Magical realism belongs in the theatre

Magical realism is a language that encompasses the entirety of lived experience in a way that can be discussed in the mainstream of academic language or literary theory. It allows me to confidently engage in ideas that I hold to be true in my own life in a manner that would not be possible if I were to speak of spirituality, the soul, and other supposedly ‘new age’ notions that have no place in academic language.
But why do I write in this way? It is one to thing to build an academic argument, quite another to engage in a creative practice that doesn’t have the same academic constraints placed upon it. For the same reason I suppose. Magical realism is a convenient and appropriate name for what I do as a playwright. In fact, it has got me out of that similar bind of having to step forward and say, ‘my plays are spiritual in nature’.

They are of course, as is everything I do, but they are also many other things and the word spiritual is so strong for so many people that I would almost be ensuring I lose much of my audience by calling my plays that. I would also, I’m sure, be letting down a whole bunch of people who came seeking a spiritual message in a spiritual play, because they certainly wouldn’t get that either.
The question of naming aside, what is it I am attempting when I write the way I do? When it comes down to it, magical realism appears to be the best fit for what I am saying which is always different and changeable, but basically I attempt to tell the stories that uplift the soul, or question the soul, question each individual and call them to action, but in a very different way to a political play. I suppose what I am attempting to impart is far more subtle, although I know I am attempting to impart something.
 I want my theatre to be one of Holy Communion with itself. So I suppose then, unlike Artaud, I see the essence of the individual as divine and this is what I want them to remember when they witness one of my plays – that aspect of themselves which has been so long concealed they don’t even know it belongs to them. I don’t ever intend to do this through dogma, but rather through complete fluidity, undermining the laws of the universe so that a window is opened to their consciousness, so they see that more exists than just this solid flesh, time doesn’t move in a straight line, place is not static and they do not start and end with their own bodies.

Theatre is about the energetic exchange of live bodies in a space and even though people talk of it in very different ways, an energetic exchange is what is taking place between all the elements involved. That is what makes theatre so powerful and the transfusion of an intention so possible. It is the ritual of theatre that ensures its success and its potential to have something translated to the audience from the play text. It is this element I want to exploit in my writing for theatre. I want to transform, translate those bodies in that space with my words. I want to access something through the ritual of enacting my words. I want to acknowledge the divine running through everyone and everything in that space. This does not mean that I want to tell them what the divine in them is or even that the stories that I tell enact the divine in overt ways – but in opening people’s imaginations to the possibilities inherent in the worlds I create they may see, at some level, the expanded possibilities in their own lives.

 

Theatre is about that, showing another view of the world, changing perception or challenging perception from Brecht to Atraud to Beckett. They all had something to say and chose the medium of theatre to say it, I believe, because of the transformative possibilities available when you have living bodies in a space.