A thought has been itching in my head
for weeks now, a thought about love, and landscapes, and marriage,
and Andy Field's new show with Ira Brand, Put Your Sweet Hand in Mine. A thought that I haven't found the time or space to formulate;
a thought that, no matter how many times I sat down over Christmas
and New Year to email Andy, refused to coalesce into words. But I'm
in a new time zone now, and a new space, a hotel near Niagara Falls,
surrounded by rough-tumble piles of hard-packed greying snow; and,
perhaps most importantly, I'm alone. Somehow the thought about
marriage felt shy of emerging with my husband hovering in the
background.
I don't remember when Andy and I
started talking about Put Your Sweet Hand in Mine, except that back
then it was still called “I would like to talk to the capitalists
about money, but they only wanted to tell love stories”. Maybe it
was when he sent me an early text that Ira performed at Buzzcut in
Glasgow in spring 2013 and I emailed him a bunch of thoughts it
inspired about the intensity of looking a stranger in the eye,
romance versus altruism, and the capitalist ideology enacted by
Hollywood love stories. Maybe it was autumn 2012 when, with fizzing
brain and palpitating heart, I read and re-read a talk he'd given in
Nottingham, Political Art: A User's Manuel. In a section called Love
dedicated to Rebecca Solnit, he quoted a passage of her
life-enhancing book A Paradise Built in Hell, the bit celebrating
“other loves”: the non-romantic loves you don't see in popular
culture, that express themselves in genuine philanthropy – philia,
friendship, for anthropi, (hu)mankind – a word narrowed and twisted
by capitalism so it now connotes lofty patronage, rather than an
active desire anyone might feel to make the world better,
particularly for the powerless. At the end of that section on Love,
Andy threw down a challenge:
I would like you to make a show about
love
In which no one falls in love
Maybe he told me then that he was
setting that challenge for himself.
In December just gone, I went to BAC to
visit Andy,
Ira and their producer, Beckie Darlington, in the middle of a
two-week stint working on Sweet Hand. They showed me what they had
made so far, then we sat in the cafe and wrangled over it. I say we:
Andy and I wrangled, while every now and then Ira, whose head was
cotton-woolly from a cold, would say that she finds it hard to work
in the abstract in this way, that she makes by doing, trying, moving.
What we were struggling to figure out was how the show could travel
from a conventional romantic beginning – eyes meeting across a
crowded room, the consuming sense of possibility generated in that
moment of connection – to a contemplation of other loves:
everything you might do or at least deliberate if you weren't
constantly dreaming about those eyes/their possibility, but actively
engaged with the world and more concerned with a wider philanthropy.
At one point I said it was the difference between looking at someone
and thinking, “I want to marry you, have children with you, live
with you for the rest of our days”, or thinking, “I want to start
a riot with you [and change the world].” It took me several weeks
to realise that these weren't opposites: they were just different
angles on the same romantic love story, so ingrained in my psyche
that it's hard to see beyond it.
I
really enjoyed the scratch showing a week later, even though it
didn't quite work. The audience sat (and still do) in two rows facing
each other, with a narrow pathway between; Andy and Ira sat (and
still do) on opposite sides, but not opposite each other. When they
speak, they don't look across at each other, but directly at the
audience-member in front of them, so when their characters lock eyes
at the beginning of the show, or bump into each other on the Paris
metro, those initial stirrings of love are communicated outside of
the couple, not within it. I happened to be sitting beside Andy that
night, and watching the person opposite him was extraordinary: he
knew he was at the heart of the story and there was a palpable
electricity to that. But what the scratch didn't make clear was that
everyone in the audience is at the centre of the story, everyone is
invited to catch eyes with the stranger sitting opposite and imagine
falling in love, or starting a riot – or eschewing the traditional
romantic narrative altogether. It wasn't until close to the end, when
we're instructed to hold hands with the person opposite and hold
their gaze, that this potential connection was made, and that was too
late.
The
fragmentary structure of the piece felt really important: every time
we were lulled into thinking about romantic love, crack, something
happened to disrupt that. But somehow this never resulted in a
contemplation of other loves. Until, that is, the final scene, when
Andy and Ira took off their clothes and replaced them with
dripping-wet outfits extracted from buckets of water, to play an
apocalyptic disaster in which they stand at either end of the aisle
and – in a mixture of quotes from Hollywood films – try to save
each other, and everyone else. “It started as quite funny, but very
very quickly became utterly devastating,” I wrote in my compulsory
email to Andy. “It is shockingly romantic, the more so because of
the distance between you. It is full of longing and desire and
absence and need and yet when you talk it's about none of those
things: it's anxiety for others, it's social care. I think it's the
moment when you're doing both things at once: looking inside love and
outside. Personal and political.”
The week after the scratch, Andy and co
took
Sweet Hand-making to ARC in Stockton, where they created an exquisite
(I say this having only read Andy's report of it, but can't see how
it could be otherwise) companion piece, I Want To Know What Love Is:
a participatory work which involves people looking through a list of
100 types of love and, if they find one that relates to them, writing
a few words about it, in return for a Casablanca thimble. If they
don't find anything relevant, they get to smash the thimble. Oh it
sounds perfect: a gorgeous invitation really to think about and
celebrate other loves, loves for friends, for pets, for ideas, for
places. The love of landscape, Andy told me later, emerged so
strongly from this work; he hoped he would be able to get that into
the show.
The
word landscape snagged at my brain, and this is the thought I've been
trying to prise out since. I see marriage as a kind of landscape,
too. When you first fall in love, that landscape is verdant, all
spring blossom and clover, but the further you travel across it, the
more you notice its jagged stumbling stones, the steepness of its
incline, the prickling gorse you have to avoid. The scamper across a
soft grassy slope becomes a hike across a windswept moorland: ardour
becomes arduous. That sounds unremittingly negative, maybe it is. But
I can see the positives in it. Tough ground feels very sure beneath
the feet. In August 2012, in the midst of a spectacularly dizzy high,
when I felt I could be in love with almost everyone, it occurred to
me how grateful I was for the security of marriage: I could enjoy
this mind-spinning love for the people around me and still think
about other things, get stuff done. Romantic love is distracting: as
Andy wrote in that piece dedicated to Rebecca Solnit,
Perhaps
love becomes a vacuum In which we can’t hear the other things
we’re trying to say
Love-in-marriage
(and maybe by that I simply mean long-term love) isn't distracting:
it's just there, a landscape of few defining features, stretching as
far as the eye can see. No wonder popular culture has so little
interest in it.
Thinking
about marriage in this way, I realised that something has always
troubled me about Solnit's celebration of other loves. I don't have the book with me so can't quote this accurately, but central to
this idea is the story of an
extraordinary woman who lived in the San Francisco area in the early
part of the 20th century, who experienced the 1906 earthquakes as a
child and was so emotionally struck by the charity people extended to
each other that she decided not to marry but to devote herself to
philanthropy. Whether intentionally or not, Solnit appears to convey
here that marriage and other loves are mutually exclusive. But
they're not. Marriage isn't a closing off from the world, but the
terrain one walks across when opening up to it.
I
tried to formulate something of that when Andy and I wrangled at BAC
but it wouldn't come out then either. Perhaps it's not even relevant.
But my inability to articulate a thought about another kind of love
than the headily romantic feels part of the same problem as the one
Andy (and Ira and Beckie) were grappling with when making Sweet Hand.
