by Maddy Costa
‘Writing
can hurt people; self-exposure or self-flagellation offers no
insurance against the pain. And while I do not think all
autobiographical writing is essentially an act of betrayal, as I’ve
also heard it said, in my experience it does nearly always make
someone feel betrayed. [A]ll it has to do is offer the record of one
person’s consciousness, one person’s interpretation of events
that involved others.’ Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty
I
ended this blog in 2018 with a set of thoughts on working with Chris
Goode and, more pertinently, deciding not to work with him any more.
I had, since November 2017, been re-examining our relationship, the
amount of his thinking I had absorbed, and the ways in which I’d
written about his work; my final post documented some of that
reflection process. But there was much that remained untold, for many
reasons: there were aspects to working with Chris that I didn’t yet
fully understand; I feared that speaking publicly about what I did
understand could harm him and other people involved; after a year of
grieving over the distance between who I thought Chris was and the
man I was discovering him to be, I was tired and wanted not to have
to think about him at all.
In
the five years since November 2017, but particularly since his death
in June 2021, I’ve learned so much about the man Chris was, and all
of it has been devastating. A bully who assaulted people. An abuser
who coerced and manipulated people, particularly young men; who used
his collaborators as shields, armour, to hide behind, even as he
rallied people to drop their own armour. A paedophile who actively
sought out images of children being sexually abused. This is the man
I worked with for seven years, summer 2011 to autumn 2018, for much
of that time romanticising his work and narrating a politics of
resistance and care around it that would have encouraged other people
to work with him too. In the five years since November 2017, I’ve
devoted days and weeks to dialogue, silent reflection, and writing,
in an attempt to understand how I could have been so beguiled by him,
how I could have missed so many warning signs, and why I carry such
intense feelings of shame and guilt for the harms he inflicted on
others.
I’m
not alone in feelings of regret: many of the people who worked with
Chris share them. None of them, however, were tasked by Chris with
building a narrative around his work, building bridges across space
and time between him and potential audiences. I write from a hope
that by sharing more of what I witnessed between 2011 and 2018, and
something of what I’ve understood since 2018 through dialogue and
reflection, I might go some way towards deconstructing the romantic
picture of Chris I had previously maintained, help to clear some of
the murk that surrounds Chris’s life and death, and counteract the
obfuscations of a man who compulsively lied and misled people.
Although
I don’t speak for others, only myself, it’s impossible not to
speak of others, including people who don’t want to be named or
remembered for Chris’s part in their lives. This is my third
attempt to write this piece, each time working harder not to betray
people, while knowing, as Maggie Nelson writes, that some level of
betrayal is inevitable. I quote other writers throughout because I’ve
needed their thinking to help me navigate the confusion and tangle of
misaligned stories Chris left behind him when he died. What I narrate
is incomplete, a work in progress. Something I began arguing before
working with Chris – it was one of the reasons he approached me to
work with him – is the importance of attending not only to product
but to process. In this case, not so much to producing a perfect
piece of writing but engaging in a process of accountability. That
process began in the December 2018 text, continues here, and will
continue long after this text ends.
*
‘The
story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not
being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on.’ Patricia
Lockwood, Priestdaddy
I
write assuming that you’ve read the December 2018 blog post in
which I explained why I was leaving Chris Goode & Company. I
assume you know already its three conclusions: in my writing about
Chris and his work, I had erased the work of other women who
collaborated with him, and fuelled a cult of genius around him, and
existed within a circle of hypnosis in which I consistently asked
people who criticised his work to see it another way, a way more
sympathetic to Chris or attuned to (what I knew of) his thinking. I
assume you know from that text that I had witnessed, and begun
discussing with Chris, problems in his relationship with power: that
he would begin a rehearsal process assuring everyone present that his
was a non-hierarchical room, in which all ideas were equally welcome;
but that half way through the process he would bamboozle
collaborators by pulling rank, and expecting them to do as he, the
director, the lead artist, said.
