What Does It All Mean?

One of the wonderful things about doing a production is that there are quite unexpected, delightful spin-offs that could never be planned for, yet come to seem almost inevitable aspects of the whole process. A little conversation I overheard the other day between a younger and older student reminded me of this. They were amusing themselves asking each other what exactly the plays they were involved in actually meant, neither of them being too sure. The situation was summed up in the plaintive question from one: But how do you perform in something when you don't understand what it means?

It wasn't the only conversation of this nature I heard, and I noted some fascinating ideas of what certain aspects of each play were supposed to mean which sounded to me wonderfully inventive and occasionally quite wrong-headed (though none the worse for that.) In some quarters I'd imagine there was a fair amount of exasperation over the obscurities of what we were doing, though I must say I have a bit of a problem genuinely relating to those feelings since I'm the kind who actually enjoys not 'getting' something and struggling to come to terms with it.

My answer to the question at the end of the first paragraph above, by the way, is to pretend you understand it, perform it, and see what happens. It's surprising how often just trusting the material leads you to some kind of resolution. And it's also interesting just how often you end up feeling you know what it means without being able to explain adequately what it means.

Sometimes there's a disturbing strangeness to all this. The young people I work with now are all intelligent, in many cases highly intelligent, and so there's a natural expectation that they will bring some understanding to even the most seemingly recalcitrant material. But I've also worked with youngsters in the past who were not in any sense academically able yet could bring a subtle sophistication to performance that would have been quite beyond most of the adults teaching them.

I never quite resolved the puzzle: where did their 'knowing' come from, and how were they so effortlessly able to elicit meaning from stuff that in terms of any form of assessment of which I know lay beyond their comprehension? Don't you just love impossible questions?