Laying your cards on the table.

June 2011 note: I originally wrote this essay on the 2nd or 3rd January this year. I was at my Dad's house in the middle of nowhere, still recovering a little bit from an all-night New Year's Eve bar shift. I wrote it in a blur, barely proof-read it, and posted it. Shortly afterwards I began to question my intentions in writing and posting this - appropriately enough, I began to feel very self-conscious about it and deleted it. I think it was online for about 20 minutes. I think that the only person who read it was Oli Goldman - a young and talented film scholar who I had the pleasure to teach in his first year at university - who caught up with me on Facebook a few days later to tell me how much he had enjoyed reading it. I think I have been meaning to re-post it since then, but it came up in conversation the other day - and I have been hoping to write more - so it seems like a good time to post. So, my objectives in posting it are different to what they were in January. Nevertheless, I hope - like I did then - that they are honest.

In Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972) - which I watched on television last night, as part of a Father Ted season, introduced by Graham Linehan who didn’t seem to know much about it - Lenny (Charles Grodin) really can’t stand the fact that Lila, his wife-of-2-days (Jeannie Berlin) talks during sex. This wasn’t something that he was aware of before their marriage - the film makes a point of telling us that Lila wouldn’t sleep with him before they were wed. Furthermore, Lenny is convinced that Kelly (Cybill Shepherd), the girl he has met on his honeymoon, wouldn’t talk during sex. He has no evidence to support that theory, but he is convinced. I reckon I could get him to wager that Kelly also doesn’t put on make-up or wear haircare products either. Unlike his new wife, she is a mathematical sum that has already solved itself so that you don’t have to.

Jeannie Berlin in THE HEARTBREAK KID

Lenny is so convinced of this that he is prepared to get honest with Kelly’s father (Eddie Albert), he is - in a phrase that Kelly gleefully takes up - ready to ‘lay his cards on the table’. He is going to be honest, he is going to reveal all of his thoughts and emotions pertaining to Kelly and Lila. He does this in a highly pressurised environment: in a busy nightclub, tightly framed opposite Eddie Albert with Cybill Shepherd, in bemusement, and Audra Lindley (Kelly’s mother), with some sympathy. But it doesn’t do him any favours: the Father sees Lenny as a snivelling toad, unworthy of his daughter; and Kelly loses interest very quickly, is there any fun in someone who just keeps telling you that he has been waiting for someone like you? She would lose interest completely if Lenny didn’t rapidly become someone else: threatening boyfriends and jocks across her high school campus.

This is a preamble to other ideas that have been on my mind, ideas that feel very familiar in their formulation but actually quite rare in their expression. I suspect, and I am not proud of it, that what I really want to write about is love. The art of being in love, the rules for expressing that love (or, at the least, making that love known), and perhaps the craft of allowing people to love you (because it is a craft, it is something that you can learn how to do - to some extent, at least). Maybe it’s not love that I am writing/thinking about - it could be attraction - but I like to refer to it as love. It’s definitely on my mind at the moment, as it seems to be come every New Year (who can explain THAT), probably because it keeps coming up in things. I felt a slight unease until I did write this, an itching in the tummy, an inability to concentrate on the football game that is on the television at the moment. At this early stage of writing (because I have begun with this paragraph, although I suspect that it will not be the first paragraph) I don’t even know if I am going to publish this. I don’t know if I am even going to finish it, it could be that I just need to write this and one other paragraph. Yet here goes, a bit of scratching that itch in the tummy (which isn’t physically possible, but I like the image).

Traditionally, I have had an intuition that the key to a love affair - definitely in the first part, probably less so in the later phases although I am not interested in them here - is to not give the game away, to keep your cards close to your chest. You plan ahead to be able to give enough of yourself away as to be interesting, but not too much. You don’t, above all, reveal your attraction, your desire, your love. As a young, socially awkward but emotionally heavy, scamp, I would hold firm to this rule. I would hold so firm to this rule that I even once lied about my attraction when confronted about it - a lie that, in hindsight, clearly cost me any shot at that particular relationship. I don’t think I am alone in this thought: I could, if challenged, name a handful of other people who would rather be lonely and dissatisfied than reveal their love to its object.