These
are all things I wrote about in 2018, but I did so in an incomplete
way. I didn’t detail harms I knew to have resulted from Chris’s
exercise of power. I didn’t go into any detail regarding the
investigation into Chris’s practice that was conducted in 2018, the
contents of the resulting report, or Chris’s vituperative reaction
to it. I didn’t mention the artist who had told me earlier in 2018:
‘Chris is not a feminist and I don’t trust him.’ Nor did I
mention how hard I found this to hear, having not only trusted but
admired and respected Chris for 15 years, since becoming a fan of his
work. I wrote a bit about the final show of Ponyboy Curtis, but
nothing about the narrative emerging behind that work: of young men
being coerced and manipulated into performing sexual acts beyond
their desire or wholehearted consent. I didn’t mention any of these
things because I believed Chris was too vulnerable to be confronted
with them. Me leaving his Company was betrayal enough.
It
felt like betrayal because, to the extent that Chris engaged in such
language, I had been part of his work-family. The first time Chris
used the word ‘family’ was in June 2011, a month after I’d
started working with him: it was how he introduced me to a rehearsal
room team, all people he had worked with before, and I felt such
warmth in being so included. People took their clothes off in that
rehearsal room, in a way that I felt a bit awkward about, but it was
fine, because the room had an open door, and anyway we were all
adults, and anyway I’d seen a lot of nakedness in the past decade
of writing about theatre.
From
what Chris said about his work, and from what he wrote on his blog
(the bits of it that I read), the naked body was an integral element
of his practice. His practice, though, had two sides, one more
mainstream, one much less: at the point when he formed the Company,
naked bodies tended to appear in the less mainstream, more
alternative work. Meanwhile in his writing he was putting a lot of
intellectual energy into thinking about how people respond to
nakedness, and what that nakedness might say to people about how we
live together and treat each other. The monologue Chris performed in
2013, accompanied in the space by a naked young man and a cat, became
the basis of an entire book (which I haven’t read) on the subject.
In
2014 I watched a show directed by Chris, which tore at the structures
of capitalism, and ended with a different young man standing naked
but for socks and clumpy boots. I noticed at the time how this young
man’s jaw was set, teeth gritted in an expression of enduring
something he didn’t want to do. As part of my response to the show,
I wrote in this blog of ‘the failure in my thinking about [Chris’s]
work, my incomplete understanding of how and why he asks for
nakedness’. In 2012 I was part of a small audience for a duet that
Chris performed with yet another young man, in which Chris was
clothed and the young man half-naked. At one point the young man
masturbated, which was difficult to watch, because I felt he was
forcing himself to do it.
That
young man who masturbated was in his early mid-20s, maybe 14 years
younger than Chris. He had been part of Chris’s work for at least
two years already, all work I hadn’t seen, in which he frequently
performed naked. We chatted a bit in those months, and he shared with
me some of the pain he felt in his relationship with Chris, a
relationship Chris talked about in terms of love, but which the young
man felt was short even of friendship. Some evenings, the young man
said, he would suggest they sit on the sofa and watch a movie
together, but Chris would insist that they rehearse. Invariably this
meant the young man being naked, and/or masturbating, while Chris
filmed him.
By
2015, that man had stopped working with Chris, and another young man
had taken his place. This second one was more like 17 years younger
than Chris, and the relationship between them felt even less equal.
Whereas the first young man was increasingly vocal in his critique of
Chris’s practice, particularly Chris’s reliance on people working
for love rather than pay (for context, in the seven years I worked
with Chris, I invoiced for a little under £3500 across Company and
side projects, not quite all of which was paid), the second young man
was more like Chris’s mentee: Chris would give him books to read,
shaping his intellect around the work Chris wanted him to do. Again,
that work primarily involved performing naked, and private
rehearsals, and sexual acts.