It
was odd seeing the finished show on Saturday night (February 15); to
be honest, I didn't properly see it, because I had spent the day
metaphorically locked in a darkened room, cradling a broken heart
(broken in the way that only love can break your heart), and was lost
in a fog of misery. It's still an oblique and fragmentary piece,
which requires its audience to make connections between disparate
propositions, and on Saturday night I could barely identify the
propositions, let alone connect them. And as I scan my memories of
it, I'm not sure what belongs to Saturday night, and what to the
December scratch. The invitation to connect with the person opposite
is more clearly made at the beginning now, and there's a wonderful
sequence in the middle where you're invited to gaze at each other,
not into each other's eyes but through them to the mind behind, to
its secret longings, fears and pains. Even so, I was surprised by how
easy it is for people sitting just a metre apart to look at anything
but the stranger in front of them. And the grip of the traditional
romantic narrative felt even more tenacious in this version,
particularly when Andy sings, in a fragile quaver, the Beach Boys'
God Only Knows. I think it's brilliant that Sweet Hand ends with
Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is, partly because it's a
dreadful song that none the less makes me want to wave lighters in
the air, partly because the show is genuinely saying that: I want to
know what love is, I want you to show me. It's the perfect soundtrack to the journey Sweet Hand now takes, thinking about romantic love.
The
day before I saw Sweet Hand, Valentine's Day (don't get me started on
the pernicious manipulation of Valentine's Day), I spent a couple of
hours volunteering at a centre dedicated to getting people into work.
The vetting process for this had been fairly rigorous – I'd had to
send in a CV and application form explaining why I wanted to
volunteer, and talk all this through again on the phone and in person
– and despite all that, the first question I was asked when I
reported for duty was: “Why are you doing this? You're a mum, you
work: why this as well?” As though the concept of philanthropy were
utterly alien.
Popular
culture could do so much to counter that, to create, as Solnit puts
it, “maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even
ideas on them”. What I've been trying to work out from within the
fog of Saturday night is whether Sweet Hand still tries to create
that map, or whether it simply talks about romantic love. I think Sweet Hand is many lovely things, but it's not a show
about love in which no one falls in love. Like a child evading its
parent's desires, it grew from that embryonic challenge into
something else.
At
least, that's the way I see it having spent so many months tracing
its progress. And I might not have written about Sweet Hand at all,
except that I'm in this hotel near Niagara to take part in a
university conference about, among other things, “embedded
criticism”, so I've been reconsidering what the gains and losses
are in involvement in process of this kind. I couldn't see the
finished version of Sweet Hand clearly because I was watching it
through a personal-crisis fog – but also because the show isn't a
single entity for me, it's split into twins. There's the living
breathing show that's playing at BAC and about to tour, and then
there's its ghost twin, a dream of a show about other loves that exists only
in the ether. I sent an earlier version of this post to Andy, which I hope not too many people have read, which he felt was a value judgement on the show that exists. It's not: it's an observation about the weird perspective I have on it, a perspective I have from being involved in the process. I'm still wrestling with what that perspective means.
The
conference, for anyone reading this on the day of publication, was
set up by the amazing Karen Fricker, is taking place at Brock
University in a small town in Canada that reminds me of Stockton, and
is live-being streamed here (click on the live videos tab) and tweeted at
#DARTcritics. The embedded panel is today at 4pm (9pm GMT), and also
features Andy Horwitz of Culturebot, meeting whom has been an
absolute privilege.
[On 10 January 2014 I joined Ramble #3, part of Sheila Ghelani's ongoing Rambles With Nature, with an open invitation to document or respond to the event. This is what I wrote.]
1. a
letter
dear
sheila
i just
sat down to write some of the things that have been tumbling through
my head since the ramble earlier and of course as soon as i opened
the clean white page i went blank. so i thought i'd write you a quick
email instead to say thank you so much for having me along. it was in
a funny way so reassuring to hear you talk about your uncertainty
around what the day had been, its purpose and import; the phrases you
used were so familiar from the way i talk about Dialogue [the
long-term experiment with new approaches to writing/talking about
theatre that I co-curate with Jake Orr]. i never know what that
project is; it exists in a space of uncertainty; and as a result i
feel constantly as though it's a failure. but at a party on wednesday
i was talking to someone about Dialogue, and heard myself say that we
shift the movement of air molecules enough to make changes seem a
little more possible. that discovery was so comforting. i think
rambles maybe possibly does something similar.
2.
time is money is time is commodity is time
The
clock outside the Royal Observatory squeezes all 24 hours into a
single circle.
Midday
is upside-down.
We are
waiting for late arrivals and talking about time.
Time
as a construct that we strain to control.
I'm
running out of time.
I'll
make up the time.
Passing
time.
Spending
time.
“Time
has become Death triumphant over all.”
(Actually
I was thinking about train timetables. But this is the line that
speaks to me now.)
This
Ramble is a movement outside time, a removal from time's
demarcations.
(So
much so that I'm late for the school run.)
And
yet, it too is bound by time,
locked
inside a single hour, so relaxed, luxurious and slow at first,
but
speeding up, until we feel time slip through our fingers
as
tangibly as a skein of silk.
3. a
line in the land
My
children want to know about the equator; they ask:
Is it
a real line in the earth?
If you
went to the desert, would you see it?
Can
you see it from space?
Near
the top of the curved hillside path leading up to the Royal
Observatory lies the Meridian line: a thin strip of metal slicing
through the tarmac like a tram rail. I stand with other people's
children, feet planted on either side of the world.
At
night, a green laser light rises from this point to bisect the sky.
This is my favourite discovery of the day. I look for the line down
the weed-strewn hill, but there's no sign of it in the mud.
Instead
there's the Thames, sinuous, ever surprising, splitting London in
two. Defying geography, or at least simplistic assignations of north,
south, east, west. My city is laid out like a geological slab: low,
by the river, the cool white gleam of Georgian neo-classical
architecture; towering above, the cold, metallic sheen of modern
skyscrapers. London looks more international, less idiosyncratic,
with every passing year.
Sweet
Thames, run softly.
Sweet
Thames, give us time: to stop, to drift, to ramble, to wander and
wonder. Give us everything that cold, metallic sheen would burn away.
Eight
women, all members of a collective, The Working Party.
And
me.
I
hover at the edge, listening.
Eight
women, not all present, each with her own needs for this slim hour,
this gift of time. Each following her own path, scattering like bees
in search of pollen. I watch them disperse and feel a moment of
confusion:
what
am I here to record?
Three
women, two, one, three, four. And me, at the edge, listening. To a
conversation of murmurs, interwoven with birdsong, so easily lost
beneath the rumble of planes, the loud percussive clatter of other
people's chatter.
Conversation
undulating like the landscape.
(Tiffany's
phrase.)
(Undulating.)
Eight
women engaged in a collective activity, understanding that each
contribution might require solitude.
Grateful
for the generosity of the invitation: how you do this is up to you.
Somewhat
anxious about how rambling looks to the outside world.
“Why
are you walking alone?”
“Why
are you, a woman, walking alone?”
“Why
don't you have a dog?”
These
are real questions Tiffany has faced when walking alone in the park.
This
Ramble is a movement outside time, a removal from its demarcations,
its
expectations.
It is,
perhaps, a small act of revolution: reclaiming time for a different
kind of work.
Eight
women, gathered as The Working Party, struggling to understand how to
gather and how to work.
And
me, at the edge, listening.
5. in
transition (i)
In
moments of solitude, I notice the trees.
The
single tree, isolated in a windswept plain,
branches
bent in a reluctant arc,
so
stubborn.
The
unnerving bulbous swell of ancient chestnuts.
Twisted
bodies and thrusting arms,
and a
frowning face, nose high and round, erupting from a trunk.
I
notice the trees the way I do when travelling on trains,
in
moments of transition, between times.
Today
I'm in transition, between an old life and a new.
I
don't know where I'm travelling
but
this Ramble is part of the journey
and
I'm glad.
6.
inside (a walking reference library)
We
live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I've never felt I
understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how
it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel
versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and
watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there
anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the
smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some
emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to
go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go
missing, never to return.
The
passage from Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending that I happened to
read on the morning of the Ramble.
A
third dimension for thinking about cracks is that of time. This is a
crucial dimension of struggle. … We come together and share a
project of some sort, in an event, a meeting, a series of meetings;
or we go down into the streets in a moment of celebration or anger.
Later, perhaps, we disperse and go our different ways, but while we
are together, our project, celebration or rage may create an
otherness, a different way of doing or relating.
