25.

Why do we only ever hear about the loftiest aspirations of theatre organizations when they find themselves faced with closure? Why does it take a crisis to make us reach beyond the language of marketing for a kind of diction that breathes civic oxygen? Signal to Noise was born into, and in opposition to, a British theatre culture that was too cool for political ardour, too in love with its cynicism to actually dare to want something. We instinctively understood what Zizek now reminds us: that a thrall to irony signals not a diminution of feeling, but a fear of the vertiginous depth and cultural urgency of that feeling; an unwillingness to face up to the terror of wanting. Back in the day we talked about sincerity, not realizing that Blair and Bush would attempt to legitimise their psychotic criminality in exactly those terms. So now we talk about desire, about wanting desire, trusting it, the thing behind the thing. When irony is complacent and cowardly, and sincerity is toxic, our want, our naked fessed-up want, is a tender, humane refusal of both. Theatre, then, because we need a public place where we can deeply care about what we want.

18.

Two quotations that circle around my head. Aaron Sorkin gives President Bartlet in The West Wing a sort of catchphrase that should be written in the window of every theatre in town. He says: “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Audiences need to know this. Going to the theatre should feel like voting, only not useless in 97% of locations. And then there’s a song by Kate Bush called ‘Love and Anger’ where she sings: “We’re building the house of the future together / What would we do without you?” // I know not everyone feels, perhaps not everyone ever could feel, as I do, that theatre has saved my life: which is to say, it has made it possible for me to inhabit, intermittently but for real, a life infinitely more fit for living than the parallel one that propels me through the out-of-order automatic doors at Morrisons on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps not everyone can feel that. But couldn’t going to the theatre become a more vibrantly elective act? A more affirmative kind of commitment? An act of deeply, urgently wanting, desiring, the thing behind the thing?