15.

In the aftermath of 9/11, and as a consequence of it, two things permanently shifted in my sense of my practice as a theatre maker. // One came in the days immediately after. I had a day job as a charity administrator, in an office within St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. In those few days, many more people came to sit in the church. Mostly they didn’t seem to be praying, they didn’t light candles, there was no visible religious component to their presence. They just needed to wrap a building around themselves, a building with some sort of civic signature. And it seemed to me that there should be a more appropriate building for that function than a church, one that was less loaded with ideology and less intricated in the operations of what we might call the establishment. // The other was an article written some months later by the poet and activist Brian Kim Stefans, in which he described a desire to turn away from ‘internet art’ (his phrase) and towards ‘theatre’. “We need bodies out there,” he wrote, “[. . .] on the streets [where] we live [. . . in] the daylight [. . .] since that is the world in which I was dumped when the planes struck.”

12.

You might remember that the tagline of John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus is: ‘Voyeurism is participation.’ It’s a maxim that comes back to me whenever people deride the predicament of the seated audience, poor saps, kept in the dark (with all the metaphorical payload that implies). How remiss of theatre to ask its audience to sit so passively. – Well there’s something in that of course. Theatre often does assume a passive audience, but this has nothing to do with the configuration of the theatre auditorium, the seating, the distribution of light. All of those factors need to be considered but the passivity of an audience depends wholly on how successfully and how seductively a stage piece asks for their active engagement. At present we consistently undervalue the work that an audience does in being present and aware of its own presence, in paying attention, in reading and re-reading what it sees and hears, in helping to hold the piece in common: all of which, given the right conditions, it can do in the most conventional pros arch theatre you can imagine.