The queen of my world

This morning my head is full of this

and this

and this

Last night I fell asleep burning to write about Kathleen Hanna, but then my son woke me up at 1.44am and 6am needing help because he has a dicky tummy and was exploding with diarrhoea, and now I'm looking at the eight-project to-do list and wondering if I should bother.

This morning my best friend from teenage years, the girl who stood on stage with me in an upstairs room in Camden and read out poetry by Sylvia Plath while I clanged around with a guitar (we only did it once), sent me an email confessing that she feels ordinary, vanilla. “Having kids knocked the stuffing out of me,” she writes. The line rattles in my heart like a pebble.

Last night we saw The Punk Singer together. It reminded me of every time I've thought about starting a band and weaselled out. Of every time I've shut up and let someone else tell me what to do rather than standing my ground. Of wanting to start a magazine and looking for permission, which is slightly more than but also the same as looking for money, instead of just slapping one together with a stick of glue and a stapler. The constant nagging thought in my head: I'm not doing enough, I'm not loud enough, I'm not strong enough to remake the world.

But that's not what it's about.

There's a brilliant line in The Punk Singer, where Hanna talks about making the first Julie Ruin record, alone, in her bedroom, quietly rebuilding herself after the fallout of Bikini Kill. I won't paraphrase it; here's her making the same point in an interview in 2013:

I needed to get used to the sound of my own voice, and I think that’s what makes a girl’s bedroom special. You can make whatever you want when you’re alone in your room. The thing that’s interesting to me about the mention of it in the film and the way it was structured is that there are all these different girls' bedrooms and all these girls are making their stuff, and then they’re throwing it away, and how can we connect these bedrooms? We’ve seen today that we can connect these bedrooms through the Internet. That’s one of the positive things happening.

Around the time that interview was published, I threw away most of my teenage years and 20s: it was all just so much clutter. Not the fanzines, though. I kept those. 

(I talk a lot at the moment about wanting to connect the disparate conversations happening in theatre, about finding ways to share ideas, the responsibility I feel to join the dots. How writing might do that, a magazine might do that. The itch to make another fanzine is strong.)

Truth is, when my best friend and I went to see Bikini Kill, I guess when they toured in 1993, I was disappointed: they were a racket, and aggressive, and the whole thing was so confrontational I couldn't connect to it. The anger terrified me. And there was a lot about their construction of feminism I didn't understand. Why push boys to the back, instead of fighting for a space where girls and boys could stand-dance-sing side by side? I have a letter from another riot grrrl, older than me, explaining that one with gentle patience; I remember reading it and feeling like an idiot.

I'm berating myself again.

Watching The Punk Singer, I recognised the extent to which Kathleen Hanna raised the stick against which I have measured most of my life. Riot grrrl changed me. It gave me feminism, politics, a way of looking at the world. I knew I wanted to make stuff when it happened (writing, art, music, I didn't know, but something), and it told me to just get started. It told me to think hard about what I was saying. And something else it told me, which even now I keep needing to remind myself: if, by saying something truthful, something vulnerable, you can connect with one other person and make them feel less weird, less stupid, less alone, that is enough.

Like all feminists, I have moments of feeling unutterably depressed by apparently how little has changed for the positive in the 20 years since I encountered it. From the micro – girls are still pushed out of the front at gigs – to the macro, which is just about everything. When I started reading Susan Faludi's Backlash last year, a book I bought some 20 years ago, I was astonished: she's writing about the virulent media, cultural and political backlash against feminism in the 1980s, but all the newspaper articles she quotes, all the instances she gives of films and speeches and stupid attitudes, could have dated from any time since.

But the systems we struggle against are strong, and we can't give up, I can't give up. There's another brilliant line in The Punk Singer where Hanna talks about starting Le Tigre with Johanna Fateman, the two of them sharing all the shit they'd experienced, and deciding they wanted their new band to be celebratory, to focus on the stuff that made them happy. By the time I got home I had Diane di Prima shouting in my ears: ALL POWER TO JOY, WHICH WILL REMAKE THE WORLD. Anger is vital. But so is joy.

Having kids knocked the stuffing out of me, too. I still feel I have to ask for permission to work, not just from the family, from myself. Every day is a fight against spurious expectations, guilt, convention. If dismantling the patriarchy starts at home, I'm failing. I don't need anyone to tread me down: I do it to myself. As for the kids, every time one of them espouses conformist gender cliches, a bit of my soul breaks. But it's not just about me teaching (nagging) them to be different: it's about letting them find the culture that will give them the tools to make themselves different. If they find something even half as inspiring, challenging, electrifying as riot grrrl, I'll be happy.

This morning, over breakfast, I played them Le Tigre, and we talked about What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?, and my son said he's not a misobogutist because that would mean he hates me and his sister. So, you know, that's a start.

edinburgh 2012, day two: dialogue st stephen's, best in the world, once in a house on fire, oh the humanity, me and mr c, the ugly sisters, paper stages, letter of last resort, good with people

[I feel more than a bit stupid publishing this. It's taken me a month to assemble. In retrospect, this is a massively self-indulgent idea. Also, it's embarrassingly long. Just to put you all off before you even start.]

6.43am, Thursday 16 August 2012. Bedroom door opens. Five year old. “Mummy, I need a poo.” I really should have gone to bed before 1.48am.

10.35am The cafe at St Stephen's has been rearranged so everyone coming to Dialogue's first live outing can sit in a circle. Disadvantages to this: when people start arriving to watch shows in the Northern Stage programme, the circle looks closed, as though they're not welcome in the conversation. Lesson one.

