Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
I have a confession to make. I, a
married woman, with two small children, am having an affair. With a
gay man 12 years my junior. I'm pregnant with our lovechild. And
we're having the baby.
How else to convey the euphoria, not to
mention sheer terror, of the past 10 days? It started so innocently:
a conversation between me and Jake
Orr at the end of my session on dialogue
between theatre-makers and theatre-writers at this year's D&D.
It was the first time we had properly spoken and we quickly
discovered a few shared experiences and principles. I was
collaborating with Chris
Goode, sitting in rehearsals, illuminating from
an outside perspective Chris' day-to-day process and the implications
of his work, whether in terms of Chris as a theatre-maker, his
relationship with the wider theatre culture, or his politics more
generally. Jake was about to collaborate with Dirty
Market, sitting in rehearsals, experimenting
with new ways to document devised work well before it was ready for
an “official” review. Even though I still occasionally write such
reviews for the Guardian,
we both expressed our frustration with mainstream media criticism as
a form. We wanted a new engagement with theatre, to find new ways of
writing or communicating about it and within it. I didn't feel his
desire to explore dramaturgy as a practice, but understood why he was
contemplating it. I admired his jumper, although I probably forgot to
say that bit.
It could have ended there, but then
Diana
Damian sent out a link to Culturebot,
a website in New York dedicated to establishing a new relationship
between artists and writers: “critical horizontalism”, they
called it, a curation of online and live dialogues with an emphasis
on theatre-writing as a creative practice. I felt an odd sort of jolt
reading it, an uncertain excitement. Then Jake read it, and saw a
vision of his future.
Ten days ago, he and I met again and
began tentatively exchanging thoughts about a new theatre website. It
would be a place of community, non-competitive in spirit, overlapping
with other websites, blogs, discussion spaces. It would operate at a
remove from the marketing agenda, the fevered fixation on press
nights and the ticking clock of closing nights. Writers and
contributors would have space for reflection: responding to theatre,
not reviewing it, certainly not belittling it with a star rating. The
writing would be strictly non-academic: I have a grown-up degree and
all but words like dialectical still turn my brain to jelly. The
space would be open to everyone engaged in making theatre possible:
not just the people who make it but the administrators working around
the piece and the audiences watching. My lovely friend Samantha
Ellis recently lent me Max Stafford-Clark's
Letters
to George (yes, I'm that ill-read in theatre
literature I'd never encountered it before) and I was struck by the
letter written after the second tech: “It's possible to endure
almost any situation at the Court as long as everybody thinks the
work is good. When the building's internal verdict is split about the
worth of a particular play morale sags alarmingly.” It's clear why
we never hear those verdicts before press night: the people
performing the play need to be protected. But what about afterwards?
How often do theatre staff who aren't counted among cast and
creatives get their voices heard, except in the most blandly
promotional way? There are so many hierarchies to break down, so many
protective barriers to break through.
So much was unknown to us in that talk:
what the website would look like, how it might operate, who would
contribute and how, where we would find the time to fit it into our
lives (I have two real, living children and Jake has two real,
time-consuming jobs, and that's just the start). Above all: were we
the only people who felt this was important? Apparently not. As we
began approaching other people – not just theatre-writers but
makers, too, playwrights and directors and producers – we
discovered we were touching a nerve. More than that: we were igniting
fireworks. I sat at my computer and with every new email saw
Catherine wheels.
It helped, I think, that this
conversation took place just as Andrew
Haydon was immersed in Forest
Fringe at the Gate. Here was a two-week
festival of work so concentrated that inevitably most of it would be
off the mainstream critical radar, even the bloggers' radar, and yet
every piece, no matter how unfinished, would be discussed in depth,
both on its own terms and in the context of the night it appeared and
the festival as a whole. It startled us all with a sense of
possibility, of what a theatre-writer could offer not only to the
people in the room at the time, but to the people around the country
who wanted to be there but couldn't. What a writer could offer to the
present and to the future. Andrew brought every single night of
Forest Fringe to life on his blog; more than that, he shone a light
on every idea and theme and thought that bounced from one night to
the next.
It wasn't until I left London for
Leeds, to spend the weekend with Chris
Goode & Co at Transform, that I realised
what a champagne bubble I'd been living in for the past five days.
The day before, Daniel
Bye had posted his musings on “embedded
criticism” on his blog and Jake and I had been compared to Marx and
Engels, which is apt to make a girl's head swell beyond all
proportion. Drunk with excitement, I did a whole lot of
self-important talking on the Saturday, for which I now feel wholly
ashamed. Thankfully, the bubble was punctured, painlessly,
beautifully, by a thought-provoking conversation with xx. What he made me question is whether the
rush to adopt a term like “embedded criticism” puts
theatre-writers at risk of creating new moulds for themselves that
might prove as rigid as the old moulds.
The engagement I, Jake and Andrew have
with our respective theatre companies is very different and that
shouldn't be blurred by a catch-all phrase. For a start, Andrew was
the only one of us who actually was writing criticism: he watched the
work on stage and reported back. What made it so valuable and
inspiring was the intensity of his watching, the acuity of his
reporting, his honesty: he never fudged not understanding, or gaps in
his own knowledge. Above all, he proved that the confession of
partiality, as opposed to the lie of impartiality that is expected in
mainstream media concerned with issues of “trust”, makes a review
look more searching and truthful, not less.
