Making a new day

Wild and free

Multiple choice, question one:
You’re walking down the street at 5pm and a gang of, let’s say, eight young men in their mid- or late-teens are walking towards you, eating fried chicken and being a bit lairy. Do you:

a) think about that night on a fairly busy road when a gang of young men taunted a man as he walked along with his girlfriend, and one of them kicked him hard in the bum?

b) think about that afternoon when four men in their late-teens had a run-in with a guy carrying his shopping, and one of them kicked him in the small of the back and he went sprawling across the pavement, milk spilling everywhere?

c) think about that night walking to the station when a group of teenagers huddled in front of the launderette and one of them said to his friends, ‘I know it, I’m not supposed to live’?

d) think about the UK unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds, and for young people of colour in particular, and wonder what these boys are growing up into, and who’s going to help them find a place in this (ferociously yet often invisibly exploitative, vindictively and carelessly unequal) society?

Whenever I write about wanting something like revolution or at least social change, I worry that I come across as boring and holier-than-thou: a bleeding-heart, wool-brained idealist who doesn’t know how the world works and doesn’t appreciate how awful things used to be before capitalism raised living standards. I worry, too, that writing is so inactive, so impotent. There’s a post (My Local Has Closed) on Scottee’s blog goading people to ‘get off the Internet and get radical’, and I think: yes, you’re right, I should, but…

One of the women in Stand talks about supergluing her hands to an office chair at a protest. Another recalls walking on the motorway when she was a teenager, to demonstrate her belief that the world belongs to all people and rules governing who can go where when are illegitimate. One of the men describes denouncing BP’s sponsorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company by rushing on to the stage before performances and calling on people to rip the BP logo out of their programme. I first saw Stand in its original run in a community centre in Oxford in June 2014 and these stories alarmed me. The self-confidence of these people. The fearlessness. The ability to take risks. Nothing wool-brained or boring about them.

Is the way I want my life

Multiple choice, question two:
You’re walking down the street at 5pm and see a woman wearing a niqab, or a burqa maybe. Do you:

a) think about the woman you know who once admitted that seeing women shrouded in long black veils makes her shiver, because they look sort of sinister?

b) think about the woman outside the tube station, yelling at another woman dressed in a bra top and skimpy skirt that she was asking to be raped?

c) think about choice, and whether the woman’s choice to veil herself, even if she considers it a free one, is fundamentally dictated by a patriarchal religious structure, and the extent to which the woman’s choice to wear skimpy clothes, however ’empowered’, is conditioned by patriarchal-corporate interests?

d) think about feminism in all this, and how important it is to hear voices from across cultural, class and ethnic backgrounds, and how complex this makes feminism, and maybe uncomfortable, and how necessary that discomfort is?

I felt a bit bored the first time I saw Stand – only for 30 minutes or so, but still. It’s such a quiet, sombre, unshowy kind of show. And however extraordinary some of their actions, the people being represented on stage are just plain ordinary. But it was that ordinariness that won me over: in no way would I define myself as an activist, or someone who acts, and yet these people didn’t seem distant from me. I could even see myself in them: the bits of me that stop me activist-acting. One of them is a mother, and talks mostly about how she wanted to bring up her adopted daughter to be confident, and stand up for herself (and so others); another talks about the invisibility of the middle-aged woman, and how she turned that to her advantage. The second time I saw Stand, at Battersea Arts Centre, coming back to those women was like sitting down for a natter with old friends; their stories were still the same stories, but it was a pleasure to hear them again, as though reminiscing over tea and cake.

And something unexpected happened: in the shift from Oxford to London, it was clearer to me how the show drew on local stories to think nationally, how these people had arrived in that community from across the UK, and were acting within their communities for the UK. When one man, who had fought against the redevelopment of the Jericho boatyard, suddenly rails, ‘We’re brutalising the place! … Turning it into a place that is impossible!’, his words made me flinch, because I was hearing myself talk about London.

I heard myself talking, but a version of me who acts, too. A version who gets radical, and truly lives the change I want to see.

