Duck, Son and Pinker

...that I’ve omitted to share:

On the proximity between theatres and protest sites, here

This is the text of the provocation I gave at the Manchester Royal Exchange’s ‘You, The Audience’ event on Monday. SPOILER ALERT: you may wish to avoid reading if you haven’t seen Jamie Wood’s ‘O No!’, and you plan to.

There’s a perfect moment towards the end of a show called O No!, by Jamie Wood. The show is a one-man theatrical homage to Yoko Ono, in which Jamie creates a series of avant-garde artworks, following the guidelines set out in Ono’s ‘Book of Art Instructions’. Invited to join him in the realisation of one of the pieces, an audience member steps on stage and climbs into a bag with him. Together, slowly, in the awkward space, avoiding the tangle of limbs, they take their clothes off. For a few minutes, they are naked together, and in the torchlit intimacy of the bag, they talk about human relationships, about love. Then, they put their clothes back on, and the show continues.

I think about that moment, often. I’m pretty certain that that audience member doesn’t walk into the theatre at the start of the night thinking: ‘I’m going to get naked with Jamie Wood on stage tonight’. But somehow in the 40 odd minutes that elapse in between, the alchemy of theatre works on them – and on us, the audience. It may sound strange to say this of watching two people take their clothes off in a bag, but that moment makes me hopeful - about what theatre makes possible.

I want to talk about hope. I want to talk about the hope that motivates me to go to work every day, to continue with the often unforgiving business of running a theatre, of stressing about whether anyone will show up and how we’ll pay for it all, of dealing with funding applications, marketing campaigns and flooding toilets. Because I think, in the current political climate, when the value systems that I and many others hold to be self-evident are under attack, it’s easy to feel hopeless – that theatre is a waste of time, that it can’t possibly matter or make a difference.

We’re wont to talk about theatre in relation to film, or social media, asking how the theatregoing experience can be more like watching something on screen, or being online. But I think a more apposite point of reference is the protest site, and possibly the football match or the religious ceremony. Which is to say, that I believe the essence of theatre lies in the live act of commune it represents.

This is the basis of my hope. At its core, what we’re witnessing around the world right now – as borders close down, migrant communities are maligned, and cultural differences quashed – is a struggle over what it means to be together in the same place. In this context, theatre is a symbol and an expression of an idea: that being with other people is better than being alone. That coming together to engage with different views and ways of living in the world is not only necessary; it enriches us. It is much harder to ignore the plight or destroy the life chances of a person whose gaze you have held. Sharing space is the beginning of kindness.

I don’t think the version of theatre I’m describing here always reflects the theatre as I currently experience it. But there are glimmers in the dark. The reason that I value that moment in Jamie Wood’s show so greatly is because I believe it is the power of our collective goodwill that is able to uphold a gesture that in almost any other circumstance would seem deeply strange, and yet now is transformed into something not only natural, but almost inevitable. What else might we achieve together, if we put our minds to it?

To recognise the inherent power of theatre is not to rest on our laurels, or to excuse the woeful lack of diversity and accessibility in the sector as it stands. The writer Rebecca Solnit says that hope suggests ‘another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is not possible without hope.’

So this is a provocation – for us to work, collectively, to make theatre truer to its essence, to do the things it has always done better than ever before. In this model of a democratic space – how is difference represented? Whose voices are heard? What does our proximity mean? How do we truly meet and hold one another’s gaze?

Today, there will be a lot of conversations about practical ways we can enrich theatre by making it more widely accessible. I’d like to suggest we begin with the question of why theatre gives us hope. Your own reasons will no doubt be various – perhaps, like the audience members who contributed to the You, The Audience manifesto, you believe in the power of theatre to move us, to surprise us, or to enable us to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.

The answer to this question is, I believe, where the invitation to audiences begins. It is the beacon that must guide us in making theatre that is better, and more powerful, than ever before.

A poem written for my new godson Eli (inspired somewhat by the fact his Mum is a photographer).

PHOTOGRAPH

Hello gentle reader, hope you're well! You look well - have you done something different with your hair?

It’s been a little quiet here of late, and that’s because I have an EXCITING NEW PROJECT afoot – and I need your help to make it happen.

In the coming months, I’m going on a bit of an adventure. I’m going to travel around the UK, visiting around twenty theatres that are in some way special or unusual - and I need your advice on where I should go. I want to get off the beaten track, and visit some of the theatres that aren’t necessarily the most famous or the most celebrated, but have a story worth telling – the ones in unusual locations, that have thrived in unlikely circumstances, or where people have, in one way or another, rethought what a theatre might be. 

I need your help in figuring out which ones should make the cut. I want to know which theatres in the UK you truly love and why: it may be a theatre in an incredible location, with an unusual history, that plays a particular role in its community, or that meant a lot to you growing up. 

I’ll be writing a book all about the places I visit, and I’m chuffed to bits the lovely folks at Penned in the Margins have agreed to publish it. This will be a love letter to theatre – a kind of psychogeographical meandering through the relationship between theatres and place: both the physical, bricks and mortar version of place, and also the ghosts and histories that define a sense of place, as well as what theatre can teach us about what it means to be together in the same place today. Perhaps most importantly, it will be a personal account of my adventures as I travel across the country.

This project means a huge amount to me, and I’d be so grateful if you were able to help me by suggesting the theatres you love, and perhaps share a few words about why they matter.

You can comment below or let me know your thoughts at [email protected] – do let me know if you’d like to join a mailing list to be kept up to date with the project too.

Thank you, thank you. That style really suits you. You should keep it.

Amber xx

Wrote this piece for The Stage a couple of weeks ago and caused a little controversy...

I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago for the wedding of two of my very favourite people. The groom has a history working with fireworks, hence the theme. 

THE QUIET GLOW OF THINGS BEING ORDINARY

On the day you'll be pyrotechnic

From the plosive of bang And the spark of the flame

caught breath and then you're Scorching skywards Aloft on a glitter of stardust Expanding, bright Your brilliance large

on the waiting sky

electric cursive scribbled on darkness Spelling out futures Dreams of possible worlds

you two: You have your own propulsion The alchemy of elements finding their match

But It will seem to us then that we're raising you up the dome of our wonder our gaze and our hearts We'll know that our love can lift you That it's more than the sum of its parts

after, it will come flooding back The stillness amplified by noise and light Then it's not spectacle, but this that is beautiful 

The small steady flame that never goes out:

In the centre of Berlin, on a corner of land between the Reichstag, the Brandenburg gate and Tiergarten, there is a square the size of two football pitches, filled with a sea of large concrete blocks, each like an oversized sarcophagus. The ground undulates beneath them, and the stones are set at varying heights, reminiscent of the toothiness of old gravestones. Spreading out across the plaza, they form a grid: but something has gone wrong, glitches in the lines that are barely perceptible, small ruptures to the system that make the whole off balance; unsettling.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened on 10 May, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A permanent presence in the heart of the city, honouring the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Spitting distance from the seat of Government: a reminder that the past should remain unrepeated, cast in stone.  