In the room are: Erica Whyman, artistic director of Northern Stage. Daniel Bye, Alexander Kelly, Chris Thorpe, Lucy Ellinson, Gary Kitchner, Helen and Abbi of Rash Dash, Annie Rigby, possibly Francesca Waite, all of whom are in or have directed work in the Northern Stage programme. Clare Duffy of Unlimited, here at Lucy's invitation; Amy Belson (press officer) and Joanna Hawkins (marketing officer) from Soho Theatre, and, briefly, BAC's David Jubb. Jake Orr, Honour Bayes, Matt Trueman, Dan Hutton, Catherine Love, Andrew Haydon and me, all of us at different stages of writing about theatre. Jake marvels later that we managed to create a space where a student (Dan), a theatre-writer in her very early 20s (Catherine), and the newly appointed assistant director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (Erica) could sit side by side as equals. Lesson two.

Something Jake and I talked about in organising Dialogue St Stephens was informality, wanting it to feel like a party where everyone is excited and talking but it's not just talking, there are performances, poetry – there are makers here, after all. None the less, even I'm surprised when Jake gets us started with a piece he's written called Who Am I?, celebrating the freedom in identity confusion, in piling label upon label on to yourself to create a plural not singular being.

I'm many things. I'm 24. I'm male. I'm a white middle class male. I'm gay. I'm a writer. I'm a foolish writer. I'm a blogger-come-writer-come-reviewer-come-critic. I'm a facilitator. I'm a maker. I'm a dreamer. I'm nothing. I'm confused. I'm bemused.

Dan Bye, who has less than half an hour with us, steers us next, into the topic of preparation: performers have a preparation ritual, but what do theatre-writers do to limber up for a night of reviewing? Do you address any assumptions about the work? Do you read the text in advance? What about the programme notes? Catherine talks about subjectivity, the lie that critics can be more objective if they don't expose themselves to publicity material. Jake brings up youth: not having a back catalogue of previous productions with which to compare a work. Annie talks about the effect of positive reviews – or, as Andrew clarifies, star ratings – and how they make audiences expectant in an aggressive way. Erica wishes the critics doling out star ratings were more specific about their expertise – especially when the demands on makers to demonstrate expertise are so stringent. Taste comes up, its effect on how people watch a show, and how rarely it's owned up to. Annie expresses a desire for properly critical engagement, reviews that give useful feedback – dramaturgical notes, Andrew suggests. Erica wishes feedback and negative criticism could happen in dialogue rather than print. Alex wonders where you have that conversation, and how to avoid a response to a review looking like sour grapes. It feels as though we're filling the room with bricks, cement, sand, water – but no one knows what exactly we're building or how to begin. Lesson three.

Next, a game. Annie had suggested in advance that she write a list of 10 things artists don't say to critics, and wondered whether we might compile a response. Her list is:

1. So, did you like it?
2. I know you've got a word limit, but now we're here together it would be great to talk about that sentence you wrote.
3. So you say, “Just email me. Just send me a press release.” But you never reply. And I'm left not knowing whether you haven't read it, or you're not interested, or I wrote the wrong thing.
4. Can we make some space to talk about what you got right and wrong? Like, if you could rewrite one review, what would it be?
5. I'm giving your review 3 stars. Don't be disheartened. 3 stars is a good review.
6. It's not a play. Get over it.
7. It's a real problem that you never come north. It's not just that we want the coverage. It's more about getting some decent quality criticism.
8. What made you want to be a critic?
9. Some of us are making real financial and emotional sacrifices to make our work. Do you see this? Is it useful to know?
10. How long do you spend writing a review? And how soon after a show do you write it? Are you happy with this?

A lot of this makes everyone laugh, but 9 and 10 make the writers in the room squirm. Especially 10: spending three hours on a review is such a meagre return for patient, time-consuming work spent making a show.

In return, my five things critics don't say to artists (I know, I flaked, I'm sorry):

1. I fell asleep.
2. I missed that key speech/ laughy bit/ image because I was too busy thinking about what I need to buy from Sainsbury's tomorrow.
3. My head was too full of other stuff when I wrote about your show, so what I wrote could have been written just from the blurb/press release.
4. Unlike the director, I have some really good, clear ideas for how to direct this show.
5. It's not you, it's me.

Of those, I am personally guilty of 1, 2 and 5. And I really don't mean 5 to sound flip, even though it does. On those miserable evenings when everything happening in a theatre seems to be rotten, it's so easy to blame the makers, rather than your own palate – and to forget that someone else in the room might be having the time of their life.

I'm generally loathe to talk about star ratings, yet it's me that turns the conversation in that direction. Annie and Alex are talking about the frustration of wanting critics to see their work, and the belief that critics generate audiences, which raises some questions for me. Who are the useful people to come into the show? Does it stop at the broadsheets? Does it filter down to Andrew and Matt? Catherine and Dan? Is the thing that makes a review useful the star rating?

It's a wriggly writhing can of worms, one I've seen opened during at least four Devoted and Disgruntled sessions, to little positive effect. As a writer for a broadsheet, I know that the answer to Alex's question, “What would happen if critics refused to put star ratings on reviews?”, is: “Editors would put them on for you.” Of the people in the room, only Matt says he likes the system, because he considers stars “a tool for nuance”. I think they're a tool, too: a sledgehammer.

A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity.

Let's just leave them to be that.

That's Lucy. She argues that everyone loses out in the star system – even critics, because the stars override the actual writing. She also points out that if it's hard to be nuanced in a 200-word review, how is it possible to be nuanced in a 140-character tweet? The general feeling is that tweeting about theatre is irresponsible, unless to give an uncomplicated thumbs-up.