But, er, why? Wouldn’t it be better to be honest, to be clear? Are not, above all else, our chances of romantic success higher if we take this course of action? If we, you know, actually tell somebody? And the answer would be: yes, of course it would be better, but experience suggests that it just doesn’t work. Experience suggests - to me, at least (I need to allow for the possibility that my personal experience of love is so idiosyncratic that it will be completely alien to everyone else, which might actually explain a lot) - that as soon as you reveal too much of yourself, again particularly your love, then everything falls apart. There is nothing left to ‘find out’, and if there’s nothing left to ‘find out’ then the game is up, you had better give up any hope of that particular good time. I have, sad to say, experienced this from both sides of the table. You can say that the change starts with your own behaviour, but truth of the matter is that as soon as you feel like your dance partner has given too much of themselves - has revealed a particular vulnerability, perhaps, or shown too much interest in you, then you just don’t want to play any more. You could consciously try to change this - to do the right thing, perhaps - but you would sure as hell be doing something that you don’t want to do.

So, you have to give away enough of yourself to keep it all interesting but not so much that it will ruin the love. I have a vague idea that the reasoning for the above is that if you give away too much, the other person feels like you will be a burden upon them, that they will somehow have to change some part of their everyday life to accommodate you in a way that they are not prepared to do. Of course, being in love - PROPER LOVE - involves this process of change, it involves harmonising your life with another in a way that is pleasant for both partners. But, at the earlier stages - the butterfly stages, the points at which you-can’t-think-about-anything-else-in-a-manner-that-is-completely-disproportionate-to-the-situation-and-which-most-often-is-not-reciprocal (we’ve all experienced it) - you want the other person to think that you will be able to create pleasure in a way that doesn’t impinge too far upon everyday life. Yet there are points at which you have to put yourself on the line, at which you have to make those bold movements - in Before Sunrise, for example, (the film which I habitually use to think through love in all of its different manifestations) Jesse (Ethan Hawke) has to ask Celine (Julie Delpy) to get off the train in Vienna rather than her intended destination. It’s an early, bold move, and he risks giving away too much of himself too early. Turns out that he doesn’t. Turns out that it was the right thing to do at that moment in time. The danger of those bold moves, though, is that you have misjudged it, that you have given too much of yourself away and fallen into that ‘nice-but-over-earnest’ trap.

It is ‘giving too much away’ that drives the first third of The Heartbreak Kid, because the film suggests that Lila gives away far too much of herself after marriage. In a matter of days (if not hours), she reveals that she sings out-of-tune constantly, she is a messy eater (particularly where egg salad is concerned) and - shock! horror! Worst of all! - She has to spend time organising her hair before entering public space. When I watched the film again last night, the phrase ‘showing your working’ came into my head - the films depicts Lila showing her working. Lenny, her newlywed husband, is no longer shown just the final product but is exposed to the mistakes, the circuitous route taken to reach the final product.

Jeannie Berlin and Charles Grodin in THE HEARTBREAK KID

The film, much like Lenny, is very unfair to Lila during these early stages (although it does make up some ground with its human sympathy for Lila after Lenny has decided to get their marriage annulled - Jeannie Berlin’s performance in the seafood restaurant scene is excellent, burying her head in Charles Grodin’s shoulder whilst letting out a high-pitched, melodramatic cry that feels entirely lifelike in the circumstances). This unfairness is further counterbalanced by the slow-burning suggestion that it is actually Lenny with the problem, it is Lenny who is unhappy with his own life, that it is Lenny, ultimately, who will not let himself get married because the depth of the commitment reminds him of the passing of time and - that old chestnut - his own mortality. (As a side note, the film is also deeply uncomfortable with the institution of marriage as well as the death-fears of its male protagonists - the ease with which the religions are switched around, the farcical formality of the ceremony seem to add up to a suggestion that marriage may be at odds with the way that human beings actually think, but less of that here).