John
Holloway's Crack Capitalism, illuminating the world that exists
not-yet.
Time,
all the long red lines, that take
Control,
of all the smoke-like streams that flow into your
Dreams...
Holes,
by Mercury Rev.
That
life is brief was continually lamented. Time was death's agent and
one of life's constituents. But the timeless – that which death
could not destroy – was another. All cyclic views of time held
these two constituents together: the wheel turning, and the ground on
which it turned.
The
mainstream of modern thought has removed time from this unity and
transformed it into a single, all-powerful and active force. In so
doing it has transferred the spectral character of death to the
notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
John
Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, not so much a book
as an elixir.
7.
edges
I
trace the edges of the park: not just its outer walls but its inner
enclosures, fenced and oddly forbidding. The tennis court, the
bowling green, the flower garden, the rose garden. Neat, contained
areas conveying rules and civilisation. Beyond the ornate gate lies
Blackheath, an unfenced sprawl of common land, flat and featureless.
Free.
Thick
box hedges protect a sunken tiled bath, this and a high brick wall
all that remains of Montague House. Once upon a time all this was
private land.
Behind
a high wire fence, a family of deer in a simulation of a forest.
Their stillness so absolute, it's hard to tell if they're real.
8. in
transition (ii)
Where
trees are evergreen you can almost believe it's summer. The relief of
bright sun after days of heavy rain. Thick dark leaves like
silhouettes against a clean blue sky. Just the cool of the air and
the paucity of flowers giving the season away.
No one
mentions the hellebores. Waxy white petals turning inwards from the
path, framed by pale pistachio leaves. Self-absorbed, or shy perhaps.
Always hard to tell.
We
stand in the rose garden, reading the names.
Ice
Cream.
Amber
Queen.
Ingrid
Bergman.
Lady
Maris Pettigrew.
Mountbatten.
Troika.
Peacekeeper.
Bonfire
Night.
All
dead. Or rather, sleeping. Gnarled stalks rise from the raw earth
like claws. Waiting, needing the rebirth of spring.
Growth
follows the knife, so the gardeners say.
Cut
out the dead wood and throw it away.
Revitalise,
regenerate.
Let
new life come.
Autumn
leaves still crunch beneath our feet.
9. oh
yes, the conversations
I
hover at the periphery of sadness and exhaustion and a group of women
I hardly know, listening.
They
talk about time.
In
relation to astronomy.
Paying
for time.
The
names of the dogs we pass: Parsley, Flaxon, Lollipop.
Not
wanting to be alone.
Worrying
about what this day might be.
The
need for hope in January, that abundance will return.
Not
wanting to impose a familiarity with the landscape upon those for
whom it is new.
The
view through a camera lens.
A
silent protest.
Painful
feet.
Emily
Dickinson.
Squirrels.
The
deliciousness of the hour and wanting it again.
A day
too beautiful to take in.
The
group as a constellation, spread out across the park.
Recognising
each other in strangers.
Taking
pleasure in surprise.
The
fertility of not knowing but discovering.
The
difference between intention and attention.
The
fine line between a waste of time and a use of time that hasn't been
defined.
A
space for breathing.
Trusting
yourself to remember.
Wondering
what it all means.
10.
the remains of the day
Taking
quiet pleasure in a bush of viburnum
(I got
the name wrong, of course),
clusters
of tiny white flowers, fragile yet firm,
breathing
in their heaven scent.
And a
line of misremembered poetry:
time
please ladies, time sweet ladies,
time
please
[Sheila Ghelani is also documenting Rambles With Nature on her blog. If you're in London, an exhibition of cinepoems by straybird, made in response to Ramble #1, is at the Siobhan Davies Dance Studio until March 2. Here is Sheila's brief description of Ramble #3:
A
purposefully quick ramble, #3 will consist of a series of performed
conversations undertaken through, in and alongside a series of
hedgerows. These conversations will be undertaken by members of The
Working Party: Mary Paterson (producer and writer), Rajni Shah
(performance maker), Suzy Shrubb (musician), Tracey Low (producer),
Shauna Concannon (academic / digital artist), Tiffany Charrington
(live artist), Lucy Cash (interdisciplinary artist) and Sheila.]
On the days I was writing this
piece about Carrie Cracknell, a jury found the
shooting of Mark
Duggan to be lawful.
This got stuck in my head walking to
school:
(assault assault assault assault
assault assault assault assault THE LAW!)
Several fire stations were closed in
London.
Amiri
Baraka died. I love the opening lines from his
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, written when he was still
LeRoi Jones:
Lately, I've become accustomed to the
way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for the bus...
Things have come to that.
I went to the launch party of my friend
Sam's book,
her first, a feminist-literary-criticism-memoir (not only has she
written a book, she's invented a genre!), and watched in what was
probably forlorn envy as she signed books for her friends, and
wondered why I felt to ask her myself would be tacky. I had a long
conversation with someone who knows cast members of Nirbhaya,
who fumed at the lack of emotional or psychological support given to
those women telling their stories of being raped; and I was generally
doleful about how, for an industry dedicated to expressions of
empathy, theatre is astonishingly uncaring (the show's the thing). I
also learned that an Actionette
friend was fired by Marie Claire just before Christmas, then phoned
by them just after New Year because they had a hole on their pages
and would she be OK to fill it?
Andrew Haydon's Postcards
from the Gods blog shot up from essential to
why would you bother reading anything else?
I spent 45 minutes in a branch of
Nationwide opening little savings accounts for my kids, and
contemplating how doing stuff online lets me, everyone, forget how a
lot of people live. Exacerbates my impatience. Makes literature oddly
vital as a site of encounter with other cultures, people without
privilege. A thought mostly connected to reading Sam Selvon's The
Lonely Londoners between Christmas and New Year: what an exquisite
novel, so direct in its realisation that nothing is right, so radiant
with hope. The pages about the natural affinity between London's
immigrant black and working-class white communities are fiercely
political yet tender; the final pages, addressing the impossibility
of leaving London, the way this city claims you as its own, burrowed
to the heart of my own family's immigrant experience.
Fergus
Evans told the Guardian via twitter that I
should be included on an alternative Stage 100 theatre list, for
continuing to challenge what a critic should be.
I wrote an email to Mark Ball, artistic
director of LIFT, who
employed me in November to create editorial copy for their 2014
programme brochure being published in February, to say thank you:
“The ongoing shifts in theatre practice are absolutely crying out
for shifts in media coverage: I'm completely astounded that I'm
getting to do this with you. This isn't flattery: the Guardian called
me two days ago to say they're terminating my contract... There is so
much really stupid thinking around arts organisations commissioning
their own magazines: I feel like with this brochure you're giving me
the space to create something that has journalistic integrity, yet
the bouncy excitedness that will get people buying tickets. Fucking
brilliant.” (This was before people started making me rewrite my
copy: even in paradise, there is compromise.)
And, yes, the Guardian phoned me to
tell me they're not going to renew my contract in March.
*
Sometimes my work feels like the most
important thing in the world. And sometimes it feels like a colossal
waste of time.
Sometimes I feel like the only thing
that's important to me is to write about theatre, because to do so is
to write about society, politics, feminism, anti-capitalism,
inequality, privilege, poverty, psychology, parenting, climate
change, art, cinema, books, long walks in the countryside, immigrant
experience, second-generation immigrant experience, belonging, not
belonging, crowded urban living, utopian longing, the poleaxing
confusion of “how
you live with other people [and] how you live with yourself”.
It doesn't matter that a piece on here attracts maybe 300 hits (of
that, how many people actually read to the end? Or past the first
paragraph?). If I can bolster, challenge, inspire, entertain, incite
into some kind of positive action one or two people each time, that's
enough.
Sometimes I think, unless I'm trying to
communicate with a massive audience, trying to effect real change in
understanding and appreciation of theatre at a micro level, the world
at macro, what the fuck am I doing with my life?
A jury found the shooting of Mark
Duggan to be lawful and several London fire stations were closed last
week. Who knows, maybe I could be doing something about that.