What Jake and I have been writing is
anything but criticism. More or less live-blogging from the Dirty
Market rehearsal room, Jake produced a
blow-by-blow account of the making of a devised show that conveyed
frustration and boredom and inspiration in equal measure. Its careful
examination of the role played by each person in the room was full of
questions: what are the directors doing? What does a dramaturg do?
Does anyone know what's going on? Are these moments of lostness OK?
Is it legitimate for me to feel part of the work even though I'm only
an outside eye? Isn't it weird for me to be in the room and remain
silent? If I can see a way forward for the piece, shouldn't I speak?
Although they forged a relationship
through proximity, Jake didn't know Dirty Market before meeting them
for this project, which is a totally different proposition to how I
work with Chris Goode. I've been an awestruck fan of Chris for a
decade now; the way I see it, I gave him a piece of my heart the day
I watched Kiss of Life in 2002 and every time I see a new show I give
another (after Woundman,
a particularly big chunk). What he has given me in return is faith
and trust. Whatever I doubt about my ability to do full justice to
his work, there is one thing I know with absolute certainty. When I'm
in his rehearsal room, I am silent witness. What I see may not be
clear to me in the moment of watching, so I absorb as much as I can
and watch it again and again in my head until that mistiness clears.
And I'm there not because I'm A Critic, or because I Write For The
Guardian. I'm there because of whatever that individual thing is that
Chris sees in me, that I can't see in myself.
To me, the value of all these
collaborations is really obvious, but one question Jake and I keep
butting against is: are we just talking to ourselves, or to the
tiniest of cliques? I honestly can't imagine people not being
interested in every aspect of theatre, especially – to borrow
Chris's phrase – upstream theatre, but then it's my life, my
passion. Whenever it worries us, we remind ourselves of another
principle of the website: we're not concerned with “success” in
the capitalist market-forces sense. This is a space for labourers of
love, not chasers of profile or monetary gain. (The title for this,
by the way, comes from John
Holloway's Crack Capitalism.) To me, that is what theatre is for:
it shows us what happens when people are not generous to each other,
or distrust each other, or live in a state of hostility, and what
happens when they extend kindness, sympathy, love. In promoting new
collaborations between theatre-writers and makers what Jake and I are
promoting are new dialogues of generosity. If that's perceived by
readers or audiences as disregard for the outside world, we'll have
expressed ourselves very wrongly indeed.
There is a general attitude of
suspicion around theatre-writers forming relationships with makers, a
sense that it compromises our writing and skews our judgment. But I
don't buy it. I feel much more compromised writing a
review of Enda Walsh's new play for the
Guardian that doesn't confess to the minor crush I harbour for the
man: I go into his plays intending to like them. I feel much less
truthful writing up an interview with Amy
Lame for G2 in which I give no indication of
the fathomless admiration I have for the woman. There are so many
secrets in theatre, so many agendas and prejudices, so much dishonest
practice. Surely we can be more open than that?
Once you start to unpick the unstated
rules of theatre-writing, so much unravels. Going to Leeds made me
think very hard about the media representation of “regional
theatre”, how it upholds the idea of a gap between London and
Everywhere Else. I want to join the two up and keep that
London-centric bubble that consumed me last week punctured. As part
of my work with Chris Goode, I interviewed the chief executive of
WYP, Sheena Wrigley, and had every assumption I held about her
rigorously challenged: that she was conservative in outlook because
of where she works, that she is more concerned with bums on seats
than artistic ambition. So many walls have been erected between
“experimental” and “challenging” and “abstruse”
theatre-makers and the grown-up world of mainstream, conventional,
traditional theatre. Let's smash them down. Let's stop locking
theatre in boxes and start talking.
So that's the thinking behind this new
adventure Jake and I are embarking upon. At the moment, we don't know
for certain what we'll physically make: what we have is a
constellation of dreams. I like to think of our website as a great
big playground, where writers and makers and audiences alike can take
turns having a turn on the merry-go-round and the swings. But I like
thinking of it as “the lovechild” even more, partly because it
really does come from a place of intense love for theatre and
writing, and the exhilaration of new friendship and mutual support
that I've found with Jake, but also because, just as any baby emits
an awful lot of poo in its early days, I'm sure we will make a lot of
mistakes. But then something will happen that is as joyful and
surprising as a child's first silvery, gurgling laugh, and all will
feel right with the world.
So here we are. Building the
playground. Birthing the lovechild. Setting off fireworks. All things
being equal, this will be posted on Deliq, but readers who might
never have encountered my blog before will reach it from the new
website. We're calling it DIALOGUE,
because that's what we dream of: shared communications, bringing
everyone who loves theatre together. It won't always look the way it
does when it launches, but in the spirit of collaboration that will
characterise everything that we do, we're following the advice of the
mighty Tassos Stevens: start simple and leave space to grow.
It took just a week of thinking closely
about what it is I do and want to do, who I am, where I am in the
world of theatre-writing, of – God help me – theorising my
practice, to make me horribly self-obsessed. So much internal
analysis isn't healthy. It totally affected the way I watched Chris's
astonishing piece 9 in Leeds; I'll explain how in a future piece. I
never want that to happen again. If there's anything that engagement
with the writings of 1970s feminists has taught me, it's that want to
live very consciously – but not self-consciously.
So here we are. Let the dialogue begin.
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