Our fragile forms of resistance....

(A letter to all theatre makers everywhere)

It feels like it’s becoming harder and harder to live in Britain right now.

Each day some new piece of disgusting corruption comes to light that goes unpunished;

Or some new, cruel, and unspeakably stupid course of action is proposed by the government that goes unopposed.

And it all just goes on and on and there seems to be no way of stopping it.

And the weather gets colder, and we don’t really know if we can afford to heat our houses, but some of us just heat them anyway, while many others can’t, and the energy companies’ profits just keep growing.

And so many of us are angry and despairing.

There is a kind of cynical and weary despair going round that is one of the most powerful weapons the authorities have left.

They don’t have much else.

Perhaps they don’t need much else…

I’m lucky because for five days out of the last fortnight I’ve been making theatre.

One of the many things that’s frustrated me about working in Scottish Theatre over the years is that once a play goes in front of an audience there’s never any chance of learning from it.

But an audience teaches you so much about what works and what doesn’t, and I’ve always had the sense that maybe the most important rewriting should happen after the first run.

But the insane and self destructive economics of the theatre industry never let that happen.

And that’s one reason I wanted us to form our own company to perform “The Not So Ugly Duckling” so that we could give ourselves the chance to apply the lessons we learnt during the first runs of performance earlier in the year.

What’s made it all the better has been to work with people I respect and love - my co-writer and performer Maria MacDonell and our director Ian Cameron.

We’ve been working in an amazing place called the Granton:Hub, in the old management block of the Medelvic Car Factory, where they built electric cars in the 1900’s.

It struck a deep chord in me, this place, because I know that when we lived in our commune, Susie and I, we would have loved to be part of it.

There are so many traces of the idealism that began it all over the walls…

The circus school in Pilton, the history workshop determined to recover and celebrate Granton’s industrial past, the community news papers, the community garden. The patch workshop that was being put together by the two lovely volunteers while we were there. The alternative health clinic. The food bank…

It must be a struggle to keep this place afloat, I can’t help thinking, but I also know that its presence in the community really matters. To try to create a sense of community and to act as a catalyst for change…

We’re a bit of an endangered species too, I can’t help thinking, us theatre makers.

Part of what we’re doing here, as it turns out, is standing by and trying to comfort through our working together our wounded comrade who is bleeding from the rejection of a funding application.

A funding application rejected on such flimsy, such spurious and such utterly inaccurate grounds it feels as if the rejection letter has been sent to the wrong company.

A brutal rejection, as these tend to be, that absolutely lacks any consideration or care for the impact on the mental health of the artists receiving it whose livelihood it is often destroying.

I know the organisation involved has good people in it doing their best under impossible conditions…

I also know that the Tories have always loathed arts subsidy, and hated the public bodies responsible for distributing it, just as they hate every other once great public organisation whose success contradicts their vile ideology and which they have therefore decided to destroy.

Organisations like the Arts Council, the BBC… and the NHS.

Their technique is always the same: bit by bit denying the funds that allow these organisations to function effectively, putting their right wing creatures in positions of authority, and slowly but surely choking them to death.

And I know that the other problem we have here in Scotland is that we have so far failed to muster sufficient faith in ourselves and determination to form our own government.

And beyond all that, our artists have tended to internalise the contempt in which the ruling class holds us and so collaborate in our destruction.

Divide and rule has always been the guiding principle of British imperialism and we, too, allow ourselves to be divided against each other as we compete for the miserable scraps of funding that in the long term only weaken us further.

I wonder when this will stop.

I wonder when we will say: we can’t go on like this.

I wonder when we will come together and demand what is our right in a way that cannot be refused.

Because, after all, we play a vital part in  ensuring the well-being of the world….

“When you deprive people of theatre”, Lorca said, “it’s as if you’re depriving them of bread”.

And he was right.

Meanwhile, far from such grandiloquence, the three of us keep working in this room with its fading cuttings, working in our painstaking way through the script.

I’m proud of our Not So Ugly Duckling. Proud of the team that came together to make it happen, and proud of the work we all did together.

But I suppose you could say our little play doesn’t amount to much.

It’s just the two of us on an empty stage with a bench.

Conjuring up pictures in our audiences’ imaginations…

It’s not going to win any awards, I imagine, and it’s not going to make us much money and it won’t make it to the West End or to Broadway…

But we know it matters.

It’s about being queer, being old, being young… being human and trying to be real.

It’s already given pleasure and brought comfort to many people, and, given half a chance, could do the same for many more.

As it happens, its future is uncertain. We can’t claim to know how or where we will perform it again.

But getting it right still matters.

All the world asks of us, I’m beginning to think, is that we turn up and do the best we can.

What happens next, what happens to the work, is ultimately outside our command.

And, weirdly, perhaps doesn’t in the end that’s not what matters so much.

It’s doing it that’s important.

Doing it, and being there.

Because it’s the act of creation that matters.

Ian, our director, says that when theatre people meet together it’s as if we light a candle.

And we must pass it on.

Pass it on.

Pass it on….

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