Do
you hear alarm bells ringing? I didn’t, because I was listening and
looking for other things. My attention wasn’t on the naked male
body – such an established element of Chris’s practice it could
be as visible, and invisible, as that of a cat – but the political
ideas Chris projected across that body. The damage of patriarchy,
homophobia, capitalism, and how to resist them. I was present for the
first research and development days on Ponyboy Curtis, and felt that
Chris was trying to create an alternative environment: a ‘temporary
autonomous zone’ in which young men could escape the toxicity of
masculinity shaped by capitalist patriarchy, and shape new
identities, new ways of being, practising care. The young men in that
room weren’t certain what they were doing, and the ways in which
they pushed back against Chris’s directing – his dictating of
mood and task – was part of what made it interesting.
‘Temporary
autonomous zone’ is a phrase coined by anarchist thinker Hakim Bey;
it appeared in a text used in a Ponyboy Curtis show in 2016, the same
show that a critic of Chris’s work described dismissively as ‘an
argument for pederasty’. I didn’t know what pederasty meant at
the time, and had to look it up in a dictionary. Hakim Bey was also
criticised for making arguments for pederasty. But that wasn’t
where I was putting my attention.
I
didn’t return to the Ponyboy Curtis rehearsal room after the R&D
in 2014, but as the ensemble continued to perform over the next two
and a half years, performers leaving and being replaced by even
younger performers, particularly university students, I increasingly
understood there was a gap between my romantic understanding and the
actuality of the work. In November 2017, some of the performers began
to speak out about their negative sexual experiences, particularly in
private rehearsal settings; immediately the Chris Goode & Company
producer, Xavier de Sousa, contacted Chris insisting that all work be
suspended until an internal investigation had been conducted into
these charges, and a code of conduct written. Chris’s response was
immediately aggressive, and Xavier resigned within the next
fortnight. I knew resigning was the ethical action to take, but I
also felt implicated – accountable – and that my work in that
moment might involve staying in the Company to conduct my own
investigation. My impulse, however, wasn’t to speak to the young
performers of Ponyboy Curtis, but to turn to other women who had
worked with Chris. People I’d witnessed, in rehearsal room after
rehearsal room, take on the care work that Chris claimed to practise.
People who, like me, wouldn’t have been objectified by him
sexually, but might bring some insight into other ways in which he
used people.
It
took me until spring 2018, when the 17-years-younger man disclosed to
Lucy Ellinson that he was being coerced, and had been assaulted by
Chris, that I began to see a pattern in Chris’s relationships with
young men. That I properly and fully understood he was abusing them.
Shortly after, an external investigation into Chris’s practice was
requested by the senior leaders of two high-profile theatres. I
stayed in the Company through that investigation, from an
understanding that my role as critical writer should be included in
the process of accountability. In fact, the report didn’t address
it, and so I’ve been pushing through that process myself.
Recognising my silence, my lack of questioning, my averted attention,
as part of the problem. Recognising myself as a custodian of secrets,
and creator of narratives, that enabled the perpetuation of harm.
*
‘He
spoke a big game about “queering”. … In (what seemed to be)
queer porn, and in kink, he saw revolutionary interventions ... a
political subjectivity that works to undo both hetero- and
homo-normativities – queer-as-disruption, as opposed to
gay-as-assimilation: “Not gay as in happy; queer as in ‘fuck
you’.” … He viewed certain sex – certainly not all sex – as
a necessary rite of passage, without which appropriate radicalisation
was impossible.’ Natasha Lennard, Policing Desire, from the essay
collection Being Numerous
There
were young men who performed naked in Chris’s work, and then there
were young men Chris singled out. As I contemplated the similarities
between the first young man, 14 years younger than Chris, and the
second, 17 years younger than him, I realised with a jolt that they
were part of a pattern. There was another man who had preceded them,
although he was only a couple of years younger than Chris. Through
talking to that man’s partner in 2018, I learned there was another
man before him; in June 2021 I spoke to that man and learned of
another man before him; both of them also only a couple of years
younger than Chris. All five of these men identified as straight. All
of them experienced a pressured demand to perform naked, particularly
in private, with Chris filming and explaining that through this
private work they were shaping his public work, public work in which
they would excel. All of them were, at the age Chris first focused
the attention of his desire on them, in their late teens or early
twenties. Young enough, as Chris aged, to be impressionable.