I come across it by chance, as I wander around the city, attempting to orientate myself without the aid of a guidebook. It’s possible to walk between the blocks along narrow pathways - single file, rather than abreast. As I move through them, the ground falls away in front of me and the stones gain height until they stretch above my head.

In the gaps between the stones, to my left and right, I catch glimpses of other people. But instead of assuming the postures of quiet contemplation one might expect at a Holocaust memorial, they’re kissing, chasing one another, jumping from block to block, taking selfies: a montage of lived life. Laughter lifts skywards. As I’m going through the deepest part, I become aware of a man walking behind me. I move over a couple of rows; he moves along too. I glance back to see if he’s keeping pace with me. When I catch his eye, he takes it as encouragement, and shouts “hello, sexy lady,” laughing.  

The memorial was created by Peter Eisenman, a Jewish American architect known for the highly modernist approach of his work. I wonder if he imagined that the huge structure he designed would become a place approached as a playground, a site as much for bad attempts at parkour and impromptu games of hide and seek as it would be for moments of deep reflection. I wonder if he conceived of the souvenir shops and restaurants trading in overpriced currywurst that would pop up along its north side, dubbed ‘Holocaust Beach’ in the German press.

It is plausible that some of my fellow visitors are unaware of what the site commemorates. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe eschews the literal. There are no lists of names here, no dates, not even the title is displayed as an indication of how an individual might be expected to respond. Indeed the number of stelae – 2711 – is explicitly random, dissuading the viewer from seeking meaning in a memorial to an event that is senseless, unfathomable. As Eisenman has said: “the enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate”.  

Much criticism of Eisenman’s sculpture – and there has been much – focuses on this question of ‘adequacy’. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody’s vehement critique takes issue with the nonfigurative nature of the work, the gap between what the viewer encounters and the brutal facts of the Holocaust. Abstraction, for him, is a step on the path to forgetting. Brody attempts to envisage what a truly adequate memorial might be, imagining a Star of David, the size of the site, standing ‘many stories high’; or that the number of stelae be increased to six million, a sea of stones that would ‘run throughout Berlin and on to Wannsee, along and across actual roads, protected by speed bumps, and every time a driver slowed down or a cyclist pumped a bit harder or a pedestrian shifted his path, it would be an act of memory’.

His conflation of literalism with adequacy serves in fact to underline the absurdity of attempting the representative in this context: a single stone cannot stand for a single human life. A memorial could never meaningfully convey the scale and horror of the Holocaust, particularly to a younger generation for whom the lived experience of their grandparents and great grandparents is so far removed from their own, and the pretense that it could is misleading.

This prompts reflection on the question of what the purpose of a memorial should be. Is it educational, a kind of mnemonic to keep the facts of history afresh in the collective conscious? Eisenman’s intention appears to be more artistic, and the sculpture, all blank facades and unreadable patterns, is a vast metaphor for the incomprehensibility of the crime, reminding the viewer of the futility of attempts at rationalisation.

But there is a particular danger in the tendency to frame genocide in these kinds of terms, as it so often is - to describe it as incomprehensible, unfathomable, unspeakable. The word ‘genocide’ was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to capture the crime committed by the Nazis: it meant, he said, "a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure.”

Simply, a genocide seeks not only to take the lives of an entire group of people, but also to wipe out all markers of their existence, to erase them from history. This is what gives processes of memorial such significance in post-genocidal societies. In this context, specificity is everything. The six million who died each had a name, and when that name is remembered and repeated, the purpose of the genocide is countered. Bearing witness is a performative act that asserts continued existence.

But it seems to me Eisenman’s sculpture answers a different question to the one Brody demands of it: not how does this society memorialise the historical murder of 6 million Jews, but how does it find, in the long term, a way to live with it?

Writing about his intentions, Eisenman cites Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the two different kinds of memory he identifies: ‘a nostalgia located in the past, touched with a sentimentality that remembers things not as they were but as we want to remember them, and a living memory, which is active in the present and devoid of nostalgia for a remembered past’.

‘Remembering the Holocaust,’ he writes ‘can… only be a living condition in which the past remains active in the present’.

Viewed from this perspective, it is no coincidence that the memorial has come to accommodate the mundane everyday business of living that springs up about it – the picnickers, the hide n seekers, my sanguine suitor, even the surprisingly numerous Grindr users who have chosen the site as a fitting backdrop for their profile selfies*. And by placing it in the heart of the urban, rather than at a removed site designated for the purpose, something is communicated about the function of a city, which works best as a place to negotiate difference, where we bring our own stories and find a way to cohabit with them.

Ultimately, what strikes me most about the memorial is a sense of hope. It is a huge reminder of a past that cannot be ignored, but might be coexisted with: a backdrop for life in all its messiness, joy and banality. Brody underlines the failure of the monument by describing the dinner he went for after his visit at ‘a pleasant little restaurant where the spaetzle (was) served with zucchini and tomatoes’ – it was, he writes suspiciously, delicious.** In fact he may be angling at exactly the success of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: that rather than allowing its visitors to forget, in asking us to remember, it prompts a more pronounced appreciation of being alive.

*I’m an outsider here: this history is not my own, and this blog does not intend to trivialise the offence felt by many Germans by the highly unsavoury reports of some activities at the site - for example, of individuals urinating. But as we await the construction of Britain’s own Holocaust memorial, and shortly after Sadiq Khan received criticism (from Alan Sugar, no less) for making one of his first acts as Mayor of London to attend a Holocaust Memorial ceremony, the question of how those killed in a genocide may be commemorated seems apposite.

After visiting The Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of memorialising those that are killed in a genocide, and reflecting on my time in Rwanda almost a decade ago. This is a diary entry from the time about an experience I had in Murambi that I’ll never forget.