*
I've been expecting the call from the
Guardian for almost as many years as I've been freelancing. By the
standards of writers' pay, I've been being overpaid. I worked out
that I got paid roughly £44 an hour for the Carrie Cracknell piece.
That's patently ludicrous. Under the new pay terms, I'd get closer to
£28 an hour. As an isolated figure, that's still ludicrous.
There are no isolated figures.
This month I'm writing two features for
the Guardian; from September to December I wrote none. It's not that
I didn't pitch features: three out of four ideas I send are rejected,
and even those accepted don't always work out. That's natural, but
time-consuming. I spent the weeks doing a combination of unpaid work,
freelance work, and applications for grants, both of which were
rejected. I love my work. But it's
still work. And I'm constantly working. Sometimes I wonder what
there is to show for it.
In the conventional sense, my Guardian
salary was the thing to show for it. It's also been a security
blanket. Last summer, Andrew Haydon asked why I don't have the
courage of my convictions: if the structures within which I live are
so abhorrent to me, why not walk away from them? I'm full of
admiration for the way he's successfully achieved that – becoming
in the process theatre's key critical voice to boot. But he doesn't
have a family; I have. [Note added 22/1/14: Andrew pointed out, very gently, on twitter today that he does have a family, he just doesn't have dependents. I know from reading Stella Duffy's blog how hurtful this kind of unconscious expression of heteronormative superiority can be, and wish I'd been more thoughtful with my phrasing.] Families lock you into structures,
responsibilities. I feel I ought to embrace being shoved out of a
traditional financial structure. Instead I just feel scared.
*
When I was 21 and 22 and lost in the
wilderness, not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life
except that I didn't want to sit on the reception desk at my parents'
factory, or in any other way join their business, I truly believed
the most precious commodity in newspapers was space. Column inches. I
sent in ideas, which were ignored. I wrote reviews, which were
rejected. You had to be really fucking good to be given space in
newspapers, and for a long time I wasn't good enough. Money was no
object in this industry; when I got my first job, I was shocked by
how much I earned (£26,000pa – enough to save up a deposit to buy
my own flat, admittedly at now distant prices). Newspapers were happy
to pay you – but give you column inches? Dream on.
Now I wonder if I was kidding myself:
after all, my newly affluent parents were always at the edge of the
wilderness, supporting me. But I also wonder whether the situation
has reversed. The internet has given newspapers limitless space, but
advertising revenue has disappeared in that black hole and now money
is their most precious commodity. You can write for them, but be
paid? That's the tricky part.
*
I've been walking around like a sack of
broken china.
(Things have come to that.)
I've been thinking that, finally, I've
been found out for the talentless fraud I really am.
(Things have come to that.)
I've been feeling sorry for myself,
because theatre is my life, but now I'm not earning my own money, how
can I afford to buy tickets? And who will give me press tickets for a
blog review that maybe 300 people will read?
(Where do I even start on the
self-centredness on this? How do I expect theatre practitioners to
pay their rent if people aren't buying tickets? Isn't part of the
problem with newspapers that no one wants to pay for them any more?
When was the last time I actually bought a newspaper? I get my news
from twitter, read the few articles that catch my attention online,
expect everything for free. Of course the economics are fucked: but I
can't ignore my role in making them so.)
And then:
I've tried to remember that people
whose intellect and craft as writers dazzle me, make me feel
unutterably puny, not only enjoy my writing but respect it, praise
it, encourage it.
And that this is the push I need to
work properly on Dialogue, and on reinventing what it is to write
about theatre; to challenge myself as a writer; to discover a new
audience, maybe not a massive or a mainstream audience, but possibly
an audience that doesn't yet know that it wants to read about
theatre, and all the things that writing about theatre entail.
Society, politics, feminism, anti-capitalism, inequality...
X
It's the push I need to build on the
work I've been doing with Fuel/New
Theatre in Your Neighbourhood, to stop running scared from the
Shunt book idea, to help Exeunt/theatremagazine
become vital.
It might have been the push I needed to
get the novels written, except that over Christmas I read a novel
that was fine, serviceable, essentially not very good, and was forced
to admit to myself that if I wrote a novel in time for turning 40,
this is how it would read. A depressing truth, tempered by the fact
that Penelope
Fitzgerald was 58 before she published a book. I still have two
decades to become good enough for myself.
The hardest thing, and I feel pretty
stupid saying this, will be learning to say “it's Maddy Costa”
when I call people, rather than “it's Maddy from the Guardian”.
My identity has been tied up in that newspaper for 14 years. I've no
idea if I'm ready to stand up on my own. But I'm going to have to.
That, and get used to not getting paid.
*
The days between sending the piece in
and waiting for it to be published were spent working with LIFT. I'm
late posting this because every spare hour lately has been devoted to
that. It's blissful. I'm working on paper again, making pages, making
a magazine. It's brought home to me how much I miss the tangible,
miss commissioning other writers, miss working with designers,
framing stories, seeing things from a reader's perspective. I miss
the sense of achievement in seeing a project through to completion.
Sometimes I think I'm still heartbroken by my failure to become
Guardian arts editor.
On two of those days, working in the
design office, this song played:
Both times I stopped freefalling and
started floating. And now every time I listen I feel it rushing
through my blood and it's like somersaults.
(Dug this one out again too. Also
magic.)
*
There's a longer version of the Carrie
Cracknell, by the way. (There always is.) Bizarrely, someone called
Hobo O'Riley seems to have decided to post up his comment on the
Guardian feature not there but on two unconnected posts here. He must
really want to talk to me about it. At the point when I spoke to
Carrie, I hadn't seen the explicit video for Blurred Lines, and the
“prudishness” question was mostly directed at myself. I've since
seen the explicit, and my problem with it can be boiled down to four
words: naked women, dressed men. When that gets reversed, the
conversation will start feeling very different.
Talking to Carrie has inspired me
finally to read Susan Faludi's Backlash,
a book I've owned for two decades but only ever dipped into,
cover-to-cover. It ought to be out of date by now. So far,
depressingly, infuriatingly, not quite astonishingly, it isn't. Dialogue is lining up a Theatre Club on Blurred Lines: I'm really looking forward to it.
Summer 2013 and controversy
is raging. Robin Thicke's supremely catchy song
Blurred Lines – in which a man in a nightclub tries to persuade a
beautiful woman to stop being a “good girl” and do what he knows
she really wants – is being banned from student unions up and down
the country, condemned in blogs and newspapers for promoting
rape culture, and topping pop charts across the
globe. All this is fuelled by the song's video, in which – in the
explicit version – women wearing nothing but silken G-strings and
clompy shoes cavort around three men in suits who clearly can't
believe their luck.
For theatre director Carrie Cracknell,
who is directing a new show for the National Theatre Shed
deliberately named after the song, Blurred Lines is a red rag. When I
wonder whether it's prudishness that makes people recoil from it, she
argues: “It's really easy for women to get accused of being
prudish, but there is an absolute line about sexual consent which
cannot be blurred. The rage I feel in relation to that song is about
the idea of strong men, fully dressed, animalising and brutalising a
group of scantily clad women who apparently are empowered and
completely in control of their bodies.
“Of course sex is part of our life
and not something we should repress or censor, but rape is not sex,
and non-consensual sex for young women is a massive problem. A whole
generation of young boys and girls are growing up and their first
sexual experiences are pornography which is deeply hateful and
misogynistic and full of violence, and this song is the tip of that
iceberg. It has to take responsibility for the normalisation of that.
Anyway, rant over.” And she stops, suddenly sheepish.
A willowy, elegant 33-year-old,
Cracknell is all thoughtful restraint on the surface, but seething
beneath. It seems odd that she should feel the need to apologise for
expressing herself strongly, but it turns out this has been a running
theme in the Blurred Lines rehearsal room. “That anxiety about
being strident or pushy comes back to the socially constructed idea
of gender,” she suggests, “and how women feel they have to find a
feminine version of power to get what they want, while anything that
feels outwardly aggressive or masculine is held back in some way.”
