Got life, got music, got theatre

I am old now and so drunk on just two glasses of wine and in the past six days I’ve had the kids on half-term and moved back into my family home that doesn’t suit me and left London three times and right now I’m sitting on a single bed in a twin room in a B&B in Malvern with my head swimming and my heart racing because tonight in a stupidly big room with an audience of not enough people tonight at Malvern Theatres I saw Uninvited Guests’ new show This Last Tempest and my body isn’t big enough to contain it, I can’t hold all at once everything it made me think and feel. I am trembling, every inch of me vibrating, with how much I love this show. Two weeks ago I was in Bristol with the company because they’ve asked me to be a board member and anyone who thinks that in some way this invalidates my response to it can right this minute just fuck right off, another time I’ll have a more temperate and articulate argument but just now the idea that what a FAN thinks is somehow less trustworthy than what a “distanced” “dispassionate” observer thinks can take a flying fucking jump. Have you seen the Nick Cave film 20,000 Days onEarth? There’s a bit in that where Cave and Warren heart Ellis talk about Nina Simone, about the transformational power of live performance, that reminded me (partly because I’d been talking to Peter McMaster not long before seeing the film about whether or how art can transform those who encounter it) of a very specific night in an upstairs room of a pub in Camden watching Tortoise play, I guess in 1994, and knowing that I would never need to take drugs, because I would always have live music to recalibrate my body and take over my brain; tonight watching This Last Tempest I had a bit of that again, heart so swollen I could hardly breathe and blood flowing with the cadence of the stage. This Last Tempest begins where Shakespeare’s Tempest ends – there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to go into too much detail because I know I’m seeing it again in Colchester on November 27 and by then already it will have changed/honed/found its rhythm, and because I want everyone to go in with the same not-knowing, to experience the same wonder/surprise, but also there’s a part of me that wants to sit up until 3am dissecting every moment of it one by one – it begins with Prospero leaving the island and Arial and Caliban needing to learn how to live for themselves; it begins with that same speech by Gonzalo X in which he envisages a non-hierarchical society that has no commerce or trade, no magistrates, no riches or poverty, no power to overthrow, a speech no teacher of mine ever adequately addressed; it begins with an awareness of climate change, our responsibility to change our intemperate behaviour, the (im)possibility of returning the earth to itself; it begins with the faltering attempts to love, to feel, of two creatures who have been shown scant love or compassion, the appropriation of others’ language to express those burgeoning emotions, the blossoming of empathy that comes with love; it begins with a longing for change, a desire to destroy and through that to create; it begins with the 2011 riots, with Crack Capitalism, with the fear of living in the end of times; it begins with sound, with frequencies just slightly beyond human hearing (how delicious to see this within a few days of Dickie Beau’s equally testing/enrapturing Camera Lucida), with an immense love of Nick Cave and My Bloody Valentine; it begins in my exploding fucking heart, and weeks of not really needing to write about theatre, and knowing this show is special because I couldn’t brush my teeth or sink into bed before vomiting words into a computer screen (honestly, if they’d set out to make a show that would be everything I love to distraction, they couldn’t have ticked more boxes). And there’s something so correct and pleasing and stupidly meta in the fact that this is me writing like Megan Vaughan writing like me, in response to Uninvited Guests reshaping Shakespeare to think about the weight of history – oh! I haven’t even mentioned the weight of history yet, the fear that however willingly we attempt to shape what could be, we will always be too scarred by what was – and the power of language to rule and ruin, divide and oppress.  And all the things it reminded me of: X and all the thinking I’ve been doing about class with/alongside Harry Giles (Shakespeare’s Miranda will weep for princes, but not the ordinary slaves), and the fact that from now until the end of the year women are effectively working for free because unequal fucking pay, and oh my god the whole sequence where gravity is destabilised, and somewhere at the heart of it, this song:

But now it’s 12.12am and my train leaves in exactly seven hours and there are still teeth to brush and pyjamas to pull on and a bed to climb into and I can’t write it all, all I can do now is marvel and shiver and wait for next time, impatiently and full of joy.