We’re in Butare, and we have heard that there is an interesting genocide memorial nearby in Gikongoro, so we go, traveling there in a typically overstuffed ‘matatu’. Rwanda is a beautiful country, and Gikongoro is extraordinarily beautiful. The hills fall away steeply from the roadside into deep green valleys, lined with glinting rivers and spotted with small houses. We take a ‘boda-boda’ motor bike along a winding dirt track several kilometres out of the town. A crocodile of men in sugared-almond-pink cotton suits walk through the shade of the trees at the side of the way. They look serene in the pale dappled light of the hot still valley- but pink is the colour of prisoners. They must be on their way to or from the ‘gacaca’, the traditional courts that we have seen in clearings by the roadsides, where they will be tried for their crimes in the genocide. Murderers? It is a moment- the motorbikes are quick- they are in the passed.

I’m expecting a modern, tasteful museum, perhaps with an ‘eternal flame’ burning outside, like the memorial in Kigali, the buzz of a school party, a few ‘muzungus’ with cameras and bum bags. Instead, we arrive at what appears to be an abandoned school building. One of the omnipresent Rwandan police officers approaches us: “Francais ou Anglais?” “English, please.” “Wait.”

Our guide arrives, and indicates to us to follow him. We walk with him, behind the building- it is a school, or used to be one, and the grounds are filled with long single storey buildings that must have been classrooms.

He is fiddling with a set of keys- the clanking disturbs the close midday air. We haven’t really spoken; his English isn’t that good, after all, and we only know a word or two of Kinyarwandese. He unlocks a door in one of the buildings. The smell hits me first, and I realise in the moment before I direct my gaze into the room what I am going to see.

Bodies. People, left where they died. I walk into the room. They have been preserved with lime. The nearest thing I can describe it to is those mummies you see unwrapped by curious Victorian 'anthropologists' at the the British Museum. With flesh intact, but all dried out so they still look skeletal. Curled and contorted. I should say something. I think I manage "Oh God." The smell. "Children," our guide says, pointing to some of the smaller corpses. I step out for fresh air.

There are four buildings like this, containing almost 1,000 corpses. My friend, Kieran, who is reading about Rwanda at the moment, has just told me that the Hutu militia were trained so that forty of them could kill one thousand people in twenty minutes.

A couple of weeks after these people were massacred, the French Army arrived - ostensibly to create a safe haven for the Tutsi in the South of the country but really, many would argue, to provide an escape route for Hutu militia fleeing from the encroaching RPF armies into Burundi. 'Operation Turquoise'. They set up a base in another set of buildings at the same school. Did they not see the bodies? Did they just ignore them? I can't ask - I don't have the language. The land by their base is lumpy. It is a mass grave. There are around five thousand bodies in the grounds of this school. The French soldiers erected a net on this lumpy ground, and played volley ball.

On the walk into town, there is a ruined brick building with no roof, windows or doors. It has the aesthetic appeal that ruined buildings often do and so I approach. The ground within the building is lumpy too, and after a moment I realise that there are bones sticking out of the earth. A butterfly alights on a human jaw bone.

(This is for you Lee Lyford!) I wrote this short play when I was 16, which was produced at the Theatre Royal Bath and subsequently adapted into a full length play. I thought it had been lost forever but just found it on an old laptop... there are a few people that might be interested to read it again... 

EMILY’S WINGS

A bright, child’s bedroom. EMILY and JOE enter.

EMILY: Quick, Adonis, push the chest against the door!

JOE: Chest?

EMILY: There, hurry up! “FE! FI! FO! FUM! I SMELL THE BLOOD OF AN ENGLISHMAN!”

JOE: I can hear him coming Arabella!

EMILY: ‘ADONIS, I’M GOING TO CUT OFF YOUR HEAD!

   ADONIS, I WANT YOUR BONES FOR MY BREAD!’

JOE: He’s going to kill us!

EMILY: Our only hope now is the spell the Guardian Witch of the Round Table told you. Remember?

JOE: I’ve forgotten…

EMILY: ‘To move fish to the sky

    And birds to the sea…

JOE: ‘…The power of magic,

I take into me!’

Now die, evil villain!

EMILY: ‘ADONIS, YOU HAVE SLAIN ME!

I’M MELTING! I’M MELTING!’

He’s gone, for good and all.

JOE: Never again to wreak tyranny on the lives of children!

Beat

EMILY: Adonis, it seems we have stumbled upon a cave of hidden treasure.

JOE: There must be a thousand gold ducats in here!

The contents of bedroom drawers become the treasure

EMILY: Hundreds of pearl necklaces….

‘emeralds’, ‘diamonds’, ‘rubies’ etc. JOE crawls under the bed, and falls silent. He comes out  with a pair of wings.

JOE: What are these?

EMILY: Wings.

JOE: They’re so cool! Why didn’t you tell me about them? We could have used them. I reckon Princess Arabella could definitely wear fairy wings.

EMILY: They’re angel’s wings.

JOE: Angel wings, fairy wings, its all the same.

EMILY: It matters.

JOE: Come on! Stop being so boring! Tell me where you got them. Did you get them in town? At the toy shop? Come on! Did your Mum buy them for you?

EMILY: Can you keep a secret?

JOE: ‘Course.

EMILY: They’re real.

JOE: beat. Confused. Then: Arabella, you have placed great trust in me. In return…I will rescue us from this place! Hold my hand and together we will fly away on your magic wings!

EMILY: Forget Adonis and Arabella. I’m not talking about that anymore. Joe and Emily, Emily’s bedroom, remember that?

JOE: Sorry. I was getting carried away.

EMILY: Calm down and I will say it again. My wings are real.

JOE: I don’t understand. What do you mean?

EMILY: They’ve been here all the time. You just never noticed them before.

JOE: I’ve been under that bed a thousand times, It’s our cave, our boat, our castle. Emily?

EMILY: You didn’t see them.

JOE: No, that can’t be right. I know everything under there. Three jigsaw puzzles, bag of sweets, Gameboy, yo yo…

EMILY: It’s you. You couldn’t see them before. And now you can.

JOE: What are you talking about Emily? You’re being stupid.

EMILY: You asked. It’s not my fault if you don’t like the answer.

JOE: Angels don’t exist.

EMILY: Oh yeah, Joe, and what would your Mum say about that? Don’t you go to church with her every Sunday? Remember the Nativity? The Angel Gabriel?

JOE: But that’s different. It’s like Adonis and Arabella.

EMILY: How?

JOE: They’re not real!

EMILY: Oh. They seem real to me.

JOE: You’re so stupid. They’re just games.

EMILY: Please don’t say that.

