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.

5.
It used to seem to me that sometimes making theatre was like taking care of a young and particularly fractious baby to whom you are godparent. Sometimes it just cries and cries and nothing seems to make it any better and you end up just shouting at it, “What is it? What do you want?” // Eventually I realised the basic problem was that I had misconceptualised the relationship. You are the baby, and theatre is the godparent, and you are the one being held, and it’s theatre that’s on the brink of despair. “What is it? What do you want?” // Theatre, like all creative activities, but perhaps more than any, is first and foremost the art of wanting. It might matter to some degree what it is that you want, but an attentiveness to the want itself comes first and deepest. // To want, to really want, can feel shameful. We are told all the time not to be self-indulgent in our work. To want is to be the author, and that feels increasingly sticky. To want is to signal a lack, and that can be exposing. Wanting is the easiest and the hardest thing to do.