I’m a single lesbian looking for a lover. I’m 44. My favourite food is chops. I make art to make money. It’s true. So I can have an everyday job. I need people to know that I have a voice and I want to use it. So I do it in the theatre. If you gave me all the money in the world, to make a show. I’d shoot myself. I can’t work under pressure! I make theatre because I want to break free from the demons inside me.
Theatre changes me as a person, that’s what theatre does it changes ya’, it is something else, like sliding down a slide. Theatre is about making something special, and rememberable. You have to see it over and over again because every time it is different. You always get excited about the next thing that is going to happen in the theatre. The actors are so soft and beautiful and front-full. And you know that the first line that comes out of their mouth, you won’t forget that line throughout the entire play.
What should theatre be like? Never a part two. No interval. Right through an hour show and that’s it. Like a rainbow on a sunny day. Bright and happy and warm and short. And they should feel satisfied. It’s like an orgasm, alright, you work up to it, and when you have an orgasm you feel satisfied. You work up to it, you work up to it, you work up to it, and then kaboom, you are seeing more than rainbows. That’s what theatre should be like.
Theatre should not be about presidents. He just raves on about Making The World A Better Place, Making The World A Better Place, Making The World A Better Place. Theatre might be about everyday things. Like not just at work. But like, like you are going to work, and you are on the train, and you look up from your phone, and there is someone on the train track with a trolley, and you are screaming at that person to get off the track and yeah, but the train has already gone past.
Theatre should be for the people. For the people to have a voice. And not feel afraid of that. In small metal objects I could never say h…hu…(human) Yeah, and people laughed. And I wasn’t trying to make a comic out of it. I just can’t say it. I zone myself into the audience and forget that I am onstage. I was really tired. That is the worst. I get all sooky and that.
Theatre needs to come from listening to other people. Listen to their stories. Get a computer full of words, and try to make a script out the words that people say to them. True stories. In-ya-face kind of stories. Stories from the heart and the mind. Stories that are deep down inside of you that you need to produce on stage. Stories that you never forget for a long time.
My taxi driver this morning, he was a single bloke, lives in a house. I asked him questions like ‘You got a wife?’ he said ‘No.’ I said ‘You got a dog?’ he said ‘No.’ I said ‘You got kids?’ he said ‘No.’ I said ‘What do you do in life?’ He says ‘I read books and I drive taxis.’ I said ‘That must be boring.’ He says ‘It’s not. That’s life.’ He said to me ‘Have a really nice day. You are a very special woman’. I said ‘You should really get a cattle dog you seem lonely’.
Theatre is for the rich. The poor. For the loneliness. For the forgiveness.
1 September 2017