The usher heads for the door, it closes, it opens, the usher comes back in accompanied by... one person, I think. It's quite hard to see from here, but it looks like one. We've always said that we are basically happy for people to come and go, come late, leave if the mood takes them. I often talk to late arrivals, but only in a friendly way, my intention being to put any skitteryness which develops in the audience back in the box. Audiences are easily scared. In an audience we are not sure what is going to happen next, we are emotionally open, we may well be sitting next to someone we don't even know, dammit, so we can be on edge. Compound this by late arrivals who we fear may totally destroy the intimacy we have just developed with our performer(s) and our play... well, it's as welcome as a call from granny when you're getting it on. It's confusing.
And so, when I talk to a latecomer, it's the antithesis of the stand-up's purpose: it's to let them know that I'm not annoyed or put off, just welcoming, open and curious and then the audience can relax too and gently wonder why the hell is the is person so late and feel smug that they go there in time.
So I say to the latecomer on the Thursday at Artscape, something along the lines of her being welcome and to make herself at home, careful getting up the stairs in the dark. And to the surprise of everyone, as happens in this crazy old three-legged-horse-dance we call life, the audient responds: "Oh, yes, I'm late, sorry, but I just had to come, I just could not miss this show. I had to see it," or words to that effect. Obviously I want to expand with pride that someone had wanted to see the show that much: how clever are Bartelt and I that we made a show someone has to see, get us, have you done that? Well then, get on with something equally important, bozo. That's where I want to go, but I have to rein that in. And, well, there is something quite odd about this audient responding to me at all. All anyone has ever said in approaching 90 shows is "sorry" or "thank you", and that sotto voce. I plough on.
Afterwards, downstairs in the foyer, I am approached by a very, very slender woman, probably in her 60s, but well taken care-of, and she starts talking. And she talks. And she talks. This is her, finally the penny drops, the chatty latecomer. She is covered in it, the sticky custard of death, she talks about her son's terrible death, her ex-husbands reaction, years of not getting to the bottom of what happened, that no one will believe them, that you can't get past it, can you, can you, can you? She stands that bit too close to me, unaware, or all too aware, of the other audients around us, not wanting them to share, to hear to talk. I manage to break off the conversation so I'm talking to a woman who knew my sister, who visited by aunt's house with her and sung around their piano. She and I embrace, we talk briefly, she cannot stay but we exchange business cards.
Only when everyone else has gone do I realise that Martin is outside with the woman whose son died, she is standing that bit too close to him, he is engaged fully, and it flows out of her, endlessly. It has been decades, he was killed in a lift, murder, she says, though never proven. Watching her now, not in the full glare of her agony - she is focused on Martin - I look at her, see her pain, at her struggle for the truth, to have it come out. She knows it will not, somewhere in there I know she knows it, but she cannot help but struggle against the inevitable. It is too far away, forgotten by so many, of importance to nearly no one, just to her, to her son's father whom she says has not recovered - he was a journalist, you know, her ex-husband, the murder planned by the wife of the son, he was blown up.....
Agonisingly, after more than half an hour, we have to shake her off. She would go on forever and we cannot help. Usually the show makes me feel like we have made contact and made something change, for the better. But not tonight. Tonight I see the desert of human suffering spread out before me and I am disconsolate. This show is not therapy, I know that, but witnessing this pain makes me fee there has to be something I can do, but there is not. She is alone. I am alone. It makes no odds whether he was murdered or not, it's what she believes and it's a life's work, accepting injustice on this scale. And there is nothing to do but to get on with the work of acceptance.
But I am lucky. We wander though town, Martin, Jacques and I. We find a place for a beer and sit in some silence, that silence of not knowing, together in our various alonenesses.
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