I have made a cup of tea. I have taken a shower and cleaned up after a half hearted little run and full-hearted little weep. The sea and the sky and the beautiful coastline were still there. I was sort of half there. And now half here. Looking out at my verdant tiny corner of Britain, this ‘one big garden’ of a country.

 

I am still thinking about it. I feel like I’ve woken up on the other side of the looking glass. And Wonderland always seemed darkly Kafkaesque to me. Never liked it. That rabbit hole. But the UK has spoken and those who want out of the EU have run past the post just – JUST – ahead. Is our great future now something to only catch glimpses of as we give chase? To me personally, the white rabbit we are now expected to pull out of our hat looks more like that bloody thing from Donny Darko.

And just to be clear. If I’d done a little single take film to camera earlier this morning, it would have shown some nice chap being frighteningly fucking angry.

How oddly comforting it is to be impotently self righteous, don’t you find? Maybe just me.

It’s the first time I have felt caught up in a fearsome-seeming social political climate change. Was about to tell myself that the people of my country haven’t awoken to such a redefining shift in social climate in two generations – until I remembered that that’s hardly true. Communities across the country have lived in soul- and community-destroying toxic atmospheres created by suddenly finding themselves at odds existentially with the ideology of the government of the day, in my living memory. Having no clue what it was really like to live through the miners’ strike up close, for example, shows just how long I have lived in the south. There are so very many ways I have not known what it’s like to have to prove one’s self a legitimate ‘insider’ here in Britain, or worse.

This morning isn’t even a proper taste of such a thing for me, is it.

So it’s interesting that people from many of those communities effectively stood with people from supposedly cosier corners of Britain to vote that they’d had enough of feeling stuck. Maybe smothered. Certainly imposed upon. Disempowered. This vote has, I think, felt like an actual lever of power for lots of us.

The question I believe we should regularly re-ask is: Who is pulling what levers? THAT is the job of a real democracy.

But now comes the mettle testing of us all, then; democracy has brought us suddenly this far. Will we reframe the whole mood imposed on us? Will we PRACTICE ways to heal the divide we didn’t ask for? If you voted out, I know you did it with conviction. Now is when your confidence in your decision must lead. Confidence to not take offense at others’ heartbreak and lostness and anger this morning. You’ve poured plenty of yours into this too, we all have. Confidence to defend the vulnerable, not how you fear others see you. Confidence to stop throwing the word ‘fear’ around – banish that duplicitous bastard of a word for a while. Confidence to not waste time seeking to justify yourself – go find ways to seek justice. And help me to know how to do it. And if you’re half the person I think you are, you won’t let yourself be phased by me saying this, you’ll simply cross the house and sit next to me. Because that’s why you’re awesome.

We have more in common than we don’t as British people alive now – even if you have felt any relief this morning and I have felt a few moments of despair. We were ALWAYS a brilliantly intricate Venn diagram of different associations, beliefs and groups – here, and all over the world. None of us fits a single box. We were never a simple label, living under any single banner. Where we are sharingly British is how we are so cool with eachother being ourselves. Perhaps better than anyone has managed it as a defined group of 65million. It is our social bio diversity that has made us strong.

Let THAT fairness and inclusivity and adaptiveness define our shared Britain now. And if you voted for this huge gamble, you’d better make fucking sure you make good on your stated British values. The Britain everyone always says was ‘built’. Not simply felt. Time for us all to get off our arses. The real world is at our door now. Our neighbours and their problems haven’t gone anywhere. So help me to help.

This from Paul Mason is well worth a read. A perspective I personally can see a way forward in, from an economist and a bloke who’s watched the collapse of the working class up close. These are the nettles he thinks we may really have to seize. The future is at hand, and now we can all, perhaps, grab hold of a bit of it. Gardening gloves on, everyone.

So shall we, mate, go and put the fucking kettle on?

x

—

“All we can do, as the left, is go on fighting for the interests of the poor, the workforce, the youth, refugees and migrants. We have to find better institutions and better language to do it with. As in 1932, Britain has become the first country to break with the institutional form of the global order.

