Strike

I have been on a theatre strike for over eighteen months now. This is not a picket line, cardboard placard, fist-waving, slogan-chanting kind of strike. It's a quiet contemplation that I had begun to get more disappointment form theatre than joy, and it was time to take a break. And also, partly, an acknowledgement that I simply wasn't getting my money's worth. For a whole decade of my life I had been going to the theatre twice or three times a week. I saw everything. I drank it all up. Admittedly, I saw a lot of rubbish, but I loved it, I believed in it. I believed, with the blindness of passion, that one could live the theatre, I thought that if I breathed enough dusty air in a small black box studio I would become part of it. No matter how hard I tried, I think deep down I remained a critic. There was always too much I processed, raged against, and criticised, for it to really become my life. So, quietly, without declaration, I decided to slowly abandon my passion and take a lover. Or rather, to return to my first lover, to a place in the dark. While in theatre I strived for unachievable perfection, here I admitted defeat, I knew from the start that this seduction was the fruit of an eyesight incomaptibility. That the cinema is only possible because it is an illusion, the apparently seamless, continuous flow of images before my eyes was only possible because of a natural human defect. Suddenly, in this somewhat soil of failure, possibilities began to blossom. All was illusion and yet no illusion. All clear from the start - no empty promises, but an initial pact: I will love you but we will never live together. I might betray you, but I will always come back. Free love. I was free to be a critic because I never wanted to live in cinema, for cinema, toward cinema. I have never wanted to be a film director, an actor, a writer. And so I am a free viewer - free to love it, free to hate it. No more investment than the few hours I spend in the dark room with my illusionary world.

Since we came back from Washington, I have crossed the picket line six times: Lev Dodin's Maly Theatre Platonov, the Cheek by Jowl's Three Sisters and Cymbeline, Complicite's A Disappearing Number, and a Michael Frayn farce, Donkey's Years - purely for the sake of friendship, and Headlong's Angels in America. (Note the distinct lack of Shakespeare - maybe because he is the hardest to be hurt by? Pas de Shakespeare, moi?) No matter how much I enjoyed certain aspects of these shows (in particular Platonov, the baby-masterpiece of Anton Chekhov, and Angels, a play I adore), I was proven right each time. Always more disappointment than joy. Tomorrow night, I will put down my striking hat again and walk to the mighty concrete temple on the Thames to see a play with a mysterious and ominous title: The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. To think that there was such a time! I am terrified of what it will feel like walking into a Lyttelton theatre full of my memories and ghosts - Private Lives of Life x 3, Mournings that may become Electra, or Iphigenia at Aulis - but wouldn't become me, wouldn't make us Three Sisters - Measure for Measure of that stage full of Owen Meany's shrieks, Streetcars Named Desire travelling to No Man's Land, Winter Tales of Pillowmen and History Boys, Anything Goes... Will I Look Back in Anger?

Technorati Tagged: Life in the Theatre; Life in Motion Pictures