The discussion comes to the boil when Chris tells a story about a major theatre looking for a new artistic director, and two people who applied for that job. Both had had work reviewed in the run-up to the shortlist being drawn up, and the feeling among people connected to the building (if not the shortlist process) was that x, whose show had been given four stars, was in with a better chance than y, whose show had been given three – even though the work was very different. To prove that even the artist mindset has been infected by the star system, Chris asks the makers in the room: when you see a poster with a quote from a review, but no star rating, what do you think? The unanimous answer: three stars.

At this point, it becomes useful to have the Soho press/marketing team in the room (lesson four): for them, stars are the easiest way to get audiences through the door. Most people are lazy, says Amy. If a show has four stars, they come. If it has three, it's more of a challenge.

To which Lucy posits a let's-make-the-future alternative: what if theatres stopped using the stars for advertising, and instead of giving prominence to what broadsheet reviews say in publicity material, gave prominence to what bloggers say? How long would it take to shift the way audiences choose to see shows?

It's a big conversation, an unfinished conversation. A conversation full of holes: I'm acutely aware of St Stephen's audience members listening but not joining in, of the silence of Rash Dash, Gary and others in the space. There's a lot to digest before the Dialogue residency at BAC starts, a lot to learn for our next live outing (September 22, details here), but also from what Alex says about feedback to work in progress, and how the most useful thing about Scratch culture is not what gets said or written about the piece, but the voice in the maker's own head that gauges how the material is coming across to the audience.

Alex closes the session with his favourite piece of parenting advice: think about the adults you want your children to be, and be that person. As general rules for life go, that's pretty acute.

12.45pm Best in the World. In the library: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and a pile of self-help/motivational books. On the TV: darts champions through the ages. Research: an interview with Jonathan Edwards, who holds the triple jump world record. And memory: Ian Charleson's performance as Hamlet, weeks before his Aids-hastened death, in which he gave himself so utterly to the part that the lines between truth and fiction, person and performance, became blurred. The same could be said for Alex Elliott: “I'm going to be myself,” he tells us early on, “and I invite you to do the same.” But what does it mean to “be yourself”? Every self is a performance, modulated for an audience, be it a close friend or a bunch of strangers, the people from work or the parent who sees beneath the mask.

A few months ago, when Best in the World was at BAC, I didn't bother going, because I thought it wouldn't be my cup of tea. Wrongness. It's delightful on so many levels. Elliott is gorgeous to watch: generous, honest, funny, encouraging. He invites us to think about insecurity, inferiority complexes, the urge to brush off compliments, and offers an alternative: the possibility of a self-appreciation free of egoism. For a brief, glorious moment, we celebrate our own achievements, the moments of quiet heroism we never give ourselves credit for. (I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that, on the day I was there, most people talked about saving someone's life, whereas I drew attention to “the nights I stay up late writing about theatre”.) Our relationship with Elliott becomes almost that of preternaturally calm, attentive children and wise, gentle parent; essentially what he's telling us is to do your best, and it's not the winning but the taking part that counts, and practise makes perfect, all that soft-cushion support stuff that you find so excruciating when you're a teenager, then secretly long to hear in the big bad world.

It's a disjointed show, I heard a voice whisper in my head while I was watching it. Although every story and idea was connected thematically, the leaps between the different elements felt erratic. And something goes awry in the relationship with the audience: we participate gladly in the making of paper darts, and volunteer willingly to throw real ones, but when a party breaks out on stage everyone remains rooted in their seat, not wanting to commit a faux pas by joining in. This is so much a show about taking care of each other, being aware of each other, as individuals and as a group, an “audience”, that the fear of exposure feels out of place.

But those were quibbles, and so is this, which I mention only because it relates to a philosophical question floating around my family. Elliott talks at length about the circumstances of his father's death, which coincided with a particularly life-enhancing, challenging and absorbing job in Spain, and his decision not to attend the funeral. It's absorbing because you can't quite work out how Elliott feels, so tangled is the mixture of guilt, defiance, sorrow and gratitude. What I couldn't understand is why he didn't seem to regret not spending time with his father as he declined. As my mum says, frequently: what's the point in waiting to see someone until they're dead?

2.40pm Once in a House on Fire.

Chris Thorpe is just behind me in the queue to get in. The one thing I remember about his assessment of the morning's Dialogue session is him saying it was the beginning of something, and not some fucking Fugazi thing either. I love it when people talk punk rock.

After the euphoria of Best in the World, I found it difficult to settle into Once in a House on Fire. It's a slow-burn piece, adapted (by Sarah McDonald Hughes, a writer I don't know) from a memoir (by Andrea Ashworth, ditto) detailing a childhood experience of domestic violence, and set in a world that, despite the pitch-perfect soundtrack rooting it in late-1970s/early 1980s Manchester, feels very distant. Part of me suspects I'm betraying my poncy southerner soul in saying that: from what my friend Anne-Marie has told me about her childhood Mancunian home, it looked a fair bit like the one on stage (violence not included). But part of me thinks she might have felt a distance from the story, too, because Ashworth's youth was too appalling and unnatural for anything else. You can't know what it is to grow up scanning the heavens for the soul of your dead father, watching your mother's successive husbands and lovers beat her, hear her described as a masochist before you understand what the word means, never knowing when the blows will land on you instead, unless you've experienced something of that yourself.

You can, however, empathise, yet there is something so matter-of-fact about this piece that even empathy is kept at arm's length. The three women on stage, especially Andrea and her sister, project a profound self-sufficiency: they don't look beyond the family, let alone to the audience, for anything. Every punch is absorbed and life carries on, and that, too, is alarming. It wasn't until about 10 minutes before the end that I started thinking about my mum, and her experience of being beaten as a child by her mother, the coping mechanisms she had to construct for herself, the nightmares she still has, the impossibility of me knowing, really knowing, anything about what she went through. At the moment when Andrea escapes to university, my heart became so full of my mum, I could barely swallow.

