquoted as saying “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily”. In other words “The bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe.”  Thus the welter of propaganda of the press and the internet is lapped up by people who feel they simply do not have the time or the resources to cut through to the truth. The stories become the narrative of a whole people and, as such, they become the truth of the politicians, the spiritual leaders, the wealthy that they can manipulate to maintain their status.  They have bamboozled us with their nonsense for too long. Let us all remember this playwrights and poets alike, at least once a year on April 10^th William of Ockham’s official commemoration day. 

And just to set the record straight about Black Knight : According to Martina Redpath of Armagh Planetarium and James Oberg, it is more probable that the photographs are of a thermal blanket that was confirmed as lost during an EVA. (a space walk) Redpath wrote:

"Black Knight is a jumble of completely unrelated stories; reports of unusual science observations, authors promoting fringe ideas, classified spy satellites and people over-interpreting photos. These ingredients have chopped up, stirred together and stewed on the internet to one rambling and inconsistent dollop of myth."

Disengagement is, of course, a defence mechanism.  We all know that if we hide under the bedclothes with our head under a pillow it will go away.  Whatever it is.  And sometimes it does.  More often than not, like a bill or a bank statement or a bad smell it won’t. I guess I should acknowledge my own weakness here. I’m of the school that says “If you can do something about it, then do it.  Otherwise there’s no point in worrying about it.”  Which isn’t a problem solver but it is a strategy for dealing with the ensuing panic.  And if the thing is too big for any sort of personal action, say it’s a terrorist attack or a long illness, then I join the majority of you in laughing at it. Laughter undermines the pomposity of those who have all the hare-brained answers. Hmm.  Laugh at the troublemakers but engage with them at the same time.  A good trick if you can pull it off. But the questions still remains, how do we get stuck into the world, how do we plug ourselves back into a living breathing culture that needs us as much as we need it?  We have so little time, so few resources.

I tell myself I need to understand myself and what motivates me before I can begin to understand anyone else and write about them with any sense of honesty.  As playwrights it is important for us all to be honest with ourselves and to know about ourselves.  As a very clever man once said “Be your own lamp.  Seek no other refuge.”  That doesn’t mean that we have to be in any way even handed dealing with our characters.  That is for journalists. (Mind you whoever heard of an unbiased journalist these days?) It is not for us to pontificate, proselytise or propogandise but Playwrights are not journalists.  We are not required to be balanced.  In fact the more unbalanced we are, the more impact we have. We need to challenge our audiences to watch and listen to our characters and let them judge their actions.  As in cricket and football, the best part of the game is the arguments in the bar at the end of the match.

 The thing is that we need to be engaged, passionate about our subject.  Whether we admire our characters or despise them is irrelevant, we need to be engaged with them as they take this journey through our imaginations while being detached enough to follow their doings without hindrance.  We must love our creations and listen to what they are saying.  We must find out every single thing that it is possible to know. Fact or fiction, however much we despise our characters we must believe their every word and report it faithfully.

When I was commissioned to write about Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma I thought that I would be dealing with someone silly and vapid and very neurotic.  That’s what the biographies led me to believe, anyway.  But by the end I had completely switched my opinion.  She was no longer a figure of fun rolling down the High Street in Dorchester on her bicycle, her bloomers flapping in the wind like a barrage balloon.  I came to admire and respect her and by following her character through my play I came to see a reality that was far more than the historical biographers allowed. I hope I was able to give Emma some sort of redemption through my words.  But her redemption was of her own doing, demonstrated through the character that grew as the play grew. All I had to do was to observe and transcribe her progress.

The most boring sort of theatre for an audience is one where I bombard you with my propaganda about the state of the world as I see it.  I have learnt how quickly an audience will switch off from that so while I am driven by my cognitive bias I must keep an awareness of it and try to recognise when it is me speaking and not my characters. If it’s my voice, speaking my thoughts then I shall scrub that thoroughly. Plays occur through the speech and actions of characters.  Those characters must be given the right to roam freely.  Some of them will utter words completely at variance with my thoughts and beliefs.  The point is not to tell you the audience what to think but to offer a window on a situation where an audience can ponder and debate.  I acknowledge that you may not think the same way that I do, you may well disagree with my views.  That’s fine.  In fact that is a brilliant thing.  As an artist I will select a situation and characters whom will interact within that.  My selections will enable you to see something of that situation as I see it but it is ultimately up to you whether you agree with me or not. To be engaged doesn’t mean the playwright has to be Serious with a capital S.  I have written comedies, pantomimes, murder mysteries and biographical pieces.  I hope they are all entertaining in their own way but I also hope that each one contains a few nuggets of truth about being human mined from observation of the way the world works and how people work within it. Writing plays, creating characters and situations is one of the best ways I know for understanding people, their inner lives and the world as it is. And whether you create serious dramas or pantomimes every word you write is a mirror held up for you to peer into.  I hope I am engaged enough with my subject matter for characters and situations to leap out at audiences and remain with them and bother them until they are in the bar after the show at least.

So does this all add up to an explanation of my own cognitive bias?  When confronted by all this I am indeed, definitely and wholeheartedly cognitively biased.  What I believe so fervently is in the inherent goodness and worthwhileness of every single human being on the planet.  I must be prepared to change and adapt to new circumstances, new ideas.  I do not believe in the reality or even the concept of evil.  The world is what it is and people in it are what they are.  Things go wrong when people stop behaving in a caring, socially aware sort of way.  The opposite of good is not evil, it is apathy. The opposite of doing good is doing nothing. I have not spoken to everybody on earth so I cannot possibly demonstrate this idea.  It is merely a belief and I realise that it conflicts with the beliefs of others and as such must be a pretty weird thought in itself.  And how can I defend my cognitive bias when I can lay into that of the conspiracy theorists?  Well, the test is simplicity, adherence to factual evidence as far as I can observe and gather it and that fact that... well, I am right.

And what I believe is that we could construct a world in which it’s possible for the majority of people to become engaged with humanity again.  To take notice of what’s going on and react to it.  Not hide away and wait for someone else to do the worrying for them.  I feel I ought to use my skills as a writer to help find simple channels to engage however and wherever people can, through science, through the arts, through politics.  The theatre is the greatest tool for this process.  It alive, it is immediate.  We see emotions and thoughts played out within touching distance.  We can see the sweat on the actor’s brow.  We can smell the sweat. And we playwrights have this great sword in our hands and we should be prepared to wield for the benefit of all.  I believe that as playwrights, we need to grasp our cognitive bias firmly and hug it ourselves until we are proved to be utterly wrong.  And even then we can mark its existence and still play it like a trout on a line.

To write a play or compose a piece of music is to appear naked on the stage.  However distant the style and subject might appear to be, in the end it is you up there and if any part of the experience needs to be authentic than that part needs to be you.

We need to convince directors, actors and producers to be bold and to give writers the resources to be as brave as they can be.  If a writer is prepared to engage with their characters on stage in a bizarre ritual of cruel truth-telling and thereby show up their own foibles and weaknesses then they need to be supported by the arts establishment and given the means to attract a whole new engaged audience.

So I’m going to cling to my bit of galloping cognitive bias for the time being and, agree with me or not, I hope you will trust me enough to stay with me for the ride because the next chapter develops the real reason why I’m banging on about cognitive bias and conspiracy so much.

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