Moments

Ferdinand often uses the word 'moments' in directing the cast, in the sense of creating dramatic, meaningful, usually funny, moments on stage. It's a useful term and after the enjoyment of seeing Made in the Middle Kingdom finally reach its audience it's obvious we created many moments in the show. In every show I've ever done there's at least one moment that resonates powerfully in memory. The one that most stands out for me in this show, and I suspect for Ferdinand, is not a funny one at all, but, for me, a moment of the odd sort of magic that can happen in theatre when everything comes together. In this case a confluence of lighting, costume, the storyline, and fine acting. It was when Edward, as the tiger, finally shed his costume and delivered the 'moral' of the tale - the utterly trite, but profoundly truthful: He who knows who he is, and does the best he can / He is the happy man. I suppose it had something to do with an effect we never planned for: the unexpected frailness of the actor emerging from that bulky costume. And something that was always there: the truthfulness of the performance. But it invested the words with the power of the reality latent within them.

That curious ability of drama (all art, I suppose) to pull back the veil of the surfaces we inhabit to peek at the light, or darkness, of what's behind, seems to me beyond analysis, and it seems to work only in the moment. The memories left are potent, but not the same.

The curiously satisfying yet shocking smashing of our 'Ming' vase in Black Comedy was of the same order - in that case fueled by the improvisational quality of something deliriously destructive taking place that we'd never actually been able to rehearse. I suppose that was a glimpse of the dark side.

I think (and it's not in any way an original thought) the ability of drama to achieve such disturbing magic was at the heart of theatre in ancient Greece. This was brought home to me, oddly enough, in a reading of Aeschylus's The Oresteia, rather than an actual performance. When I say 'brought home' I'm not talking about any kind of knowing of the intellect - I'm talking of the actual experience, the cliched shivers down the spine, the glimpse of the real. I was reading Ted Hughes's translation of The Eumenides, in a crowded hawker centre one lunchtime in a break from a workshop, and had got to the bit about the Kindly Ones, the Furies, being invited to reside in Athens and I saw what those lucky Athenians saw all those years ago - the dreadful and wise powers that live amongst us, and just how fragile, just how close to the edge we are. Those Greeks certainly knew a thing or two.