16.

I had a soundbite for the press interviews that went along with our Signal to Noise production of The Tempest in audiences’ own homes. “I’ve always tried to remember,” I’d confide, “that theatre is an experience you have, not a building you go to.” People liked that. And it’s true that an act of theatre can be undertaken anywhere, at any time, by anyone who wants it. But here we all are, sitting in a theatre that is still called a theatre despite only rarely in the last few years hosting any kind of theatre, let alone any theatre that was content to call itself theatre. The editors of the excellent new Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater lament that theatre changes more slowly than poetry does: but poetry is not the name of a kind of building, and buildings, even now, change more slowly than minds do. Ten years on, and about to start rehearsing a new piece for home performance, I would like, speculatively, to invert my soundbite. What if, while retaining our current plurality of performance spaces, both real and virtual, we said that theatre would in the future be distinguished by dint of its happening in a designated theatre building?

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.

7.

A friend of mine once went to see Fiona Shaw performing Beckett’s Happy Days, and hated it. After the final words were spoken, and the stage lights had dimmed, right then in that little niche of reverent blackout time before the inevitable rapturous ovation, my friend, without entirely intending to, found himself saying aloud: “Utter shit.” All eyes turned on him and he now describes it as the most embarrassing moment of his life. The level of embarrassment he experienced seems to me to reflect the violence of the situation. For some, that violence will appear to be contained in my friend’s exquisitely timed heckle, just as those in the seats around him clearly adjudged his wounding remark – wounding not just to the actress on stage but to the silence that was rightfully hers – to be a violent act. But isn’t it rather that my friend was acting in self-defence, in the refusal of a tyrannical violence that the whole apparatus of that theatre event is designed to uphold? That system demands a total complicity, and our choices are three: silent assent and collusion; tacit distantiation; or to speak, and thus ventriloquize the violence that inheres in the situation.

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!

4.
I don’t make live art, I make theatre, but now’s not the time to try and articulate my sense of what the difference might be because I’d only then immediately undermine my assertion of the depth and cultural urgency of theatre by mentioning Stephen Sondheim, which is exactly what I’m about to do. Sondheim’s early musical Company is a story about a bachelor, a longterm singleton, and all his friends are in relationships, and at the end of the show, in a scene set at his own birthday party, he sings a song called ‘Being Alive’ in which he itemises all the things that make other people annoying to live with and difficult to love. And then he has a bit of a think about it and decides that what’s really missing in his life is all the annoyingness and difficulty that sharing it with another person would bring. And what brings about his change of heart is that one of his married friends tells him, “Blow out the candles and make a wish. Want something. Want something.” Maybe we can imagine a version of that song called ‘Being A Live Artist’, and it would contain exactly the same line. “Want something. Want something.”