#contemporary work

At the start of June 2017, undergraduate Drama & Theatre Arts students participated in a workshop led by Writer and Performer Chris Thorpe on creating texts for performance. 1st Year Drama and Theatre Arts student James Dougan gives us his take on the experience…

Responding to the simple stimulus 'AN ACT OF PUBLIC VIOLENCE', Chris asked us to write a monologue in the third person present tense. Everyone chose different 'acts'. I wrote a piece about a school shooting, whilst other people explored relationships and gender. 

After these were written, we came back together and Chris expanded the brief: as a group, we were going to write a series of connected monologues based around the stabbing of a politician in Birmingham city centre. We then wrote fresh monologues. While I wrote a piece from the perspective of a man watching from his apartment above, the perspectives of children messing around and homeless men were also explored. These were then redrafted by placing brackets around what could potentially be discarded, though Chris stressed that no words were to be deleted, just discarded. Overnight, our 'homework' was to write a dialogue between two people exploring the failures of language to summarise that which cannot be summarised. Effectively, trying to put into words what can't be put into words. 

As all of this was going on, as a group we experimented with rule based performance, deciding on a performance 'frame' and using different guidelines (ie, 'you must raise your hand and be given a microphone to speak'), with the aim of combining these into a short performance at the end of the week.

Below is the monologue I wrote: 

The man watching from above is thirty-five years old, though he looks much older.

If the glass weren't there I'd think that maybe he'd be about to jump. I know that's a loaded assumption to make, but he's stood fifty meters above the ground wearing nothing but a white shirt (and socks), in an apartment looking like something I saw in a film once, with a window so vast and clean it may as well not be there. 

The floor makes it look as if he's floating. The marble is so clean, reflecting the city's skyline, and again so vast, it looks as if he's floating. Maybe it looks as if I'm floating too.

But there is a window separating him from the everything else so he won't - can't - jump, and he's stood close enough to the it so that every time he breathes it mists up the glass, and sends the smell of his breakfast back into his face. The glass is immaculately polished, not by him, so that even brushing a finger against it leaves a mark. It doesn't seem to bother him though, and he's now leant even more forward so that his forehead is completely resting against the glass, and if the glass weren't there he'd be close to tipping over completely.

Below him is everything else. (And everyone else within it). He looks from the way he's standing, silhouetted, like an astronaut, head encased within glass, staring out over a new world. He doesn't looks like the kind of person to go into the shops the apartment overlooks, but they form the valleys and canyons of this new world nonetheless, and the infinite swarms of people rushing everywhere are the microscopic inhabitants of this place.

The strangest thing about this is the clarity. You can see all the faces clearly, though the way he's craning his head suggests that if he had a decent camera he'd take it even further, intensifying this canvas into something smaller, an image more focused than the sprawl before him at the moment.

His head moves like a grasshopper's to see someone parting the crowd, as possible as it is at this time of day. Or is it the middle of the day? His phone is nowhere to be seen, and there aren't any clocks in the apartment. From up here, the man who the crowd is parting for looks like an idol, (or a warrior coming home from some ancient battle, chain-mail scarred and bloodied). Trailed by a camera crew, he gives the impression of someone wholly at ease in his situation - even from up here. Even though his blue tie is at odds with the white of his shirt, his rolled-up sleeves and the jacket slung over his shoulder (is an attempt at phoney casualness that) makes the man watching fifty meters up sigh.

Suddenly, like a virus breaking into a cell, (because from his almost vertical perspective the people do look like cells in an immune system), a woman has broken through the crowd and begun to talk at the man. Not to him, but at him. I can see that even from up here she looks pissed. (Her fingers are filling the air in front of her). But then, as the two women go round to help her there's suddenly someone else in the image.

A small finger hooks onto the politician's shoulder, and he goes to turn to look at whatever it is behind him, but before he can complete the rotation his head just jerks up, like he's a car hitting a speed-bump. 

And fifty meters above the ground in an apartment like a film-set, the world goes still. The politician and the woman with blonde hair - they just stay there, both connected by something held under the man's jaw. (Maybe the man watching thinks it's beautiful, in a way. Even from all the way up here).

And nobody really moves until they put the signs together: the flecks of red against the woman's white blouse and the drops on his exposed arms, the fact the politician's eyes have rolled backwards into his head and his mouth is moving slightly as if to talk. One of the women's mouth stretches open into a scream. (She properly goes for it), and even from up here behind the glass the man hears it like steel on rough concrete. The man watching from fifty meters up lets out a little wince (as if he's just found a hair in his soup).

The politician in the once-white shirt takes a few steps backwards as if the woman with the dyed blonde hair has just spilt half a pint down him, then falls back as the crowd surges around him. Something, which at this point can safely be assumed is the hilt of a knife becomes visible.