X

6pm An unexpected chat with Melanie Wilson about Autobiographer: about the different women I know who felt profoundly affected by it, and those who weren't; the difference between responding to a show and reviewing it; the impossibility of a critic speaking for everyone in an audience. Autobiographer was a pivotal moment for me this year; getting to talk to the woman who made it feels magical. It's at this point I realise just how much I love this space that Northern Stage have made. It feels like a community, but one in which I belong. One in which I'm not afraid to talk to people: Northern Stage performers, other artists just visiting, other women on their own in the cafe. I don't do this in London. I sit quietly in a world of my own. At Northern Stage, that world of my own surrounds me.

6.40pm Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions. I feel a little anxious going into this, and not just because exhaustion is starting to strike. I vividly remember seeing an earlier Will Eno play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) at Soho in 2004, and feeling two things in frequent oscillation: that the writing kept slipping away from me, or rather I kept drifting away from it, unable to grasp its content, its import – except in the moments when I was gripped by the writing as if by a vice, which squeezed so hard I felt physically sick. Five minutes into Oh, the Humanity, I felt that vice again, and revelled in its familiarity. And this time I knew: pay attention. Eno's voice is so light, so urbane and casual, his writing can seem throwaway. In fact, every word counts.

I might come back to this coruscating/excoriating collection of vignettes after seeing them again in London (five days before seeing the revival of Thom Pain at the Print Room: oh, the anticipation!), but some things it's necessary to say now:

One: Lucy Ellinson is phenomenal. Utterly, mind-blowingly, brilliant. She plays four women, and gives each one a slightly different American accent, an accent that manages to convey the woman's social class, her self-confidence and her ability to cope with the more-or-less horrific vagaries of day-to-day life; while at the same time maintaining enough of her (Lucy's) own idiosyncratic inflections that each accent feels not imposed but inhabited. Not only that, but she speaks with such subtlety that you don't realise how sharp and savage lines are until blood seeps from the wound they make. In Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently, she plays a humble office worker at an airline unexpectedly charged with apologising publicly to the families of people who died in a freak plane accident, who, for one brief, excruciating moment, swerves from the point to talk about the attempt to resolve her feelings about her father in a series of failed relationships with men whose weight upon her body was scant consolation. Words cascade from her mouth before her brain has even registered that it's forming sentences, but then she recognises how outrageously inappropriate she's being and a look of pained bewilderment flashes across her face that is as agonising to witness as it is exquisite.

Two: one of the women Lucy plays describes herself as “very ingoing”. Suddenly I know what I am.

Three: I didn't realise how much I wanted to see actors on stage pretend that two chairs are a car, fail to get the engine started, and announce that the problem is “they're chairs”, until I see it here.

Four: having established that the car is in fact chairs, the couple realise a man is staring at them. He introduces himself thus: “I am the beauty of things.” I melt. Perfect.

8.15pm Me and Mr C. There's barely 15 minutes between the end of Humanity and the beginning of Me, so it's a blessing that Gary Kitchner's show is so cheery and conversational to start. The first 25 minutes whizz by with him gathering resources from the audience: a horrible job; an experience of being called something ugly by an employer (I show him the scar from the day a former boss called me a stupid little cunt); stuff we have in our fridges; a kind and wise volunteer from the audience to assist him on stage (today, a chap called Ed). The tone is light and bantering, a bit like being at a stand-up gig, and the absence of the fourth wall just feels so right.

The lengthy introduction is so enjoyable that it's almost a disappointment when the show “proper” begins. It's a condition of the character: Me is humble, bumbling, scrabbles for words, and so does Gary when inserting our material into the shell of his script. But the show's energy and focus dissipate in the character's fuzz of hesitation. Still, two things are effective: the poignancy of Me's relationship with the silent ventriloquist dummy Mr C; and the scenes in which Me attempts to deliver stand-up and we, the real audience, pretending to be an audience, crush him with our heckling. It's all done at Gary's instigation, but the brutality of it is horrible. I couldn't do it, couldn't bring myself to take part. But if everyone had done the same as me, we would have broken the “real” show – and that would have been worse, wouldn't it?

9.30pm Lucy Ellinson and I agree that our heads are much too full. After she heads to the pub I chat to yet another woman on her own; she works in Cornwall, and gives me a flyer for Mayday Mayday, which I seem to miss everywhere it plays. In return I tell her excitedly about the Hunt and Darton cafe and Paper Stages. Ingoing me is startled by how outgoing I'm being.

10pm The Ugly Sisters. I take a seat next to another woman on her own, who leans over and asks if I know a man called x, naming my husband. They went to school together, and although she and I haven't met, she recognises me from Facebook. It's a mark of how excited I am by The Ugly Sisters that this doesn't send me screaming from the room. And I am excited: because I missed Rash Dash in Edinburgh last year, but heard lots of good things about them; because there's a band on stage playing lurching chords and punk-thump drums; because Helen and Abbi have back-combed their hair and look petulant and wild. The shy, silent women huddled on the sofa this morning have transformed themselves into pussy-riot-grrrls, Bikini Kill's Rebel Girls, snarling antidotes to every prissy image of princesses and prom queens that young women are expected to aspire to. And I love them I love them I love them. I love the way they collage music, heart-pulse music, music that throbs and stalks and croons and howls, with a magpie's horde of gilded pop culture, TV talent contests and trash romances, junk fashion and junkie aesthetics. I love the way they give their story chapters, and give their ugly sisters petulant beauty, and make the affirmation of a mother's love the one thing a young woman really needs. I love their anger, humour, honesty, rawness, tenderness towards each other. Yes, I want them to be telling another story about women, finding the new stories, the untold stories, not falling back on the same old fairy stories. But there is a long and brilliant tradition of feminist fairy-tale revisioning, and with The Ugly Sisters Rash Dash gloriously take their place on it.

