Different Every Night

I’ve been feeling a little fractured lately, and I’m going to attempt to explain why, through the medium of theatre.

Temporality is absolutely theatre’s best asset.  “Different every night”, “live” and “unpredictable” are all positive attributes of both watching and making it.  Likewise, whenever I review a show, I bear in mind that tomorrow night’s performance might carry a wholly different energy.  It is exciting, this element of the unknown.

As some may know, I recently started working for Theatre Delicatessen.  I first became aware of them when I was working on the Soho Poly Theatre Festival and volunteering for Secret Cinema.  Through both environments, I became interested in the question of “What constitutes a theatrical space?” and even wrote an essay on it for university.  One day at Secret Cinema, a girl handed me a copy of TimeOut and I read an article about their residency at Marylebone Gardens.  Already harbouring an interest in non-conventional theatre spaces due to the Soho Poly’s humble existence in what is now a storage room, the main thing that drew me to Theatre Delicatessen was the act of taking over an old office building.  They turn them into event spaces, art spaces, spaces for artists to rehearse, flourish and grow.  It is recycling, on an epic scale.

So here we are now, at 119 Farringdon Road, in the old Guardian office building.  There is a set date on the lease, and it is our home until further notice.  Artists come through our doors, rehearse their work, and leave.  We house and co-produce work, which brings audience through the doors who likewise come in, sit down and watch a show before I bid them goodnight.  The building itself is obviously still under development, and every time I go down to the basement to see what the SoundBoxed collective are up to, they’ve built or painted something new for their performance space.  Chandeliers have appeared in the event space.  The fourth floor is currently gearing up for ‘The Space is Inbetween Us’ by AlexandraBaybutt and David Somló, a production that by its very design, will be different every night.  

The bodily process of each day is the same, but what happens in between is very different.  It is exciting, it is exhausting.

***

I have quite a substantial soap box from which to shout about theatre criticism and regional theatre i.e: there is not enough coverage.  I am currently in the process of finding voices in Hampshire.  I really want to be able to tag team, so we can get more of the incredible work covered (Although Theatre Deli is a London Living Wage employer, I can’t afford to hop back every week.  So if you’re out there and interested, PLEASE get in touch).  It is great, and brimming with potential, and the only thing that made my London-move questionable.  But to go and review work, I leave this already temporal city to fly through my parent’s home, hop behind the wheel of my granparents’ old car, and watch and critically diagnose work that likewise, by nature, is fluid.  I then write the review.  I email it off and it is published in the ether and read by GOD knows who and...I get back on a train.  I head straight back to work, and people again fly in and out of those automatic doors with “Hello-how are you?-Goodbye.”  

It is exciting, it is exhausting.

***

A week ago, I went to the first workshop for the Soho Young Company Writer’s Lab.  For the first exercise, we essentially turned the main stage into a map of the world and stood where we grew up, where our parents grew up and where our grandparents grew up.  This was fascinating from a socio-geographical perspective, mainly because everyone spread further and further away from London.  But also to watch people climb over the seats to reach Mozambique, or to look up onto the balcony to see Canada.  We sat down again and immediately, the map disappeared.  I had just been at home, and at my grandparents’ home, how was I suddenly back in the Soho Theatre writing about it all?  Aptly, I have come away from the session with the beginning of a new play drawing on my ancestry, and of a fractured sense of belonging.  It was exciting, it was exhausting.

***

For the past fortnight, the King’s College Arts and Humanities Festival has been happening.  Within it, I was involved with a project organised by playwright Jingan Young which was a collaboration between poetry/playwriting/art to explore the theme of colony.  We took over this amazing little bar in the depths of the KCL strand campus and allowed stories to be told in a space that already has quite enough of its own stories to tell (just ask Ben, the barman.)  We watched as it turned from bar to theatre and back to bar, where we danced and drank in the very same space our talented actors had spoken and moved in.  It was incredible.  I feel very much as if we flew through that space at a rate of knots, shouting a whirlwind of stories with the sense of urgency that performing in a non-conventional space inspires.  It was exciting, it was exhausting.

Artwork by Aowen Jin, photo by Rebecca Yeo

***

Tonight, I went for a run.  Within a crazy week, sometimes an extra hour’s sleep really is preferable to half an hour pounding the pavements, so it has been a while.  But tonight, I think it only took a few seconds before all of that feeling of fragmentation, of discord and of temporality dissipated.  I returned home strong again, whole again, with restored acceptance of what the hell I’m doing here.  Of course a lot of that comes down to the rush of endorphins.  But also, it is in the simplicity of breathing in, and of breathing out.  Of being my body, having control over the space I cover, the speed at which I cover it and the pressure with which my feet strike it.  For each passing second, the pavement is only my running ground, nothing more.  

***

The thing about space that is used for theatre is that it is so radically multi-functioning.  What happens in that space is always a little bit magical.  Magical, but then it’s gone.

And, that’s why I’ve been feeling a little bit fractured.  There’s been a lot of magic, in very different places, where the only constant was my own tired, hungry, neglected body.  But I have now eaten, I have been for a run.  I will sleep.

Bring on next week.