Yet, Lila falls victim to the problem I have prescribed - she reveals too much of herself, she lays her cards onto the table, and she pays the bitter price (her marriage is ended, she is banished from the film, it tramples all over her, reduces her to a shrieking wreck in Miami seafood restaurant and then spits her out, never to be heard from again). The film counterposes this against Kelly - a character who purposely reveals herself drip-by-drip, providing a seductive and mysterious exterior for Lenny to obsess over. In fact, Kelly’s mystery causes Lenny to reveal entirely too much of himself - he becomes an overearnest wreck, encroaching into everyone’s frame, their personal space, telling her he loves her after just hours. In order to stay attractive to Kelly in Minnesota, Lenny has to invent a different exterior, pieced together from lies and bullshit that Kelly’s father sees through immediately.

These thoughts are dovetailing with thoughts inspired by Chris Goode’s latest blog post (if we are talking 2010 reflections - which we’re not, by the way - then Chris’s blog, with its rich and detailed thoughts about art, theatre and life, has been a major find for me - one which has helped my thinking about theatre, and provided hours of interest when I have been waiting for people to collect their coats at work) in which he suggests that what is needed is the space for people to be honest, to be open, to reveal themselves and be able to truthfully and fully announce ‘how they are’ and be listened and responded to. This made me think about the time - just a week at present, although another semi-regular class is imminent - I have spent learning directing with Elen Bowman. One of the things that I found most useful, most comforting, most liberating, most creative, about Elen’s classes was the feeling that you are being listened to and the space she creates to discuss thoughts, feelings and reflections on the work so far. There was space, for example, for me to discuss a theatre industry-related dream/nightmare that had arisen in the light of consciously feeling very free about my work thanks to Elen’s space and input. It made me think that I have also tried to create this space - not to the depth or, probably, to such use as Chris describes in, for example, rehearsals for The Author - in my teaching work (particularly when I was teaching a difficult literary criticism class, where it felt important to do a more casual ‘warming up’ session at the beginning) and, to an even more casual extent, when I was making Tape in 2009. I definitely agree with Chris that such a space is necessary, that its usefulness would be extraordinary, that the thought of it is rather beautiful.

But how do we square that with the idea, articulated in The Heartbreak Kid and familiar from experience, that exposing ourselves in this way may remove our mystery? It may even make us unattractive or, even worse, unlovable. This isn’t a description of how it should be, but a fear that revealing ourselves in the way that is necessary may actually be a burden on other people - or may be received as a burden on other people. We reveal ourselves at the risk of making someone else think that they will have to change their everyday existence to accommodate us. As I write this, I find myself disagreeing with it, objecting to its existence, so I should re-assert that this is an anxiety rather than a cast iron ‘this is how it is and always will be.’ To resolve this anxiety I want to separate ‘revealing ourselves’ from ‘being a burden’, I want to assure you that if you tell me how you are feeling - how you are really, honestly, properly feeling - then you are not being a burden on me. I think it also has something to do with your objective when you do reveal yourself. I am not sure if any of this possible - so perhaps my objective in writing this, in this particular act of self-revelation, is to hear from people whose experience suggests that this is untrue. People who can persuade me that it is safe to be honest and to be open, and that it is possible to do this without making someone feel like you are an unnecessary burden upon them.

And that brings me to the act of writing itself, of writing this which, now that it is winding up, will surely find its way onto the Internet. Have I revealed too much of myself here? Have I revealed myself as someone who thinks too much, someone who over-analyses, someone who is no fun? I have written some things - particularly in that previous paragraph - that feel true but undesirable (I even deleted a sentence that involved imposing conditions on revealing oneself, because I realised that it wasn’t how I thought at all). Am I making quite a political move here? Do I want somebody in particular to think of me as interesting, or as thoughtful, or as sensitive? Or maybe I want the opposite, to make someone think that I am pathetic and ridiculous? And who could that person be?

