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]