If we do have a rerun of the 1930s now in Europe, we need a better left. The generation that tolerated Blairism and revelled in meaningless centrist technocracy needs to wake up. That era is over.”

Paul Mason, writing in Medium >

In the final hours before voting opens in the British EU referendum, I took a nature ramble. You might clearly have as much time on your hands as I evidently did today to sit through all of this, but it is my last lamenting statement of why I shall be voting In, tomorrow morning.

 

What a grim climate we’ve created in the last weeks of this campaign. What dark moments. How split we have been on it – all of us find ourselves disagreeing with loved ones and mates. Which is why we can’t simply chuck around lazy judgements about the positions – we’ve all thought about it, felt it, agonised over it, too much.

The EU is woefully undemocratic. It is prey to lobyists and internal quangos and is unacountably opaque. But it is more than an economic block – it is a cultural integration. And this idea of it, for me, ultimately creates the more positive climate in which to do business of every human kind. Some of which is extremely pressing and will take something like our common market to tackle. If we can just turn the supertanker of it, to help turn many others.

It is currently part of the corrupt-seeming system. But it could give us a way to really face the future. Much more, I believe, than an explosively selfish-looking Brexit. But either way, tragically, when the poles finally open, we won’t be hearing the last of that bloody awful word “Brexit”. Gah.

Whatever you do, do it with a clear concience and a dollop of grace if you can. And I too, shall attempt to not be a dick about it. See you on the other side.

 

If there’s one thing that London theatre group Dante Or Die’s new play most certainly is, it is moving. It is sometimes fully running. And always discomfortingly shifting.

 

Handle with care is the latest production from a project founded by Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan that creates, as they put it, “playful and emotionally driven site-sensitive productions”. And if you don’t know a thing about it, as I didn’t when I rolled up to a self storage lock-up in Poole with some art pals to see it, then I almost don’t want to say anything more, for fear of spoiling the unprepared effect.

Yes. A self storage lock-up. You did read right.

 

WALKING IT THROUGH

Presented where I saw it by Lighthouse Poole, with a script by Chlöe Moss, the piece follows a young woman, Zöe, through some twenty-five years of her life – a life of storing things and moving things and keeping things and pondering the value of things.

Now, if you’ve never been to a site-specific theatre piece, or installed art event, the unnerving effect of what it entails will have a special impact on you – but even if you’re an old art hand, which I have no doubt you are, the act of following players around their own stage, assured that you will be ‘invisible’ to the characters as they pass amongst you and move past you will still turn your radar up to eleven, sensitive to what the hell might happen next. Like any great art might. And more importantly, it’s brilliant fun.

The cheeky fellows from Dante Or Die, including Terry O’Donovan himself, playing a kind of linking motif character throughout, liked playing with the weirdness of this format for their audience. It is a bit of a fourth wall head trip. A structure that wasn’t just nicely playful, however, but was also about engaging our analysis of the three-dimensional journey of this story – like gaming, almost – and about connecting us to the characters. Rather personally in one case, as I believe I got dragged half into an embrace between two of the them in one scene. Saucy actory types.

It was nice to know nothing of what to expect. For all the installations and exhibitions I’ve hived off to and darted furtively into over the years, I’ve not been to many S-S live productions. Not like this. One of the last installation pieces on rails that I went to, I didn’t get to enjoy properly – because I was in it. Hazel Evans‘ splendid collage of works around the spaces of the Shelley Theatre, The Ink Mountains – but even as someone involved, I could sense something of the magic of moving an audience out of their seats and around your work. Suddenly they’re involved more on your terms than their’s.

