I Told You This Would Happen - On Tour

Hello.

I'm going to put some thoughts about touring I Told You This Would Happen here because this show is really hard, and also really brilliant to perform.

I can't promise there won't be spoilers. So if you haven't seen the show and plan to, read on at your own risk. If you like knowing what's going to happen before they do, maybe join a group or something, because life happens man.

Thursday 28 May

We opened in Hull last night. Part of the story I'm telling happened in Hull. I realised as the Humber Bridge loomed from behind the bend of the M62 that I hadn't been back since. Good, I decided. I'm back on my own terms. Frankie's Tavern, the docks, the station. Still, good. 

The tech didn't finish until 19:40, I was on at 20:00. Less good. (Nobody's fault, brilliant and patient technicians getting to grips with a technically nuanced show). Lounged at the desk, sharpening my pencils, feeling more in the room than I remember feeling during the previews. Back then, I was deafened by my heart gulping in my ears, tonight I'm enjoying the pre-show music.

Clearance, first move, start talking: to the people in the room Kathryn. There are people here to hear you. I don't want to be here, I don't want to do this (I'm talking though, the words are coming out, in the right order). I feel this to a certain extent with every show, it's a hard story to tell, I have to get to a dark place by the end, and at the beginning that feels like a crazy thing to be volunteering myself for. But it's written in such a way that the play just happens to me, and the more I let it, the better it is. There was a catharsis when I wrote it, and there is in the playing too. 

I make eye contact with a couple in the front row, there's an interesting woman on the end, another older couple further stage right, a man I come to silently refer to as 'the reviewer' for reasons unknown to me, and a sporty looking man in the middle, on his own, possibly straight from the gym, what made him book this? I wonder. He's precisely who I want to have this conversation with tonight. Come on then, you're on.

Off to Halifax this morning. Raging thirst. 

Me: There's a retail park behind this roundabout, I'm just going to pop in there, want anything?

Tech: You really do know Hull then.

Me: Yeah.

In Boots: all Boots shops look the same except when you're a time traveller and it's 2007 and that's not the pharmacist you remember. 

Bought some vocal zones, because I'm here for a show. Still good.

Tech: So was it just coincidence then, that the tour started in Hull?

Me: Yeah. 

I slip Dr John into the cd player. Nicked my boyfriend's car cd case before I left. Feels good to be blasting some good blues as we zip up the flyover, past the Humber churning mud. 
Feels good to be playing music I listen to with someone brilliant. Feels good to be doing this on my own terms, and not on my own.

Halifax is lovely.

Friday 29 May

The get-in in Halifax made me want to take up smoking. The anticipation of performing filled my stomach with acid, at twenty to curtain up I'm having that kind of full body flush usually reserved for being sick. 

The show was fun though. Endless technical hitches gave my relationship with the space a live quality that allowed me to play, and we got some nice laughs.

I learnt I don't need feedback. I asked my producers to send out a feedback form with the programme sheet. What was I thinking?! People can have whatever reaction they want to this show, and frankly it's none of my business. 

Toying with the idea of collating any feedback I get and posting it to Douglas McPherson in a glass box with a big TICK painted on the side of it. 

Dear #tigerdouglas, 
Here is some testimony of what subsidised art means to people in rural communities and anywhere else that isn't ONE POSTCODE IN LONDON (who wouldn't see work like this or anything else without subsidy). 
A bientôt,
Beaumont x

PS. Turns out Capitalism isn't an entirely fair system and money has a funny way of making its way back to the same people. Measuring success on ticket revenue is a bit like the star rating system some of you critic types still go in for - pretty fucking arbitrary and entirely based on the bias of the critic or system.

And just one measure of many.

And I'm getting off topic.

Saturday 30 May

Cleaner show on the tech side of things meant it was easier for last night's audience to join the dots, and they were wonderfully with me through the whole thing. Chipping in with 'yeah's and 'oh no's. Looking forward to tonight, and a whole day in sunny Hexham with no get-in.

Tuesday 2 June

There's a thing that happens about two thirds of the way through the show, after we've had a few laughs, and around about the time of the 'fucking' slide, when people stop looking at me. Maybe it's counter transference on my part, but it feels a bit like I've betrayed them with what our relationship is about. I'm really pleased with this as a dynamic. It enacts the subject matter. 

