In Sickness and in Health.

 

I think theatre is sick.

Or is it our leaders who are sick?

Like you, I never felt that I belonged in the theatre, but then nor was I for the street. I have always been a little bit afraid of theatre, or bored by it, but I think I am more afraid of the street.

A tendency to shyness and/or the history Modernity has bequeathed me a fear of being found loitering – a woman in the street is a figure of ambiguity. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t want anyone asking me what I am doing here, all alone.

Is that why I cannot belong in theatre? Why I have to burrow into my books?

But after reading pvi I am not quite done with live art. Really alive art. I am thinking that there could be a theatre of the inner body – not some kind of fake simulation, but an investigatory theatre of the lungs, the bones, the bowel, the heart.

This is not a new move of course. There have been journeys into the body in theatre and performance. Artists have swallowed tiny cameras; an eye on the end of a tube has gone in search of illuminated polyps projected onto gallery walls. There have been surgical events in the gallery – incisions, facelifts, implants. Much has been made of tissue cells and sutures, of magnifying glass.

But I lack confidence in this body as theatre. I have little faith, but a smidgeon of hope – for example, I will never stop hoping that I might see my father again, although he is dead 10 years this September.

Is that too much to hope? After all, theatre likes to deal in fake characters, idée passé. Maybe theatre can bring my dad back, clad him up in his thick grey suit, tie his tie and lace his shoes and prick him and poke him … and, well, push him out on stage, where he will have to watch where he steps because he has a bad leg because of a hemiplegia from a botched operation on his brain a very long time ago. (I remember the uneven seam arcing across his cauterized skull, like a fault in the ground. The soft left side of his face sliding downwards, like a collapsed cliff.)

I am not quite sure how theatre will bring back my mother. How will she enter? A shift in genre? Stage left on a palanquin with her four children upholding her? Or will she totter in on heels, already tipsy, diaphanous, her curls stiff with Schwarzkopf spray?

I like the idea of a palanquin. There are some people – families, for example – who need to hide things. I am all for a theatre of the interior, for a theatre of stealth and thievery.

I do like your games, pvi, and I believe The Hague is almost ready for such a proposition. But first we must determine the health of these World Leaders of ours.

I have outlined my suggestions for interior investigation below.

But they worry me, these games of ours. In what modality will we play them? Are we allowed to laugh? Is this serious play: I dare you to touch the electric fence.[1]

 

 

 

MRI: A game for world leaders to play

The intention is exploratory. What will we find? And in the world of medical over-servicing, there is every chance we will find something.

1. Take off all your clothes and put on the pale blue gown (arms first/tie at the back).
2. Put on the headphones and lie on the table. You must remain very still, as the machine is extremely sensitive to disturbance.
3. Don’t worry about those heavy lead weights on your lower limbs; they will hold you still in case you want to get up and leave.
4. Don’t leave.
5. And don’t look around. I can assure you everyone is represented, and they are all hearing the same thing, more or less.
6. I have to say, some of you look very small and old without your clothes. The body is so much more insubstantial and yet more real in the flesh. How can that be?
7. The women – there are a few – are the most at home in their gowns.
8. Keep still, please. We are now going to raise the bed on which you are lying and press a button to move the platform into the magnetic resonance imaging machine. The strange pulsing noise you hear inside the tunnel is not the sound of some alien invading force bent on world domination – fingers off the button, now! – but the sound of hydrogen atoms emitting a radio signal which is measured by a receiving coil. I assure you, everyone is hearing the same thing.
9. We are looking for dis-ease, for something malevolent, terminal, something that will cause you to falter, something that will render you unfit for the job ahead.
10. Chances are we will find it.
11. Here we go.
12. Some of you are shaking. One or two are crying. Why are you so worried? You are all in this together. You could have talked to each other in the change room; you could have exchanged nervous pleasantries, put each other at ease, agitated for a collective protest to such invasive procedure, refused to undress. But you chose not to.
13. And now look where you are: all alone in the scanner.
14. And it’s not looking good.

 

 

 

[1] Eisen, G., 1990. Children and play in the Holocaust: Games among the shadows. Univ of Massachusetts Press.