What's left? -- The acid test

"This is an acid test: ten years later, do we carry with us a trace in which we can reconstruct the play? This trace is an acid burn, it forms itself in a silhouette – not just a picture, an image with an emotional and intellectual charge. From this hard kernel the meanings of this whole work can be found again. Examples: Mother Courage drawing her cart, two tramps under a tree, a sergeant dancing."

-- Peter Brook, The Shifting Point

The other day I watched a production of Hamletmaxhine. I watched it only a week after our show, while I was still trying to make sense of what had happened. Watching Hamletmaxhine clarified a few things for me.

It was a pleasure for me to watch the production, to watch something well executed, and that had a coherence, or perhaps more precisely, has something to say.

It was fun for me to watch the ebb and flow of energy between the audience and the performers. To recognise how there are scenes in which draw the audience in. Bright, happy (I might be tempted to say, comic) scenes. The audience like these scenes, and to some extent, these scenes are necessary, really necessary, to open the audience up.

And yet what really haunts me is a single image: a woman in black, with a long semi transparent cloak, crosses a bridge. The slowness, the silence.
Why does this image haunt me? It doesn’t actually even make sense in the play. I don't know what it is trying to say. And perhaps, there lies the mystery – this is an image which makes no sense, and yet, as Peter Brook might say, it burns.

That's what I look for really, those moments, when energetically something leaps across the gap from stage to audience. A spark that leaps across a trench, to ignite a blazing forest.

If you ask me what I remember out of the Berzerk! project, and perhaps, what I will remember after all this – they are those magical moments in rehearsal, when something leapt out. The first time we ran through, when Haruka's energy burst all seams and floored us. Those early days of improvising in the studio to late morning light. The feeling of sudden coherence in the Aphex dress run for the work in progress showing. It is those moments of magic that I would want to bring on to stage as a director… which somehow got muffled in the Fringe. (I have come to realise that the Fringe Theatre is spatially not helpful in establishing the rapport between audience and actor. The seats are too sloped – most of the audience literally, looks down, on the actors and even though it is a tiny theatre, gives the unfortunate feeling of distance)

If anything, I think the project gave me, as a director, an understanding of what Jacek was trying to tell me with his electrical circuit diagrams… the different types of rapport that one can have with the audience. Scenes which open up the audience: playfulness, joy, humour. Scenes which demand something of the audience: patience, reflection… even ones where you push their limits. Especially ones where you push their limits. That is the problem with proscenium arch theatres – the audience feels safe. Even when the huge 3, 4 metre high flats came crashing down in the final act of Hamletmaxhine, it was not as impressive as I imagine it must have been, on stage. We are safe in our seats from what is happening on stage.

Yes – when I watch a play, things affect me on different levels. What feels engaging to me initially is not necessarily what lingers afterwards. I sensed this most clearly when I watched Theatre du Pif's production of Blackbird. During the show, I was hooked by the dialogue; but weeks later, my strongest memory is that of Bonni's monologue.

For me then, the test of theatre is what lingers afterwards. What I am interested in creating is that which lingers afterwards. In a way, I want to talk to the audience not right after the show, but a few months later. Did anything stay? Did anything last?

Why do I ask for that which lasts? I tend to keep many other things – most notably, my relationships - in present tense. The bright, giddy present. What will last, will last, and what lingers in the memory is not necessarily a reflection of what was beautiful or important.

I suspect that it is the educator in me that asks for long term effect.
Or perhaps, a desire for immortality.