For Blurred Lines, which opens this
week, she's working with eight female actors – including Sinead
Matthews, Ruth Sheen, Claire Skinner and Michaela Coel – and a male
writer, Nick Payne, to devise the show in the rehearsal room.
Together they've been improvising a series of scenes that tackle the
representation of women across film, television, theatre and pop.
They're also contemplating casual misogyny, the normalisation of the
sex industry, rape culture, and ongoing problems to do with work and
parenting.
It's useful, Cracknell says, to have a
male writer taking part: Payne describes himself as a feminist, and
argues that the issues with which they're grappling are not women's
only. “Nick said in rehearsal one day: a lot of this is a male
problem. Rape is a male problem. Men are not trained as boys that
they might become rapists, they're not taught in sex education that
they have to take responsibility for whether a girl says yes or no.
Of course we could argue that it should be a female playwright, but
his perspective and searching and questioning have been as relevant
as mine.”
Apart from Thicke's song, Blurred Lines
has its roots in the work that pulled Cracknell into the mainstream:
her 2012 production of A Doll's House, the Ibsen play championed by
feminists because it depicts a woman walking out on her husband and
children in an attempt to discover her real self. The production,
starring Hattie Morahan as a fluttering, manipulative Nora, had two
successful runs at the Young Vic in London before transferring to the
West End; it moves to New York in February.
“The first question we asked when we
started making A Doll's House,” says Cracknell, “was: what does
the play look like now? What's the relationship between the gender
politics of the 1890s and the world we live in? The thing that Hattie
drew out was this idea that Nora's power is completely seated in her
sexuality. That really struck me, because of this idea that women are
more sexualised now than they've ever been, or trying to move towards
an ever-narrowing ideal of what it means to be beautiful and
therefore powerful.”
Are things really worse now, or is the
problem that we expect decades of feminism to have made things
better? “Women have always been judged on how they look more than
men, women have always been objectified more than men,” Cracknell
agrees. “What happens now is a pernicious, deep-rooted connection
between global capitalism and an unobtainable physical ideal. The
desire for profit of those big beauty firms and of our television
culture, and the way that those things are hooking into each other,
feels really overwhelming.”
To coincide with the stage production,
Cracknell made a short film for the Young Vic and the Guardian, in
which Nora – again played by Morahan – is updated to a modern
working mother, falling to pieces as she struggles with her
impossible juggling act. Payne co-wrote it with her, and had a strong
influence on her thinking about both Noras when he handed her a copy
of Kat Banyard's wake-up call to a generation of post-feminists, The
Equality Illusion. Reading it, Cracknell says, “I had a feminist
awakening. I'm of a generation that to some extent have been told
that we're equal, that women have every opportunity men have. But I
believe Kat's thesis: the equality we'd been sold was an illusion.
Women are still disproportionately disempowered in public life and
being paid less than men, while sexual harassment and violence are
endemic in our culture.”
None of this occurred to Cracknell as a
teenager. “I was raised with the idea that it was irrelevant that I
was a woman: you just had to get on with being funny, being kind and
working hard.” Back then, theatre was a hobby; her real ambition
was to be a politician. She had a “strong left-wing upbringing”:
her mother was a primary school teacher and latterly head; her father
a businessman who taught at Oxford Brookes University and became a
local councillor. “The first time I voted was for my dad. This idea
of the right to vote was such a profound thing in our house,”
Cracknell recalls. She studied history at Nottingham with full
intentions of becoming an MP, but theatre snared her in her first
year. Now she pins her socialist hopes on her nephew, who is also
studying history and politics at Nottingham and wants to run the
Labour party. “I've asked if I can be in his cabinet on gender and
culture,” she laughs.
She spent a few years assisting
directors including Dominic Dromgoole and Katie Mitchell, then at 26
became the youngest artistic director in the country, co-running the
Gate in London with Natalie Abrahami. “We had a brilliant five
years where we got to find our own identity make loads of public
fuck-ups in a quite joyful teenage way,” she says. “Natalie and I
were interested in experimenting with form, in what theatre and dance
look like when they're together, so it always felt like this punk
little venue.”
She managed to combine that with having
two children, now aged two and four (they have a starring role in the
Nora film, where they get abandoned on a trampoline). Cracknell won't
talk about how she balances work and motherhood, but does admit that
she finds balancing her own ambitions complex. “My desire to parent
is as strong now as my desire to move forward. But I feel calm about
making a bit less work, and enjoy that work more as a consequence,
focusing on it more, having more time to develop it. A Doll's House
was born out of a year of preparation because I was on maternity
leave; I probably couldn't have made that work without that space to
cook it in my mind.”
Rather than her own struggle with
childcare arrangements, she prefers to comment on the bigger picture:
“In Blurred Lines we've been doing quite a lot of research into the
economics of how parenting affects the female work force. There's an
elite 15% of hyper-educated women who are in many respects echoing
the working patterns of men, very long hours, completely committed to
their careers. A proportion of them have children and tend to go back
to work quite quickly, and can therefore afford childcare and just
about make that work. The financial gap is growing between that group
and women who work in part-time, less well-paid or less skilled jobs
who can't always afford formalised or flexible childcare and
therefore can't affect change over their salaries or over the kinds
of roles they can take on.”
Theatre tends to be low-paid with long
hours, so where Cracknell fits into that picture isn't clear. Again,
it's not something she's comfortable going into. So far, she says,
being a woman hasn't diminished her own opportunities: mostly she's
been able to do the work she wants to do, and she's been given some
fantastic opportunities. Alongside her West End debut with A Doll's
House, last year she directed her first opera, a well-received
Wozzeck for ENO. But she feels a more general frustration with
theatre culture: “It's still a male-dominated world because the
stories we tell are inherited from a culture in which women weren't
allowed to do those things. And we still predominately think the
stories of men are more important and more interesting than the
stories of women.
“We're only in the second generation
in which women have really been able to take full control in public
life and therefore we don't have all of those stories yet. We have to
understand who those characters are, we have to take the female
narrative out of the domestic and into the public.” Recently she
was invited to direct a play for the National's biggest space, the
Olivier, and was startled by how difficult it was to find a female
character with the “scale or scope of emotional depth” to fill
the room. Somewhat predictably, the play she's going to direct is a
Greek tragedy, Medea.
That's in June; before that she'll be
at the Royal Court, directing a
new play dissecting rock'n'roll celebrity by
Simon Stephens, and contributing to the life of the building as
associate director. One of her key tasks is dealing with gender
imbalance. “An American actress brilliantly suggested that you
could take every screenplay and change half the male character names
to female ones. Why can't the doctor or the policeman or lawyer or
the judge just be women? Sometimes I think at the Court we can do
that, we can encourage writers to think of their protagonist as a
woman without actually changing very many of the characteristics.”
Despite
that early ambition to become an MP, Cracknell is constantly
surprised by the extent to which politics, gender or otherwise, now
govern her theatre-making. “I used to call my work 'political with
a small p': it was about the human experience. As I get older, I
understand that the human experience is at the heart of a bigger
experience, and I've found that really liberating and intellectually
stimulating. Rather than my work always being about the story, it's
about the context for the story as well.”
I'm in the middle of this ridiculously
massive job that is stopping me sleeping at nights and setting up a
five/six month programme of Dialogue Theatre Clubs (squeak!) X and I seem to be going to Canada to
take part in an academic conference for the first time ever (aaargh!)
and somewhere in the back of my mind I've concocted this entire book
that I want to write about Shunt (honestly, Tassos Stevens says one
thing, one tiny thing, on twitter about how great it would be if
someone, possibly me, wrote about Shunt and I just haven't been able to forget it, it's like
it bore a hole in my brain and I keep poking my finger in and
squidging stuff around) and then there's the Fuel New Theatre in Your
Neighbourhood blog to update and somehow in the midst of all this
Mary Paterson and I are plotting a new project together and I think I
need a deep breath now...
