A pattern is developing....

Saunday 10 February 2013

If you've read, you know, a couple of these here blogs you'll have seen a pattern developing:

1. I get edgy and nervy and wonder why I'm doing the show.
2. I do the show.
3. I remember, with the help of fabulous audience members, why I am doing the show.

And so it goes.

Rather brilliantly Caroline, the AD at Theatre Arts Admin Collective, had suggested that we have a Q&A after each show hosted by someone else, and this evening we have Rev Alan Storey who is the rev from the church on Greenmarket Square. The church that has a cafe inside the church. You know, that church. My kind of church. There are clearly some members of his congregation here as well as other folk and we have such an interesting time talking afterwards, with one young woman explaining Xosa traditions around mourning, including spending time with the body, and how these are going out of fashion and so she is wondering what the future holds for her community, its attitude to death, what will happen when she dies. Martin and I are both sorry to hear that is the way things are going, rather than the way we'd like them to go: towards death, and the rites surrounding death, becoming more part of everyday life.

My - as it turns out - modest hope at the beginning of this extraordinary journey with Martin M Bartelt back in autumn of 2007 was that I, we, might change something for one person through this show. We managed that at the first performance when a woman, now a friend of ours, told us how she had been standing next to a friend in a queue in 1979 when he had been murdered - stabbed in the back by a passing stranger. At our opening preview she explained that she had felt all these years that her behaviour at the time had been crazy, but seeing the show, 30 years on, had made her feel that she had simply reacted as people do in these situations. Martin and I had listened to her, agog, the pair of us, struggling to take in her story and, well, amazed that our play had somehow given her permission to talk, and maybe to accept herself. Since then we have become accustomed to hearing these incredible stories, although not inured to it. The sum of human suffering is somehow smaller than its constituent parts and we cannot but be moved by what we hear and be frustrated that so many people feel so utterly alone, that we cannot do enough about it. Tonight, and for the rest of this week, we encounter extraordinary stories.

When we are at the back of the hall saying goodbye to the audience a woman, shorter than me, probably in her 50s, approaches me. She was sitting next to her husband in the front row during the show, I remember her. She thanks me, which I accept as graciously as I can, and then she says that she used to be one of those people who didn't mention a death, that if someone she knew was bereaved she would not say a thing.

In the Q&A I had talked about people's propensity to avoid the subject of the dead, that this, for me, is such a shame, a real missed opportunity, and often adds the insult if isolation to the injury of loss. I had said, as I always do, that mostly all I have to say to someone who has suffered a trauma is that I'm very sorry, that I don't know what to say, but that saying that to someone can very often be of comfort. They are not expecting you to bring their loved one back from the dead or cure cancer during a five minute conversation between work and the supermarket in the street, but you may be able to let them know that you still mind about them and that you accept them for whoever they are now, and whoever they will be; that you do not expect them to be cheerful or, well, anything other than that which they find themselves to be. I'd said those sorts of things. And this woman in her 50s, part of the Rev's congregation, I think, said to me, "I used to be one of those people who avoided talking about death, but not any more; thank you."

Blimey. Just blimey. Partly I am always surprised that people avoid the bereaved, even though I have erstwhile friends who did just that with me, close ones to boot, but the blimey is only, you know, 10% about that. 53% of the blimey is that this show can make that kind of change, and the remaining 37% is that this gentle, polite woman wants to tell me this. I mean, well.... blimey.