the sum of chance encounters

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.

 

 

*

 

 

[It seems I'm not able to write about Chris Goode and Company's Open House except at several months' distance. I've spent snow-chilled January dreaming myself back into the heat flare of May 2012, and a room in Bristol where magic quietly took place. This picks up a story thread from an earlier post, How You Do This Is Up To You, which talked about the first Open House at the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Transform festival, 2011. As ever, all gratefulness to the participants in Open House Mayfest for their trust and patience: Chris, A, T, P, J, H, and Robert, whose surname I never found out, whose illustrations were enviably good, whose leap into the unknown filled me with admiration.]

Let's start again with the room. A long, thin rectangle on the second floor of Hamilton House, a community centre in the middle of Stokes Croft, an enticingly anarchic street in Bristol lined with derelict squats, hipster coffee shops, anti-capitalist ventures and elaborate graffiti. Windows stretch two-thirds of the way along one wall, making the room bright and warm in the heavy May heatwave, noisy with traffic and indistinct chatter from the cafe tables below. A silken red evening dress hangs at one of the windows. Much of the opposite wall is glass, too, but that's opaque, blacked out by curtains in the corridor outside. The room extends in neatly demarcated zones: an admin space with imposing, cluttered wooden desk and a tea table offering biscuits; a carpeted section, over which creep jagged lines of masking tape; a large square laid with black plastic dance mats; at the furthest end a stage, not raised, defined instead by a lighting rig that looms pointedly over motley pieces of dumped furniture.

It had taken the organisers of Mayfest 2012 a while to find a suitable room for the second incarnation of Chris Goode and Company's participatory work Open House. Hamilton House was a thoughtful choice politically (their website explains why), but the insinuating presence of that stage betrayed a certain misapprehension. Open House is an experiment in foregrounding much that is implied, assumed or ignored in theatre-making: that theatre isn't a product but an ongoing process, a collaboration between people in a particular space and time, a reflection of life and the living of it. There are intermediary showings and a final performance, but these aren't staged events so much as staging posts in a journey: a journey without end.

The time will come when I spend the full five days watching Open House unfold – which isn't so much watching as participating in a quiet way – but I'm not there yet. I joined Chris and co a little after midday on day three – Wednesday 23 May, 2012 – and instantly felt the difference between this Open House and the first, programmed within the 2011 Transform festival at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. The mood of the room was lighter, less charged, buoyant with laughter. I spent a long time wondering what caused that change. The summery atmosphere? The windows that encouraged voyeurism? The levity of being peripheral to the rest of Mayfest, outsiders unbound? The giddy pleasure of work that feels like play, in an atmosphere of mutual respect?

All of those, plus this: in the Bristol cast, women and men were equally balanced, with Chris and two returnees from the all-male Leeds team, T and J, sharing the space with A, H and P, a dancer and choreographer who went to the Leeds Open House as a curious outsider and has been a key collaborator with Chris Goode and Company ever since. And this: the Bristol cast were a more irreverent lot than the Leeds team, not more playful necessarily, just less inclined to meticulous theoretical debate. In Leeds, there was a lot of electric talk about the performance being alive to the moment, in a “constant state of jam”. In Bristol, in a prominent position on the desk, was a jar of strawberry jam. That's how different the two rooms were.

The other key difference was the relative absence of other people. There were visitors, one of whom, a grey-haired, smiling man called Robert, became a key contributor, but nothing like the flow of festival volunteers, theatre members and not-involved-but-intrigued figures that filled the space in Leeds. Without this traffic, the pressure towards activity, into which visitors could be drawn, was removed.

This concentration of numbers, plus the fact that the three actor-maker-performers (T, A and H) are all people who feel comfortable creating and playing characters, plus the nudge to voyeurism (the windows) and narrative storytelling (the stage) suggested by the room, combined to shape the work I saw made on my first day.

Their first day, Monday 21st, started with a show and tell: Chris had asked everyone to bring in an item that was important to them, which might hold the beginnings of ideas. Beside the red silk dress on the window ledge was a wooden circle with geometric lines carved into it, an elegant example of a tree of life; there was also a library book, Last Night on Earth by choreographer and director Bill T Jones, a small crimson cushion embroidered with the words Kneel to Pray, and a painted wooden spoon who goes by the name of Mr Curry. There was also something I couldn't see: a susurration. Shhh: listen. A whisper, a breath. “Is that the sound of extinction?” someone had written on the opposite wall.

By lunchtime on Wednesday, these items – with the possible exception of Mr Curry – had inspired something approaching a story. It had characters: a man, possibly dead now, whose life's work had been the cataloguing of extinct species; a woman who worked in the building across the street from Hamilton House, an artist probably, who spends her days cataloguing the life she sees from her window; another woman, glimpsed in the street wearing a red silk dress, a mystery with whom both the other characters are obsessed. It had questions: what is the relationship between the man and the artist? What does the woman in the red dress represent for them both? And within these tentative foundations of a narrative structure it had a multitude of set-pieces: a communal dance and a choral dream shanty; a comical index of fictional creatures; some absorbing texts on lies and dreams; a desire to hear an inventory spoken; and a non-religious response to the invitation Kneel to Pray.

There was something rather lovely about the impulse towards catalogues, indexes and inventories in this, because while the performers worked together to develop the materials for the showing that evening, I was busy cataloguing their working space. This is an abbreviation:

*a masking tape path, mimicking the sharp geometry of the tree of life, messages scribbled along each line:

(a change of heart) (a mending of ways) a chance for redemption

will I ever stop being afraid?

if I keep waiting, maybe it will get better?

a new journey?

an old dream?

a chance to change?

*details of extinct animals linked with string to a 1931 map of Land's End

*a chart recording the height of everyone who enters the room

*ink drawings by Robert, dream visions of woodland, the Open House room, a mysterious figure in a red dress

*two posters inviting contributions: tell a lie about yourself/tell us something true about yourself. While I'm making my notes a woman comes in, browses for a few minutes, writes on the lies poster, “I truly know love”, then walks straight out.

*Robert's truth: My life has in part been a project of reinvention and of constructing a world uncontaminated by my father's approval.

*A's truth: I let the flow of life happen. I have met amazing and unusual people when I have swum against the tide.

*a text inspired by the tree of life – “Follow the line. The line forks... The line flows and races. The points it passes through are each a present and each present has length for one end is joined to the past and the other to the future or possible futures... What happens at the end of the line?” – paired with Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken.

*hula hoops in red, blue, yellow and green

*a table spread with photographs of each performer wearing the red dress. J looks like a brothel Jesus.

*behind the desk, written on an A3 sheet: I'd like to see the shadow of a bird in the road but not the bird that's casting it.

*a yellow Post-It note stuck to the window with a single word scribbled upon it in pencil: JUMP?

In another unintended mirror of the burgeoning narrative – the man is so engrossed in cataloguing the world around him, he neglects his own family – I'm so absorbed by the task of noting every detail in the room that I almost miss it being transformed. T, feeling his way towards playing the man, takes charge in creating an environment for him in the stage area. He clears away the superfluous furniture, arranges a desk, a sofa, a cabinet and a coffee table, and upon these places the paraphernalia of the man's existence: his index cards, a plant, a trumpet, a wireless. This is one story space; outside the window is another; in between, a clear zone for dance, improvisation, collaboration with the audience.