 

STEPPING IT UP

So there you are in a self storage facility, perhaps for the first time in your life, and you are presented with people in character. What happens next? What even normally happens in these vaguely undead places? This is surely the riskiest of environments for an actor to work in, isn’t it? Which is undoubtedly why Dante Or Die go to work – how will each audience collectively react? Perhaps an especially English politeness helps here, because if there’s one characteristic in audience members that can fan the whiff of sadism (and masochism) the actors undoubtedly bring to a concept like this, its a slightly sweaty-palmed desperation to do the right thing in front of strangers. So we all tagged along, and tried to keep out of the way and keep up. And not join in, like an improv workshop.

Interesting to observe too that this new language for theatre, which each site-specific production has to intuitively teach its audience on the job fast, really does get people to change their perception while in there. As well as me, another audience member to be caught up in a deliberate close encounter with a character was long-time able performer, the storyteller and actor Michelle O’Brien – and both of us old hams looked a little embarrassed in our tiny entangled moments with the actors. Where normally either of us would play such a thing for laughs – and God knows this Get Out Of Performance Jail card is the basis of almost everything I’ve ever done – here, we felt bound to not break the spell. To not intrude on the characters with our own attention-handling. We felt oddly suspended between worlds.

It fast makes you wonder if we the observers are ghosts. Haunting these awkwardly private moments and spaces. Before beginning to wonder if it’s not us who are the ghosts, but the characters. Or, in the end, all of us. Spooky.

 

SHAKING IT OUT

Handle with care worked as a prime example of the need for balls-out creative confidence. Very nearly literally in one scene, in which I could sense every single audience member’s heightened radar firing off How The Hell Will I Handle A Naked Actor Three Feet From Me emergency memos to their mental war room for a moment there. More splendid sand shifting from the players, even in an especially moving scene.

But as much as boldness in the performance – and the cast gave soundly impressive performances, creating authentic private scenes for us with nowhere for an actor to hide – the success of something like this hinges on showing great care in the logistics. The choreography of light/sound/space had to be bang on point in a more fluid environment than a theatre. Here, the use of all elements was embedded in the core idea and brief of the script at every stage. It had some cleverly filmic touches in the uncomplicated technical solutions to communicating something set across many years – to the point where I didn’t think they needed to spell out the dates as they did. All of the tech, from music curation, to lighting, to costume changes, to physical devices between the actors, all of it was always to serve some human moment. Drawing in our mental connection even in these logistics as the production tapped into everyone’s unavoidable subconscious understanding of the language of edited screen storytelling.

For me, the art of theatre’s at its best when it hangs all script, tech and design off the spine of its idea to hit emotional truth.

A meticulous, immersive, site-specific drama gently tapping a rich feed from a dead good single idea. Handle with care did exactly this down to the details, with a lovely format twist at the end. For all the stuntery of it, the main thing you feel under the thinking is the ephemerality of us as human. The fragility of all the meaning in our lives. It’s touching. But I’m not sure it’s meant to be wholy uplifting; it’s meant to shift your perception. And the end result is, yes, moving.

For me, all work should aim to be this rounded in its execution. Dante Or Die, I think, slightly nerd-sessed over it – and that’s undoubtedly a large part of why I enjoyed it so much. Also, partly because for me it was a box to open that I had no idea about the contents of.

Anyone who loves theatre, writing and performance production should look out for DOD, and after this show, might leave saying “I see what you did. And there, of all places.”

—-

HANDLE WITH CARE

Created by Dante or Die’s Co-Artistic Directors Daphna Attias & Terry O’Donovan with Chloë Moss

Directed by Daphna Attias

Text by Chloë Moss

Design by Jenny Hayton

Lighting Design by Zoe Spurr

Sound Design by Yaniv Fridel & JP Thwaites

Cast: Amy Dolan, Stephen Henry, Benjamin Humphrey, Elan James, Terry O’Donovan & Rachael Spence with Lucy Yates, Rachel Wrightt, Anushka Samarasinghe, Lucie Jenkins, Florence Maclennan, Stefy Barton & Maria Ahmed

Lighting Assistant: Roisin Dullard

Stage Manager: Philip Hussey

Assistant Stage Manger: Richard Irvine

Find out more at: danteordie.com