But I don't feel quite ready for 2014
until I've properly said goodbye to 2013. That involves at the very,
very least saying thank you to the following shows (in no order
whatsoever) for nourishing and/or cheering and/or challenging and/or
holding and/or breaking-remaking and/or inspiring and/or surprising
me over the course of the year: In the Republic of Happiness, Life
and Times, Mental, (the Unicorn) Henry V, The Forest and the Field,
Becoming an Image, Orpheus, My Perfect Mind, Say It With Flowers, The
Victorian in the Wall, Landscape II, Trash Cuisine, Mission Drift,
Our Town, Strange Interlude, London Stories, what happens to the hope
at the end of the evening, The Amen Corner, Circle Mirror
Transformation, Blackouts, Fleabag, Grounded, Squally Showers, Ring,
The Worst of Scottee, Secret Theatre Streetcar Named Desire, The
Events, A Conversation, Fatherland, Wuthering Heights, Credible
Likeable Role Model Superstar, Our Glass House, The Future Show,
Beating McEnroe, Ballad of the Burning Star, The Way You Tell Them,
There Has Possibly Been an Incident, Not Until We Are Lost, Each of
Us, Hoke's Bluff, Nut, Mojo, Mr and Mrs Moon, Jumpers for Goalposts,
(Young Vic) Beauty and the Beast, Toynbee, Surabaya Johnny...
another deep breath...
and try to ignore that nagging
frustrating realisation that I've barely written about any of these
things...
PLEASE NOTE: The following gives away an awful lot about about the vacuum cleaner's work Mental, which he's touring into 2014. If you'd rather experience the show knowing nothing, or at least with its surprises intact, it's probably not a good idea to read it until after you've seen it. Thanks.
We shuffle past the closed bedroom
door, neatly lining shoes along the hallway wall, to a small, neat
living room decorated with insurrectionist art and fabric owls. A
cheerful, kindly woman offers tea and tiny carrot cakes, primly
arranged on a tiered stand, and though the atmosphere is relaxed, an
awkwardness hovers, as though we were gathered for the wake of a
distant relation and weren't quite sure what our demeanour should be.
The bedroom, white with pistachio-green
trim, is sparsely furnished. Disco sings sweetly from an
old-fashioned record player. We snuggle against the wall beneath a
giant duvet and slowly a hand emerges from the low bed before us,
fingers wriggling as they test the air. Then a face, nervous but
smiling. The body is very much alive: it's important to remember
this, that we're beginning at the end, with James sitting with us,
talking to us. We cling to this fact as his story unfolds.
*
“I've never done anything like this
before in my life. Never made a 'show'. It was a real experiment to
try and do it. I'm more comfortable with it now. I've kind of gone,
yeah, I spent nearly two years making this thing, I should show it to
people.”
Ten days before seeing Mental, I meet
up with James-the-vacuum-cleaner-Leadbitter in his basement studio in
the Artsadmin building, a square concrete room that might feel like a
prison – the one small window is high in a corner, and barely lets
in natural light – were it not for the homely clutter and art
crowded around the walls. One painting, hanging above the two desks,
stands out: a rectangular canvas, painted gold, with the words
“Representative art is so 19th century” printed on it in stark
black helvetica. In the corner opposite the window, a duvet is
crammed in the space above a storage cupboard; beside the door sits
the old-fashioned vacuum cleaner from which he takes his pseudonym.
He rolls out a folding table for our tea; I sit in a black office
chair that insists on spinning me away from him. He laughs: “That's
my producer's chair. It's like: get back to the computer, get back to
work.”
Leadbitter started making work in 2003,
shortly after his first stay in a psychiatric hospital. “The very
first piece I did was called Cleaning Up After Capitalism: I had the
vacuum cleaner, and wore a yellow bib with 'cleaning up after
capitalism' on the back, and I'd go into public spaces or corporate
spaces, like chain stores, or the City of London, and do a cleaning
act. I'd clean and engage people in conversation. A lot of my work
was straddling performance intervention with direct political
action.” A lot of it landed him in serious trouble, too. In 2005,
he was taken to court by Starbucks for a number of transgressions
against its brand, which included defacing Starbucks coffee cups so
the logo read “Fuck off” and setting up a website encouraging
others to do the same. It's worth reading the “decision
of independent expert” document commissioned
as part of the case: Leadbitter's irreverence offsets the corporate
humourlessness beautifully.
His protest came from a place of
boredom: “I got bored with mainstream activism, I got bored with
marching against the war in Afghanistan.” And from cultural
discussion around branding: “No Logo came out in 2001 and that was
really influential. I started to read Adbusters, the Canadian
magazine, and fucking around with billboards. Graffiti and street art
really influenced me, that thing of: don't wait for the audience to
come to you, take the work to the audience, go to the community and
present your work to them, go to the contested spaces and make the
work there. That always got me really excited.”
But beneath the global-political was
the local-personal. “Having gone through the psychiatric system,
which felt very oppressive, often it was about creating a space of
liberation through these performative acts. I often would look at
advertising and feel really alienated, so it would be reacting
against that, or challenging that kind of dogma. And I guess I was at
a point in my life when, I was 23, I didn't really give a fuck about
anything. Not I didn't give a fuck about anything, some things
I really cared about, but I wasn't necessarily concerned with what
would be the consequences of what I was doing. Also, the medical
treatment that I'd got really didn't work, so this became my way of
trying to make sense of the world, and make sense of these
experiences I'd had in treatment and as a teenager.”
In some ways, teenage Leadbitter was
typical, at least of people who end up working in theatre. “I went
to a really great youth theatre in Burnley, so I had that bug from an
early age. I used to run tech for the whole youth theatre; my mum
wanted me to be an actor but I preferred doing design.” When it
came to university, he opted for set and lighting design at the
Central School of Speech and Drama: what a mistake. “I hated it: it
was really conservative, and I should have gone to Dartington with my
friend Robert.” He dropped out after a year. But it wasn't just the
course: the depression he'd started experiencing before university
was worsening. He was already self-harming; now he was suicidal. And
this is where Mental begins.
*
There were so many possibilities.
Running in front of a lorry.
Jumping off the roof.
Pills. Knives. Rope-lengths of fabric.
He tells us these stories surrounded by
heavy wads of paper, piles and piles of documents, medical
assessments, police records, obtained via the Freedom of Information
act, each portraying a version of James Leadbitter, the slight man
with tufty hair, twinkling eyes and an electric-blue dress scooping
from his shoulders, who sits in his bed, in his own bedroom, sharing
an outsized duvet with his audience. One by one he slips plastic
sheets on to an overhead projector and reads from them the
evaluations of doctors and nurses, the clandestine comments of police
and their spies. If you're quick, you can read outside the
highlighted sections, get a fuller picture. I notice with a catch of
breath his birthday: 29th May, five days before mine. Fractured
personalities written in the stars.
I don't remember all the details of the
life he narrates – it's a few weeks since I saw the piece, and the
intimacy of the environment precluded taking notes – but I remember
vividly his demeanour. He has the campness of a late-night-telly
light entertainer; the roguishness of a small boy doing something he
knows he's not supposed to, face sparkling with pleasure in
transgressing and being witnessed in his transgression. The line
between performing himself and being himself is subtle, and will
shift according to the perception of individual audience members: I
feel he stands one side of it at the beginning, when he's talking
himself into starting the show, the other in the fleeting moments
when overcome by a memory of cruelty, or kindness. His inability to
comprehend his treatment at the hands of powerful social institutions
is ongoing and genuine. But always there is this levity in his
narration, which comes from a place of generosity, a desire to
support his audience as we listen and absorb.