As in Leeds last year, the seven company members – Robert had been fully adopted to the team by now – gathered in the late afternoon to create a set list, putting in order the disparate elements for their showing. Unlike in Leeds, almost no one came to see it: just four of us, and two of those were me and Nikki, working with Mayfest and there to give Chris and company production support. There was much that was enjoyable, beautiful, invigorating in this showing. I loved the layering of composed and immediate/responsive texts: A observing life out of the window while H walks towards the building in the red dress and H's disembodied recorded voice tells a lie about jumping from the window and soaring over the city. P folding and stretching into taut, eloquent shapes, A describing her movements, J alone then Chris in urgent chorus reading out the Follow the Line/tree of life text. I loved the communal dance, and how the audience stuck faithfully to P's voiceover instructions, even as the performers embarked on a different dance, raising questions of who we choose to follow, when and how, suggesting the difficulty of keeping up with or adapting to the unexpected changes inevitable in a fast-paced life. I loved the wistful poetry of the inventory of the contents of the Marie Celeste. Most of all I loved the Kneel to Pray cushion, and the invitation drawn from it to say something true, all of us taking turns to speak honestly from our own lives. P's truth: “I want to stay with the people in this room for at least a month.” Yes.

In Leeds the first showing was so complete, as a work and as a statement, that it felt like an ending. In Bristol the first showing felt like a beginning. There was much in it that didn't really work, not least the characters of the cataloguer and artist, the latter of whom barely emerged, the relationship between them remaining opaque. The descriptions of extinct animals tickled everyone but, as Chris acknowledged, they felt like they belonged to a different show.

In fact, although we left the room that evening energised and enthused, by morning everyone expressed doubts about the showing. The tight structure had been useful in terms of avoiding the sense of chaos that hovered over Open House Leeds, but it also closed down or thwarted possibility, leaving the performers with little room to play. The narrative they were building, said Chris, felt too much like a story that could be made in other circumstances, more traditional circumstances, and made better in five weeks, not five days. It didn't suit the unique proposition of Open House – and it was the kind of show Chris hadn't made for years.

As a group we agreed that the most exciting aspects of the showing had been the things that least resembled the prepared material. Moments of intimacy, of talking and responding to each other; moments receptive to chance, in which small ideas could thrillingly expand; moments unique to that time, that room, that grew from observing directly the world outside. Chris realised that he had conflated a relish in the process of creation with the creation of things (characters, narrative) that indicate craft. He wanted to make something more porous. He also wanted to leave the room.

This was a difficult proposal for the team to negotiate, because it came from a place of disillusionment not with Open House as an idea but with the impossibility of fully expressing that idea without the people for whom it was created: the, for want of a better word, audience. Chris wanted to find a park, a local square, anywhere outside, and make up a game that could be played with passers-by. After much tussling with pros and cons, the dissuading argument was voiced by T: “The challenge is, we're in this place: what can we do here?” What did Chris want that he felt he could find in the park? Light and air. Half the room had that at least. So what were the constraints of the room – and how might they be resolved? How, by rethinking the room, could they take control of the space? These questions would direct the morning's work.

First, though, Chris made two decisions that would prove vital and vitalising. One: that they would throw out most of the narrative material built up over the week and start again. Two: in response to a confession from A, that she had hardly breathed during the showing, so anxious had she been about forgetting what was next on the set list, Chris announced that whatever they did that evening, there wouldn't be a running order on a flip chart. Music would help to give a dramaturgical shape to the showing, and each performer would be free to respond to that and to each other with whatever materials felt appropriate and closest to hand. In the impish code of Open House, the aim was more jam, less bread.

With that, they set to work. Chris felt it would be interesting, if questionable ethically – we'll come back to that – to record and project a film of the street scene below. J positioned the screen directly at the end of the row of windows, introducing light and extending the view to outside. Then he and T set about reconfiguring the space. The dance mats were shifted: instead of a square chunk in front of the stage, a long, thin rectangle running alongside the windows. From a tunnel with defined zones, the room became panoramic. The stage area was cleared again, furniture and clutter pushed against the walls. The crimson sofa remained, and this became the focus for an afternoon game: a dance created by P for herself, T, A and Robert to perform, with four strategic positions, seated, perched, standing and reclining. As they accustomed to the moves, the players began to incorporate an element of storytelling, first using Consequences, each taking it in turns to add a line to a growing tall tale. But this proved cumbersome and overcomplicated. Chris suggested shifting “say something true” from the Kneel to Pray cushion to the arm of the sofa. Better. T requested a round of “tell a lie”: good, but a verve was missing, an outlandishness. What would be really exciting, said Chris, eyes glinting, would be for this to be the sofa of truth and lies – and for us not know which is which. Perfect.

Except for one thing: unlike the Kneel to Pray truth game, audiences couldn't join in – the speed and precision of the dance left no room for intrusion. The extent to which the invitation to visitors had shrunk became apparent when Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair, performing elsewhere in Mayfest, visited for an hour in the late-afternoon. We've forgotten how to be generous, Chris feared.

Instead of playing, Kieran and Gary became snagged in philosophical debate. A new film had been recorded through the window, of H walking down the street in the red dress, and Chris invited us to invent stories about the people she passed. But as we began to speculate on existential crises, fraud and dreadful accidents, he felt misgivings: that to impose a narrative on a stranger, with its undertone of prediction or twisting of fate, was in some way unethical; that the film itself, taken in secret, sinister as CCTV, was unethical too. But no, the company variously argued: the commentary says more about the speaker than the person being seen; these narratives were simply an exercise in imagination; the figures on the film were so small they could hardly be identified. The exercise stayed – on condition, said Chris, that we played in a kind way, combating the heartless invasion of CCTV with lyricism, humanity and warmth.

(For the rest of the day, the words “ethical problem” were a cheeky running joke.)

As the time for the second showing approached and nerves kicked in, a mild tension arose among the performers: perhaps there could be a running order after all? Chris remained gentle but adamant. He reassured them: they wouldn't be working by wits alone, but following basic rules of engagement that would allow jam to flow freely. (That is absolutely what it says in my notebook. I suspect Chris also said it another way but in my wisdom [cough] I didn't record that bit.) They could talk to each other about what might happen next, and to the audience, too. If there was a movement, a text, an idea or texture they liked, the invitation was open at all times for them to do it, say it, introduce it. They simply needed to remember the key pieces and notice where the room was going. No set list. No running order. That one key decision was all it took to unlock possibility and make the second showing electric.

This, very roughly, because I couldn't take all of the notes and do all of the watching, is how it played out:

A and P dance together; T sits on a table outside describing – we hear him through J's mobile phone – what he sees on the street, what we witness through the window.

and I think about how we look at the world, and how we record what we see

Observations from a post at the window now, Robert drawing the scene on the glass itself, and while Chris plays piano, J starts listing the things he would like to see out there.

just then, a chorus of happy birthday floats in from the cafe downstairs, and the world outside and the world of Open House fuse

P begins dancing, A describing her dance, T and H trace the outlines of their bodies on the floor, and Chris begins to read: “Follow the line. The line forks...”

and the melancholy lilt of the piano and J's dream list carries into P's body, making her movement seem more pained, more anxious, than anything she's danced through the day

P moves to the truth and lies sofa; hesitantly, the others join her. A pause to establish rhythm and then:

Robert: I once killed a man

H: I find it hard to tell the truth

T: I'm not a man

P: I once ate a frog

A: I have a dog

what do we even know about people? Their secrets? How can we know “truth”? How can we distinguish?

While the sofa dance continues, J invites the audience to take part in the communal dance...

and there's something about the way he does this, so eager, so diffident; something about the fact that the designated technician can switch roles in this way, that they all merge roles, T directing and designing, A choreographing, all of them writing; something about their boundless energy and embrace of cooperation, that is so touching to witness

… and then: CCTV.

