What is our responsibility to represent truth on stage? As a person who makes theatre- dare I group us? Yes, I do- as people who make theatre, I’d say we’re most often looking to represent truth. In fact, I’d take a swing at the idea that many art-makers (new possible job title?) are aiming at a similar shot; in making art, I am most often wanting to tell a story that speaks truthfully to its audience- that says, here’s something a human has experienced/is experiencing/that you might experience at some point, does my experience connect to yours? Can human experience be shared? And I most connect to other people’s art when it speaks a truth to me. And that doesn’t necessarily mean from beginning to end- I can recall very small moments of productions that have lodged themselves into my brain as nuggets of truth. The Queen stretching and writhing around on a stage in RashDash’s ‘We Want You to Watch’, as she describes the sensation of sex. Jane Eyre grasping at the next wrung of a ladder in Sally Cookson’s adaptation of the novel- I don’t know what it was intended to represent, but I know that I cried at the weight and exhaustion and isolation of it as an image. There’s a beautiful moment in Donna Tart’s ‘The Goldfinch’, where Hobie explains:
“—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.”
And that’s the thing about truth, it’s so deeply personal. So, if we’re asking audiences to engage on that level with our work, what is our responsibility as the makers of it? I’m wading into philosophy I fear I haven’t the tools to handle, but, fuck it, get your wellies on, we’re going in anyway. Truth in story-telling seems to be the theme of my Edinburgh Fringe experience this year. At this year’s Festival I directed ‘A Wake in Progress’, written by Joel Samuels for Fine Mess Theatre Company. The play explores grief, death, funerals and how we say goodbye. It is partly scripted and partly built by the audience at each performance. Amy Flemming as narrator works with the audience to create the detail of the story, playing an array of games to build the world of it- the characters’ names, ages, how they met etc and the audience’s stories weave their way into the play throughout. Here we are clearly working in the world of artifice; although the structure is in place, the audience are building the characters and the details of their stories. Although the style of the play is highly naturalistic, the audience recognise that we are clearly in the realm of a theatrical construct, the game is visible. And so truth lies in the audience’s individual response, depending on where and how the show hits them and to what extent they want to, choose to, engage.
However, I saw several pieces at the Fringe Festival this year which asked its audiences to think about the place of truth and story in theatre. ‘Mouthpiece’ by Kieran Hurley, which I saw at The Traverse, explores the story of Libby, a playwright in her mid 40s, once successful, nearly the next big thing, and then not. She has a chance encounter with Declan, a vulnerable teenage boy, and an unlikely friendship grows. And it’s a complicated but, for a while, very likeable friendship. Until it’s not. Because Libby smells a story and starts to build from their series of meetings, a script, a play. And over the rest of the production the question of Declan’s consent for his story to be told sits. As someone who often makes theatre with more vulnerable groups and communities (whatever that means, to be human is to be a certain level of vulnerable from the off in my experience) it’s such a central question- is this your story to tell? If not, do you have consent, not just uttered once, but whole-hearted, continuing, involved consent? I had a fascinating experience watching ‘Team Viking’ by James Rowland, at the beginning of which I heard him say words to the effect, ‘everything I’m about to tell you is artifice’ in the place of which my friend sitting next to me had heard, ‘everything I’m about to tell you is true’. Although we didn’t realise we were starting from such different points until discussing it afterwards, what we’d heard totally affected the next hour of our experience. It turns out, we’d actually heard both, we’d just prioritised them differently; the idea of truth and storytelling is something James is playing with in his work.
Dan Ward’s show ‘The Canary and The Crow’, a beautiful piece of story-telling meets gig theatre, developed in collaboration with Middle Child, about Dan’s experience of being a black, working-class boy, attending a private grammar secondary school, populated by mainly white boys, via a full scholarship, also got me thinking about truth. Firstly, it hit me hard, it took me five minutes to leave the auditorium (which is pretty inconvenient in a Fringe get out time-frame) because I was sobbing. So although I am not black, or working-class, or a boy (or man), there were some truths in it that hit me hard enough to inconvenience a get-out. The play ends with the very line, “This is my lesson. This is my art. I dare you to try and tell me it’s not relevant” (which is possibly what undid me). Dan was about as clear as you can get within the play itself- this is my truth. That’s why it’s relevant and important. Because I’m telling you something that matters to me. That is true. That costs me something to tell it. And judging from the audience response, it mattered to a lot of others too. What I love about truth telling is that sometimes the literal representation of a thing isn’t true enough, take Bryony Kimmings who in her latest production ‘I’m a Phoenix, Bitch’ uses a kind of Greek-epic format to tell the story of her trauma as a single mother caring for her sick baby, struggling with her mental health- Bryony needed a structure bigger and more epic to tell the scale of her experience. To tell her truth.
The work I’ve been most interested in at this year’s Festival has leant towards more confessional and autobiographical experience. In the murky waters of truth, I will say one thing with some certainty- the framework matters. If you’re going to say this is my true story, and you’re going to ask audience members to show up with you (because it costs them something too, as well as, and beyond, the literal exchange of cash), if you want an audience to connect to and travel through it, and for it to meet them at their own experience, which means asking a level of vulnerability and openness from them- to me, it does matter that a story is yours to tell. Because otherwise the exchange loses value. Of course, storytelling exists, and always has done, in the relationship to its audience, in knowing when to expand a little longer on a thing, when you’ve waffled on far too long (ahem), when something needs great pace, and when there are elaborations and elements of fiction borrowed to engage a hearer. But I do think we have a responsibility, if we are telling a true story, to ensure that it is true and that it is our truth to tell. And there’s a simple solution here, if it’s not your truth, create a fiction from it, change the framework. But I’m wary of confusing the two, fiction and truth. To me, it matters, clarity around truth matters.
In my mind, there’s a relationship between truth and how stories manipulate audiences. I’m interested in the level at which theatre works in manipulating audiences, and it’s not something I feel very comfortable with. The idea that an audience should cry here or laugh here- I know it’s how many others create work, but it doesn’t sit right with me. Of course, I want to give proper thought to what the audience experience will be, I want them to feel, certainly, but I can’t claim to know what a room of diverse human beings that embody all kind of lives lived and not, all kinds of truths and versions thereof, what they will feel and how they will react. And I’m not interested in manipulation. What I am interested in is making things that are true to ourselves, and hoping that someone in the audience will feel, like Hobie describes, that despite the 984 other people in the room (who am I kidding, Edinburgh Fringe- 24 other people in the room), it feels as though the show is saying, “Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you”, and if 985 (25) people feel that in tandem, then we’ve hit some really exciting, subjectively true territory.