Cinderella and the prince

lived, they say, happily ever after,

like two dolls in a museum case

never bothered by diapers or dust,

never arguing over the timing of an egg,

never telling the same story twice,

never getting a middle-aged spread,

their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

Regular Bobbsey Twins.

That story.

[Anne Sexton, Cinderella]

X

1.15am The perfect end to a perfect day: reading Paper Stages in bed. It's not so much reading as hovering like a hummingbird in its vicinity, occasionally pecking at this phrase or that: there are playlets here to perform in public spaces and/or share with other people, journeys to take, phone calls to make. But when I reach Andy Field's Incidental Plays it's much harder to turn the page. The romance of them is irresistible.

Kiss Chase

Two people aimlessly chasing each other through the streets of the city

They switch roles almost imperceptibly

Ducking between cars

Across parks

Down narrow alleyways

Weaving through packed crowds of people

[Which didn't at the time, but now that I'm typing it out, makes me think of a lyric from this:]

HTTP 404 – File Not Found

People stood on opposite sides of a pelican crossing

Seemingly incapable of stepping out into the road

They gaze at each other longingly

Apologetically

As the lights turn from green to red

An indeterminate number of times

And as I close the book and turn off the light, love swells through me, for everyone who made Paper Stages, and everyone at Hunt and Darton, and everyone I have spoken to today.

6.45am Friday 17 August 2012. Bedroom door opens. Five year old. “Mummy, I think I need a poo.”

10.30am I have a ticket for Blink but have to return it to give me more time to rewrite Project 9. I knew at the time of the interviews that the organisation-producer-artist relationship I was exploring was incredibly vulnerable, and I've been remiss in squirrelling away the writing and not sharing it more. It's taught me to be more thoughtful, towards others, and their need for more and better communication, and particularly as a writer: I've extrapolated unnecessarily, for dramatic effect. It's taught me that while traditional journalism skills are useful here, they can also be damaging, in the ease with which they disregard human feeling and sensitivities. Above all, it's taught me to keep probing, keep asking questions, no matter how much more work it creates.

12.30pm Letter of Last Resort/Good With People, the Traverse. I bought my ticket for this days ago, thinking it a must-see: the reviews of David Greig's Letter from the Bomb season at the Tricycle made it sound brilliant, and I twice missed David Harrower's A Slow Air (in Edinburgh 2011 and earlier this year at the Tricycle) so felt the need to catch up with him. But by the time I arrive at the Traverse my enthusiasm has gone. As recognised the night before, at this fringe I'm not in a place of fourth-wall theatre; my brain is elsewhere. So Letter of Last Resort is very good, playful and sharp, restlessly circling, informative, challenging – but I'm just not gripped by it. The young American women next to me love it, despite the perplexing references to Radio 4 and the Archers. And Good With People is tense, tricksy, sneakily political, but it feels like a small piece in a big space, big enough for me not to share it. I curse myself for not having the perspicacity to book in advance for Bullet Catch instead.

there's dirt on my rose-tinted spectacles: three months with uninvited guests [aka vanity project 6]

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.

 

*

 

[A quick note: I give away a lot about Make Better Please in this, so if you want to go in knowing nothing you might want to come back here after the event. However, I saw four-fifths of Make Better on DVD before seeing it, and still found it immensely powerful, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything much.]

I felt a lovely serendipity at work in my first proper encounter with Uninvited Guests. I know the Guests have been around for donkeys but somehow they evaded even my peripheral vision, until Lyn Gardner's review of Love Letters Straight From Your Heart – but that was in August 2009, and I didn't get to see the show until February this year. The long wait proved fortuitous, because it pulled me from the midst of a total preoccupation with Chris Goode & Company. Specifically, I was tussling with CG&C's Open House (2011 edition), a piece that sought to eradicate the gap between performers and audiences, partly to share the making process, partly to unsettle the “staged” work by making it alive to chance and change. Uninvited Guests, I realised, share a belief in these objectives as fundamental principles, and I'm finding it fruitful to think about where the two companies coincide and diverge.

At that moment in time, the key difference was one of control versus chaos. Open House felt febrile; the work as shown to a paying audience had a structure of sorts, but nothing rigid enough to contain the impulsive energy of the performers, who pinged around the space like pinballs, bouncing off the audience and the walls. I say at that moment because since then I've seen CG&C's 9, which was as elegant, focused and taut as Open House was scattershot and messy. But 9 positions itself in relation to its audience more or less conventionally: we sit, we watch, actively absorbed but effectively passive (please note, that's a surface evaluation, to be cracked apart at a later date). Whereas in the two Guests shows, more so even than in Open House, audiences are participants: the show can't happen unless the people holding tickets in the room (re)make it.

Where the control comes with Love Letters and Make Better Please is in their meticulous construction. In each case, the Guests have built a very precise architecture, then invited audiences in to do the decorating. Some nights the walls will be splatted with red and black paint; some nights they'll be swathed in pastel-coloured silks. The emphasis is on the audience's particularity, the individual-to-group personality we impose on the building – and yet, there's no escaping the knowledge that the building itself, with its rigid walls and solid floors, doesn't change. It's the tension between that fixed core and the audience's mutability that makes these two pieces so fascinating.