P: this person came to a dance class I once taught.

A: this man was just told he's lost his job.

Me: [pointing at a woman pushing a pram] she's wondering if she should have kept the baby.

what do we even know about people? We know stories. The snippets of autobiography they're willing to share with us, the yarns we spin around them.

And something I didn't acknowledge until reading A's for the Mayfest diary: in telling stories about others, we give away our selves...

Chris reads a text I haven't heard before:

this is our time

after all the struggle, the pain, the breathing deeply...

we are the sum of chance encounters

H returns to the window for a new round of observations.

we are the sum of chance encounters. The readiness is all. And how much, how much we see, when we only stop to look

A begins listing them in chalk on the floor.

**the piece of theatre that could only happen now, of this moment**

P is dancing. A is dancing. We can hear J on the phone, reading out the Marie Celeste inventory. And suddenly there, walking up the street, boldly, a vision from a dream, is T, wearing the red dress.

and the world is too much, too detailed, too full to take in

The next day, in a state of exhilaration, I scribbled this in my notebook:

what made it so magical was how it flowed without flowing, felt coherent despite its leaps from one set piece to the next, how open it felt for them to improvise while keeping within the parameters set for themselves earlier, how the showing was infused with all the stories and all the life that had come into the room, how it contained story without story and narrative without narrative, how it relied on trust between the performers and achieved alchemical transformation of the elements that all the best theatre is capable of

By the time I wrote that breathless note to myself I had left Open House behind. I left on a high, thrilled that I had seen such extraordinary, eloquent, surprising work. In less than an hour, through game playing and sharing trust and feeling their way, those seven people had communicated so much about how we relate to each other, talk to each other, talk of each other. But also I left on a low: where was everybody? The audience barely reached double figures for the Thursday showing. Why had there been so few visitors; why were the evening numbers so small? Chris and I discussed this on the Thursday: in Leeds, there was a strong sense that Open House was needed, important, a signpost for a possible future; at Mayfest, it was just another intriguing piece in a fascinating programme. In Leeds, Open House was in the same building with other work; people could wander in and out without having to make a special or effortful detour to the room: that opportunity wasn't there at Mayfest. Did it matter? We decided that in the truest sense, not at all: Robert was there, integral, happy, contributing, invigorated. To be able to affect just one person's life, help them construct a world uncontaminated by another's approval, gift them the opportunity to swim against the tide: to do that for one person is enough.

What troubled me then, and continues to ache in me now, however, is a terrible sense of bungled responsibility: that what I had written about the Leeds Open House had in any way stopped people coming in Bristol. That perhaps I had given wrong impressions, created apprehensions. That the memory I had imprinted of one quashed the life of the other. All that remains of these Open Houses are the stories that are told. And while I know, rationally, that there are no “true” stories, still I want the ones I tell to be right.

*

A postscript: I've spent a couple of days dithering about posting this, and I'm glad I did, because I in the midst of that hesitation I finished reading Borges' Dreamtigers and found this bit of brilliance that articulates precisely what I think this Open House did:

At times in the afternoons a face

Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;

Art must be like that mirror

That reveals to us this face of ours.

They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,

Wept with love to descry his Ithaca

Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca

Of green eternity, not of wonders.

I cherish that word humble, as I cherish my time in Open House.

shunt's the architects: an exorcism

Here are some things I don't do:

I don't look at the Daily Mail, even just to be able to berate the contents of the Daily Mail.

I don't read newspaper reports of war or violence or rapes, and avoid listening to more than an hour of the Today programme because it fills me with despair. (The despair threshold used to be 10 minutes.)

I don't watch political discussions on TV or listen to them on the radio.

I don't listen to Any Questions or any other current affairs talk radio.

I don't engage with celebrity culture.

I don't watch reality TV.

I don't think I'm in any way a superior person for not doing these things. If anything, this failure to engage with the media that surrounds me exacerbates my already pronounced naivety and exposes me for what I am, a gauche idealist with scant compass on the real world. But it's a choice I make to be able to function in that world. To be able to live without despising other people. To be able to believe in the capacity of human beings not simply to survive catastrophe but to create good.

Wonder -- is not precisely Knowing

And not precisely Knowing not --

A beautiful but bleak condition

He has not lived who has not felt --

Tonight, watching Shunt's TheArchitects, I spent 15 minutes essentially doing all those things I choose not to do, all at once. It happened like this. There are four characters, lower class in the old way of ranking people – grotesquely boorish, charmless and coarse – but upper class in the modern hierarchy governed by money. They are obscenely rich, but apparently generous, because they have invited us to take the trip of a lifetime on board a luxury cruise liner, where our every whim will be amply catered for. Why wouldn't we want to enjoy this opportunity? As they themselves say, we've worked for it: we deserve it.

Of course the ship starts sinking. Money corrupts, money corrodes. Money, you might say, is a beast we can't control, a beast whose form is mysterious and terrifying. A beast to whom we are ritually sacrificing our children, as the king of Crete once fed children to the minotaur. We watch these children struggling to lift themselves beyond its grasp – quite literally: they are played by aerialists – but one by one they plunge into money's abyss. And we do nothing. Because what can we do? How can we change this all-pervasive system?

And then we look up, and see the four characters again, raised above our heads, leering down. They don't care. They carry on indulging themselves as if it never happened, and we watch with amused fascination that, as the spectacle continues on and on and on, becomes a sickening voyeurism that is as culpable as the indulgence it gorges on. Do we carry on watching because they provide a spectacle? Or do they continue to provide the spectacle because we're watching? As the minutes tick painfully past, does their confrontation mutate into desperation, a longing for it to end? Why don't we cry, Enough!, and turn away?

Suspense -- is his maturer Sister --

Whether Adult Delight is Pain

Or of itself a new misgiving --

This is the Gnat that mangles men –

I went into The Architects with two things: a determination to see the best in it, because although I hadn't read any reviews I had seen the swirl of argument about it on twitter following press night and knew it split opinion; and a dim memory of skimming through Catherine Love's essay on audience agency/entrapment. It's been interesting revisiting that essay, and reading through Matt Trueman's writing pre- and post- press night, because they both found the final tableau underwhelming, whereas for me it transformed the show from what had felt like an entertaining but slightly toothless satire on luxury and greed, into something much more powerful, vehement, challenging and disturbing. I watched that tableau for its protracted and agonising entirety, willing it to stop but refusing to give in, and felt utterly filthy for doing so, because I knew my presence made its continuation possible. As I watched, I thought about all the media I reject, and wondered whether rejection is good enough, whether it's better to know the enemy than dwell in uninformed assumption, whether I distract myself by abhorring the messenger from taking proper issue with the message. It's a matter of responsibility: of accepting responsibility for the world we create. A world in which money is more important than people, in which the primary financial system is one that demands the ritual and frequent sacrifice of, if not lives, at least livelihoods. And who knows, maybe I read the show this way only because earlier on today I'd been thinking about the contradiction of my life, whereby I'm clearly some kind of bloody Marxist now (and when I say bloody, what I perhaps mean is instinctive-but-undereducated), yet I live in London where even to own a house is to contribute to appalling inequality, but it does seem to me that if The Architects is as much about choice as Matt and Catherine (and, for that matter, Shunt member David Rosenberg) say it is, then it's about the choices we make to do with money: to have more than we need, to indulge a warped sense of our own “value”, to believe we deserve more than others because we work so hard.

