23.

It is, to be specific, 10.15pm Friday 21st May as I write these words. I’m in a different hotel room further downtown and I can barely hear the signals of central Manchester on a Friday evening above the noise of the aircon. Both the ice machines in the hotel are broken so I’m drinking warm diet Coke. It’s diet Coke because exactly a year ago in yet another hotel in Manchester I did the home test that revealed that I had become diabetic. All this is instantly, specifically, the case. I’ve just done the last performance of a new piece called Where You Stand which is partly made out of a collaborative blog. Working in that way reflects the question that burns most ardently for the moment. How can the work I make speak in high fidelity to the complexity of how we now live and the almost overwhelming challenge to work towards living better, in a way that feels less violent, less exploitative, more equitable, more joyfully queer? For the last couple of years I’ve had three tenets in mind, that I try to make every piece of work conform to. I thought I’d have improved on them by now, but I haven’t. I’ll finish up by talking about those.

22.

If I’m arguing for a return to the notion that theatre is not just an experience you have but a place you go to congregate with others and share that experience, we had better for a moment consider the site-specific. This is a category of work that like so many others is regrettably hidebound by our continuing failure to distinguish form from content. Which is to say that our excited focus has been on the site. Partly this is media-driven – do me a Titus Andronicus in a bus station and you can have a photo across three columns. A previously unused site will seem to equal novelty, even if what’s placed there is no more than an arrangement of reupholstered deckchairs on the same old Titanic. What’s deep and culturally urgent about the site-specific is not the site but the specific, which theatre has always struggled with. Prefabricated theatre is always conceived in a blur of generalities. To be specific is to be responsive not just to the site of the work but to its audience, to its social context, to its cultural moment, to the weather. Theatre is made here and now specifically between us, and whatever is not is not worthy of the name.

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.

10.

Eleven years ago I started a company called Signal to Noise, which borrowed its name from the idea in cybernetics that wherever information is moving around, it is also changed in transit. It gets scuffed, broken up. The liveness of theatre, especially but not only when it is permitted to be fully itself, means that it has a sure tendency towards this kind of turbulence, quite a low signal to noise ratio. I wanted to make work that was full of noise, full of turbulence, that celebrated (rather than attempting to suppress) the qualities of theatre that make it theatre, that make it unpredictable and ephemeral and resistant to commodification. // After our first show, a wildly turbulent queer sci-fi dance-theatre epic, somebody who saw it said he felt sad to imagine that I might think all the signals were somehow lost, that nothing remained but a kind of chaos and cacophany. But for me the signal that survived was the most important thing. Not because of the thing itself, but because of the thing behind the thing. Communication might fail, but the desire to communicate was always somehow preserved in all the noise.

6.

At present we’re going through a period in which one way of avoiding wanting too much, too exposingly, is to ask the audience what it wants. This is a totally legitimate desire and it sounds quite progressive but to equip an audience with the information they need in order to authentically want something within the space you’re holding open for them is an extremely difficult task, and one that still requires the artist to have a very clear sense of what it is that they want out of the encounter. For the audience to feel that they have been left holding the baby is all wrong. They have to know that they’re the baby. They have to feel held. But they also have to feel understood, or else they develop a terrible sense of their own infantilisation. They can’t make themselves clear. They’re at the mercy of an adult who knows less than they do about how they feel. // Too often, securing the parameters for an audience to want things in turns out to be so incredibly difficult that you end up in a room where nobody wants anything, but is required to accept the desires projected on to them. Do you want your rattle? Yes you do!