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.
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