The most likely explanation is that I just had a funny itch in my stomach. A funny itch that started when I read Josie Long’s Dodgem Logic #1 comic on New Years Eve on the tube (which has a terrifying panel through the middle of the two pages, disarmed only slightly by a cartoon Josie Long apologising for interrupting her train of thought, in which she states that “…but when something is right, it is; not it should be, or is supposed to be, or will be once blah blah blah”); which intensified on New Year’s Eve itself when I reflected upon relationships past - illusory, lost, and broken - which have come to a head on that oft booze-fuelled night; which was taken even further with The Heartbreak Kid; and something which I finally connected to Chris’s blog. Over 2000 words later, that itch has subsided a little, and I feel like I can concentrate on that football game a bit better.

Let’s not forget that the itch has gone away because I have just given myself the space to think and to work out. The space to say what I am thinking about.

P.S. I am quite aware that this piece doesn’t have a conclusion, doesn’t really have a point because I am too scared to follow the logic to its end because of the inhibitions and restrictions that it contains.

Yet, about half-way through writing this I was reminded of the insight of my friend Abigail who also spent two weeks learning directing with Katie Mitchell this past January (but I’M NOT REFLECTING ON 2010, DAMMIT). We were talking climate change - as we were wont to do in that group - and we were talking about how a full appreciation of the enormity of the issue can put other things into perspective. I remember her example, “things like telling boys you fancy them…you realise they’re just not important”. So, let that be a conclusion to you: this all feels important but it’s really just the minutiae with which we concern ourselves, none of it really matters. (But that’s not true. Is it?)

On the tyranny of production values.

I used to be in a band. We were called My Friend Fred (in hindsight, I think that the name may have been inspired by an idea I had for a ska band oriented around the concept of mental illness: a concept that was [probably rightly] rejected in all but its name by the rest of the band). Again, looking back, we didn't sound all that pleasant: my thinking at the time was dominated by the concurrent thoughts of wanting to reject musical competency and wanting people to like us (a destructive combination). Yet, I'll tell you what, performing in that band was fun. A lot of fun. Performing was a shot of adrenaline (adrenaline that did little for my control and precision as a guitar player).

The arguing in the car on the way to gigs was less fun. I am sad to say that being in this band probably weakened my friendships with two individuals - both of whom, at the beginning, were very good friends but neither of whom I talk to much these days (it should be said that this is equally accountable to the fact that we all live in different cities now and, in one case, different countries - we're hardly the three people in a seaside town who all listened to Less Than Jake but couldn't figure out how to integrate horns into a punk rock band). Again, in retrospect, I can see or at least suspect that these arguments were to a significant degree sparked by my serious-ness about the whole endeavour. Particularly when it came to booking gigs - I wanted to play 'good' shows, supporting 'good' bands, and wanted to look 'good'. If we had stayed together for more than about 9 months (or was it longer? I can't remember), I would have been the one who pushed for 'getting signed' - you know, the bad guy in Wayne's World or something similar. This is in spite of the fact that one of the best gigs we ever did was in a working-men's club in Folkestone, as a joint birthday party, with just our friends (videos from this performance keep popping up on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure there's none of our performance - mostly those of my brother, in his makeshift one-night-only band, called The Dukes of Hazzard, singing Pennnywise). We probably would have had as much fun, had an-as-good-if-not-better experience, just playing shows like this. I couldn't understand that at the time: I wanted us to jump into the deep end, to be a 'proper' band, a 'professional' band.


THE DUKES (PART.2) "BRO HYMN"
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(To my mind, there's never not a time to re-visit the moment when my brother was lead singer of a band for a night - the fact that he doesn't turn up in this video until 1:30 in, faffing about with a bubble gun, makes it all the more brilliant).

I have been reminded of this notion of being a 'proper' or a 'professional' band today. I was definitely taken with this idea, close-to-obsessed with taking this band in that direction. This was motivated by school yard competitiveness: there were three or four different bands of around my age, all of whom would boast of supporting this-band or that-band (regardless of whether they were or they weren't), or of touring that country or that country. When I would go to punk rock gigs, you could praise a support band by saying that "they sound like a professional band". The idea of sounding like a professional band, behaving like a professional band, working like a professional band was an extremely seductive one to teenagers interested in music. If you were being offered more gigs, with more famous bands, from more established promoters, being complimented by more established record labels, then you must be travelling in the right direction. Or, at least, that's how the logic went.

