The Burning Stage #3
Up Close and Personal
A village pub in the remote west of Ireland. A young man bursts in and claims to have murdered his father by hitting him with a shovel. The inhabitants of that place are shocked but there is grudging admiration for such a man of action. Soon the girls are falling in love with him and coming to blows over him. But then the young man’s father appears, still alive. Now the village turns against the young hero. They thought highly of him as a great story teller but now he appears to be a liar and a failure in the very thing he was boasting about. So, in order to regain his standing in their eyes, he again attacks his father leaving him for dead. This time the villagers are disgusted by his cold-blooded actions. In the end the father recovers. And, after a reconciliation, Father and Son leave to wander the world togetheer..
The Murder weapon
One of the great advantages of working in a Burning Stage style is the fact that the drama occurs in a very intimate setting. Close enough to the audience that the actors are within touching distance. Or, at least human-sized to the watcher. There is something about this very aspect that makes the drama so compelling.
The play I described above was a turning point for me in my life. And for that very reason.
It was a school trip to the theatre. The old Salisbury Playhouse. It was a converted chapel as so many theatres were (and still are). They were presenting “The Playboy of the Western World.” A drama about small village life in the far West of Ireland. There was something about the energy and the language, the proximity and sheer reality of the actors, which made me know that this was something I was going to have to do myself.
An odd thing. My father was an engineer on a farm. He always wanted to follow his father into being a blacksmith but his mother was strongly against this and insisted on him having a white-collar job. In the end he rebelled, ran away to London, suffered a severe road accident and, when the war intervened, he was able to take up his mechanical life. It is, perhaps not so strange, that my trajectory was similar. Having got over wanting to be a train driver and RAF pilot, I felt I wanted to work on farms like my father. My school, and my mother felt differently and wanted me to go into accountancy or teaching. But then - the school trip - and my future was sealed. In the end I was thrown out of school, hitch hiked to London because that’s the only place I knew where theatre happened. Slept rough, got a job in a West End Theatre and the rest, as they say, is history. Incidentally, I loved my father very much and never wanted to kill him with a shovel so any parallel stops right there.
The fact is that something whispered in my ear that that was to be my life and thus it was.
Amid the glamour and glitz of the West End in the Swinging Sixties, I still felt slightly dissatisfied. There was something still to be achieved. I eventually trained as a teacher and learned all those important things like the science of people - Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychology. And, returning to the theatre, I knew that it was to be the personal, human sized aspects of the theatrical experience that mattered. It was an exploration of the world through human experience. It was never about me; what I wanted to explore was not what I waas familiar with but what I didn’t know. “The Playboy of the Western World” was as far from my experience as could be, in a language I could barely follow. But it spoke to me personally of what it was to be human.
And being human is crucial. Being a writer has big responsibilities. Those of us who are driven to it have a duty to use the impetus for good. By which I mean furthering human contact. In the days of the distancing effect of social media we can be a catalyst for bringing people together. It is not about me. It is me using any skills I have acquired to create a tiny corner of a better, more human and humane world. Thus, I do not write about my personal issues. Any issues I have with the world are mine and mine alone. I want to talk about what is universal. I have always been wary of Issues. An Issue is what makes you different from me. It forms a power gradient. I want the drama to describe how you and I are the same.
If you scroll back to read my previous essay about Writing for the Drama #7 (Choose Drama. Choose Society: part 7) you will see that I argue that issue-based theatre is, generally, a drama devoid of characters. What characters there are, exist only to be the mouthpiece of the writer. They do not grow organically out of the events and interactions portrayed.
So, I always seek the exotic. As I writer I choose to write about what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I want to find out things about the world and share them with my audience. Thus, I have written plays about people with unusual lives. About remarkable men and women. Are they so different from us? About people from different cultures. All the time I want to learn more about other human beings to try and distil that very human thing that unites us all.
Back in the sixties and seventies we could envisage a future where everyone would be networked together for the common good. It was called the Global Village. Then the internet intervened and made that come true. But, sadly, instead of uniting people it drove them off into their own rabbit holes and reach for their six shooters to ward off anyone they couldn’t understand. Now we need the Global Village more than ever. Somewhere people can nod to each other in the street as they pass by. Places where we can sit and talk and listen.
And, when I have directed plays, I have wanted them to be close to the audience. Within touching distance so that we share the same things. The themes can be enormous. Cataclysmic or domestic. Either way, they are about the human response to them. When I was appointed to be Artistic Director of different companies, I deliberately set out to produce theatre in just such unlikely settings: Village halls, churches, small studios and arts centres. Adaptations of Classic novels, a play from Russia, retellings of Don Quixote, Frankenstein, Hiawatha and The Thousand and One Nights. A play about a car factory, about young homeless people living in a caravan. These we performed in the round or in unusual arrangements within these settings. Some I wrote myself, others I commissioned new writers to develop.
I also worked with some far-sighted designers who, with the minimum of technical requirements could make these unlikely spaces into somewhere the audience could notice what was happening and feel at once homely but where the unusual could happen.
Peter Brook changed the way I thought about theatre.
When Peter Brook wrote about creating a new sort of theatre in the “The Empty Space” he was describing of the sort of ways theatre could be more relevant to its audiences. Those ideas still resonate through everything I am writing here. For me, it is not necessarily about making new dramas, but about creating a new form of theatre that will populate those spaces.
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH CBE (21 March 1925 – 2 July 2022)
“The Empty Space” Brook, Peter (1968). The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. ISBN 978-0-684-82957-9
Have you read “The Empty Space”? What other books or theatre visits have inspired you? Has theatre changed your life in any way?