To the woman who cried. I am sorry, but I hope it helped.

Doncaster tomorrow.

Monsters Inc

So Rolf Harris is the latest to be declared 'a monster'. 

David Sillito reports for the BBC:

"During his trial prosecutors said Harris was a "Jekyll and Hyde" character who took advantage of his fame."

Jane Peel talks of Harris': 'Dark side revealed under court's spotlight'.

I find this gothic language unhelpful: it's another way of making abusers 'other', another way of pretending this sort of thing is down to a few objectionable individuals, rather than something our culture facilitates. It was the same with the Elliot Rodger case: a kid declares his hatred for women because not one of us had offered ourselves to him, and he goes out and shoots at people, killing six. However the news stories are of a 'virgin killer' (like that explains anything) or even more worryingly fixated on his asperges as a means of  discounting the misogynistic intent of his attacks. 

If you listen very carefully you can hear the thrumming bass line beneath this kind of reporting 'notallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmen...'  

Thing is, it's much more terrifying than that: you don't have to be a monster to be an abuser, you just have to decide to do it.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Charles Saatchi, pictured throttling his then wife at a ritzy London restaurant, now hosting artistic depictions of said assault on his company's website: enacting that very capitalist tactic of absorbing the opposition in order to smother it. And if there's one thing Mr Saatchi knows, it's the role of buying and selling in defining an artefact's cultural worth.

I'm not for a second implying that the acts perpetrated by Harris, Rodger, Saatchi and their fellow abusers aren't monstrous, but I am also saying: 'nice' men harrass, groom, molest, hit, strangle, manipulate, assault: nice men rape.

I've been thinking a lot about shocking truths supposedly 'hidden' in plain sight. I've written a show that is partly about how we only see what we are pre-disposed to see. It's a show about how our misogynistic culture plays out in our intimate relationships. It's also a show about Pick up Artist forums. For the uninitiated: the Pick up Artist industry teaches men techniques and behaviours to employ in picking up women. Despite the fact that these techniques are often highly reductive, predatory and manipulative, PUAs are largely written off as losers who can't pick up girls (sad little monsters). These have spawned reactionary 'anti-PUA' sites which refute the notion that men should have to use techniques or behaviours to get sex from women: not because these techniques and behaviours are often highly reductive, predatory and manipulative, but because women are only good for etc etc (shouty scary monsters). Seen in this context Rodger's actions are the logical end game for misogyny.

'notallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmen...'  

Recently a very wise and very dear friend accused me of making 'middle class' art. As I baulked at this over my g'n't it clarified something for me about where I'm positioning this piece, and the media's infinite ability to be shocked by revelations of another nice man we all trusted before putting him in with all the other monsters...

Discounting is an unconscious minimisation or exaggeration of circumstance, relating to the self, others or a shared reality.
There are four accumulative levels of discounting:
1) The existence of a problem: nice men don't rape
2) The significance of a problem: ok, nice men do rape but it doesn't affect me
3) The possibility of change: ok, nice men do rape, this is bad for everybody but what can we do, it's the way they're wired, or something. 
4) Our personal ability to effect change: ok, nice men do rape, this is bad for everybody, the ability to decide what we do with who we are is what makes us human, so I'm going to...  

My answer to that last one was to write my show. 

I've had to graciously concede that I'm not making proletariat revolutionary art. In fact, it's worse than what my dear, wise friend suspected, I might even be making art for the ruling classes. I wonder whether the four levels of discounting are also mirrored in how to make 'revolutionary' art according to our class system? And for this definition of revolution I shall appeal to the etymology of the word: to revolve, to roll back (the shutters, perhaps?):
1) Make the people at the top aware of the existence of a problem. No bread you say? Let them eat cake...
2) Cause a commotion with the people in the middle that cannot be ignored, which means we cannot flick past it in the Sunday Supplement: and suddenly EverydaySexism means #YesAllWomen.
3) Let the people at the bottom know that it does matter, and it is shit and it doesn't have to be like this...
4) Revolution.

Or perhaps (and this is my vain hope) you can make something that contains enough for all four to happen, quietly and personally. Perhaps you can make something that enables one person to be shocked that nice men rape, and another to see that they can do something to effect change. I sincerely hope so, because that's what I'm spending my summer attempting to do. 

Going off-script: real life ad-libbing.