(Incidentally, one person from one of these school-yard bands was actually signed to a major record label and was pushed as a heart-throb for underage girls. Looking now, I see that his website hasn't been updated since 2008, suggesting that he has indeed been dropped by his label. His old website serves as a virtual index of the ruthless of the music industry - that thing that we all wanted, in one way or another, to buy into; that thing that I annoyed or hurt the feelings of two friends pushing for.)

Recently, I've been interested in how this idea of 'professionalism' or 'proper-ism' in art is used as a template to dictate what a 'real' band, what a 'real' filmmaker, what a 'real' theatre-maker looks like. It was an idea that appeared on my academic radar when researching and writing about the film 'Tape', and the use of digital video technology in cinema. The technology was (and is) relatively inexpensive. When these cameras first flooded onto the market, there was an explosion of rhetoric in independent film circles about how filmmaking was finally democratised. Typically, this rhetoric would observe that filmmakers were no longer constrained by the price of cameras and other equipment, and how digital technology offered them access to cheap filming and editing equipment that was of professional quality. This rhetoric found concrete examples in the work of the Dogme95 movement - particularly the success of Thomas Vinterberg's Festen at the Cannes Film Festival - and then, in American form with The Blair Witch Project. These films had cost relatively little, yet they were proper films!

And there's never not a time to think about Festen.

Yet there was no denying that the digital video image had a particular texture and quality. The compression of the light captured in front of the camera into bits and bytes gave the image a blocky quality, a sharpness that stood in stark contrast to the warm edges of film stock. No-one was mistaking digital video images for what was previously accepted as the way that films looked. For filmmaking to become truly democratised, what was needed was a re-conceptualisation of what a 'proper' or 'professional' film looked like. Otherwise, films made with digital video would continue to be seen as aberrations from the norm - they would be amateur, either by necessity or by choice. A stylistic choice that had to be resolved within the overall aesthetic of the work. We can see here the tyranny of the professional: a set of production values that a text must meet to be treated as 'proper' by audiences. And these production values are prohibitively expensive: in order to make a film, you need to have money.

Yet, if enough filmmakers chose to make films with DV technology, it is entirely possible that this shift, this re-conceptualisation of what is 'professional', could be enacted. Perhaps there was a moment when professional production values could have been re-defined to the point that filmmaking could have become truly democratised (I tended to think that this was a fallacy when I was writing my thesis, although I am now warming to the idea that it could have been possible). Instead, Hollywood moved to re-define what a digital video film looked like: it successfully shifted the digital video film from the inexpensive to the extremely expensive. That re-definition was called Cloverfield.

Cloverfield - a mega-bucks monster movie produced by J.J Abrams, the man who brought you TV's Lost - pretended to be a DV movie. It embraced the shaky-cam aesthetics that had come to be associated with the DV technology. It used timecodes - added during post-production, evident to anyone who has ever actually used a DV camera for home video purposes - to foreground its 'amateurishness'. However, within this context of DV-ness, it created a big monster. And lots of explosions. But mostly, a big fucking monster. Now, this is outside of the remit of anyone making a film on a budget low enough to necessitate the use of a DV camera. Oh, and it also used a HD camera - not the DV camera that it tried so hard to represent, the DV camera that lent an air of authenticity to the monster movie genre - so it didn't have to deal with the image texture of the true DV camera. This film created a new standard of what a DV film looked like, it re-affirmed that 'proper' production values were expensive business, and it therefore quashed the democratisation of film (something that was probably pretty much done anyway). Of course there's nothing stopping you from making a movie with a DV camera - there's a lot of budgets that necessitate it - but Cloverfield had ensured that, without a truckload of cash, you were going to fall short of the production values of what is proper and professional in cinema.

Cloverfield - mmm, low budget.