One
of the things Chris wanted to impress on people – young men and
audiences alike – was the radical potential of queerness. Not the
cosy queerness that sought equal marriage (assimilation) but a
queerness that actively resisted dominant cultures (disruption). Some
of what he argued for I found inspiring; but when he spoke of an
activist group that, at the height of the Aids crisis, distributed
deliberately damaged condoms to welcome risk, I felt less sure. But
to me, with my cis-het conventionality, and lack of reading in queer
theory, most of what Chris said about queerness felt incontestable.
It was like being policed, a feeling shared by other people who
worked with him – including queer people. When I read Natasha
Lennard’s essay Policing Desire in 2021, I found it hard to believe
she was writing about her abusive ex-partner and not Chris himself.
An
older gay male friend told me once that for a gay man to obsess over
straight men is a trope of internalised homophobia. Lennard points
towards the ways that, in Chris’s case, it was something more
sinister. In October 2017, a problem arose between the
17-years-younger man and another collaborator in a work Chris was
directing. I queried it with Chris, and was told that I might see the
situation differently if I understood the young man to be bisexual
and closeted: that is, if I weren’t erasing the young man’s queer
identity. It was an identity Chris was cultivating – but Chris’s
policing successfully shamed me into silence.
The
other collaborator in that situation was queer, as were many other
people in that cast; and I was aware that Chris felt challenged by
them, insecure in their presence. On the wall in that rehearsal room
was an extract from the text being rehearsed, written by Chris: a
diatribe against privacy and its interconnections with privatization.
It was full of crossings out and questions, where it had been picked
apart by the cast. Chris wrote against privacy while coercing the
17-years-younger man to perform sex acts in private rehearsals. Chris
told me that the man was bisexual and closeted, and also told me that
the rehearsal room full of queer people was reminding him of a
traumatic experience in his past, in which he’d been victim of a
homophobic attack. That scene was replaying in his mind, alongside
thoughts of suicide. He was presenting himself publicly as a
political thinker, and presenting himself to me as a victim, to hide
his acts of abuse, and hide that the queer sex he saw as radicalising
involved emotional and sometimes physical non-consensual violence.
*
‘Queer
culture enacts rupture as substitution as the queer child steps out
of the assembly line of heterosexual production and turns toward a
new project. This new project holds on to vestiges of the old but
distorts the old beyond recognition; for example, a relation to the
father dedicated to social stability in straight culture becomes a
daddy-boy relationship in queer contexts dedicated to the
sexualization of generational difference.’ Jack Halberstam, The
Queer Art of Failure
In
2015 I had a long conversation with a performer who had been asked by
Chris, as part of a rehearsal process, to read aloud some writing
(not by Chris) that detailed the sexual abuse of a child. I was an
occasional visitor to Chris’s rehearsal rooms, and was absent that
day. I learned after November 2017 that this was another pattern:
Chris avoiding certain material, certain asks, when I was around. The
performer hadn’t been given warning of what the text contained, nor
was his consent sought, and afterwards he was shaken. Together we
discussed the moral ambiguity of this material, and our discomfort
with the thought that for some people, such texts might be a
masturbatory aid. Neither of us thought for even a moment that Chris
might be among the masturbators.
In
2018, as part of my reflection process of that year, I read a blog
post published by Chris in 2014, in which he wrote about persuading
an actor to perform naked, who didn’t want to perform naked, via
references to several pieces of porn he’d watched, at least one of
which featured people who might not be legal age. On 14 March 2021, I
learned that Chris had downloaded pornographic material featuring
children; he was then arrested on 5 May. I don’t think it’s a
coincidence that it wasn’t until 1 June – in the hours after
Chris died, although I didn’t know that until 2 June – that I
felt able to ask any questions about the age of the children
involved. With apologies to anyone who doesn’t believe in the
uncanny, I believe Chris had a hold on my mind, a hold that insisted
I care about him and not judge him, and his death set me free from
these concerns.