JOE: It’s all make believe. It’s just lies!

EMILY: You don’t mean it. Once we had to go into the Giant’s house to get the Golden Fleece, do you remember?

JOE: It was hot. We had to walk for miles across the tops of clouds in the sunlight. We didn’t want to miss our tea and so you told the time with dandelion seeds.

EMILY: We were there, weren’t we?

JOE: Yes, but it’s different. It’s…

EMILY: When I’m inside Arabella I can’t come and go from her life any more than I can Emily’s. I don’t control her, she controls me.

JOE: That’s how I feel about Adonis.

EMILY: Then you should understand about the wings.

JOE: But Emily…Angels…

EMILY: Arabella and Adonis have a fraction of the truth that angels do. Trust me. They’re real, I promise.

JOE: Emily, you’re my favourite person. When we play, you make everything come to life and seem real.

EMILY: So trust me.

JOE: I want to. I wish I could. But I can’t.

EMILY: Why?

JOE: It doesn’t make sense. I know you say it’s in the Bible and I believe in that, but it’s like Adam and Eve. It’s a nice story that helps you to believe it all but everyone knows that really they explain nothing.

EMILY: Well, I know that angels are real. For me, they explain everything. Where does that leave me?

JOE: Grow up, Emily. We’re too old for this anymore. I don’t know. Maybe we should have stopped playing before now. For me, that’s all they were, games we were playing. It seems like they are starting to get to you.

EMILY: I know that’s not all they were. You’re wrong. There’s something getting to you.

JOE: What exactly, Emily? What’s getting to me?

EMILY: Everyone else. Your family, the boys at school, the TV. You’re letting them change who you are. You didn’t see my wings before because you didn’t need to. But now you’re different, you have questions in your mind…

JOE: You’re right. I said something before; I said that Adonis controlled me. I was lying. That was how it used to be but it’s different now.

EMILY: Lies is such a strong word Joe. It doesn’t suit you. You’ve changed. I can see it. But it’s not too late. If you just trust me, it can all stay the same…

JOE: I’m not sure I want it to stay the same. We play babies’ games.

EMILY: They’re not babies’ game. They’re nothing and no one’s games, except ours.

JOE: But we shouldn’t be playing them. It’s not normal.

EMILY: You want to be normal? You want to be like all of the other boys, kicking a ball about by day and fanticising about Britney Spears by night?

JOE: Well, why not? If it’s what everyone else does?

EMILY: You want to be like everyone else? You want to be just like your Dad when you grow up, hmm? Work at the bank?

JOE: I can if I like!

EMILY: You used to say you were going to be king of the world and I was going to be your queen.

JOE: Stop doing this! Can’t you see that’s impossible?

EMILY: No it’s not.

JOE: There is no King of the world. There never has been.

EMILY: That’s only because everyone’s too much like you. They’re scared to see the possibilities. And what about being yourself, Joe? What about finding out who you really are? You want to be like everyone else? You disappoint me.

JOE: No, you’re getting me wrong. I don’t really mean I want us to stop playing together. But I don’t understand why I can’t have both.

EMILY: Because our magic is so fragile. Anything else will smash it to pieces.

JOE: There’s life other than you.

EMILY: There never used to be.

JOE: Well now there is.

EMILY: Then we’ve lost everything we had.

JOE: It’s you. It’s you’re fault. You’re the one making up the story about the wings. That’s what’s tearing it apart!

EMILY: Look at them. Look at the colours. Don’t you see the way the light is shining out of the feathers? How could anything made by a human be as beautiful as that?

JOE: You say it so passionately. You’re a good actress. But perhaps you really believe it?

EMILY: Yes.

JOE: Grabbing the wings They’re not real!

EMILY: Be careful!

JOE: begins to pluck out the feathers You’re so stupid!

EMILY: Why are you doing that?

JOE: To prove to you…to find the stitching that holds them together.

EMILY is screaming, then sobbing. The bedroom is littered with feathers. Joe has destroyed them. He is exhausted.

JOE: No stitches. No glue. Nothing. You were right.

Silence.

EMILY: No. You were. Look at the feathers. Angels’ feathers could never look like that.

JOE: I’m sorry.

EMILY: I really believed…

She sobs. Pause. Joe puts his hand on her shoulder but she shrugs it off.

EMILY: I’m fine. Don’t worry. Thank you for helping me realise how immature I was being.

JOE: Please don’t. I believe you now.

EMILY: It’s too late. What use is a pile of dead feathers?

JOE grabs some of the feathers she is about to throw away and starts to cry.

EMILY: What would the boys at school say if they could see you? You’re such a cry baby. Look at yourself, weeping over a pair of fairy wings.

JOE: They’re angel wings.

EMILY: Whatever.

JOE: I thought it mattered.

EMILY: Not anymore. They’re gone now. It’s forgotten.

She goes to the mirror and looks at her face. She wipes the tears away and then begins to pose with her hair in different styles.

JOE: Listen, can’t we forget all this? Go back to the way things were? ‘Arabella and Adonis, saviours of the world!’ Emily?

EMILY: You used to say you wanted us to be king and queen of the world. It probably seems like a long time ago to you. You said you would rule the Northern Hemisphere and I would rule the Southern Hemisphere and we would live on the equator together. We’d be magical, we’d wrap around each other and stretch around the Earth. Let’d play that game, shall we? Wrap around each other?  Come on, I thought you wanted to go back to the way things were!

JOE: Stop it! It’s not the same!

EMILY: But that’s what Kings and Queens do, isn’t it? Cover each other, get inside each other. We’re grown ups now, you’re the one who wanted to be like everyone else! Are you saying you wouldn’t enjoy it? Are you saying I would have to force you?

beat

JOE: No.

EMILY: I didn’t think so. And even if I did, it could never be as bad as what you did to me.

JOE: There must be something I can do?

EMILY: Nothing. I can’t do it anymore. Not without my wings. This has ruined us.

JOE: But now I believe it all.

EMILY: You don’t believe it. Belief needs faith. It’s not worth anything if you know it’s a fact.

JOE: Where are you going?

EMILY: Into town. Do some shopping, chat the boys up, get a Macdonald’s.

JOE: That’s it, is it? You’re just going to turn your back on everything we’ve created?

EMILY: It’s too late. We couldn’t ever get it back.

JOE: I’m sorry Emily. I’m so very, very sorry.

EMILY: Goodbye Joe.