For those who don't know, Love Letters works like this. Before the show, you email the Guests – anonymously, if you like – with the name of a pop song and a dedication to someone you love. On the night, Richard Dufty and Jess Hoffmann take turns to play our songs and read out our stories, delivering them with an evenness of tone that allows the words to carry their own weight, unencumbered by imposed emotion. There is an extraordinary, spirit-soaring interlude, in which Hoffmann recalls the exhilaration of first love by racing round the room chased by Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, and a surprising key change when Dufty performs a contorted dance for his partner. These palate-cleansing performances might show up the comparative banality of our dedications, but the contrast also makes us cherish the simple sincerity of each other's language, the directness of our expression.

It would be so easy to be cynical about this show. The language of love has been debased by overexposure, in literature and cinema and the very pop songs we dedicate to our beloveds. To talk of love is to trade in cliche. The Guests know this; they know, too, that there are no original love stories, only variations on timeless themes. The format of Love Letters is so glaring, I'm sure each show is compiled using a tick-box list. Story of first love? Check. Story of unrequited love? Check. A marriage, a death, a tribute to a mother or gay lover or best friend? Check, check and triple check. Even when I was writing my own tribute, I was aware of a certain hyperbolic contrivance in my storytelling: they'll definitely use this, I caught myself thinking, it's so emblematic of an archetype. When it did emerge, I had one of those weird out-of-body experiences: it was so perfect in terms of the narrative arc of the show, I felt completely detached from it, and hardly recognised it as a description of my own life.

What makes Love Letters so brilliant is that it doesn't try to evade or deny the cynicism these observations engender. Cynicism is acknowledged, accepted and ultimately, gloriously, transcended. Each tribute comes so much from the heart (even mine), it's as though we're collectively reclaiming the language of love, reminding ourselves of the truth, the shocking individuality (a brilliant phrase I've stolen from Doris Lessing), buried in every melancholy and ecstatic cliche. Love and heartbreak might be universal and timeless, but THIS love, THIS ache, THIS heartbreak, is unique.

The same awareness and defiance of cynicism is at work in Make Better Please, perhaps even more so, because the raw material is bigger and fiercer and less forgiving than love. This time our contribution begins when we enter the room. We sit in groups at round tables reading the day's newspapers, looking for stories that make us angry. It's all so civilised, so liberal-middle-class: there are comically huge pots of tea, generous supplies of biscuits, a general reluctance to engage with the Daily Mail. But then comes a shift in register: a Guest sits at each table, and as we swap headlines he or she asks, “What can we do about this? How can we change it?” It's not enough to be exasperated or riled; sinking into despondency certainly won't do. We need to act.

So Uninvited Guests do act. And just as in Love Letters, they work methodically, to a strict format. It's years since I've looked at Aristotle's Poetics but I have a feeling that this format, whether consciously or unconsciously, adheres to the ancient system of tragic plot, shifting from mimesis and anagnorisis to peripeteia and catharsis: imitation and identification to reversal and purification (and yes, I have just copied that out from Wiki). So in the first stage, Richard and Jess embody the public figures we revile: they are David Cameron crushing the poor, and James Cameron using his riches to mine asteroids, and a doctor in Britain carrying out genital mutilation on girls. We can ask them questions, upbraid them, hurl abuse: say everything directly that we can't say in real life, except on Comment Is Free, where there is always someone ready to tear us apart. This is intriguing in itself: the sense of relief in having free rein to be liberal and moral and self-righteous. Already, it's double-edged.

And then Richard and Jess make us identify with people we have encountered, will encounter, in the news: with the woman begging not to be killed as a gun is pointed at her neck, with the soldier with a sack over his head and his arms bound together, with the child cowering behind a tree as all around him people are massacred, with the serial killer wielding the gun. You've put down that newspaper, but can you really look away? What happens if you don't look away? Uncomfortable, isn't it? Desperate, isn't it? And yet the room is still so civilised, so liberal-middle-class. Outrage is not enough. Sitting back is not enough.

So Richard Dufty steps forwards. He strips to his underwear and he speaks in tongues. He absorbs all the wrong in the world, allows it to scratch at his veins and snap in his bones. He abjects himself before us, throws tea over himself, struts and crows like a chicken. For us. Do we want him to? He looks ridiculous. It's embarrassing to watch him, excruciating. And utterly, savagely compelling. That someone can expose himself to such a degree, shed every fibre of dignity, be so raw and abandoned and brave. For us. If he can do that, I thought as I watched him, I can do anything.

Here is another telling connection with Chris Goode: I felt that courage, that willingness to peel away every layer of self-protection, and say out loud everything that is big and frightening and fucked-up-weird, radiate from Chris in God/Head, too. It's more than coincidental to me that both shows found inspiration in Quaker meetings, both embrace quiet and stillness, and both build up to a dynamic ritual: Chris adopting the figure of a roisterous minister, preaching a joyful gospel of acceptance, of human fears, humiliations, sadness and fury; the Guests performing an exorcism, the “evil” that Richard has assimilated driven out of the room, out of our lives, by Jess the pagan punk priestess, a thrashing, stomping voodoo queen wielding, of all things, a fire extinguisher.

This is the point in Make Better where cynicism can really kick in. I find the ritual mesmerising, but then I have superstition encoded in my genes: invited to invoke a ghost of the recently deceased, I will without hesitation begin chanting Adrienne Rich's name under my breath, because she is my lodestar and has the power to change the world from beyond the grave. Not everyone shares these insanities. I'm also an idealist, a political romantic, and I know from interviewing Uninvited Guests how much the show is rooted in wistful memories of former idealism:

R: There's a nostalgia for the punky, idealistic energy of youth; we're referencing the village hall indie band or the punk band who really think –

J; “We can change the world!”

R: “We can get out of this village, we can conquer the world, we can make a difference.” That's why it's Make Better Please: it's us wanting to be like that again and to live that again. There's an element of doubt about it, or yearning.

J: Hope, maybe.

