sharing the pain, sharing the glory

Tiggi is home for the holidays.  It's wonderful. Someone to talk to endlessly about creative projects, who understands completely what it's like to be bursting with ideas. Someone who knows from first hand experience how hard it is to seem modest when you have a healthy respect for your own talent.

The downside is that I am bursting with pride over my "Playing Faustus", which has been extraordinarily well received, and Tiggi who normally shares these triumphs with me is unable to manage crowds and enclosed spaces. So I have to content myself with raving to her about a play she hasn't seen or read. It's even beginning to bore me.

The truth is that, as is the classic way of the artist, as soon as one work is completed, you move on to the next one. The previous work is quite uninteresting; only its flaws stay in your memory. The good parts have simply become part of one's oeuvre.

I made this pretty little speech at the cast party (the first part was all the thank yous that last night speeches contain de rigeur):

...For me the last two months have been among the most rewarding and exhilarating episodes of my life, and that’s saying something. I have delighted in every moment of seeing and hearing my literary creation become a living thing in your hands. I have loved watching you making the characters your own and running with my text. And that’s a mixed metaphor.   As director, I’ve also enjoyed every single minute of rehearsal, as Jeremy will affirm, and have loved working with such a great group of actors. No-one ever complained about the great weight of words I laid on you in those long long speeches.

I have promised David that in the next part I write for him, he will only have to grunt and not kiss anyone.

 

Theatre is catharsis. And this piece of theatre is specifically cathartic for me. You – without necessarily realising it – have taken  my thoughts, feelings, the inner workings of my head and heart, and embodied them. You have made them your own, and in doing that you have let the light in under the door. To change the metaphor, you have been the instruments and collaborators of  this birth, and now it is born, it is no longer inside me. Shit, why can’t we express ourselves without metaphors…

 

Last night I watched David intently, as I always do – for all the right reasons -  saying my lines, expressing my thoughts, and suddenly I realised that they were no longer mine.  They had gone into the play, been transformed by art, and left me.  

This doesn’t make the play any better or worse -  it could be cathartic and still be crap literature - but I wanted to share it with you, and thank you all from the bottom of my now rather less tortured soul. And now it’s time for the power of hug....

That last remark is a reference to a great line added by Kieran, who plays Brian. After the most brilliant, soapy and soppy rendition of "The Power of Love", he tells the audience to experience "the power of hug". Wish I'd written that line.