I left The Architects with nausea in my throat, a rock in my stomach and my brain in a fever of horror. Writing this, I want to return to the long speech one of the architects who run the cruise liner makes at the beginning of the show, about wonder (particularly as expressed in the Emily Dickinson poem above) and the optimism of architecture, its fusion of past achievement with dreams of a better, brighter future, because it was so uplifting – but that vision is tainted now, too, because what does architecture need if hope is to become reality? Money, money, money.

And even my own relationship and response to the show feel tainted, because I was given a free ticket, and that opens the door to a labyrinth of questions. Would I feel differently about it if I'd paid? What effect does money have on the way we watch art? Why do I “deserve” a free ticket, when others who have written about the show bought theirs? Aren't I helping to maintain a microcosm of inequality? And where does that leave my high-and-mighty politics?

some flotsam, some jetsam

If there were more time, I'd write...

about walking on Christmas day in an outskirt of Oxford, seeing fields flooded with rainwater, lapping with quiet tides, stealthily creeping over the path behind our backs; temporary lakes incongruously demarcated by twisted wire fences and the wooden posts of submerged stiles, across which a couple in a canoe calmly rowed, coaxing along a wooden picnic table that had overturned and floated away...

and seeing Orion through the windscreen of the car, pointing the way back to London; listening to Hadestown, marvelling again at its tenderness and anger; thinking lovingly of Little Bulb and the Orpheus show they're making; now and then catching the snuffling snores of the smallest and looking back to see the biggest gazing out of the window, beginning Motor Vehicle Sundown in her own time...

about seeing Elizabeth Price's The Woolworths Choir of 1979 for the first time knowing nothing about it, with a friend who remembered news of the fire from tiny childhood and my son who protested at the sharp jabs of the soundtrack's clicks and claps, not quite knowing what I was seeing but mesmerised, unable to leave; and returning a few weeks later, for a second watch alone and a third with both children, the kids this time as rapt as me, feeling as though I was inducting them into some mysterious cult, because when I watch those dancing girls (we are chorus, we are trefoil, we are quire – but it could read queer – WE KNOW) I swear they're communicating some dark secret truth about women and sex and the fire at the heart of the earth and the universe...

If I could only figure out how, I'd write about the Two Boroughs Theatre Club at the Young Vic, which I've been collaborating on since September and is my favourite interaction with theatre criticism: the Dialogue dream – of discussion that is accessible, respectful, informative, thorough, which opens up the work in unexpected ways – made real. I was disappointed when the club on The Changeling was cancelled last-minute (too close to Christmas): it was a mixed bag of a production and I was super-excited about thrashing it out with people who go to the theatre for... what? Different reasons, of course: because it's there, being given to them for free, and because they're curious, and because theatre gives them something visceral that the TV doesn't. Deliciously, many of the people I've met there are as addicted to theatre as I am: they're just more restrained when it comes to spouting off about it...

and Dialogue itself, and the weird, intense, brilliant week Jake Orr and I spent at the National Theatre Studio: weird because we were (unexpectedly) paid, and it's the first money we've made with this project, and there was something so pompously noble about doing it altruistically and for free; intense because we worked and talked and thought hard, weeks of activity crammed into five too-short days, interspersed with passionate conversations full of encouragement and enthusiasm for our argument (link coming with a record of all this); brilliant because we finally finished collating everything for the BAC project, which felt long overdue, but that was weird too, because I suddenly realised, with appalling intensity, that the writing I had done for it was somehow all wrong*, tonally all wrong, that I need to find the voice for Dialogue writing the same way I must continually, for each editor, find the voice for the Guardian, X the same way I occasionally find the voice for here...

[*since writing that I've read this in Dreamtigers by Borges, which more precisely articulates that feeling of wrongness:

As I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.

Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.]

If I'd had more time a month ago, I'd have finished writing something I'd started on the Radar Platform on criticism at the Bush, an invigorating event in which Sean Holmes of the Lyric Hammersmith talked inspiringly about a realisation that struck him post-Three Kingdoms: that people are hungry for different theatre, theatre that challenges and surprises and even confuses them, and they don't really care what the reviews say, they will come if it's offered. But they're not being offered it because artistic directors are not being brave. I've thought about his speech a lot in the past few days, although for a disconnected reason: I've been kicking off about the Royal Court again (and, less venomously, the National, because of Curious Incident and The Effect), this time for not being bolder with main-space programming, locking writers of new work into the tiny upstairs space (and thus denying that space to others, with whom they might be taking a genuine risk), fuelling the accusations of elitism hurled at theatre by chasing the buzz of a sold-out show. Mostly I subscribe to the Andy Field argument against bigness, agreeing that the relentless quest for expansion in theatre replicates capitalism's drive for unlimited growth and all the hierarchies implicit in that – but the Court shows none of Andy's passion for or belief in the small, and in fact, with its hotline to the West End, follows precisely the trajectory that Andy rejects. Mostly I understand that some new plays are fragile, and some need time to find their feet, and some benefit from the proximity and concentration of the smaller space – but the Court rarely shows evidence of programming its upstairs room with those things in mind. Instead, it behaves cynically and without courage, and holds a position of such power and influence that it encourages others to do the same.

I'd have written, too, about how much I loved Ramin Gray's speech at the same event, which also lamented theatre's capitalist trajectory, and argued that mainstream (and particularly star-rated) criticism fuels it by writing about plays as commodities, hot news items, disposable entertainments, rather than nourishment for the soul. I'm of an age now, he said, where I'm not afraid to talk about spirituality out loud – and I felt my heart flip, because increasingly I want to talk about the “value” of theatre in spiritual terms but still find myself wary of the word. But it's there when I think about the difference between feeling and understanding a piece of theatre, an intellectual response and an emotional response – thinking sharpened that specific mid-November week by two shows.

One was Ramin's own production of Ivan Viripaev's Illusions, a crafty portrait of two marriages, and everything impossible to know within them, that made a couple of people who saw it the same night as me angry, because (they felt) no attempt had been made to solve the challenge of staging it as theatre. Sure enough, once the icy thrill of the first few pages of text abated, I momentarily wondered why I wasn't listening to Illusions on the radio – but figured that that way crossness lay, and basking in the twisty-turny stomach-churny feeling of it was going to give me more.

The other was Christopher Haydon's production of The Trojan Women, a show I'd invested lots in seeing (in that seeing it meant I never got to see Mike Bartlett's Medea or Stella Duffy's production of Ordinary Darkness, and almost missed out on Sight Is the Sense), but which, for reasons I found hard to fathom, barely moved me. There are all sorts of incidentals I want to blame: my own tiredness and the enormous efforts I had to make simply to stay awake; the woman directly opposite me actually sleeping through much of the show; the audience members to my right who looked bored; the students behind me whispering and rustling throughout – although that did inspire my very favourite moment, Dearbhla Molloy's Hecuba turning to them with finger to lips and twinkle in eye to shush them. But other people there the same night managed to filter those things out. And there was much I felt I couldn't blame: Caroline Bird's frequently clever translation; the incisive comedy; the fierce performances; the complex power politics between the three women and the men attempting to control them; the savage final moments when the baby is torn from the chorus; the video of the gods, which others felt was glib, but to me conveyed the terrible power beneath the gods' grotesque absurdity. At one point I had a thought that always irritates me when I hear it in my head: how differently would I be feeling if a woman had directed this? But that's poor thinking on my part. More useful to wonder if my problem was with the cerebral cool of the production. I left wondering why we do this: why we spend our nights in the theatre, in London a place of some privilege, distantly contemplating war and savagery and patriarchy's crushing of the human spirit, when these things are actually happening in the world and maybe we should be more actively participating to challenge them? Partly that thought came from a sense of guilt: much of that week was spent watching people on twitter raging about violence in Gaza (and, it feels slightly bathetic to add, about proposed cuts to the arts in Newcastle), and feeling pathetic and ineffectual for my failure to do anything, even just join the angry soundbite conversation. But guilt is a waste of emotion. And it wasn't really that: what I apprehended in The Trojan Women was the difference between a contemplation of war and savagery as an intellectual exercise, and feeling that savagery in your heart and bowels – spiritually, in a word. That's how Lucy Ellinson played the Chorus: watching her, I could feel not only the anger of her character but Lucy's own fury, the fury she had been expressing on twitter, about Gaza in particular, the fury of the powerless who know that to speak is to act is to move incrementally towards change. In Lucy's performance I could feel life and theatre and galvanised political action enmeshed. That was what I wanted from all of The Trojan Women. That is why we do this.

