slow fade

It’s long been a running joke among people who write about theatre that our favourite words in the English language are “the show runs 70 minutes with no interval”. But I’ve realised that another phrase delights me even more: “Performance will be followed by a post show Theatre Club”. This isn’t the explosion of ego it might seem, because that delight is specific to performances where someone else is hosting theatre club, and I haven’t organised a thing.  I’ve been to two not-hosted-by-me post-show discussions in recent weeks, engaging in them like any other audience member (albeit talking wayyyyy too much). Even though my aim with Theatre Club is to facilitate with a very light touch, so that the conversation is non-hierarchical and questions are offered to what I like to call “every person’s expertise in being human”, I still feel a lot of responsibility for how the dialogue unfolds, especially when critical political topics or sensitive experiences are raised.  There was pl...

I’ve been a fan of the PappyShow since early 2019, watching a euphoric performance of Boys at the Brighton Festival. I’d long heard good things about the company – the joyfulness of their work, their spirit of collectivity – but Boys exceeded all anticipation. The show was a laugh-and-cry delight, exuberant, heartfelt and direct, that felt from the audience like being in friendly company with the performers, all young men of Black and Asian backgrounds. I was there to host a Theatre Club at the invitation of Brighton People’s Theatre , who had group tickets and wanted a supported space in which to chat afterwards: most of what I remember about that conversation is a constant stream of marvel, at the skill of the performers and their openness in thinking about public perceptions and expectations of masculinity, black masculinity in particular, and their actual experiences, feelings, dreams. Fast forward to early 2023: the PappyShow and I are connected again as part of the Moving R...

In the middle of her zine/audio play/essay/memoir Heart-Space Astronaut , writer Emma Adams recalls a play she wrote in 2010 about climate breakdown and capitalism, a play she intended as ‘a howl of a warning’ that ‘would make people care, stop, think, change’. Except, she writes, it didn’t. Her work was as ineffective at solving climate change as all those dreadful plays featuring polar bears that plagued theatre in the early 2010s, as ineffective as ‘the many scientific reports written about it. The kids striking about it. The many UN declarations demanding action about it.’ Heart-Space Astronaut is one of a number of works made by the Dissonant Futures Collective, eight multidisciplinary artists exploring together what might emerge from climate grief, a feeling lodged in my bones more or less since my second child was born (both of them are teenagers now). It was exactly what I needed in the days after seeing Katie Mitchell’s production A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction...

I’ve been hosting Theatre Clubs for a long time now – a whole decade! – and in the first half of 2023 it’s reached its ideal state, with the support of Matt Burman, artistic director at Cambridge Junction. He’s enabled (and paid!) me to establish Theatre Club as a regular, promoted event in the Junction’s programme, which brings together regular attendees, occasional visitors and Junction staff to talk about work that sometimes challenges us, or refuses to fulfil conventional ideas of what theatre is, or what a play might be or do. The first conversation there, about Kakilang’s Home X – a dance show meets virtual reality game meets participatory piece, in which disparate people talk about their relationships to ideas of home, belonging, citizenship and migration – immediately joined the list of Theatre Clubs I dwell on and discuss with anyone who’ll listen. The particular mix of people meant that we met the show’s content with our own experiences: of moving to another country to live w...

This text is a somewhat tidied edit of a mostly scrappy keynote delivered at the launch event for the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts . My invitation had been to respond to the introductory texts, but each of those coaxed me into other chapters, and so every time I sat down to start writing, I became instead absorbed in reading more. The book is a mammoth compendium of essays from a multitude of perspectives in audience research: historical, philosophical, speculative, exploratory; interested in everything from the neuroscience of how people respond when watching a live performance to the nature of fandom and the political problem of globalising audiences. I finished collating my thoughts on the train to Leeds, where the event was taking place; after I read it out, someone from the audience said it was like listening to someone free associating, which was expressed as a compliment so that’s how I’m taking it. I didn’t have a title for this until I listened to ...