What can happen in an empty theatre.....

Standing on the stage, looking at the rows of empty seats, I can’t help but imagine them full of people and wonder what they’ll make of this strange thing we’re creating.

When I was just a writer and would sit among the audience I’d be struck by the weight of preoccupation they’d be carrying.

It’s strange to imagine now, but at the beginning there were no computers and certainly no mobile phones.

Our information about the world came from such different sources; and our capacity to communicate with each other was so much more limited.

I was very struck in those days by the fact that even though most of the people who came to theatres lived peaceful and prosperous lives there was still so much unhappiness.

Preoccupation and unhappiness that my words had to break through somehow…

I thought maybe it was because at some level people knew, or were uneasily aware of, the injustice of the economic system on which  our prosperity was based.

And now I’m also aware of how much of that prosperity is built upon slavery.

It’s as if the unspeakable horror of that practice is like a suppurating sore, an unhealed psychic wound under all our consciousness.

And because at heart we feel bad about ourselves, it’s so tempting to find someone we can condemn as being far worse. And to do that in the hope that it will somehow make us feel better.

And since now we all have our mobile phones in our pockets and in our bags, witch hunts and scapegoating have become so accessible to us.

All the time…

I know, as a trans person, that there are well funded and organised groups ready to attack or denounce me.

And not just me, but all of us. We, or our friends, or our children… we all could so easily become targets.

And then my little phone has a nasty habit sometimes of telling me: “News for you”. And then foisting a headline on me on some new act of cruelty or folly.

Perhaps a headline about our prime minister’s breezy contempt for the laws he is charged with upholding.

Or perhaps news of the breakdown of our health services; the breakdown of our legal services; the breakdown of our environment.

The destruction of the natural world that upholds us.

And all of us enter the theatre with this sense of catastrophe hanging over us.

All of which makes me think that the people who will be sitting in these seats won’t just be worried or preoccupied; but almost in a state of trauma.

And maybe I should try to distract them.

Or maybe I could trigger their distress to grab their attention, or stoke their capacity for hatred or for rage.

But I don’t want to do any of that.

Me and this audience will meet each other a week today.

I want to help all of us, somehow.

Help us open our eyes to where we are in this place of profound and incredible change. Its horror and its beauty. Its hope and its despair.

Help us remember that we are in this together: that we are not altogether helpless.

That change is possible.

And that change begins with ourselves.