And now it's 2013, a year I saw in on Salisbury Crags, first at midnight, marvelling at the moonlight shadows (and yes, I did have the Mike Oldfield song in my head, certain it was by Fleetwood Mac), shivering with bliss at the sight of Orion and the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia beaming above and fireworks dancing across the horizon; and again later that afternoon, straggling behind the others with my smallest, marvelling at his strength and silliness and charm, not needing anyone else. This is the year he starts school, and I try not to wish away the months, but I'm so impatient, not just for writing or any of the other selfish pursuits (and the less time I spend sewing, the more sorry my wardrobe looks), but the changing-the-world, the small-scale stuff Josie Long challenged us all to do in Romance and Adventure, a bittersweet show with a trenchant heart that I just about caught at BAC, the lo-fi activism, or action, that demands a rethink of how you apportion your time.

Time time time. One of the most appealing conceits in all literature is the time turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that allows Hermione Granger to sit twice as many exams as anyone else. I'd use mine to live multiple lives. I'm no sci-fi reader and my knowledge of physics is less than rudimentary, but the notion of parallel universes has loomed large in my over-romantic imagination for decades. When I interviewed Nick Payne for G2, I wanted to play a game with him, where we told each other of the lives we live in parallel universes. Sitting down opposite this kindly regular guy in a grey suit with glasses, I chickened out: it felt too appallingly personal. I have so many, some more disturbing than others: the one where I'm a fashion designer and the one where I'm a painter and the one where I moved to New York at the age of 22; the one where I never married, the one where the love wasn't unrequited, the one where I'm divorced. The one where the car accident was fatal; the four where I simply gave up.

The basic laws of physics don't have a past and a present. Time is irrelevant at the level of atoms and molecules. It's symmetrical.

We have all the time we've always had.

You'll still have all our time.

There's not going to be any more or less of it.

What I realised watching Constellations for the second time – and it was so much better in the West End, the suicide strand less bludgeoning, the whole thing sharper and more electric – is that in all my parallel universes I do something else, and because of that I am someone else. The genius at the core of Constellations is that the opposite is true: whatever happens between those two characters, they are always the same characters, with the same jobs, the same awkwardnesses, the same bad jokes and propensity to embarrass themselves, fucking up in all the same ways. Payne is entirely unsentimental: there is nowhere perfect. Mistakes and sorrow are everywhere, and every life ends in death. I love him for that.

In the past few weeks I've felt as though I've given myself a magic gift of extra time, simply by abandoning Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea on page 152 (of seemingly millions) and reading other books instead. The Sea, the Sea is clearly brilliant: the writing mimics the sea itself, its inexorability, its inscrutability, its scintillating beauty. But oh god is the book's narrator annoying. A theatre director renowned for his productions of Shakespeare, a former actor, an incorrigible, self-obsessed womaniser, he made me think so acutely of Trevor Nunn (not that I've ever, you know, met Trevor Nunn) that a few pages were enough to make his company feel unbearable and by page 152 I was in despair. So I gave up. To cheer myself up, and because I'd recently come across the Brautigan Book Club, I read my first Richard Brautigan in maybe a decade, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, and it was gorgeous. It's told by a man who works in a library that doesn't lend books but receives them: the labours of love that people scrawl into notebooks and take to him with shyness, gratefulness and the subconscious knowledge that they are idiosyncratically articulating the soul of America. He lives there with Vida, who arrives with a rant against her own voluptuous body, and finds with him the possibility of self-acceptance. At first the book felt oddly written, because it apparently unfolds with all the banality of unedited everyday speech. And what's so brilliant about this is that when Vida realises she's pregnant, and has to travel across the Mexican border to Tijuana for an abortion, you implicitly understand that abortion is banal too, a difficult but necessary physical process, a right that shouldn't be demonised or criminalised. The book feels all the more potently political for its understatement.

After that, my first Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's, which was subtle in different but also brilliant ways. It's a portrait of a marriage slowly dying of compromise, distraction and mutual disappointment, buffeted by the second world war, persisting through the resignation of the wife, a glorious, sparky, irreverent woman who loves the Brontes and refuses to conform to anyone's expectations, least of all her buttoned-up husband's. Her heart cools and she is tempted away but in the end she decides:

I never wanted to be a Madame Bovary. That way for ever – literature teaches us as much, if life doesn't – lies disillusion and destruction. I would rather be a good mother, a fairly good wife, and at peace.

Which seems as good a new year resolution as any. As for Taylor, I want to emulate her precision, her elegance, her emotional acuity, in the stories I keep saying I'll write, when there is more time...

saying things out loud in public

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.

searching for a hollow in the sand

The list of things that make me think I should Stop Writing Now is long and mutable, and it's a fairly safe bet that a new exhibition of oil paintings will shoot to the top. I started daubing in oils when I was about 15 and maybe the fumes infected my brain or the pigments poisoned my skin but I became hooked and have never kicked the addiction, despite all-but-quitting painting over a decade ago. A good exhibition is the glimpse of the bottle, the glint of the needle, that shatters a precarious resolve: I walk around in a paroxysm of envy and grass-is-greener confusion, wondering how, why, I let writing come to dominate my life, when paint was surely the partner for me.

I'm so accustomed to feeling this that the past three months have been perplexing: one exhibition after another has left me comparatively unmoved. It's partly to do with the oils I've been seeing: lots of the symbolist work at the Scottish National Gallery was minor league; I can't abide the prissy erotics and risible melodrama of the pre-Raphaelites; too much of the Munch was dispensable. But a few days ago I saw a small room of new work by a painter whose last show was an electric shock of unexpected self-recognition, and felt surprised again by my equanimity. The painter is Simon Ling, and I should declare an interest: I met Simon years ago at a lindy-hop class and although I hardly ever see him he lives in my heart because he's the only person with whom I dance and can feel even fractionally competent. His last show, in the main space at Greengrassi, startled me because it did exactly the things I dreamed of doing with paint: investigated the degrading effect of humans on nature, and nature's insidious revenge, in images of ragged wastelands and strangled forests and derelict buildings smothered in weeds, representing this collision realistically while calling sly, sensuous attention to the act of painting itself. The new show, also at Greengrassi, is much smaller, and there are three paintings in it that I love, of buildings around Old Street station, each one fascinating in its slipperiness. One building seems to stand askew, another to careen towards the edges of the canvas, while the third holds itself together at the edge of collapse. I think again about the abandoned painting of a crumbling building in Athens that I was supposed to give my dad for his 50th birthday: these, too, are things I dreamed of doing. But this time, it's OK that I'm not.

