The Brighton Festival tapers off behind us in a tail of smoke.
And Edinburgh looms.
Also the possibility of a visit to the Aarhus Festival in Denmark early September.

The Brighton experiment was exciting, exhausting and ultimately satisfying. Had a brilliant team in the Fire Cracker Lucy Moore, the inspired Geoff Hense and the two luminous Emmas. Also the pleasure of my mother and brother all the way from Australia for just one hectic week! Midwife Emma Kilbey totally pulled it out of the bag for a last minute bit of directorial brilliance and support on The Growing Room, even when her own play Shift was opening the very next night! She rushed off afterwards to hang telephone receivers from the theatre ceiling.
As you do.
She is a good woman that one.

Sadly the Brighton Festival free sheet didn’t end up in the hands of the audience for The Growing Room, so there was no published evidence of our thanks. There will be a long list (following this sprawl) of all the ones who should have seen their names there.

All three pieces went down very well. There’s a lovely review of The Art of Catastrophe here. Bringing it back to life was a total treat. I’d forgotten how beautiful a thing is is to be in the rehearsal room with the deep instincts of the whip smart Emma Roberts; how much humour there is in the tarriest of tar black places. There is a glorious review of The Growing Room by Nione Meakin who totally got it and loved it. here.

It is always such a relief to know a piece basically works and translates. Tricky thing, this solo lark; the most important ingredient, the audience, being the mixing desk or antennae through which this all translates or doesn’t. Sinks or swims. And that being the point of it all after all.

Alison Thompson from The Sunday Times listed the Triptych as her pick of the entire Festival and Fringe which was a lovely surprise.

So all good and after a little more development on the third and final piece, we will be ready to put all of them on the road together.
At least that is the plan.

I was concerned about the stamina required (mine and the audiences) to program all three pieces in a single day as we had first imagined. The physical and emotional train wreck of The Art of Catastrophe being potentially as exhausting to perform as it is to experience! Audience feedback has suggested people want time to reflect and digest as the pieces are quite intense and complex.

To unpack it all, I went with David to the Hay on Wye festival in Wales where he was doing a talk on Utopias at the How The Light Gets In philosophy festival. This is a small festival that runs beside its more famous literary bohemoth big brother. The literary festival, now run by The Telegraph and Sky news, has been sold off to corporate iconography, trade fair aesthetic and giantism. Pretty vile actually and a rude shock to those of us who had been lazing around in a tent in a field by a sparkling river, right next door only moments before.

An unexpected treat was seeing the great poet and literary meanderer Iain Sinclair talk on the psychogeography of London and the UK. Really kicked off for me a desire to play with resonances of landscape. The symbology of landforms.

England has always felt to me to be a liminal landscape of soft focus, damp, unclear vistas and soupy encounters. There is a yearning for heat, rock, deep water and open space. Also thinking about the shadow lands of Australia somehow residing in the bleached, harsh and un-arable desert. The hinterland at the edges of every white Australian’s consciousness; black history stretching far beyond white collective city unconscious. Our inherited European dreaming of cities and maps, paved pathways and pantheons. The ghosts at all our edges.

Also about how we need our opposite (or an other) to flourish. To come up against. Spar with or simply behold. As an individual, tribe, species etc.

It is strange then, that i don’t feel more at home here.

Ran into the lovely, rangy and laconic Howe Gelb back stage at the Dome one afternoon, both of us in pre-gig preparations and snuck him into one of the showings of Steal Compass, Drive North, Disappear prior to his own show later that night. I would have returned the favour, but was busy washing chalk from theatre walls in preparation for Caroline Horton, who was next up with her pure and beautiful play You’re not Like The Other Girls, Chrissy.

Howe declared himself a fan and pushed us Aarhus’s way. Lets hope it works. It turns out he is a bit of a magic man.

A few recommendations from my post-festival treats: Spymonkey and their Love In. Most deliciously funny was their live rendition of this which still makes me laugh out loud sitting here at my desk and Petra Massey’s inspired gymnast. Liz Aggiss’s splendid Survival Tactics for the Anarchic Dancer and Seth Kriebel’s The Unbuilt Room (further excursions into psychogeography, but this time traversing the very ground beneath our feet). Also really enjoyed Matt and Silvia’s knowingly rough and mischeivous Naive Dance Masterclass presented under their moniker Inconvenient Spoof. What i am left with is this: What is the point of any art if there is not some kind of joy behind it? Even sitting quietly and secretly behind the scenes. Life is really too short for the other.

Amidst other post festival come-down treats, had the the total pleasure of seeing Howe play last week in London at the Union Chapel with A Band of Gypsies and special guest appearances by John Parish and the belated discovery of the delicious Sarah Blasko. Also Australian and Brighton resident and possessor of quite fine and rare vocal bliss. Its quite a thing to watch these guys play together. Their joy is so apparent and the obvious delight in each other and those rare times great skill marries with animal instinct and grace. All held together by Howe’s gruff warm self effacing banter and natural magic. Inspiring stuff. Howe and I managed to annex a sliver of time to meet over several dangerously good single malts and then the horror of the late night / early morning train back home.

So that’s May and the month that was.

Accepting some kind of peace: that this ferocious, burning and incessant questioning might be counterpointed with a bit more acceptance of the unknowable and the unresolvable. Having come to the end of one long meditation on the struggle to love, these new shapes and questions have begun to arrive about land, family and belonging. So lets see where that investigation leads us.

A long one this one.
Next time won’t be such a gap.