Given
that I don’t watch porn but otherwise live a conventional cis-het
life, and given that I fell in love with Chris’s work in 2003
specifically for how beautifully he wrote about love and
vulnerability between gay men, it was always important to me not to
judge Chris’s desires. I read the Halberstam quote in January 2021
and thought: yes, this is what Chris was tapping into when he named
Ponyboy Curtis, the culture of daddy-boy relationships that distort
heteronormative structures. A key problem of that room, however, was
that Chris refused to see its generational difference: in his eyes,
they were all boys together, despite Chris being daddy age. Once I
learned that Chris was a paedophile, I understood Chris’s
sexualisation of generational difference completely differently.
Chris was hiding paedophilia behind his own version of disruptive
queerness: making disruptive queerness and abuse of children look
like the same thing.
As
the realisation sank in that Chris actively sought out images of
children being sexually abused for his own pleasure, I began to see
his Company work in a new light. I heard anew the references to Woody
Allen in one of his monologues. I saw again the character who is
raped while dressed in school uniform, with short trousers to make
him appear even younger, in another of his shows. I no longer trusted
the humble, honourable relationship between a lost and lonely teenage
boy and a lugubrious middle-aged man wearing nothing but a loin cloth
in another show. The one reassurance I had to cling on to concerned
Monkey Bars: although it was constructed from interviews with
children, Chris wasn’t present at any of those conversations;
instead the children talked with Karl James, a specialist in dialogue
and someone who genuinely values care and attention to safeguarding
in his work with children and adults.
Paedophilia
was in Chris’s work all along, and yet I refuse to accept that this
means I, or anyone, should have known all along that Chris himself
was a paedophile. Whenever I think about this accusation, I think of
Tim Crouch’s play The Author, in which Crouch himself appears as a
playwright called Tim, who dies by suicide after being caught
watching a film of a baby being sexually abused. The force of that
play – aside from that sucker-punch scene – was its relentless,
clear-eyed gaze at the slipperiness of theatre, the ways in which
theatre makes truth from fiction and spins fiction from truth, makes
these categories unstable, brings the very concept of what’s ‘real’
into question – and makes its audiences complicit in the violence
theatre, often unthinkingly, reproduces. In 2010, The Author played
for four weeks at the Traverse in Edinburgh, where I saw it, with
Chris performing opposite Crouch in the cast of four. I have puzzled
over this for more than a year, and in September 2022 have come to
the conclusion that for Chris, The Author was a smokescreen, armour
he could hide behind, protecting him from accusations that his own
works, however seemingly autobiographical, might be true. But this is
conjecture: as with anything that Chris isn’t here to explain for
himself, I can’t know for sure.
At
the same time, I recognise that there were other aspects of Chris’s
work that I was very ready to accept as truth. His descriptions of
suicidal impulses and attempts, for instance, I understood implicitly
to be his own. I had such a clear sense of Chris’s vulnerability
that I never properly appreciated his power, or his violence.
*
‘Narcissism
is not self-love. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a nagging
horror that you are, deep down, unlovable. A narcissist needs the
love, attention and admiration of others to survive because he or she
cannot produce enough healthy self-respect to be at peace. […]
Their dark secret, the secret they can’t face, is that they loathe
themselves.’ Deborah Orr, Motherwell
There
were so many ways in which Chris saw himself as vulnerable, a victim.
He’d grown up amid the Aids crisis and turned 15 the same year
Section 28 was passed. He had a fat body in a fatphobic world. He was
an experimental theatre maker in a UK theatre scene terrified of
risk. I absorbed his sense of victimhood and believed that, through
his work, Chris was resisting and even seeking to dismantle
oppressive structures of privilege and inequality.