Painting is the one thing I don't allow myself to fudge: I'll make clothes and write and invent cake recipes and just muddle along, but if I can't be brilliant at painting I won't do it at all. Not even as a hobby: the phrase “Sunday painter”, for that matter the word “hobby”, makes me balk. Occasionally I've wondered if such fundamentalism isn't idiotic. But last year, reading an interview with John Berger in the Guardian, I received confirmation. “Painting is something that you need to do if not every day, then certainly most days,” Berger said. “It is almost like being a pianist, if you stop you lose something. The phrase 'Sunday painter' is not often a compliment.”

I've been thinking about Berger a lot this past fortnight, since X I had to confess, sotto voce, that Berger is one of far too many writers whose books I know I ought to have read by now but which I've been trying to absorb by osmosis, as though simply having them on the shelves were enough. Who knows, maybe it's worked: in an email conversation about Berger X, Rajni Shah wrote admiringly of the way that, in Berger's writing, “the space of language is not separate to the space of thinking is not separate to the space of eating and walking and falling and hesitating and implying”. Which is pretty much exactly what I'd like to be doing on Deliq.

At the same time, I've been thinking about painting, or rather, about writing-as-painting, slowly becoming conscious of a correspondence between how I used to paint and how I now write, at least for Deliq, at least about theatre, and vaguely wondering what that means. So I had something of a double-flip when I came across this passage in Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible, the second essay in Berger's book The Shape of a Pocket (yes, I am actually reading him now):

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter... When a painting is lifeless it is the result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a collaboration to start. He stays at a copying distance. …

The modern illusion concerning painting … is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.

And then this, from the fourth essay, Studio Talk:

...two words: FACE and PLACE.

… Whatever the painter is looking for, he's looking for its face. All the search and the losing and the re-finding is about that, isn't it? And 'its face' means what? He's looking for its return gaze and he's looking for its expression – a slight sign of its inner life.

… A place is more than an area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension of a presence or the consequence of an action.

… How does a painting become a place? … When a place is found it is found somewhere on the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the painting begins in this hollow.

Forgive me if this sounds completely ridiculous, but everything Berger says here (and I realise there are lots of ellipses: they don't negate the recognition but further confirm it) chimes with me instinctively not as a painter but as a theatre-writer. What am I if not a receiver, struggling to give new form to that which I've received? What am I looking for if not the face, the inner life, of a piece? What is Dialogue, the website/proposal for a new approach to theatre-writing that I started this year with Jake Orr, if not an attempt to get close enough to theatre-makers for a collaboration to start? And what might become possible if I were entirely unafraid to leap into that hollow in the sand, where the frontier between life and theatre, me and the piece, has been wiped out?

I've been writing this in my parents' house in Cyprus, a portal to a parallel universe where all the paintings I did as a teenager hang on the walls and I'm confronted daily by the person I never became. Earlier today I went for a walk around their village and listened to Deerhunter and beamed at the mountains turning lilac in the sunset, dove-grey roads snaking across them, and photographed the small gnarled trunk of a tree, its sinuous limbs curved like the body of a woman, two snapped branches reaching out in supplication, and thought of Daphne escaping Apollo, and of coming back tomorrow to draw it. Last night I threw together a yoghurt cake by whisking three medium eggs with five tablespoons of honey, maybe 50ml of olive oil, 200g Greek yoghurt, three heaped spoons of plain flour, 125g ground almonds and a sprinkle of cinnamon, baked it for 40 minutes in a moderate oven, then glazed it with more honey, a spoonful of lemon juice, and nibbed almonds; it was good, something like a mild smooth cheesecake, but I wish I'd made the effort to bake it in a bain marie. Every evening I sit with my computer on my lap and half-despise, half-relish the impossible frustration of words, while my family play cards and drink and talk politics. And at the beach I read this, from another essay in The Shape of a Pocket, about Vincent van Gogh: “for him the act of drawing or painting was a way of discovering and demonstrating why he loved so intensely what he was looking at”. And I shivered as the heat of the sun turned my skin indignant red and thought: yes, that is how I want to write about theatre, too.

Benedict Andrews: the (as it were) director's cut

It wasn't until I'd written it, rewritten it top-to-bottom, and addressed myriad editorial queries, that I knew how to write about Benedict Andrews for the Guardian. Unfortunately, the lightbulb switched on seven minutes into the afternoon school run on publication day, by which time another radical rewrite was out of the question. I know why he foxed me: we talked for 70 minutes, energetically and sometimes intensely, sitting on the set for his Young Vic Three Sisters – in both attempts at the piece, I noted that his is the first rehearsal room I've walked into where the actors work throughout on the actual set – which, I suspect, encouraged the conversation to sprawl across the room. Every attempt to squash it down to an 850-word print space felt doomed.

The thought I had on the school run was this: that I should have focused more on the vexed notion of “director's theatre”. One of the things I read about Andrews before interviewing him was a review of his eight-hour power through Shakespeare's Histories, The War of the Roses, by someone who clearly hates his work. At the Guardian's request, I quoted the following from it: “Benedict Andrews is my nightmare of what director’s theatre can come to.” (I haven't bothered linking to it because if you're going to read a review, it should be Alison Croggon's.) Another, more useful, quote came from Cate Blanchett, who was part of the Roses ensemble and collaborates with Andrews often: “His rehearsal rooms are muscular – brutal, even – but he loves being surprised.”

“I think what Cate was talking about, it's sort of a demand from the beginning,” says Andrews. “I'm wanting [the actors] to really go for it, and I don't have a blueprint – OK, I have a big blueprint, but I don't know what's going to happen. I'm wanting them to invent and me to invent, I'm dependent on them to feed me and me to feed them. That's a sort of tightrope act and a real dance; it's like a performance, very playful, very theatrical, but emotionally raw as well. I'm interested in something happening in the theatre, happen[ing] night after night. It's a construct and a game but something's got to take place.”

What I liked about this was its refutation of the criticism that the people responsible for “director's theatre” have a fixed idea about what their production will do and how it will play.

“I think that's bullshit,” Andrews shoots back. “I don't know any good director who works like that. If you love actors you want them to be liberated. It's really a dialogue at its best, and I'm reliant on people who are on their toes and inventive and playful. That's such a dangerous cliche, that this director's theatre is an imposition: people who are threatened by what they see read this in reverse. It's actually the opposite. I come into a rehearsal room with a series of givens: I guess that's part of the game, what you choose to put in. We make the rules that there are these things here, and if you come in here you have to tell the story with [them]. I don't ever put it on [the finished set] at the end, in the final week, because I don't believe that set design is decoration. Everything is absolutely fundamental and used and discovered in the room. The room has to earn its right to exist.”

This has been key to the development of his work, he says: the desire to “get rid of ornamentation and move towards something that's raw for the playing, but that has an argument about the world in it, [which] you watch being constructed. [It's saying,] this is a place for theatre, as opposed to saying: this is nice wallpaper and that's how the world is. That's a special thing that theatre allows us, which cinema or photography can't do: to watch a series of constructed instants and maybe think about how they're made.”

Now I've put all those quotes together, I realise a piece revolving around this material would have been doomed, too. The thoughts are too big, too vigorous. But without them, I couldn't talk effectively about his sense of the differences between British and German theatre. An obsessive reader of theatre magazines, he was aware of work happening in Germany long before he first visited the Schaubuhne in 2002. That association grew from two things: his first bash at staging Three Sisters, at the Sydney Opera House in 2001, and a production of Marius von Mayenburg's Fireface the same year. Mayenburg wasn't able to see his own play but did watch an early run-through of Three Sisters: he told Andrews that he'd never seen Chekhov like that before (more on this to come), and that the atmosphere in the company reminded him of the people he was working with in Germany.