Two glasses of wine in and my friend and I are reminiscing about our experimental arts degree.  It’s been more than a decade. We talk about the time we confused our neighbours by stripping to our underwear in the garden of our student house and covering one another in paint. The time we took over an abandoned warehouse in South London and made an opera based on each of us losing our first tooth. The time we danced naked on the stage of the Barbican. We talk about the house party where the invitation was to ‘Wear What You Always Want To Wear But Never Do’. I wore dungarees. She wore leg warmers. One of our friends came as a bag of Skittles.

Then she tells a story about another experience she had while we were studying. It’s a perfect account of the sort of thing that happened during our degree, and these stories are precious to us, are a kind of talisman of our shared history: we tell them to other people to set ourselves apart, just a little bit, and we tell them to each other to remind ourselves of the things that bind us, to redraw the circle of our friendship. So I listen to her tell it, knowing I’ve heard it before and knowing I’ll hear it again, settling into the creases of it.

In this story, my friend, as part of her research for her dissertation and at the behest of one of our wackier tutors (and they were all pretty wacky), gets a train to Birmingham, arriving as dusk settles. It’s winter, and dusk settles early in Birmingham. She’s alone, and on a crumpled piece of paper in her pocket – because smartphones and TomToms and googlemaps are yet to be part of our world - she has directions to an address she doesn’t know.

A taxi drops her off, not at a fashionable arts venue as she’d anticipated (a renovated chapel with exposed brickwork perhaps, or a converted warehouse on the waterfront), but at a neat, unremarkable house in a Victorian terrace. I imagine my friend, who is slight, and feminine, and who has always looked a little young for her age, but is also fearless and strong and underestimated at cost; I imagine her standing in this street in a Birmingham suburb with a name like Sarehole or Pype Hayes or Rubery, and I hold that image of her for a moment, alone in a strange place beneath the orange of a single street lamp.

The door is opened by a stranger in a white uniform, that of a beautician, perhaps, or a nurse. He’s a large man, with thinning grey hair, a flush to his cheeks and skin so smoothly shaved it catches the glow of the light. He takes her into the kitchen and makes her tea – “I don’t drink regular tea, so he made me herbal” – and gives her a chocolate chip Bakin’ Boys cupcake. They talk for a while, chatting about her day, the weather, the things people talk about when they meet for the first time. He explains what’s going to happen. With permission, he puts his hand on her thigh. “We get close, because when you touch someone like that, you have to”. After a while, he takes her upstairs, lies down on the bed with her, and for fifteen minutes, in silence, he spoons her. Then, they say their goodbyes, and she leaves.

Often when my friend recounts this it’s an oddity, an example of the eccentricities of the performance art world, and she tells it knowing it will raise a chuckle. After all, it’s pretty weird to let someone you’ve never met before spoon you. But beyond that – beyond the weirdness – there was something lovely about it, lying there in a quiet that began to be comfortable, the rain lashing at the window outside. She says when she describes it now: “it’s something you don’t forget about, something you won’t experience again.”

The man with the Bakin’ Boys cupcakes knew this. ‘It’s all allowed’, was his mantra. Those words are perfectly shaped to that moment: they contain the permission to find the situation strange, and funny; the hint, perhaps, of potential debauchery. The possibility of being moved in ways we might not have foreseen. The invitation to be whoever we are within the moment, without fear of judgement.

The name of this artist was Adrian Howells. A few years after my friend’s experience, after we’d graduated and I’d landed a job as a PR representing a bunch of hepcats on the left field of London’s theatre scene, I ended up doing a gig representing a theatre festival in which he was performing. The premise of the event was that every show in it was designed to be staged for just one audience member at a time, and I had the job of explaining the significance of all this to a bunch of jaded journalists who had been dispatched to write about it. As I herded them through a series of ‘One-on-One’ encounters (in which they were strapped into wheelchairs, asked to lie down in coffins and suspended from a third floor window), I tried desperately to convince them that the whole thing was nowhere near as gimmicky as they desperately wanted it to be.  

I spoke to Adrian a few times during those weeks, and he was kind to me, really kind. He took great care to find out about my interests, my history, my life outside my work, which was nowhere near as typical an experience for a young PR working in the arts as you’d hope.

In a festival of work that was often preoccupied with testing ethical boundaries in a way that could be seriously unsettling for those who experienced it, Adrian’s performance was distinctive for the simplicity of its invitation: to explore what might happen when we allow ourselves to be unguarded with one another. In Footwashing for the Sole, Adrian would bring his audience member into a quiet space, illuminated by candles, invite them to sit in a chair, kneel on the floor in front of them, and slowly, gently, wash their feet. He’d performed it all over the world, in Glasgow, Ireland and Australia. In Palestine and Israel, where he’d washed the feet of the Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. Every time, he’d lift the feet to his mouth and kiss them at the end. No matter how calloused, blistered or fungal they were, he would always lift them to his mouth and kiss them.

To hear Adrian speak about his work was to ache for touch. He’d talk about how rarely as adults we experience physical intimacy in forms that aren’t sexual, and the damage this does to our connections with one another, with our own bodies. For him what touch could be, and was a metaphor for, was kindness.

Several of the artworks in the festival centred on a small betrayal of trust: a hidden camera, say, or a disclosed secret. One-on-one performance is by its nature often an exploration of intimacy, and sometimes, of how easily intimacy can be faked, or manipulated. There was a cruelty at the heart of these pieces that Adrian found difficult to stomach. He recognised that they unsteadied the ground for all one-on-one performance makers: that the thorn of cynicism they left with those that experienced them meant they could never engage with another one-on-one performance in quite the same way again.

And Adrian’s work rested on that faith. The beauty of his work was in his bond with the audience member, that their exchange, which might well have seemed strange, was held up by the grace of two people consenting to do something they normally wouldn’t. So he was frustrated by these other works. More than that: he was angered by them.

It wasn’t until Edinburgh Fringe 2011 that I finally experienced his work first hand. The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Holding and Feeding took place in a relatively high-end city centre hotel. I remember rushing through wet streets, discarded flyers beneath my feet, torn posters flapping like prayer flags against the grey sky, the Royal Mile full of young people with loud voices and painted faces and great big dreams. I was irritable, most likely hungover, and I was running late – at the Edinburgh fringe I was always running late.

I pushed my way through a heavy rotating door and found myself in a hotel lobby full of white furniture I couldn’t imagine anyone sitting on. My hair had gone wild with the weather and my shoes left damp marks on the floor. I was shown to a bedroom on the second floor. Adrian opened the door like he’d been expecting me. “Hello, Amber,” he said. He wrapped his arms around me, and held me for a long time.