Fighting what is wrong

Multiple choice, question three:
It happened. The general election happened and despite everything that seems to you logical and humane and natural - that education shouldn’t be stratified but equally accessible to all people, that creativity is essential to human existence, that healthcare should be available to anyone who needs it, all the basic socialist values blah fucking blah - the Tories are back in, and not even with a Lib Dem contingent to hold them back. (Enough with the Lib Dem scapegoating already. Yes, they chose power over principle. But civil servants could give you first-hand evidence of them also tempering Tory cruelty, and no one in British media made space for that narrative.) Do you:

a) sink into a black hole of total fucking despair (in which Cat Power’s Myra Lee album is a suitably devastated soundtrack)?

b) remember looking up that Russell Brand piece from 2013, just to have a more informed opinion when denouncing it, and being surprised by how compellingly he made the argument that ‘the impact of voting is negligible and it is our responsibility to be more active if we want real change’, all the while feeling a ripple of shame for connecting in any way with someone so unconscionably and irredeemably twerpish; and think of this again the morning after the election, when looking feverishly at its facts and figures, recognising that the number of Tory seats in no way reflects the number of votes, which arguably means Brand is right, that the impact of voting has been negligible on the House of Commons, but also means he’s wrong, because it will be forcefuly felt by those whose lives have already been impacted by Tory austerity (the young, old and unwell, basically), which also means he’s right, it’s time to focus on that ‘responsibility to be more active’, and in the midst of the maelstrom you ask yourself: what am I going to do?

c) look again at the facts and figures and see that coming up to four million people voted for UKIP, and realise that apart from a knee-jerk ‘I blame the BBC’ you have no capacity whatsoever to understand what those people think they want, what those people think they need, what those people are standing up for, or what they think needs standing against?

d) see people on twitter talk about volunteering as an act of resistance, as a way of making a society based on altruism rather than selfishness, and feel a sudden stab of anxiety that this, too, is what the Tories want, people who already love libraries volunteering in their local libraries to keep them alive and people who already love art and theatre volunteering to make art theatre and teach these skills to others and people who love looking after people volunteering as carers, and letting the little insignificant people get on with that so that the rich people who love money get to just keep their money and don’t have to spend it on anyone but themselves, and worry that even by volunteering you might confirm the neo-liberal victory, and fear that even by worrying about this you have failed your own humanity?

A lot of the young people in Apathy scare me.

A lot of the young people in Apathy are nothing like me.

A lot of the young people in Apathy remind me of Rufus, the 10-year-old from Men in the Cities who watches porn with hungry fascination, attacks boys at his school out of an inarticulable desire to be physically close to them, and tells an older man that inside him is a terrorist. I found Rufus repugnant on first encounter. And on the second, he became painfully human: vulnerable, lonely, besieged by desire, naked in his honesty, loveable.

I have intermittent flashes of recognition reading Apathy: when Gaby responds to being burgled with something like relief, because ‘It’s happened now'; when Daisy attempts to make lentil dhal, and it comes out bland. What I mostly recognise in Apathy, though, are the things I’m afraid of for my children. The power of the internet, the access to violence it offers, how that violence bleeds into everyday life. The lack of communal spaces, the warping of communication – again by the internet – so that the deepest truths are spoken to strangers who aren’t what they seem. And slowly, I recognise something else: a younger me, the teenage me trapped in London’s hinterlands, where the only communal space was the bleak slab of concrete outside 7-Eleven, a place I wasn’t even cool enough to congregate in, who was banned from corresponding with a mysterious penpal (we never exchanged photos, or described how we looked) after I wrote him a letter telling him in some detail about my first experience of sex. Our local library – small, insufficient, but something – was transformed into a Stop-and-Shop, too; I remember walking in and thinking: but where are the fucking books?

I read Apathy the same night I saw a work-in-progress of Other (Please Specify), a show Chris has been making with Ned Glasier and a group of late-teens/young adults from the Islington Community Theatre. Watching the performers - a long line of them - define and redefine themselves, expand and resist those definitions, I thought for the umpteenth time about how useful theatre is as a place in which at once to see oneself reflected and see through to other people, to see yourself as you would define yourself, and recognise common humanity with people nothing like you. I keep re-reading Apathy thinking about the people who might recognise themselves in it. Their fetishes, their perversion, their confused politics, their loneliness and depression, their desire to change or disrupt gender, their embattled sense of identity. Wait, stop: perversion? There’s no such judgement here. I keep thinking about people not just recognising themselves in this text but exhaling with the relief of a) being seen and b) not being condemned. And the more I re-read it, the more these people feel familiar to me. The more vividly I see them, and attempt to understand them. Even Arthur, the guy who surrounds himself with images of animals tortured and maimed, and Grace, the woman who googles images of mass carnage. At the end of Apathy, Chris asks a series of questions about his characters, inviting you empathise, to connect, to see another way. He’s had an idea, made a series of suggestions: the rest is up to us.