Andrews directed his first production at the Schaubuhne, Sarah Kane's Cleansed, in 2004, and worked there regularly over the next six years. “It's a real baptism by fire, being at the Schaubuhne, because it was the greatest house for contemporary theatre in those times, maybe still now. I learned so much losing my language, when actors were speaking German and I didn't really understand it. And [Thomas] Ostermeier was inventing a lot in those years – still is, but I remember while I was there seeing the birth of several new ideas from him. So you have a very strong leader, and a very good ensemble attracted to that person, … [who] have an expectation that you will have ideas beyond the literal. [The actors are] very truthful, they can invent on basic naturalistic truth, but their job is also to invent metaphors simultaneously. I don't mean that as some sort of conceptual exercise: it's the visceral nature of theatre that they can invent and play on many levels at once.”

English actors – and he said this on the basis of a just a few days working with the Young Vic cast – by contrast demonstrate “a pragmatic, utilitarian literalness about things, which is a really great skill if you can use it as a springboard and not be bound by it. There's a facility with text and language that can be both a safety net, because they know how to make it sound, and a skill that suits a lot of the writing. I'm encouraging them to break through that into something raw and sometimes messier.”

It's this messiness, he argues, that separates German and British theatre. “I guess there's an assumption [in Germany] that a director's job is not necessarily to make something nice and well-made, which it is here. I'm all for well-made, well-crafted, but the expectation [here] in a way is: please don't go beyond that, because it's wrong somehow. Rather than letting it be a train crash but it's alive.” He points to Three Kingdoms, and the way it brought a “terribly revealing binary” to the surface. “In German theatre culture there are so many contrasting arguments about what theatre is. German theatre is many, many things: it's a hothouse; yes, some of it is excessively conceptual. [In England,] it's a shorthand people use to deride things that are different.

“The interesting thing [about Three Kingdoms], and why the controversy happened maybe, [is that] Simon Stephens writes well-made English plays, so you're seeing in English something that seemingly should be the well-made English play, done in the German way: done in a way which says, right, let's rip it up and start again. Over there, it's part of a very rich, dense theatre culture. I enjoyed Three Kingdoms very much, particularly as an experiment; … maybe in the end I saw a train crash, but I would rather see this train crash than something well-mannered and polite.”

I didn't talk about any of that in the Guardian because I still feel confused about my weird role in the discussions around Three Kingdoms. Nor did I manage to squeeze in the canny politics of David Lan bringing Andrews into the Young Vic. In May, Lan published – on Matt Trueman's Carousel of Fantasies – a speech about the need for young British directors to see German work, because: “when you do experience this theatre, you become a little bit more free as an artist, and consequently a little bit more capable of communicating through art the complexity of your own special and individual experience of living in the world”. But it's one thing to see that work in Berlin, quite another to see it and feel it and witness its effect on an audience in a London house.

I say this because nothing prepared me for Andrews' Three Sisters. I've seen two other shows by him this year, and they didn't persuade me that I would love his Chekhov, despite the fact that one of them, Gross und Klein, is among the best things I've seen this year. The production felt really clean, distilled to a series of vivid, precisely detailed vignettes through which Cate Blanchett's thrumming Lotte stumbled in search of human connection. Caligula, at ENO, felt as overwhelmingly busy as Gross und Klein was focused and pure: stadium seats thrusting across the stage, violence erupting from the aisle between them, symbols of pop-capitalist culture littering the space. I left it to Matt Trueman to synthesise it all for me, which he did, brilliantly.

My problem wasn't with Andrews, it was with Three Sisters. I'd seen it once before, when I had to review Katie Mitchell's National Theatre production, an excruciating experience because I found it paralysingly dull and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, could only assume it was my own ignorance and philistinism that made it so. (Funnily enough, I didn't say any of that in the review.) Having seen Andrews' version, I suspect the problem was more with Mitchell's decision to emphasise the listlessness of the siblings' existence: the trouble with such unvarying, torpid inaction is that it inspires very little sympathy. Then again, Lyn Gardner has suggested to me that Three Sisters doesn't make an impact on you until you've felt real disappointment in life: maybe I've finally got the experience I lacked in 2003.

I enjoyed talking to Andrews about the Mitchell production, not because he'd seen it, but because he'd seen her Seagull in Copenhagen and described it as “a Hammershoi painting”, a collection of “period pictures” whose purpose he understands but which are not sufficiently removed from what he dismisses as museum theatre for his taste (at least, that's how I interpret what he said; apologies to him if I've overstepped the mark). He has hated museum theatre ever since he was a teenager, when he saw a radical Lithuanian production of Uncle Vanya directed by Eimuntas Nekrošius at the Adelaide festival. “That was my exposure to what theatre should be and what Chekhov should be. When I started going to the state theatre [in Australia], I thought: what are these people doing? I felt like Konstantin in The Seagull: that they should be destroyed and start again.”

What he was seeing was “lace and high necks” and productions that were “about manners. I think the plays are about class, class is important and a dying class is important, a dying bourgeois who live in a bubble. [In Three Sisters] they talk about a storm coming that will wipe us all out: we now know what that storm was, and what perhaps in 25 years would happen to these children of the bourgeois.” The focus on manners, as opposed to class and class conflict, he argues, “is a big piece of bullshit to hide in. It's this big fantasy everybody has that [Chekhov's plays are] about repressed people being nice.”

From what I can gather, there was nothing nice about his 2001 production of Three Sisters. It was a breakthrough show for him, and sealed his reputation as difficult and divisive. “It was the first Chekhov I'd done, and the first time you meet it it's raw discovery. And I was a much younger director. I was blindly doing it and the production was a mess actually, probably in a good way. It threw so many things at it: the stage was covered in Star Wars toys, Irina was crying holding a Yoda doll, there was disco music playing. None of this to my mind was for provocation: it was alive for us, as a group making it. Now I look back and I think, there was probably some clutter in front of the heart of the play, but I wanted it to be wild and not genteel.”

He was 29 then; now he's 40: “I hope you do get wiser as you get older,” he laughs. “To come back knowing it but not trying to do the same production is very interesting: the thing reappears even more incandescent, even more truthful; the transparency and lightness of the thing becomes even more incredible; this perfect crystalline structure carries these complicated people in such terrible pain. I'm much more interested in people; I think that's something that happens as you get older in theatre. I was much more interested with form: form's [still] a very big question for me, but now all I really want to do is watch very good actors playing and being truthful.”

Honestly? Very good actors playing and being truthful is exactly what you see in the Young Vic production. There are all sorts of fascinating things happening in the staging: the elevation of the Prozorov family on stiff grey tables, a structure of class and cultural values that is slowly dismantled until the sisters must squarely face the realisation that they are nothing more than dust and earth; the huge box ceiling looming over them, like time itself; the choreography of the sisters, so close, so far apart; the psychological exactitude of the costumes; the time-blur of the music, quietly alerting us to the fact that Andrews has in mind our iPod generation who, like Chekhov's characters, surely – surely? – know that something has to give, that capitalism and the self-obsession, inequality, climate change, violence against human existence it entails can't be sustainable, but don't know when change will come or how it will manifest itself or what it might actually mean. But I didn't think about any of these things watching it; some of them, I wasn't even able to articulate fully until talking the production through at the Young Vic with people who participate in the theatre's Two Boroughs project. I didn't think because I was too busy feeling electrified by the performances. I went twice, certain that it couldn't be that alive, that exciting, the second time around: if anything, I heard it more clearly and felt it more acutely, because the characters – oh, the paradox – were saying those words for the very first time.