The disco soundtrack, soft and radiant
with love, gifts more lightness. One song repeats over and over:
Love is, love is the message that I
sing to you Love is the message that I bring to you
The
contrast of that care with the official language of the documents is
sharp. Here, Leadbitter is a number, a sequence of actions, a list of
medication. His humanity is bypassed. Frequently Mental feels like a
work not of individual autobiography but of exposure, indicting a
society that practises institutionalised betrayal. No one who works
at the hospital where he is first sectioned tells Leadbitter that it
specialises in treating personality disorders. The more successful he
becomes as the vacuum cleaner, the more rigorous and resourceful the
police become in inhibiting his activities. It's not until he
recognises a face on Channel 4 that he can explain this feeling of
being targeted: the groups with whom he has been working have been
repeatedly infiltrated. The police documents are packed with personal
information: address, identity numbers, hidden distinguishing
features such as the tattoo on his back that reads “our
civilisation is fucked”. They got that one wrong, says Leadbitter,
mouth curled in a sardonic smile. He turns around, pulls up his
frock; the light catches on the letters carved into his skin: “THIS
CIVILISATION IS FUCKED”.
*
“People talk about mental illness as
this monolith, but it's as broad as any other – schizophrenia to
anxiety is what cancer is to a common cold. It's not comparable, but,
you know.”
At the age of 19 – he's now 33 –
Leadbitter was identified as experiencing multiple mental health
problems: depression, general anxiety disorder, panic anxiety
disorder. More seriously, he was diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder. Only no one told him. “It's quite common if
you have what's called a serious mental illness, so things like
paranoid schizophrenia, borderline multiple personality disorder. For
a long time they wouldn't tell you because the stigma of the
diagnosis could be as bad as the actual diagnosis. I get that, but
for me that's not the issue: the issue is how you inform the
patient.” He finally found out about two years ago, at the end of
an assessment process, when he was handed a sheet of paper with his
diagnosis and sent on his way. There's a painfully funny scene in
Mental when he pulls a copy of Borderline Personality Disorder For Dummies (it genuinely exists) from under the duvet, one of many books
he bought when trying to make sense of this new information.
Essentially, he was being medicated for
a condition he didn't know he had, and that, says Leadbitter, “was
really destructive. Because by the time I was 26, I'd got a job at
the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in Glasgow, I was in a relationship,
but I was still completely undiagnosed, and all of that crumbled in
my hands. I totally destroyed it all because I didn't know what was
going on. I didn't have the language to talk about it, couldn't
reflect on it, you know?” He moved back to London and attempted to
reconstruct his life, “in a way in which I could cope. I developed
all these coping strategies, smoking a lot of cannabis.” But they
didn't work, and in 2009 he had a relapse and was back in hospital.
Acquiring and reading through the
thousands of pages of medical notes written about him over that
14-year period has been “one of the hardest things I've ever done”.
Did he recognise himself in the descriptions he encountered? “It's
really different. Some bits you're like, yes, that's so correct, and
then other bits you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Who
are you talking about? It really depends on the person you're talking
to, because there isn't necessarily a test for it, it's not like you
can do a blood test and be told, you have bipolarity, it's so much to
do with your own representation of your experiences, how you talk
about your experiences.” Which might be different on any given day,
I note. “Exactly. Some days you can't even speak, and some days
you're spilling rather than sharing.”
I ask if there's a family history of
mental illness; there is, but, he emphasises: “I don't buy that
[mental illness] is just genetic or it's just social. I have a very
strong attitude that anybody that wants to apply a simplistic model
to mental health is getting it wrong, because it's infinitely
complicated.” Talking therapy – of which he is a staunch advocate
– offers a brilliant insight into those complications, he argues.
“Although it is utterly, utterly painful, and quite horrific at
times, it's also a wonderful process of discovery, not just in terms
of yourself and your mind but how that relates to the world that we
live in and how society functions. You learn that everything is so
utterly complicated, there are no black-and white-situations.”
*
The lights dim and Richard Hawley's
voice, comforting as a sheepskin coat, croons in the darkness:
Roll river, keep on rolling
Ancient lady cold
I'm forsaken, lost and forgotten
Roll river roll
In James' bedroom, watching a shaky
film of a tiny, adored figure walking in the middle of the street in
a Glasgow full of snow, I absorbed Roll River Roll as a love song;
it's only later, reading the lyrics, that I realise it's the ballad
of a man about to drown. James' description of his post-relapse
suicide attempt is delivered lightly, with a tender solicitude, for
himself and his audience, but with every accruing detail it becomes
harder to hear. He mentions the carrot cake he bought for his final
meal and I remember eating mine before I came in and want to cry. He
shows pictures of his room in the hostel he moved to after leaving
the hospital, a safe house for people at risk of suicide, remembers
the night in the kitchen when he had to resist the siren call of the
knife drawer, and was held by a warden whose non-judgemental
understanding cracked the ice of his benumbed soul, and we all want
to cry, James too. Always there is the knowledge that he is here,
telling us these stories; he survived and continues to survive. But
it's the overwhelming awareness of the pain he has experienced that
makes Mental so difficult to sit within. That, and the fact that he
relives it, in front of an audience, night after night after night.
That in itself feels like a kind of self-harm, and I don't know how
he can do it.
*
“In the three hours leading up to the
performance, it's very like, 'Am I really about to share all this
stuff? Why am I doing this?' And then I start and do the show and
afterwards I feel really icky.”
One of the things I like about
following the vacuum cleaner on twitter – aside from his ongoing
campaign against mental-health stigma, embedded in our culture in the
abuse of words like mental, crazy, bonkers, nuts, which he attacks
with weariness, fury and sparks of dry humour – is that every now
and then he'll have a sharp little dig at conventional theatre. He
looks a little shame-faced when I bring this up. “I'm not a big fan
of what I call theatre-with-a-capital-T. I guess I struggle with a
lack of legitimacy in a lot of these things: when you've been in a
psychiatric hospital, you go to the theatre and, like, this doesn't
compare. When was the last time you saw a mad person play Hamlet? And
how amazing would that be? So yeah, I do bitch about it quite a bit.
“It feels like theatre hasn't quite
caught up with visual-art theory, you know? Visual art has very much
abandoned representative practice, but theatre is still wrapped up in
that. When I do go to a theatre and see the things that I really love
and get me excited or angry or upset, it's people speaking about
their personal experiences, like Kim Noble or Bryony Kimmings. The
first time I saw Franko B – and we've worked together a bit – it
really hit me: it wasn't just this pretending, it was very, very
real. I can relate to that on a very personal level, but I also like
that immediacy.”
When performing Mental in cities other
than London, Leadbitter always aims to find another bedroom to house
it. His one experience of staging it in a theatre venue has confirmed
to him how important that is. “I did it at the Tramway in Glasgow a
few weeks ago, that was to 50 people, and it was really difficult. I
don't think it ruined it, but it did change it quite a bit. I had to
extend the range of my performance, some bits had to be a little bit
bigger. At home I can be quieter, I have that real intimacy. It
changed it for the audience, too: there's this bit in my story about
the police coming into my bedroom to take me into hospital, that's
much more significant when it's in my own bedroom.”
The decision to stage Mental in a
bedroom rather than an open social space like a theatre also demands
that the audience travel somewhere unfamiliar – in my case,
in the dark and on my own, which always generates mild anxiety in me.
“There's a slight challenge in there,” Leadbitter agrees. “That's
something I found doing the show in Latvia, at this amazing festival
called Homo Novus. A lot of people were coming to me afterwards and
saying: 'I was really frightened about coming to see your show, I was
going to be in this bedroom with this crazy person, the police say
he's a domestic extremist, I was frightened! And then it starts and
you just destroyed that thing immediately.' I hadn't really thought
about it like that at all.” But that's wonderful, I say. “It is!
And it's nice to challenge that preconception of mental illness as
well.”
It was the second hospital stay that
encouraged Leadbitter to reconsider his work, and made Mental
possible. The difference, he says, was that the breakdown: “was
really public. I was doing this big commission with Artsadmin, I had
to drop that. That was really difficult, because I felt like I was
letting them down. And I was tweeting about it a bit at the time. It
was this thing of going: this is so fucking intense for me. I was
very close to dying on a few occasions.