He showed me into the bathroom, explaining that he’d return in a few minutes. The room was lit only by candles, glinting on the surface of the bath. The water was deep, filled with something milky and sweet smelling, rose petals scattered on its surface. It was the stock cliché of a relaxing bathing experience, the kind that gets wheeled out ad nauseum in adverts for certain high street pharmacy chains, but right then, when I was exhausted and my brain felt totally bruised by the rigours of a month on the fringe, it was perfectly lovely.

I wiped steam away from the mirror and gazed at my reflection. Loose strands of hair were stuck to my face with rain, and the candlelight made the bags under my eyes flicker. I began to undress. Adrian was going to bathe me. I had my swimsuit with me, but when I took it out, I decided on the spur of the moment not to put it on. Why did being naked matter? Much like physical intimacy, as an adult nakedness is so often synonymous with sex, but in spite of that – or perhaps precisely because of it - it seemed then to be a simple signal of the fact I was going to trust him. I looked at my body in the mirror, pale, a little flabby from all the festival boozing. It’s all allowed. I put my swimsuit back in my bag, and stepped in the warm water.

Adrian came into the bathroom and said: “it’s an honour to bathe you”. He said it with such sincerity that it couldn’t be received in any other spirit. He began by lifting my leg from the water, taking a sponge, and ever so gently lathered between my toes. We didn’t say a word to each other, as he took each of my limbs in his hands and washed them, then my face, with care. At first I was nervy, self conscious, but as the minutes passed, I relaxed, and my eyes closed.

For half an hour I was the object of his undivided attention. I try to think of other occasions when I’ve been bathed by someone and I can’t think of a single one, not even from my childhood – of course my mum must have given me baths but I can’t think of a single example. At the heart of it all, there was melancholy. I had heard Adrian speak about how unbearable he found all the loneliness in the world. The Pleasure of Being… was a salve for that. But could it be enough, when it was so fleeting, when in a few minutes, it must be over? Afterwards, he wrapped me in a huge towel, sat me on his knee, fed me a piece of chocolate, and held me. I felt cared for. I felt loved.

While I’m writing this I go to visit my grandfather in hospital. He’s my last remaining grandparent, and he has cancer. He’s no longer able properly to digest food, so we visit him as often as we can, spending hours gathered around his bed, holding upbeat conversations about how good his garden is looking, England’s failure in the rugby. My dad makes too many jokes about Arsenal beating Tottenham in the league. Sometimes he wants to talk, sometimes he doesn’t.  He is coming to the end of his life. We try, tentatively, to push him towards the topics we suppose we will regret not having discussed when the time is too late. We ask him to tell us who his heroes are. We remind him of the holiday we took together when I was three. He was in the war, I think, there must be questions I haven’t asked him about what it was like to be in the war.

But it is all too conspicuous; it underlines how much we haven’t talked about, because there wasn’t enough time, there is never enough time. He asks me to massage his feet and his legs, and I’m grateful: it’s a gift to let me do something for him when I’m so unsure of what I can do. People tell me I’m good at massage and although I’ve never trained I find something instinctive in it, somehow I’m able to imagine myself into the other person’s skin, to feel what they are feeling. Nurses come and go and make too many jokes about how it’s their turn for a massage next. I tell them to form an orderly queue, and we all laugh too loudly.  I throw myself into the task, lose myself for ages in rubbing his papery skin, the bones like sticks. In this I am able to express the care I struggle to put into words. My understanding of the power of this act – the kindness I am able to give without speech, through touch – would be lost on me if it wasn’t for Adrian. I don’t realise as I squeeze cream from a tube, take his rake thin leg in my hand and begin to rub it, that this is the last time I will ever see my grandfather. But later, I will be glad that we spent it together like this.

I found out about Adrian Howells’ death when I was home alone, sliding my thumb across the blue screen of my mobile phone in the minutes before sleep like I’ve so often told myself not to. Suddenly my stream was full of emotional status updates relating his passing, testimonials to Adrian and the impact he’d had. They were the kind of dispatches that usually accompany world disasters, earthquakes and tsunamis, and perhaps that’s because in the little corner of space we shared it really was like something seismic had happened. At 51, he had killed himself. When I learnt of his death, I cried.

In the weeks that followed there were tributes to him, so many tributes, people who knew him well and loved him and were bereft, and people who, like me, hardly knew him, but were touched by his art and his generosity. Andy Field recalled “his broad smile… the warmth and gentleness of his arms as they wrap you in a welcoming hello… a "how are you?" that really meant: How are you?”. Chris Dupuis said: “Adrian gave me a certain kind of hope…Maybe he recognized we were both oddballs and had to stick together. Or maybe he just cared a lot about people.” Battersea Arts Centre lit a candle for him and wrote: “He taught us about theatre, care, love, regret and hope. May he rest in peace.”

I talk to my friend about how it was to learn about his death like that, someone I knew, but didn’t know at all, really. The weight of the grief I felt, which didn’t seem like it should belong to me, of struggling to know how to express it. Being naked with him in that bathroom, then figuring out how to participate in mourning his death online: these were two disorientated intimacies in contexts I had no precedent for.

I wondered about the strength of my response, and was suspicious then about whether I’d in fact been duped into a false connection by his performance, the feeling of touch, the sense of risking something and having that risk met and protected, all adding up to more than the sum of its parts. I had felt so cared for, as if for those minutes we spent together I was the only person in his world, but so must the next person and the person after that, each demanding a genuine connection in exchange for the price of a fringe theatre ticket. And what of the people he instinctively disliked, for there must have been those, the people about whom he’d thought, I’d never want to go for a pint with you? What if that was me? What must it have cost him?

The internet tricks us into false senses of intimacy too. Through it I maintain a simulacrum of connection with 750 Facebook friends, the 1,487 people I follow on Twitter. There are people I wouldn’t say hello to in the street, but I’ve spent a good twenty minutes looking at pictures of their wedding, read their eulogy to a recently deceased relative, seen the ultrasound of their unborn child. I imagine I know them. It’s an illusion, of course. People aren’t their wedding photos.

The evening my friend and I spend discussing Adrian is a few days after the Paris massacres. On the night it happened, I was home alone, watching the news unfold on my laptop in bed, horrified. I was completely floored by the events, a genuine pain that was again disorientating, that I didn’t know what I ought to do with. I watched as grief unfolded against the window of my social media accounts, individuals who didn’t know anyone killed, but were moved to put into words their sorrow for what had happened and those suffering. Letting something flicker alight, because an acknowledgement, an expression of solidarity, felt important.