I was reminded of this part of my thesis, and my obsession with the professional in my short-lived bout of musical performances, this past weekend at Improbable's Devoted & Disgruntled 6. D&D6 (as it is known) is a open-space meeting for anyone who cares about theatre - an opportunity to raise and discuss an issue that you care about with generous like-minded folk. People often talk about the inspiring and galvanising qualities of D&D, but I found it a far bumpier ride than this would suggest. My experience fluctuated between hearing amazing ideas that spoke to questions I had had about theatre, meeting exciting people with analogous frustrations and interests to mine, and feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall. I think that if the experience had been exclusively positive then it would have been a cause for concern: life is a series of fluctuations between, on the one hand, an excitement that is felt in your body and can only be expressed by jumping into the air and, on the other, a despair that makes you feel that you are too thick to communicate with anybody because just no-one seems to understand you. And, as facilitator Phelim McDermott pointed out, D&D is nothing but a reflection or echo of real life. The principles that are set out for the open space, he says, are just what happens in life, and it would be a sign of subjective distortion if the only thing I experienced for two-and-a-half days amongst my fellow human beings was ecstacy.

When the dust has settled, though, the experience was overwhelmingly a positive one: I didn't call a further action session on the Monday morning just because, as I articulated to new friend Julia who seemed to be experiencing the same blurriness as I that particular morn, I felt like my action had been taken in meeting the people I had met and fully intending to carry those relationships forward in future work. Any further steps to action would have been quickly and badly thought-through, I felt. So much needed time to be digested and to take something even remotely resembling actual physical form. We were, after all, dreaming nothing less than a complete upheaval of the conditions under which theatre in constructed, produced, exhibited and received.

And this begins to steer me back around to the tyranny of production values and what constitutes 'professional' theatre. In a stimulating panel on Saturday afternoon about whether 'theatre supports the systems and class structures that have failed us', there was significant agreement that theatre institutions as they stand - in their working practices, their staff entry requirements, even perhaps in the nature of the work that they produce - renew conventional, class-bound, self-destructive, unsustainable forms of society: you know, the capitalist system. This was a conclusion arrived at in at least three panels that I attended: as well as this one more generally about 'politics', it was also persuasively argued in a panel about patriarchal blocks and one about climate change. There was a lot of agreement that the ways that we produce, the ways that we perform and the ways that we watch theatre need to be re-thought to create a more inclusive, a more sustainable, and a more challenging mode of theatre. Yet, we always seemed to get stuck when imagining what this mode would look like - making it all to easy to retreat from this bold conclusion.

It was suggested that performing in living rooms could be one route forward: something that has antecedents at least in the early days of Red Ladder Theatre Company, and Wallace Shawn's monologue The Fever. This suggestion was mitigated by a young producer, who responded that yes, it sounds like a good idea, but you'd still need a lot of money for props, for costumes, for set, for lights and so forth. And this struck me as the tyranny of production values in the context of theatre: just like in cinema, you need a certain type of (expensive) camera to make a 'professional' film, we are in many cases (at least, I know that I have thought this and probably still do to some extent) of the opinion that we need these technical, expensive things to make a 'professional' piece of theatre. If we don't have a set, or costumes, or props, or lights, or composed & recorded sound, or famous actors, or comfortable seats etc, then we somehow aren't thought of, or don't think of ourselves, as making a proper piece of theatre. I think that some of the least appealing theatre that I see is work, often on the fringe, that is in thrall to these production values, that directs itself in the direction of these production values, but clearly does not have the money to meet them. It makes half-hearted attempts at meeting these standards, and falls visibly short of the mark, rather than making a virtue of the lack of money. (The work is not necessarily bad because of this characteristic, but it is often a reliable index of a set of aesthetic ambitions, work practices, etc).

