26.

In Where You Stand I nick a bit from Sara Ahmed’s brilliant book Queer Phenomenology, in which she notes, not at all in the context of theatre, that the ‘rect’ in ‘direction’ is the same as the ‘rect’ in ‘correct’ and ‘rectitude’ and for that matter ‘rectangle’. It’s all about straightness. As a director, it would seem to follow, my role is about keeping everything straight. Orderly and tidy and straight and narrow. It doesn’t seem to fit me at all. I mentioned this to Jonny, about the ‘rect’ in ‘director’, and he said, yes but don’t forget it’s also the ‘rect’ in ‘erection’. This would seem to conjure an image in which as a director I’m the conductor not just of chaos but of a chorus line of cocks. I hope it’s not as actually phallocentric as that but once I have your attention I do quite want to shape, or at least help to hold open, your experience of desire. I recall Natalie Abrahami’s statement regarding her anxiety about nudity on stage: isn’t it distracting to spend all evening watching someone’s genitals? My answer: not if those genitals are the most beautiful thing on stage. Desire is always political. Want something. Want something.

11.

In 2008 I made my first piece in collaboration with the actor Jonny Liron. It was called Hey Mathew and it was, among other things, an attempt to make a piece of theatre that was genuinely candid in its staging of queer erotics without simulation, without coyness and without much regard for where the line is normally drawn. // Towards the beginning of the process Jonny and I went away for a weekend to start working on this sexual content. The only ground rule we had was that I would, as the saying goes, look but not touch. Everything else we negotiated as we went along. Some of the work was as challenging aesthetically as it was complex ethically, and we talked a great deal, making sure we were both OK, figuring out how to pay close enough attention to what we wanted. What I particularly remember from that weekend, though, and this remains my most striking emotional memory of it, was that no matter how difficult, how searching the conversation got around the intellectual underwriting of the work, still every time Jonny got a hard-on, I got one too. The blood in his body speaking directly to the blood in mine.