It all seemed insufficient - it was too quick and easy, it cost too little. An individual might update their networks about their sadness for the victims and their families, and in the next moment be searching amateur porn sites, or ordering extension cables on ebay. A genuine expression of care can’t be so easily packaged or moved along from.  

In the days that followed there were debates about this online, gerrymandering at the borders of sorrow. Bickering about Facebook capitalising on people’s desire to turn their profile pictures the red, blue and white of the Tricolor. There was condemnation of the undue weight given to these massacres as opposed to all the others that happen around the world everyday, condemnation of the media for failing to give all these other massacres adequate coverage, then the riposte that those making this criticism weren’t getting their news from a broad enough range of sources. On the night it happened, someone pulled a stunt: they posted a picture on Twitter of the Eiffel Tower in darkness: ‘Lights off on the Eiffel Tower for the first time since 1889’. It was nonsense – the Eiffel Tower’s lights are turned off every night - but nearly 30,000 people shared the post, and it was widely reported in the media. Everything about the hoax left me dizzy. I stayed silent.

The internet is an emotional wild west. There are no paradigms for how we ought to behave. Adrian saw his work as a counterpoint to the emotional dislocations caused by modern life, particularly our online interactions. “It’s such an irony that we’re so technologically advanced… but we’re not advanced in terms of nurturing each other. That’s where I come in,” he said.

In some ways, the artworks that he created, in all their glorious weirdness, how he asked us to be intimate with a stranger in fashions we are so unused to: these were emotional wild wests too. Adrian was at home in liminal spaces. In his earlier years he’d been a member of The Citizens’ company, known for its exploration of sexuality and gender, and had been a part of the experimental cabaret scene, in the guise of his drag alter ego, Adrienne. I imagine that these communities fostered an understanding of what it means to be conflicted, and that there can be beauty and strength and discovery in that. I suspect his work was made possible by that backdrop. It’s all allowed.

I think, again, of him in that bathroom, of my friend lying with him in bed on that rainy night, how what he seemed to be communicating was that in the midst of it all, of this muddling and unnavigable world, kindness can be a rudder. It seems a naïve strategy. But in the uncertain landscape we live in, where a night might begin with enjoying music in a concert hall and end with a leap from a top floor window to escape gunfire, it could be the best one we’ve got.

My friend speaks about her regret that she wasn’t able to give him something back. She received an email feedback form a few days after the performance, and didn’t complete it: it seemed too impersonal, too poorly fitted to the shape of her experience. The sad truth is we were ill prepared for the intimacy he offered, and didn’t know what to do with it. “Did it mean anything to him? Did he think about me, afterwards?” my friend wonders. It’s a conversation we can never now have.

My story Tuimaini has been published in Issue Three of The Wrong Quarterly - this is a little taster... 

Your earliest, greatest (and perhaps only) artistic act was performed on a late April afternoon soon before you learnt to speak.

Were you nearing two already then? Sitting at Grandpa’s table, your legs swinging freely beneath your chair. The house, cold, even in spring, filled with that faint pang of gas that always carries you back there. The overcooked, cooling meat succumbing slowly to Grandpa’s knife, his voice booming, pale plates quivering beneath the patient grasp of your family. Lunch, everyone knew, was served as an after thought to his politics. You watched the fat, slick Labrador watching his hand and salivating.

You yawned, turned your head away, didn’t listen to him speaking. Nairobi and Kampala and Mau Mau and Uhuru… the strange words had already become familiar, unlistened to.

It was too soon for you to understand the way one sentence can sometimes contain two truths, the way that stories can do battle with themselves. Too early to know that the act of putting into words can be a means of seeking sense in chaos.

You did not yet comprehend the mystery of time: that this man with hairs in his ears and nasal cavities, and the man who was present at the end of an empire, in Kenya and in Palestine, were one and the same. Like each of us a stitch that folds time back on itself, creases it- and then leaves it to run smooth again.

No one noticed you slip from the table, not even the dog responded to your tug of its tail, your invitation to play.

Outside the spring day was sunny and fresh. A damp smell of newly cut grass made you wrinkle your nose a bit and sneeze. You felt your family watching as you plodded across the patio, past the flowerbed where for a moment you stopped, bent down to prod a worm pink against the soil, crushed it under the heel of your mary janes. For the first time you felt the power of commanding a gaze.

Let me imagine the expression that played across that innocent face as you turned your back to the dining room window, lowered your pants, squatted in your animal way, farted and then deposited on your Grandpa’s flawless garden, a not insubstantial turd. The young artist: finding, in the absence of speech, a more succinct form of self-expression.  I like to imagine you smiling.

To read the rest, buy the magazine (in print! paper! not digital!). It is an object that will look damn sexy on your bookshelves even if you never get round to opening it... you can buy a copy here... 

Barry says it and everyone explodes.

Tina’s chair tips back. A shower of dry roasted goes flying. A fist is slammed down on the table. The quiet couple in the matching cardis glance up from their gammon and eggs.    

Vaz pats Barry hard on the back; his face red, neon lycra straining. I’ve always said you should be a comedian, he wheezes between guffaws.

You know how it feels to be in on the joke. You’ve chuckled at chain emails, found mirth in an internet meme.  There was that time they changed your screen saver to Esther Ranzen. The gift-wrapped sock. The Mills and Boon in the stationery drawer.

There was the summer you and Tina spent making puns from the names of the Beatles.  I’d Best be off, you’d type into Yahoo Messenger. Lenn-on me. You’re Paul-ing my leg. Stick with me baby, I’ll make you a Starr.

But it's the ungotten punchlines that are expanding outwards.

I suppose I should take up bowling.

Are you trained to use matches?

Rita Ora’s Toyota is stuck in the car park.

It’s like that party they had, to which you weren’t invited. I didn’t think it was your sort of thing, Tina said, when the photos were already on Facebook, Vaz in his elvis wig and aviators, Barry grinning with a jaegarbomb.

The laughter is spreading. Vaz is repeating it to a girl in a going out dress who didn’t quite catch what was said. Even the bar man’s at it, shaking his head while he pulls a pint of Strongbow. Tina glances up at you, her smile that wide constellation: Come on! she splutters. Rita Ora? Rita Ora is stuck in the car park!

Rita Ora. Rita Ora. Rita Ora.