But, maybe a lack of money could be a conscious choice. Given the choice between spending a lot of money on costumes, set, props, and technical gadgetry, and spending nothing at all on these things, we can choose to spend nothing at all because it could make for better work. This would be something of a re-conceptualisation of what proper theatre looks like - if enough people did it, or something similar. We would break the tyranny of production values by shifting assumptions and expectations. We cause a shift in the definition of what good work is. When I think about it, most of what is thought of as aesthetically radical, 'directors theatre' (yuck), today in this country relies heavily on a bold use of lights, sound, set etc etc etc. There is less focus upon the potentially bold use of performers, when in fact some of the most radical theatre-directors could just be directing performers in really interesting ways.

I'm sure that a lot of people have already realised this (didn't Peter Brook write a book about it? What? In 1968? Yeah. Before the Internet? Well done Tom.) but personally I have perhaps been too in thrall to the tyranny of production values, so it's worth thinking about and articulating. Perhaps some other people have found themselves in the same web. In the same way that I wanted our band to sound like a proper band, I have wanted to make theatre that looks like proper theatre. And what constitutes the notion of 'proper' or 'professional' (I have used the terms vaguely and loosely throughout - would never pass an academic board) is defined by the big institutions, those with the money who have a vested interest to keeping the production value bar high, otherwise just anyone could make theatre, couldn't they? And we can't have that. No, can't have that at all. This makes the obvious worth re-stating though: to create this inclusive and accessible circuit of theatre and performance that we are dreaming - one that asks more from its audience than just their money, one that allows its artists to survive without being defined and dominated by the capitalist system - we need to name and to subvert the tyranny of production values.

And that can only be done in our work.

On criticising, on creativity.

A friend recently told me a story about going to see a show in London - a show that he had really, really enjoyed (he might have even used the word ‘loved’). Coincidentally, two people were sitting nearby with whom he has vaguely acquainted: both of whom, like my friend, made theatre in one capacity or another. Immediately after the show, these two people accosted my friend for his opinion. They had both, in unison, hated the show, an opinion as strong as my friend’s just in the opposite direction. When my friend’s opinion turned out to be in conflict with theirs, they demanded why he had liked it, what was it about that show that he could possibly have liked.

Now, for my friend, this post-show incident marked, perhaps even tarnished, the entire experience of the show. All my friend, at that early point, could volunteer was that he had enjoyed it, it had moved him. I would venture to say that, to this pair of theatre-makers, my friend’s reluctance or inability to talk about their opinion at that early stage appeared as a sign of wrong-ness, maybe even something worse. Regardless, his failure to stand up to their ruthless line of questioning likely would have confirmed their own opinion - the opposite side being unable to answer the bell.

When I heard this anecdote, it sounded familiar to me - probably, I hate to say, from both sides of the fence. I could recount times when other people’s quickly expressed opinions have felt like an assault: I have learnt to deflect them, although this has its downsides (recently, at the Young Vic, an acquaintance asked me “So, what do you think?” in the interval, to which I responded “I think that it’s half-way through” and was aware of having been rude, when really all I wanted to do was to talk about anything but the show, aware that I was halfway from having all the evidence). I can recall having actually changed my opinion on something, or at the least being aware of the thought that my opinion was the wrong one, after watching Das Experiment as an undergraduate (a film that found a rather gripping and exciting experience, but which my peers unanimously agreed was ridiculous and farcical - I was too embarrassed to volunteer an alternative viewpoint, and kept quiet, feeling a little ashamed).