Notes made while watching Stand at BAC:

deserves respect like any other human being

network only as good as the guys around you

asylum seekers/ they’re still human

COMMUNITY

CONNECTION WITH NATURE

convergence of people together

live/ the change you want to see

if you do it everyone will do it

THERE MUST BE SOMETHING WE CAN DO

(I was surprised more reviewers didn’t pick up on the stuff that’s said about asylum seekers and refugees in Stand. Maybe it felt socialist blah blah to them, but to me - seeing it on the first preview at BAC, against a backdrop of uncounted deaths in the Mediterranean, desperate migrants being dismissed as vermin, and immigrants repeatedly being blamed by people appearing on the BBC for all the ills of Britain, rather than those who exploit them - this material felt so trenchant. The asylum seekers that the woman in Stand works with are, she says, typically people who have been ‘quite high up in society and had a good education’, traumatised not only by being tortured in their own countries but ‘treated as though they haven’t got any humanity’ in the UK. She speaks from first-hand experience: not the kind of prejudice, racism and scummy controversialism that routinely gets voiced in the UK press.)

Note written across my computer screen, staring at me as I write:

The question is not: ‘How can I, one person, make a difference?’

The question is: ‘What kind of difference do I want to make?’

Leading in a new way

Multiple choice, question four:
Stand and Apathy pulse with an invitation: what are you going to do with this material? What might it inspire in you or from you? Do you:

a) think about the generosity behind these gestures: the way Chris chooses not to speak for himself in Stand but instead invites six ordinary, flawed, complicated individuals to inhabit that space, so that other voices can be heard; the way he sketches characters in Apathy, not as end points but beginnings, stimuli for other people’s imaginations and ways of making?

b) think about the cunning behind these gestures: the invisible power of Chris as editor and author of Stand, using other people as his mouthpiece to shape a dissident discourse that is radical yet banal; the evident diversity of the characters in Apathy belying the fact that so many of them come across as left-leaning in politics (arguably, even the guy supportive of UKIP for their disapprobation of the EU)?

c) think about making or performing a response to Apathy, but feel overwhelmed by how much theatre, how much stuff, is already happening (especially if you live in London), or incapable of making something interesting, or too trapped by the neo-liberal economy that has successfully transformed all play into work, leaving no time for genuine play?

d) think about writing, and whether it’s just pointless, and whether it’s enough to tell stories to those who are already prepared to listen, and whether it’s enough to tell stories about people who are already in command of their own story, and whether the stories of theatre can ever be as powerful or affecting as the stories of the media, and whether the people we should be making a stand against right now aren’t politicians at all, but journalists and particularly editors and radio and TV producers?

The night I saw Stand at BAC, I had a friend visiting whom I’ve known since university, although the conversation we had after I got home made me wonder if I’d known him at all. He talked about his resistance to parliamentary politics, his feeling that listening to or arguing against politicians does nothing to shift the day-to-day experience of the people in his family or other close communities, and that what actually, deeply matters is how you interact with those around you: how you work towards less violent forms of communication that might encourage people to be more truthful and less guarded, how you act in ways that inspire people to think better of themselves, how you offer support to people to help them feel more safe. And yes, he’s white and middle-class so he comes at these questions from that privileged perspective, but he’s also the son of an Assyrian Christian woman who migrated to the UK under violent circumstances. He might not know anyone struggling as a result of disability but he does have family from Damascus who last year became refugees. The politics he was articulating was one of generosity and kindness, of strengthening communities through dialogue, and finding a new sense of value – in others, and in oneself – by rejecting the false promises of capitalism and focusing instead on creative action. I told him how much this thinking reminded me of people like Chris, Rajni Shah, Harry Giles, that I know through theatre, and about the book I’m reading, Growing Up Absurd, published in 1960 by Paul Goodman, who spoke in a similar way about the necessity of finding value beyond the ‘organised system’ of corporate America. There was a relief in both of us, I think, in recognising each other’s language. Because this stuff is hard to explain to people. It usually comes out wrong.

I’ve written about Stand three times now, and quoted that bit every time. In a moment of embarrassment talking about his political beliefs, my university friend said: ‘It sounds really 60s and hippie.’ We’re all so scared of radiating wool-brained idealism. But. But. Here’s Paul Goodman on the Beats:

How relentlessly and consistently that and other ‘factual evidence’ has been quashed, the better to maintain the status quo.

Multiple choice, question five:
You’re thinking about standing up for something, thinking about protest, thinking about change, thinking about changing yourself, and a pop song starts playing in your head. Is it:

a)

b)

c)

d) [handing over to you]