— read write play

I’m trying to write a book. Actually, I’m trying to write the synopsis for a book, which will probably become the introduction to that book.

To be more accurate, I’m trying to write a begging letter – please publish this book! – and a extended, elaborate promise – you can trust me to write this book about these things. Even worse, I’m trying to persuade publishers that giving me a contract will be good for them – people will give you money and want to be your friend!

And I’m also – horribly, horribly – aware that books aren’t the most obedient kind of objects, and that whatever I think I’m going to write now may not entirely resemble what I end up with.

I can remember applying for PhD programmes and looking down at a box on a form that asked me to describe, in 500 words or less, my proposed project. To describe an 80,000 word project that I hadn’t written yet. The one that was going to take me three years to write and wouldn’t entirely reveal itself until I wrote the conclusion in Edinburgh, on a March morning with debt piling up like dirty snow. The one I’m still thinking about six years later as I try to put together a book project.

Most of this project has already been researched; it develops from my phd and from a year or more of thinking and writing and talking – oh yes, the talking. I know what this book is going to be about: the critical and philosophical territory that makes this an academic work, the practitioners, artists and companies who form the core of the new research, the two big fat (exciting, pragmatic, strange) arguments that return on nearly every page.

But I still don’t know if I’ll recognise this book when I’ve written it.

Not quite sure what to make of Andrew Haydon’s mildly tongue-in-cheek list of cliches of visual theatre that should be banned: some items on the list are specific images or props – battered suitcases, falling feathers, umbrellas-as-birds, people climbing out of furniture¹ – but elsewhere there’s the demand that we get rid of entire forms of  media: no microphones, no video feeds or projection. Is the medium really the problem, or the way in which it is used?

I also particularly enjoyed the dual prohibition on blackouts and movement sequences instead of blackouts. Is this a call for performance without any scene breaks, a bid for the punctuation of the empty stage or just bloody-minded awkwardness? The failure of visual theatre or performance work to develop its own vocabulary can be tiresome, but it strikes me as a little unfair to mark out those forms alone for a failure of imagination. The “off-the-shelf” approach to direction and design (hello, box-set) isn’t exactly unknown in mainstream theatre. As ever, there’s more than enough blame to go around.

Perhaps we can arrange some kind of artistic trade: visual theatre gives up the bowler hats and shredded-paper-as-snow, and naturalistic drama stops pretending those doors at the back of the set lead out into the garden.

1. This might be shorthand for “anything that resembles Theatre de Complicite, circa 1992.” [↩]