R: We're at a point in our lives where we've seen this political cycle go round and round a few times now. [In] student years, you thought maybe the world could be completely different, then you get a bit jaded. So it's a little bit of a political cry for help, as well as a confident [declaration of]: “We can change the world if we all get together and do something.”

I love Make Better Please because it comes from a place of jadedness and desperation, bludgeons its own cynicism, and finds a path back to idealism. I love its melancholy acceptance that, although everyone will make a journey through it, not everyone will reach the same destination alongside it. Most of all, I love Make Better because I believe in it. I believe in its ritual of purification, in its enacted triumph of hope, community, socialism, fairness, respect for humanity, over the degraded politics of selfishness, capitalism and inequality. I feel a genuine catharsis at the end, when I sit and listen to the people around me tell stories of generosity and kindness. I know, perfectly well, that when I walk out of the theatre the world around me won't be changed. But I feel encouraged and invigorated by the optimism of the piece, its untrammelled energy. This is what they can do. What can I do in return?

It's only as I write this now, a fortnight after seeing it, that I've realised something else crucial about Make Better. In the moment of watching, I felt the divide between this spectacle and what I see at gigs sharply: at gigs what I feel is escapism, at Make Better engagement. But when Richard talks about the punk bands who believed they could change the world, he could be describing the riot grrrls, who actually did. So Jess Hoffmann, fellow mum-of-two, fellow plate-spinner, fellow firebrand, this one's for you:

Before I go, a couple of scraggy thoughts. I'm finding it really weird how out-of-sync I am with Lyn Gardner at the moment. She's like my mentor and my favourite auntie and my fount of all wisdom, theatre or otherwise, rolled into one: that our views on things are not coinciding, over a sustained period, is genuinely disturbing to me. Knowing that new-best-friend Jake Orr felt unmoved by Make Better troubles me too. But that's the thing about work that is made by its audience and different every night: I haven't seen or felt the same show as them. I was, however, in the room in West Yorkshire Playhouse with Matt Trueman, and spent a lot of time wondering what he thought – or rather, fretting that he was sitting with his arms folded, stewing in scepticism. When I discovered how transfixed he'd been by it, I was so relieved: that he wasn't going to throw a cold, wet towel over my excitement and that I could still feel like we were on the same team.

The one other thing I haven't mentioned is that Love Letters wasn't strictly my first encounter with the Guests. In autumn 2010, as part of a piece I was writing about pervasive theatre, I saw Give Me Back My Broken Night, a collaboration between Paul Clarke (and possibly another Guest, I never found out) and Duncan Speakman that imagines a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future Soho, but filters that vision through a romantic-utopian lens. It was a gorgeous piece that haunts me still: every time I walk through Soho Square I remember standing outside the gates with Paul, describing to him the wonderland that I would build there, with oversized teapots (oh!) and follies and slides, and watching in wonder as my words became images on the iPad in his hands. So you see: for 18 months now, Uninvited Guests have been making me see the world differently, and making it better.

Last of all: a vanity. This is the original copy of my piece about them for G2: part of me really wants to rewrite it a third time, to bring back all the interview material I dimly remember cutting to fit the 800-word space, but if I do I'll never get back to CG&C and Robert Holman, so move on I must.

*****

“We're always told that one of the essential qualities of theatre is its liveness, its immediacy,” says theatre-maker Richard Dufty. “It's not like a film that just rolls on, even if all the audience leaves. But most theatre, even experimental theatre, feels like it's following the script, following the score, regardless. It's not particularly contingent on an audience, and certainly not contingent on you as an individual within that audience.”

Dufty is one-third of Uninvited Guests, a theatre company based in London and Bristol that aims to put individual theatregoers at the heart of every show. In their touring production Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, audiences are invited to dedicate songs to people they adore, for Dufty and fellow Guest Jessica Hoffmann to read out during the course of the performance. And their newest piece, Make Better Please, begins with the audience reading the day's newspapers and plucking out the stories that make them angry or upset, which are then used as the source material for the rest of the evening.

“Rather than site-specific performance, what we're making is a kind of date-specific performance, with user-generated content,” says the third Guest, Paul Clarke. The result, says Dufty, is “a real sense of liveness, where the material is fresh each night”.

Since Clarke and Hoffmann formed the company in Bristol in 1998, Uninvited Guests have explored different methods of, as Clarke says, “democratising the authorship” of their shows. Earlier works borrowed techniques from documentary theatre, with the company interviewing people about, say, cinema (for their 2000 piece, Film), or representations of violence (2004's Schlock), and incorporating this text into the finished script. Dufty, who joined the company in 2000, says they had a tendency to treat this material ironically, “measuring ourselves against it with a sort of knowingness. But we got a bit bored with that, and got older, and wanted to try being more honest and direct.”

That's how they came to make Love Letters in 2006. The piece grew in part from the trio's experience of attending a number of weddings and being struck by the outpouring of emotion in the speeches. “We don't speak from the heart in that way in everyday life,” says Hoffmann – so they decided to create an opportunity for people to do so. The results are acutely moving, with audiences taking advantage of the promise of anonymity to write tributes to spouses and unrequited loves, best friends and beleaguered parents, that are often astonishingly candid.

But Love Letters also offers a cool critique of social experience, says Clarke. “It reflects on the way that we perform romance, the way that we return to songs in order to express our feelings, and the way that when we say the words, 'I love you', we're speaking words that we've heard thousands of times before in the movies. No matter how real the emotion is, it's still coming up against the representation that we've seen.”