“Actually, this is something that's
really amazing: for me and a lot of my crazy friends, we all say this
is our civil rights moment. A lot of us talk about coming out of the
closet. It's this thing of going, fuck it, I'm not hiding this any
more. So although it was very difficult, it had some positiveness to
it. And it really changed the direction of the kind of work I was
making. Also – I found this doing the Mental piece – coming out
and going, OK, this is the shit I have to deal with in life, you get
other people going, yeah, I can relate to your experiences, and these
are my experiences. That solidarity is so, so empowering. When
somebody says, I know what that's like, and you know they know what
that's like, you go: OK, I'm not on my own, this person can genuinely
relate to me.
“The language that people use is
really, really different to when you're in hospital and you say to
the nurse, I don't want to continue any more, I can't take it any
more, and they say, we're going to help you get through this. The
response is so different. It's little things like, I said to somebody
I really want to self-injure, and they were like: have you tried
putting elastic bands around your wrists? When you really want to do
it, pull them really hard and flick them against your wrist. I tried
it and it was great. Or I'm having a panic attack on the ward and an
old guy comes over and calms me down in 10 minutes, no drugs, sat
with me, held my hand. It's a really beautiful and amazing thing to
have that solidarity and mutual care. More of that please.”
Increasingly, his work seeks to create
places in which solidarity, empathy and empowerment can flourish.
Many audience-members have commented that they could do with sharing
the cup of tea after Mental, rather than before, to decompress after
inhabiting such an intense space; Leadbitter understands that need,
but asks his audience to leave directly after the show, because he
too needs space to look after himself and decompress. (This isn't a
hard-and-fast rule, and compassion is exercised: the night I saw it,
one member of the audience was so affected they left the bedroom,
went straight to the bathroom and burst into tears; they were then
allowed to stay in the empty bedroom until ready to face the night.)
As quoted above, performing Mental makes Leadbitter feel “icky”;
what pulls him through is the audience response, not in the room so
much as in conversation, on email and on twitter in the hours and
days afterwards. People open up to him about their own experiences
with depression, doctors, anti-depressants; they ask his advice; they
tell him: “I can relate.” In Latvia, he says, “a 19-year-old
woman came up to me after the show and said, 'I've never said this to
anybody, not even my parents: I have a psychiatrist. I've never told
anyone and I've seen your show and I'm not embarrassed any more.' For
all the difficult it is for me to do the piece, for that one person,
I'm happy.”
Prior to Mental, he made a piece called
Ship of Fools, in which he turned his flat into a hospital for a
month and sectioned himself. “The Ship Of Fools will function as an
inter-section between mental sanctuary and creative liberty,” he
explained on his website. “As part of this time the vacuum cleaner
seeks creative residencies at the Ship Of Fools: both artist and
non-artists alike in an attempt to find creativity in madness.” His
next project takes that idea much further. “It's called Madlove –
A Designer Asylum. I'm a big believer in the notion of an asylum, a
safe place to go to experience madness, but it's going to be an
asylum designed by mad people for mad people to experience madness in
a more positive and less painful way. We're going to bring mad people
together and people that work in the mental health industry, or
people that are carers or that support people, and say: right,
because psychiatric hospitals are so oppressive and so difficult to
be in, let's redesign it completely. Let's think about what we need
to go through this experience. It's still going to be painful, but
let's change it. My producer has this really wonderful statement:
it's putting the treat back into treatment.”
I can't wait to visit.
*
Seeing Mental had and continues to have
a profound effect on me. It's affected how I watch theatre: a few
days after I was in Leeds and happened to catch the James Brining
production of Sweeney Todd at West Yorkshire Playhouse; its first
scene is set in an asylum, and it looked exactly like the asylum in
Joe Hill-Gibbins' Young Vic production of The Changeling, right down
to the individual gestures of the actors. I left at the interval,
unable to watch any more, feeling no connection with what I was
seeing. At the end of November I caught up with Hannah Silva's The Disappearance of Sadie Jones, a taut three-hander about a woman whose
depression has led to anorexia; there was much about it, not least in
the breakdown of language, that felt insightful, and yet part of me
was troubled by the aestheticisation of this experience, particularly
in a scene when Sadie kneels on a cabinet and slowly wraps a red
chiffon scarf around her waist and wrist, delineating self-harm. In
that moment, honesty was replaced by theatre.
X
Mental has made me reconsider what it means to be honest. Now and
then people commend me on the honesty of my writing and I feel
quietly fraudulent, because I hide as much as I reveal. I come from a
very old-fashioned culture that believes fundamentally in putting up
a front; much as my family rail against its hypocrisy, it's coded
within us and that's a hard habit to break. But it's also typical of
me to interiorise everything: keeping a blog has been extraordinary
in that respect, in reminding me that self-expression isn't just
possible but OK.
Increasingly I'm interested in what it
means to invite someone to listen to the voice that rattles around
your own head. A lot of the work I've really cherished this year –
Mental, The Worst of Scottee, Laura Jane Dean's Head Hand Head, Peter
McMaster's Wuthering Heights – in some way or another does exactly
that. Head Hand Head X really
touched me: for maybe 40 minutes, Laura enacts the different
obsessive compulsive routines that she has adopted over time to cope
with the paradoxical trauma of being so terrified of dying that
you're afraid to be alive. The voice that speaks to us is the same
voice she hears inside her head. It felt like a privilege to be given
access to something so private.
Mental felt like a privilege, too. I
left it feeling intense gratitude towards James, for sharing his
internal voices with me. I heard enough of myself in it that I've
been galvanised into doing things I hadn't previously thought
possible, into engaging in conversations that I hadn't previously
been able to contemplate. The narrative of struggle, or not being
able to cope, is still expressed so rarely that people are startled
by it, or react negatively to it: we need to work together to support
its honest expression, and through that change the social conditions
that make struggle and the inability to cope so much a part of our
lives.
*
“Do you feel in control?”
He shakes his head. A barely audible
whisper: “No.”
“What could be done for you to feel
in control?
There's a small pause. “Well, I think
that the art world needs to get a bit real about supporting disabled
artists. Artsadmin are phenomenally great at it but I feel that a lot
of the time me and my producer are really having to fight for the
support I need to do the show; we're having to say: 'This is why it's
going to be a bit more expensive, because somebody needs to help him
and look after him.' So that could be better.
“Not being attacked by the state for
being disabled would be a help: I'm going through the Atos process at
the moment – Atos Healthcare are doing the whole welfare reform
process – so I'm having to defend my benefits, it's really
anxiety-provoking and the stigma is still really horrific. I've been
assaulted coming out of the hospital, people have attacked me because
I'm coming out of the psychiatric hospital. Casual use of the word
mental, or the casual use of the word crazy, it hurts, it hurts when
I hear it, so that's still difficult. It's difficult to have to go:
listen, I don't want to be aggressive or assertive about this, but
can you not use that word around me because it hurts.
“There are some really amazing people
out there who get it. Without Gill Lloyd [co-director of Artsadmin],
without Lois [Keidan, co-director of Live Art Development Agency], I
would have stopped making work three years ago. Gill has fought,
she's said: 'James, you need to keep going; I'll help you write an
Arts Council application because you can't even read at the moment;
if you've nowhere to go, sleep in your studio, don't worry about the
rent, it's fine.' I was going to get kicked out of the homeless
hostel I was in and the fact that she would stand by me and write to
the council and say, 'You can't do this to somebody', that is
phenomenal.
“The way I describe it to some people
who I feel don't quite get it is: 'Imagine you're doing a show in a
building and it's not wheelchair accessible, you wouldn't say to the
person in the wheelchair, you need to build your own ramp to get into
the building.' But often that's what happens to me: often, I have to
explain that I need to bring two people with me, one to look after me
during the show, one to look after me outside; I need a quiet
dressing room because when it's noisy I'm going to have a panic
attack.
“That's part of the battle and I'm
prepared to fight for that, because it's not just for me: it's for
every person who has a mental illness.”
