EACH OF US
2013
A businessman falls for
the quietest woman in the world.
An encounter at a party makes him
question his character.
A group of collectors show him how and
why his story will end.
Funny and
romantic, cryptic and surreal, poetic
and uplifting; in a mixed-up world,
populated by self-conscious bees,
cigregrettes and corporate thwarts,
how can you stop yourself creating a
social catastrophe of your own life?
My
last solo theatre piece was Not
Everything is Significant in 2008 and it
sometimes takes a while to get something
new together.
Five years is ages though. Sorry.
How I work on my shows involves
transcribing long lists of images and
moments and jokes and lines of dialogue.
Most of them are made up, but some come
from real world observations. They’re
then stirred together in my brain and on
bits of paper and typed up, examined,
edited, re-written, thrown away,
recovered and shuffled around. And then,
somehow, they tell me what story they’re
all part of. That’s when the work
begins.
I
first performed scenes of what is now
Each of Us on 25th May 2010 at a
friendly music night called Totally Acoustic Live.
They consisted of the section where the
narrator meets Radium in the canteen,
and part of the bit in the flat with the
slow motion car bomb. The opening
prologue with the party and the kid and
the ex-box was first performed at
Interrobang‽, a groovy performance and
spoken word club, on 27th September
2011, and the whole piece was read to an
invited audience at the Leicester Square
Theatre on 15th December 2012.
Excerpts were sent out to members of my
mailing list over the previous couple of
years too. They would have read all the
different titles the story went through:
The Options, This is My Treasure and The
Earth From Space were all tried on and
discarded.
On stage, the piece was played in a
weird gallery-like space. The stage
furniture was a bench and at the back of
the space was a reproduction of an
amazing painting by the artist Kerry
Brewer. Her work offers the briefest
glimpses into the shadows and twists in
our reality; you shouldn’t think of them
as pictures but as spells. Her online
gallery is HERE.
The awesome score was by Simon Oakes and
Mark Moloney and was played live along
with the performance at the 2013
Latitude Festival and at Green Man in
2014.
Erica Whyman not only directed the piece
with her usual magic touch and made the
stage show fantastic to perform, but she
also suggested essential re-writes and
clarifications. Malcolm Rippeth lit the
show moodily and ingeniously, and Kat
Hoult was fantastic managing and
operating it every day. Andy Lane took
the striking photograph for the poster
and the publicity was designed by the
excellent Stephany Ungless.
The story itself was inspired by a few
things I’ve grabbed from the world these
days, from people’s self-obsessions to
bees and little red lights. Sorry if it
feels a little melancholy – I thought it
was an interesting direction to take it
in. An early draft was even more
downbeat and Ballardian. Different
people find different ways to describe
the ending – it’s sort of a Rorschach
Test of the soul; the narrative gene in
active mode, if you like. I have a
feeling as to what happens next – there
are clues in the text – but it’s nice to
leave the moment as it is, hanging in
time.
The first real run-out of the show was
at the Kings Arms in Salford as part of
the 2013 Greater Manchester Fringe
Festival and then it was on to Latitude.
The fantastic people at the Pleasance in
Edinburgh had booked the show for a
month in August, and although it was
difficult to build an audience after
five years away, I had a wonderful time.
I also performed it at the Tobacco
Factory in Bristol in December 2013.
In 2014 the terrific Show and Tell
booked me on a London Roam – five fringe
venues over a couple of weeks – as
well as a run at the Burton Taylor
Theatre in Oxford. In the summer I
performed it with Mark and Simon playing
the score live at Green Man, and solo at
the first ever Whit Lit Festival in my
home town of Whitstable, and at Port
Eliot. My last show of the year was in
Chester as part of the Chester
Literature Festival.
2015 saw the first international
performance of Each of Us at the Teatro
del Lido di Ostia, Italy. The script was
brilliantly translated by Francesca
Montanino of Offrome and I played the
show under projected surtitles. It was
brilliant to take the piece to such a
friendly and generous audience.
I also performed it at Residenza IDRA in
Brescia in December 2015 as part of the
Wonderland
Festival. It was a double bill
with Tre Desideri (the Italian version
of Three
Wishes) and on the following day I
taught a workshop about solo show
conception, writing and performance. It
was awesome.
If you’re interested in future live
performances of this or any of my other
pieces, the excellent Tom Searle now
puts together tours for me. His website
is located at www.showandtelluk.com
and he has stacks of great people doing
terrific shows.
"RIGHT NOW SHE
WAS A DISCLAIMER WRITER; BUT SHE DIDN'T WRITE ALL
DISCLAIMERS"Read a script extract from Each of Us
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