Repeatedly
in my years of working with him, things would happen that challenged
these beliefs, but in ways I couldn’t make sense of. It was like
being given pieces of a jigsaw that didn’t match the picture Chris
had given me to work from, and so I put those pieces aside in my
mind, to figure them out later. Performers told me that he was
bullying in rehearsal rooms. A young male performer told me that
Chris chose days when I was absent from the rehearsal room to
escalate his demands around nakedness. In 2014, Chris had written
into a monologue accounts of a ten-year-old boy committing a rape and
a heterosexual man raping his wife and a description of himself in
the midst of a sexual encounter fantasising about a paedophilic
relationship, and when the director of that monologue began to
challenge his choices, Chris became sulky and uncommunicative. I
challenged none of this, because I trusted the political work I
thought Chris was doing. Making theatre in ways that refused to make
capitalism; rehearsing for a performance, but also rehearsing less
hierarchical ways of living.
I
trusted this because Chris’s language, his articulation of his
work, his resistant politics, seemed absolute and true. This is why
2018 was a year of grief for me: belief had died, and yet still the
language remained. I know deeply that there are many people who
worked with Chris who don’t recognise the person whose actions
required the commissioning of a report and whose death revealed an
abuser and a paedophile: people for whom the experience has been like
discovering a Mr Hyde, or seeing the grotesque corpse of Dorian Grey.
There are many who experienced Chris as generous and supportive,
people who learned from him practices of care and resistance, people
inspired by his articulations of queer resistance. It is disorienting
to discover this opposite.
Once
I learned that Chris was a paedophile, the hidden jigsaw picture
became punishingly obvious. In July 2021 I read Deborah Orr’s
description of narcissism and it became a helpful frame through which
to understand Chris’s projected victimhood. According to some
research shared with me by someone else who worked with Chris –
someone who did challenge him, and also stopped working with him in
2016 – paedophilic disorder sits in the same part of the brain as
narcissism and antisocial personality disorder. The latter is
characterised by a disregard for consequences: a disregard for
people, and how they might be hurt, that I now see in a lot of
Chris’s actions, including his choice to die instead of accept
responsibility and be accountable for himself.
Whether
I was cast by Chris, or took that role myself, there were ways in
which I functioned as the Echo to his narcissist: so enraptured by
his work that I repeated the political ideas I wanted to believe in,
without sufficiently questioning the gap between intellect and
action. Now that I see the ways in which Chris distorted and
exploited the language of queerness, and resistance, I see Chris
himself as an embodiment of toxicity, and it affects how I see his
work. Ponyboy Curtis has become to me essentially fascistic: an
exaltation of whiteness and masculine virility, erasing rather than
engaging with difference. And his Company work, work that I thought
decried the inequality and violence of a world that denies people
food, shelter, education, access to art, a brutal world that trains
people from a young age to replicate the power structures of
heteronormativity, patriarchy, class, now reads to me as work
decrying the inequality of a world in which a man can’t fuck people
of the age he desires.
*
‘I
heard the news about Chris’ death in the same moment that other excavations were happening, literally revealing bodily evidence
of the many years of child abuse and genocide that have occurred on
the lands that are colonially known as Canada. Evidence of histories
that have largely been ignored, in spite of repeated reports and campaigns for justice. The two stories arrived in proximity, and they felt
utterly connected. They are both stories about harms that were
happening and continue to happen within structures that are upheld by
white supremacy. They are stories about what we choose to ignore. And
they are stories about the tightly-wound relationships between power,
hero-worshipping, and violence. [...] Our work now is to transform
those narratives, and part of that work lies inside us. In
recognising our own attachments to those narratives, in recognising
that we are part of the stories we tell.’
Rajni
Shah, Going Into the Difficulty, blog post published 19 July 2021 on
autumnbling
I’ve
quoted at length Rajni Shah – someone I’m very grateful to have
met through Chris, and to have been able to talk with about Chris for
many years – because they articulate with precision and compassion
the position I hope to inhabit in relation to Chris. Although I’ve
lost all belief in Chris’s work (and therefore in the work I did as
critical writer for Chris Goode & Company), I agree with Rajni
when they write elsewhere in their blog that erasing Chris is
potentially ‘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)’.