Yet, I am also sure that I have treated some works of art unfairly in a rush to form an opinion about it - sometimes a work will do something early on that will affect my entire experience of it, meaning that I will be negative about it regardless of what it will turn to do or to be. Sometimes I have felt like, on reflection, that I went into a theatre or an auditorium with a mental checklist of notes that the work has to hit or barriers that ‘good’ work cannot fall beneath (at different stages of my journey with art, this checklist may have been stylistic, political or craft-based). This feels like doing violence to the work, forcing it to accord my own rules rather than accepting and appreciating it on its own terms. Similarly, I have also felt like my experience of work has been a frantic scramble to form an opinion before the final applause or the final credits - to be able to face or, even better, preempt those conversations, those questions, those challenges from friends and peers. I suspect that this might be a common experience for many people, either under the pressure of peers or the desire to be well-equipped for a post-work discussion. I have suspected in the past that some people enjoy the discussion of the work, or perhaps - even more unfairly - the describing of their own response to a work, than the actual work itself. I don’t know whether this is true, or maybe just my insecurities projected, but it feels familiar. In the past I have said - as I said to my friend with whom we begun this journey - that if someone already has an opinion formed by the end of the show, then it is most likely not a very good opinion. It is probably not developed from reflection, or if it is then that reflection has taken the place of appreciation. (I wrote and then deleted the word ‘proper’ twice in different places in that previous sentence, which hints at an unfortunate note of dogmatism in my thinking - you SHOULD do this with art, you SHOULD do that with art - I would love to be called up on it, and be given suggestions for alternative ways of thinking).

I have been thinking about this today, because I have been reflecting on issues of appreciation and aesthetics. I detected an overwhelming, an unhealthy even, element of criticism in my thinking about making art. This is a particularly pertinent issue for me, because I recently - well, in the past 18 months, made a leap from extensive thinking and training specifically as a writer of art criticism and theory, to a PhD level, to a maker and creator of art. This wasn’t as clearcut as the previous sentence makes it look, there was a period of overlap, a period during which one made significantly more sense than the other, but it is creating a rather large obstacle at present. We all have an inner critic - that voice that says ‘ha! That sucks! You’re not working hard enough!’ - but it’s a particular struggle when the artist in you is so small and inexperienced but the critic is able to draw on theory and a lot of time spent engaging with work. The critic is able to convincingly explain why this imagined work is derivative, or why it is intrinsically inferior to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Anderson, Katie Mitchell or one of another directing role models.

The answer, I think (as with everything), is to relax into the creativity, and trust that the critical experience will inform it. I hold on for dear life to the examples of the Cahiers du Cinema critics-turned-directors: a group of critics who went on to direct some of the most important and beautiful films of film history. I think it’s important that the critical experience informs the creative experience - and, perhaps, vice versa. In fact, maybe what I want to suggest is that there needs not be a held separation between the two, that they are just two expressions of the same experience - a critical opinion can be formed from a creative appreciation and reflection, and creative expression can be informed by critical opinion, critical theory, a critical knowledge of history.

Yet if you worry too much about one or the other, force one or the other too far into self-consciousness, then it can have a distorting effect. This is, I think, perhaps what happens when we fall into ‘opinion-mode’, focused more on forming our post-work opinion rather than the work in front of us. This will probably be encouraged by our thoughts about ourself, our friends or our circumstances: the pressure of university, for example, and the self-suspicion that we may be less intelligent than our friends, can motivate us to focus on the opinion rather than the work. That opinion, by the by, will probably be wrapped in theory, in pre-suppositions, and in unclear thinking (I know, I’ve had these opinions).

By way of conclusion, I would say that there is, most likely, a distinction to be made between the terms that these conversations could take place under: if it is OK to articulate half-formed thoughts about a experience you have just had, describe things that immediately appealed to you, under the understanding that there may be contradictions in these sensations, without feeling pressurised to relate it all to Baudrillard or put it in its full historical context - under the understanding that these things may well become important or necessary later in your reflections - then the thinking would become clearer, the discussion more shared and more enlightening. Yet there is a contract here, a responsibility here, to keep the work in your thoughts, to keep reflecting, to not dismiss out of hand, to accept that things may appear to you later rather than immediately.

The second conclusion here is probably a more selfish one - the acknowledgement that this writing is mostly a working out of anxieties relating to what I hope to be a forthcoming period of creativity. I start looking into a new project this week - making a few nudges in an unexpected direction, a direction that my critic is screaming that I know nothing about and have no place within - and, like many other directors of my age and experience at the moment, am also thinking about and proposing a project for The JMK Award (an exercise that I find difficult, making huge leaps in a direction without making all the little steps necessary for foundation). It’s an exciting period - if I can only just stop worrying that I am doing it properly. The answer, like so much in life, work and love, is to relax.