In the show I’m currently touring we open by asking members of the audience to make a plasticine version of themselves as they enter the theatre. Last night in Alnwick a gentleman came up to me during this initial pre-amble to protest that he ‘comes to the theatre to be entertained by the performers and not the other way around’. On leaving he let it be known that he still prefers ‘plays with a script’, which we took as a gratifying compliment. Thing is, we do have a script, but we’ve also got carte blanche to meander from it according to whatever is happening in the room during each performance: heckling, phone calls, stage invasion - all actions are gleefully incorporated into the show. We’ve done our jobs well when even the scripted bits feel as if we’re improvising.

Yet again I find myself comparing this experience to the theory around life scripts. This weekend on my psychotherapy course we explored our own life scripts [meaningful face]. The psychotherapeutic counselors among you will be familiar with the ‘this is your life as a play’ exercise, for the uninitiated: essentially, you imagine your life as a play.

To envision the First Act of our life play we are led by the course tutor to imagine the stage onto which our life is set. What kind of play are we watching? Who are the main characters? What is the atmosphere? Act One ends with the beginning of adolescence.

The theatre maker in me was already on guard for any Chekhovian weaponry adorning the flats. (Anton Chekhov’s remark about playwriting that ‘if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, it must be fired before the end of Act Three’ is one of the oft quoted golden rules for making theatre, along with Aristotle wanging on about time, and if you’re going to tour a show, three is the biggest cast you can fit in a van). Of course because life scripts are by definition ‘unconscious’ it might not have helped the exercise that I was cognitively analyzing my life script with such professional interest. I found myself resisting the reflex to imagine a proscenium arch stage with obligatory red velvet curtains, yet despite the fact that I can count on one hand the times I have performed on such stages in my career, this stereotype is what sprung to mind when asked to ‘imagine a stage’. In a small way this is an example of how life scripts work: an inherited idea with which, despite present-day resistance, we are compelled to comply.

The Second Act of our life plays took us up to present day. After the fight-dance choreography item of my late adolescence I found myself turning to the box and asking for the house lights to be switched on and the red velvet curtains taken down. I stood on the lip of the stage, conscious of being higher than the stalls and not wanting to be, conscious of ‘being in a play’ and not wanting to be. As we took a break to notice what we had conjured in our respective life-plays my mind wandered as I wondered about the connection between my desire to break the fourth wall in both my ‘life play’ and work in general.

So much of the theatre being made now that excites and engages me enacts this deconstruction of inherited convention. The artists I look up to are the ones you don’t literally look up to from the stalls – they’re on the threshing floor with you, in this moment, in the same room, and they’re talking to you. Not yesterday’s audience, not the audience they imagined in rehearsals, but the living-breathing-right-here-now audience. In a sense, the theatre I’m interested in making is theatre that is interested in breaking it’s own inherited script.

I’m thinking of Steiner’s assertion that life script is ‘a life plan which is rigid and unchangeable. Like the lines of a play, a life plan expects to be followed word by word from beginning to end and allows for little improvisation. A script is written by somebody else and like actors in a play we feel bound by ourselves and others to act the part to the bitter or happy ending’ (Steiner C, 1979, Healing Alcholism).

Far be it for me to contradict the man who brought us ‘Warm Fuzzies’ but there are plays that allow for a bit more than ‘a little improvisation’, in fact there are plays that allow some of the script to be created live each night. I happen to be in one. I concede the ending is always (necessarily) the same, and to that extent it is absolutely scripted, however the care taken to make it feel like it might not be, speaks to the desire to ‘break script’ and act according to the moment, to be truly ‘live’. It is pleasing that the same language when applied to breaking life scripts describes people who are wholly a-live.

To imagine one’s Third Act is to contemplate the type of ending you feel your life play is heading toward. ‘Ah’, I thought, as I returned to the mind-theatre I had just flattened at the end of Act Two, what to do now then? Make it about the audience, I supposed. Let some of the audience onstage. Go and sit amongst the others. ‘What happens next?’ Well I have no idea - it entirely depends on who else is in the room. ‘How does it end?’ Well I guess I’ll leave, at ground level, probably through a fire exit, I might afford myself a Hollywood-esque backward glance, perhaps I’ll sight a space once called ‘a stage’ filled with people getting on with stuff. Maybe I’ll have played a part in starting that.

[Curtain]