You suggested it at the away day back in Summer, the midst of the heat wave, when to think of wool seemed an act of pure masochism. Stu claimed the idea as his own, then the others got on board.

For weeks you’ve been preparing: setting aside spreadsheets to craft paperchains. Hanging strings of cards no one has written in. Upending the shredder. Stu makes a poster on Photoshop: Mary and Joseph getting turned away at the inn. Should have gone to Jacksons, it says.

Each of you has kept your jumper secret. You tucked them in the backs of drawers and closets. Leagues of silver reindeer, dancing snowmen and Disney princesses have waited, imagining quick spreading grins. Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal! Everyone is elevated by knitwear.

When the day comes you barely want to unwrap it. But you’re greeted with squeals of delight. Stu throws an arm around you and does a thumbs up while Cathy takes an instagram. There’s Noddy Holder on the radio and mulled wine in the microwave.  

Later, you’ll close up early, go for curry at the place with the good pink coconut stuff. This should be a new tradition, you’ll say, and everyone will agree.

Most days, you tell white lies on tinder. Dread the question in the pub. No one invites an estate agent to a dinner party.

But now you have tinsel in your hair. Stu has a musical tie. Cathy is valuing properties based on their chimney girth. Glitter is spawning like a festive skin disease.

My new column for The Stage is online now....

“I'm reading 'If On A Winters Night A Traveller' for the first time. Guys. Ask yourselves. IS IT A LITTLE BIT WANKY.” - @ambermb, Twitter, 30 October 2015.

OK. Maybe not my finest contribution to the Twitter canon to date (although three people favourited it and this was way back before they’d even introduced those heart things so, y’know). In the two seconds’ thought I gave it before I wrote it, it struck me as a vaguely humorous thing to tweet, implying in a few words as much self-deprecation as criticism of the book: dismissing what is widely held to be one of the great works of Late 20th Century Literature in such a crude fashion is quite patently silly.

Nonetheless, it raised the hackles of some of my followers. The word ‘wanky’ is a little sensitive for those of us in the experimental arts world: it’s a term that gets used as a knee jerk response to anything that’s not immediately digestible, or easy to categorise. It can be used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, a permit to dismiss something without really engaging with what it’s trying to achieve (yes, guilty as charged). For some, it’s just plain disrespectful to the craft, hard work and passion that typically go into creating the work.

Am I wrong, then, to use the word? Should I heed my followers’ calls and expunge it from my vocabulary? Whilst I can relate to the unease about the term, an artist like Calvino is clearly too sophisticated to have been unaware that his book was liable to prompt responses like mine. If On A Winters Night A Traveller is designed to make us aware of our own experience of reading it – repeatedly wrong footing us and unsettling our understanding of our relationship to it. It’s deliberately alienating, provoking us to consider what constitutes a literary experience, and whilst the artist might hope his readership would cultivate a slightly more nuanced response, it’s almost a prerequisite of the project’s success that the reaction of some will be less sophisticated.

But at its heart there’s something more troubling about the word, and the sentiment it represents. It suggests a perceived exclusivity. I use the term in relation to If On A Winter’s Night… because I don’t feel like I’m 100% in on the joke: that all those people who love it so much identify something I don’t, and it makes me feel left out.

Ok, I’m going to digress here from Calvino because I haven’t actually finished the book yet, so I’ve probably done enough of a hatchet job on the literary criticism there for now. Instead I’m going to talk about something I do know about, and that’s experimental, formally innovative theatre. Because I can imagine that sometimes the feeling of watching something genuinely leftfield on stage for the first time can feel a bit like I felt when reading Calvino.

The fact is this: experimental theatre isn’t a parlour game. The aim is not to emerge with the most intelligent sounding reading with which to impress your date over a Peckham real ale post-show. There are no rewards for ‘getting it’.* Part of the wonder often lies in uncertainty, in discovering your own relationship to the work. What chimes, what doesn’t. This disorientation, the ambiguity of meaning in a world where so much is prescribed, is often the very basis of the appeal.

I’m not sure that we tend to go far enough to make this clear to audiences, especially those who are not regular arts attenders. Forest Fringe’s Andy Field introduced me to this amazing video of John Cage performing Water Walk on an 1960s American reality TV show, I’ve Got A Secret. I’m totally obsessed with it - I could watch it again and again for presenter Gary Moore’s pitch perfect introduction: “he takes it seriously, I think it’s interesting, if you are amused you may laugh, if you like it you may buy the recording”.

Maybe every theatre should just frame this and stick it over their doorway. As Andy has pointed out, it’s an absolutely brilliant introduction to an avant garde artistic experience because it invites the audience ‘simply to experience it, and even possibly to like it, without needing entirely to understand it’. The model theatre for me would be a space where a group of people can meet new ideas in a spirit of curiosity and with a willingness to respond honestly. It’s a simple, and as complicated, as that.  

I feel like the modern art world is way ahead of us in making a virtue of weirdness. Think of the YBAs, the deliberately courted controversy surrounding Saatchi’s 1997 Sensation Exhibition. It caused media outrage; it also generated unprecedented levels of public demand for work that was provocative, uncomfortable, and questioned our very notions of what constitutes ‘art’. It paved the way for the Tate Modern, which opened three years later.

In an article reflecting on the role that that organisation has played in transforming attitudes to modern art, Roya Nikkhah talks about openness, accessibility, proximity. She quotes Sandy Nairne, former director of programmes for Tate, on the thinking behind the decision to leave the Turbine Hall as a large open space, rather than breaking it up with a café or smaller galleries, “so that people could do their own thing in it - picnic on the floor or engage with the art.” It was a way of legitimising different kinds of interaction and response.

Nairne goes on to say: “Ending anything reverential about modern art was crucial, so we famously put on an art course for taxi drivers. The message was really clear - this was a place open to anybody who wanted to come in the door. It wasn’t talking down to them. It was allowing them to be part of that discussion. It could cater for art experts and people who knew very little about art alike.”

What accessibility means here is not changing the work itself to cater for the preconceptions of its viewers, rather it’s about creating a context for art that acknowledges and makes space for them, but also posits the possibility that the viewer may come away feeling differently.

This doesn’t answer the question of whether I should still be bandying about the word ‘wanky’. But I don’t think that I’ll jettison it from my literary arsenal any time soon. The impulse to say it strikes me as a rather a useful litmus test: a way of determining whether the work and its framing welcomes different kinds of literacy and engagement.

As for If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, the jury’s still out. I should probably finish reading it…