The odd thing is, so much of what they say is so clunky. Olga's opening speeches are functional, not realistic, and yet you hear them the way you hear a boring big sister (I say this as a boring big sister) banging on about stuff you already know. Irina is so painfully earnest, Vershinin weirdly stiff. And yet the actors make every word ring true. And then there's everything they don't say: the second time I went, I kept catching Masha mouthing along mockingly to her husband's Latin aphorisms; the moment when she almost remonstrates with her sisters but then sees Vershinin and is silently magnetised by his presence is thrilling. And then there's everything that gesture communicates: whenever Kulygin kisses Olga's forehead you know, just know, he has married the wrong sister.

Something else I didn't properly appreciate until talking this through with the Two Boroughs participants, and beginning to read an essay on Three Sisters that Andrews gave me at the end of the interview: whereas the Katie Mitchell production expressed the sisters' experience of time as a suffocating heaviness, Andrews understands that it's possible to know that you are wasting your life away yet feel enjoyment in the moment of doing so. The first two acts are time seemingly suspended, present fleeting pleasure buoyed between a halcyon past and a glowing future: in the last two acts, time collapses, so that past and future are equally irrelevant, and the present, without those consolations, feels unbearably bleak. This is how time drifts for all of us. The best anyone can do is get back up, face the music and dance.

I talked to Andrews quite a bit about the politics of his adaptation, because even on the page it blazed. He didn't talk about the play being “relevant” but live, alive, present. “There's all sorts of loaded words: if you hear the word decadent, our decadent culture, that echoes back through the failure, the so-called failure, of that type of communism. There are plenty of people now starting to say there might be another use of the word communism, to try and salvage that political system. [Tuzenbach says], maybe we're approaching some kind of zero point: that's deliberately from Living in the End Times by Zizek, that argument that there is a kind of collapse of all these possible systems.

“[Tuzenbach and Vershinin] are not actually giving political lectures, that's the interesting thing; they're kind of just bullshitting, talking around these themes to get at something else. But it's a big theme in the play and I want to make it charged still. We can share if we want to a sense of end times, or a sense that everything might suddenly collapse.

“Something is in the air for the people in this play: they're a terminal bourgeois, [their] world was about to explode, and here's this young bourgeois woman saying we have to work. That means a completely different thing for us now, in a post-industrial age, from what it would mean for her as the daughter of a general, who hasn't lifted a finger, with a maid doing things. Or the baron says [of his own privileged youth], I'd sit in front of the telly while someone took my shoes off. Sometimes I can see [the actors] try to process that on a class level [as in, relating it to the English aristocracy]: for me, it could just as easily be an Icelandic banker or someone who owns a supermarket chain or a new rich in Russia or Mexico. It [happens] here: you're busy, you have a nanny in the house looking after the kids. But people don't want to believe it exists here, or that our culture is based on a service industry. We want to believe we're all part of this iPod world: people do not want to believe that there is actually a huge class gap in society still.”

Museum or “genteel” Chekhov, he repeats, obfuscates these politics. “I'm not saying you have to do contemporary versions: a period version can make you think about this. But for me, so much effort goes into that as a smokescreen, to get away from these being real people, people who are in questions of being alive now, [who are] as blind and as confused as us about what to do. We're playing the play instant by instant, … and this is what leads to big questions: why are these women in the situation that they're in? Why are they so stranded in their lives? I think they become an exemplar of what's become a key condition for us, which is a kind of homesickness in our own lives, a radical homesickness wherever you are in the world.” Like the army, shipping out of the provincial town, he says, people now move wherever their job sends them, or wherever they can get the biggest pay packet – never mind the personal cost.

Andrews isn't someone who indulges in a lot of private talk, but this reference to homesickness makes me curious. I ask him where feels like home to him at the moment and there's a long pause. “There's sort of nowhere yet. Iceland is becoming that: I have an application in for an Icelandic residency status and I would set up there as a base. In a way I feel at home there because I'm there a lot and that's where Magga [his partner, Margrét Bjarnadóttir] is, but often when I'm there I'm also in anticipation of going somewhere else. But then of course my friends and family are in Australia. I put myself in the state of the characters in this play: I live in a perpetual state of homesickness for somewhere else. But then it's also very beautiful to be a stranger, in a way.”

I can't help cheering when he talks about building his career around Magga, turning down opportunities to run theatres in Australia so that he could live in Europe with her. It's not just about love, it's about work: “I've needed this other perspective in the world, I need to work with actors from different places and to work in different theatre contexts. I also think I'm keeping alive the possibility for writing. If I had [stayed in Australia] the last 10 years, I wouldn't be a theatre director any more. I think I would have shrivelled up and died.”

Talk of writing elicits another confession: as a teenager he wrote plays, but in his twenties he had a crisis of confidence and switched to poetry. “When I was a learning director I was consciously or unconsciously trapped by all the great writers that I was working with: Sarah Kane, Beckett, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Marius von Mayenburg. Sometimes they can make it almost impossible for you to write.” (Quick aside: I find it brilliant that he puts Sarah Kane first in that list. Just brilliant.)

“All the plays have been accidents,” he adds. “I didn't think that I was going to write theatre: I thought I would continue to try and develop writing poems and maybe write fiction.” The first play grew from a conversation he overheard in an airport in summer 2010; since then he's written three more, in feverish succession. “It's like a door opens in the brain, there's something going on in there, you start eavesdropping on these people and follow them. It's a very unusual situation because suddenly I have this clutch of plays but they're not performed. My great hope [is] that they will come into the world separate from me as a director. I could do good productions of some of them [but] they're not written for me to direct. [But] in Australia it's very difficult: people are intimidated by me as a director. When I give them to people, maybe this is their polite way of getting out of doing them, but there is the question: if you don't do it, who should?”

Andrews has done a production of one of them, Every Breath, and the reviews I've read for that are vitriolic. He doesn't expect people to find his plays easy: “They're not written as a well-structured well-made play – I think they're well-structured in terms of a rhythm, but they do strange things, maybe too strange, I don't know yet. I hope the plays end up having an argument or saying something or make a consolation with things happening. There's a kind of noise in them that maybe people find a bit scary.”

He has an English agent who has been sending the plays out; responses to the most recent, Gloria, mostly compare it to the David Lynch film Inland Empire, which I've been warned against seeing on the grounds that Twin Peaks gave me recurring nightmares for five years and this is infinitely worse. Both Gloria and Every Breath are set in gated communities, a trope he often uses as a director, too. “I'm quite interested in the closed-off community under surveillance as a sort of modern paradigm,” he admits. “But then there might be a whole other level underneath it, to do with my job [being] to sit and watch people, to be a voyeur all day of very private things. So these plays then end up being about [an] obsession with watching, an obsession with eyes.”

Very private things: that, too, is what you see in his Young Vic Three Sisters. Whether it's the queasy transformation of Natasha from bumbling provincial to strutting lady of the manor or the wry glance shared between servants, whether it's Andrey assimilating his shattered hopes with Ferapont precisely because the old man can't hear him or Masha howling like a savaged animal when Vershinin leaves, Andrews exposes everything that these characters try to hide, or try to ignore. In doing so, he makes you face up to yourself – and leaves you maybe just a little more accepting of that self than before.

Final note: there's a lot of great music in this production, but this song is very much the best...