It
would be so easy to see Chris as an anomaly, an outlier; maverick as
a theatre-maker, monster as a paedophile. It’s more difficult –
and essential – to look at the ways in which Chris was
disappointingly ordinary: a white cis man with a warped relationship
to power, who used the environment of trust, good-will and love
relied on in theatre-making to disguise acts of abuse. Theatre is
full of them. The women I spoke to in 2018 about working with Chris
told me other troubling stories of working with different
high-profile men in theatre: men who were bullies in the rehearsal
room; men who coerced their performers to give more of themselves –
if not their naked bodies then their minds, their experiences,
particularly their experiences of trauma – than they wanted to
give; men who erased the work of their female collaborators. In March
2021, a friend sent me a photograph of a handwritten poster they’d
seen stuck to the window of the National Theatre Studio, naming Chris
beside seven other male directors with the words: ‘I HEARD YOU’RE
WORKING WITH … BE CAREFUL’ and ‘This is not a complete list.
#me too’.
These
aren’t stories I’m ignoring, but nor are they stories I’m
telling. These aren’t people I want to protect, and yet they’re
people I’m not naming: to do so would be, from what little I know
of libel law, litigious. I’m trying to rebuild my shattered
integrity, and yet I feel myself caught within a whirligig of silent
complicity that spins on, my ethics as a storyteller still in
question, my role in upholding this culture of harm and power
essentially intact.
It’s
a culture made by all of us that can, with patient work, and
attention, be unmade. That unmaking will require people to change. In
2018, Chris was asked to change. The report into his practice advised
that he write and abide by a comprehensive code of conduct, that he
adhere to safeguarding policies, that he not work in private
rehearsal rooms any more, least of all with young men, that he engage
actors through transparent audition processes, and that he bring
together an advisory board to whom he would be accountable. (In the
years I worked with him, Chris Goode & Company had an advisory
board, but they met rarely and I didn’t meet them once.) The report
appeared to be describing, not the abuse of which Chris was
specifically culpable, but the malpractice that harms and that is
rife across the theatre sector. And while it was ineffective in
regards to Chris, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful in other
ways. I heard many of its recommendations repeated in very different
contexts, in the early months of the pandemic, when theatre people
committed seriously to discussing how to bring change to this
industry that puts the show, the product, above the health,
well-being and capacity to pay rent or buy food of those who make it
– conversations all too easily forgotten when theatres reopened.
Chris was typical of an entire sector that is built on, thrives on,
commitments to human relationships, while treating humans as
disposable resources in service of a product.
Challenging
this is hard, and I know because of how I’m trying to change. In
March 2022 I was part of an awful, damaging performance-making
process with a lead artist who appeared to be centring care – for
instance, by including an intimacy director as part of the team –
but who didn’t take on board the recommendations of the intimacy
director, made other performers feel appalling when they asked
questions about the material, and sulked because the others didn’t
want to perform naked. As relationships in the rehearsal room
deteriorated, I attempted to ‘save’ the show, but doing so only
made everything worse. And so I began bringing the underlying tension
to the surface, with the result that the show was cancelled, five
days before it was due to open. There are times when the show must
not go on: this was one of them.
To
be absolutely clear, this lead artist was not abusing anyone, and is
not an abuser. That difference is crucial. But people experienced
different kinds of emotional and physical harm in the room he was
leading. And abuse should not be the one thing people making theatre
are not willing to accept.
Writing
this text has also required some change. I’ve been committed to
thinking about process, dialogue and transparency for a good decade
now, but this writing has pushed me to live that thinking, more fully
than ever. From the moment I started writing in June 2021 I’ve been
in dialogue: with Rajni, Lucy Ellinson, Xavier de Sousa; with people
I was writing about, including people harmed by Chris. All of them
have enabled me to reach new understandings, have responded to the
text in ways that led to reconsiderations and rewrites, above all
have supported me as I recognised the ways in which my writing could
replicate or perpetuate the very harms I was attempting to write
against. That delicate process of sharing, receiving, listening,
rethinking, has been difficult for sure, but an energising challenge.
It’s shown me a more ethical way of living, one in which dialogue
and transparency are tools of repair.
