Re-visiting Bohemia of the mind...

Photo by Marius Cern on Unsplash

RODOLPHE I remember the room, high above the Paris rooftops.
I remember the sound of the city like the sea.
I remember the damp. I remember the cold.
The cold damp nights of Bohemia.
Bohemia: a country of the mind.
A country of art.
Bordered on the north by poverty
On the east by hope
On the west by love
And on the south by hunger and despair!

This is from my 1994 play “La Vie de Boheme”.

It’s not what I meant to post.

I meant to post the first instalment of my “Ines de Castro” as a paid subscription.

And I’ve failed, again, to navigate the mechanisms that enable me to do this.

Doing so involves prioritising my work as a commodity to be marketed and sold… which of course in a way it is, and I should be sensible and embrace this as a notion.

But can’t. I just can’t.

And I’ve posted these first lines from my play about starving artists in 19th century Paris who, like me, were in revolt against the materialism of their times, because it suits my dilemma with this newsletter,

And it suits this week, week zero of the fringe, when like so many other artists I am half out of mind trying to prepare for our show to open.

Open in a festival that applies the capitalist economic model to the arts in all its brutality.

So the story of Rodolphe and his fellow artists is the story of most of the artists on the Fringe: working for next to no pay to create work that will make money for other people…

The story of my life, I guess. When I wrote this play I was no longer fashionable, no longer able to write original plays for the theatre, because nobody wanted them.

We were slipping further into debt and might even have lost our house, if it weren’t for this utterly unexpected commission from Clive Perry of Pitlochry in 1993.

At the time, Pitlochry was the most solidly bourgeois theatre in Scotland…

But they asked for, and enjoyed, this story of starving artists…

Life is often strange.