Where Love Letters deals with the inner self, says Dufty, Make Better Please looks outward, at what audiences think about the world around them. More than that, says Clarke, the news is rewritten, “according to the people in the room, telling it in their own words, rather than the authoritative words of the newsreader or the politician”. But the show also challenges people to think about how they consume news: as Hoffmann puts it, over coffee on the weekend, as “entertainment, just stuff that you do”. Instead, audiences are invited to take responsibility for what they read, by imagining themselves into the stories they have selected, and taking part in a pagan ritual to exorcise bad news.

The hope, says Dufty, is that people will be inspired to “think about how they relate to the world, how you might make a difference”. He admits the show has its roots in nostalgia for the idealism of youth: the trio are now aged between 38 and 40, and feel “we've seen this political cycle go round a few times. So it's partly a cry for help. That's why it's Make Better Please: there's an element of yearning.”

It's clear that the Guests' own politics are left and liberal, so what happens if their audience is primarily Conservative? Dufty admits they don't know. “Hopefully it's enough of a vehicle that people will get the show that they want or need. But it's still to be tested. It's a show that will find itself on tour.” For Hoffmann, Make Better Please is a leap into the unknown made possible by a decade of learning to trust each other as performers. “Anything could happen,” she says, “but I think we're at a point where we can deal with that.”

i bury my head in the browny-red earth

A while back I interviewed Fiona Shaw about playing Mother Courage, for a little something accompanying an essay by Tony Kushner in the Guardian. It was one of the more entertaining experiences of my working life, but also a troubling one, because she talked about Britain being at war in a matter-of-fact way that made me realise how little I thought about living in a country at war, if at all. I'm politically naive at the worst of times, but my casual ability to ignore Britain's military manoeuvrings suddenly mortified me, my thoughtlessness tantamount to a support of aggression, because it contained no protest against it.

I found myself thinking through this again on Sunday, somewhat unexpectedly in the midst of a Kitchen Revolution-style cooking session putting together a tray of moussaka, a plum crumble tart, two quiche bases, some caramelized onions, and three meals' worth of pasta sauce for the freezer, feats of domestic goddessry undermined by my failures as a parent that morning and, indeed, through the course of the long weekend. My soundtrack, on repeat, was PJ Harvey's Let England Shake. Harvey is one of those singers I've always admired, but at a slight remove: I have several of her albums, but never listen to them, not even Stories From the City, which I loved when reviewing. Let England Shake isn't nearly as friendly or accessible as I remember Stories being, but it's the album that has taken up residence beside the kitchen CD player, that compels me to play it again and again.

I'm slowly appreciating what makes it so fascinating to me: it's a folk album, its rhythms and language hewn from traditional English music, but it's a folk album that sounds absolutely of our times. Much of its modernity lies in the crafty way that Harvey weaves in quotations and samples from other songs. The most obvious – and the line I find myself unable to stop singing – is her twist on that mock-desperate line from Summertime Blues in The Words That Maketh Murder: “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”, which she sings at first with wry, eyes-narrowed irony, becoming more furious with every repetition. But there are so many others: on Sunday, for the first time, I caught Blood and Fire coursing through Written on the Forehead, and was startled not to have noticed it before. But this is subtle music, muted and ambiguous. I uncover something new in it each time I put it on, which is exactly what you want from an album.

What I particularly discovered on Sunday morning is that Let England Shake makes me feel like I live in a country at war, almost permanently at war; a country belligerent to its core. Harvey does this not by singing about new wars or modern wars, but by singing about wars fallen from living memory in a way that makes them fiercely present: much as Brecht did with Mother Courage. Harvey's imagery is devastating in its simplicity: she sings of “England and the grey, damp filthiness of ages”, of the country “weighted down with silent dead”, of how “our land is ploughed by tanks and marching feet”, and each line fills me with the horror of recognition. This has happened and it is happening and it will happen. On and on and on.

All that killing

Ancient history

Modern history

Vortex

Shipwreck

Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper

So many associations images I can't get into my poem

Because I'm still such a really bad poet

Because the universe rushes over me

And I didn't bother to insure myself against train wreck

Because I don't know how to take it all the way

And I'm scared.

[Blaise Cendrars, from The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jeanne of France]

I admire Harvey, but I'm also intimidated by her. She released her first album when I was in my teens and struggling to shape my identity, using music as my mould. Riot grrrl emerged at the same time and was inspiring and confusing and absorbing to me. Harvey's refusal to associate herself with riot grrrl struck me as bizarre. Where was her sympathy, her solidarity, her feminist spirit? I didn't understand. Now I have more appreciation of her formidable self-possession. She was only a few years older than me, but she already knew how to take it all the way. Nearly two decades on, I still don't.

I was that 17-year-old riot grrrl again later that evening, watching the Drew Barrymore film Whip It. Along with Miss Velvelette Actionette, I've been a bit obsessed with roller derby ever since the 'Ettes performed a benefit gig with the London Rollergirls: we'd both love to join, but we're a bit, erm, wussy to subject ourselves to all that bruising (the unlikelihood of my even remaining upright in rollerskates is a moot point). It's not a great film – the plotting is fairly conventional and predictable – but the 17-year-old in me adored it. And there were a few scenes that made the grown-up me silently cheer: seeing a rollergirl with her son; that delicious slap that Bliss gives her errant ex-boyfriend; Babe Ruthless coming in second to Iron Maven; most of all, the exquisite moment when Bliss guesses that Juliette Lewis's character is 27 and Lewis's face softens before she snaps, “I'm 36.” Drew Barrymore, I salute you.

As for the plum crumble tart, you might have thought that a crumble with a pastry base might be overkill, but you'd be wrong. The pastry was crisp and plain, the crumble soft, with a hint of ground almond and cinnamon, the plums sour-sweet, and it all got eaten far too quickly. Thank goodness the Actionettes are dancing at Duckie this Saturday: all that go-going needs fuel, you know.