Entering the Labyrinth

What a couple of days! Just when we thought that the material was beginning to yield, to cohere, we found ourselves having to unpick everything we had created in order to progress the piece. The most enjoyable aspect of devising (and the most frustrating) is the creation of a dense weave of ideas, images and intuitions which eventually begin to proliferate meaning in what appears to be a semi-autonomous process of generation. Mary and I have begun to recognise when it’s happening as the work becomes light, playful and ridiculously easy. Drop a stitch in the weave, however, and you find yourself laboriously unpicking the work in order to find the fault which has made any further progress impossible.

We had found a fertile starting point in a dream which I had had way back at the beginning of our devising process. It was a dream which appeared highly significant to me – although I didn’t know why – and it returned in conversations and in the devising process a couple of weeks ago. In this dream I find myself as a sole performer on the comedy circuit waiting to go and do my ‘spot’ but with no material to speak of – apart from a book of jokes I’ve borrowed from other comics. I’m aware, in the dream, that I should really be generating my own material but I can’t really think what that may be; in desperation I consider using a Brummie accent to comic effect, and telling some stories about my days in ‘avant-garde theatre’. Once in front of the audience I become a gross caricature of myself screeching a welcome in broad Brummie and making fun of everything I’ve held dear about the theatre. I found it cathartic to actually make this image flesh and blood but I wasn’t sure why she was relevant to the piece.

Having given her a few outings I commented to Mary that the views this woman held on theatre would probably be shared by my mother who has never really trusted theatre and ‘theatricals’; my mother doesn’t have a Brummie accent but Birmingham is my home. This morning we returned to the problem of Brummie Woman’s presence in the piece (she felt right but we just didn’t know what she was doing there). Our conversation led us to consideration of the ‘monstrous mothers’ who have appeared to dominate our research during the last few months and she appeared to fit the bill as one more incarnation of this strange breed. We noted that these mothers appear in films such as Marnie and The Piano Teacher as ‘real’ mothers whereas, in fact, Freudian theory would suggest that they are externalisations of unconscious monsters – superegos - created by the daughters in response to an inability to free themselves from their love-bond with the mother. I suggested that Brummie Woman was one such manifestation and Mary responded: “Yes, and not only have you created her, now you’ve got her running the show!”

In that moment it was as though an earthquake occurred in my brain. Tectonic plates shifted and huge layers of metaphorical accretions cracked and stirred. In such moments – and they are terrifically rare – it seems, just for an instant – possible to remake the world so easily. In reality we dashed to work and had a great three hours re-arranging the Brummie Woman material and the stuff that adhered to her; suddenly this material was malleable and manageable; we knew how to use it, how to play with it. The further we moved from it, however, the more difficult and intractable the work became. The energy became dense and heavy again, like moving boulders. And yet I know that just a word, a thought, looking at the material from a different perspective will shift the blockage and provide new vistas on the material we’re exploring!

I have the feeling though, that nothing will ever be the same again…