Life Is Theatre, Theatre Is Life

Thoughts about performative behaviour on stage, at work, and in life

Photo by Johannes Hofmann on Unsplash

1.

The carriage, a mild soporific with its sun-glass windows, woven wool recliner-chairs and warm hum, was so beautifully engineered that the only indication of velocity was the mountainous landscape cinema-ing past.

We sat opposite each other, a small table between us, she hurtling backwards and I rushing forwards. The window intermittently vacuuming into blackness before exploding back to full colour again, as we sipped our teas through tiny holes and the train dove in and out of tunnels like a joyful dolphin.

I had been watching her eyes and her hands as she emphasised and embellished, stressed the gravity, or the comedy, or the unworldliness. But by the time she thrust her head forward at the climax of her story, wearing a wide-eyed expression of astonishment, her palms in full Ta Daaaaa, my attention had branched and I was lost.

Of course she had seen I was drifting off, my eyes a lighthouse in the fog, my half-hearted attempts to reanimate my expression merely flagging the obvious. She leaned slowly back in her seat, her palms still open and her eyes firmly on me as she smiled and said, “You’re not even listening.”

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking, or, to be more explicit, I watched my thoughts rising.

I had noticed a fellow passenger who was the absolute spitting image of Jacque Clément. I didn’t bother to point him out because I knew she had no idea who Jacque Clément was, but for me, seeing this lookalike released a startling avalanche of spontaneous thought. But as I said, I can’t take credit, I’m mostly an audience member applauding my unbidden thoughts as they unfold.

Clément had been an actor on stage and television when television was just stage acting with cameras. Some said he was an infuriating ball of demonic energy with no patience for lesser actors. Others said he was an absolute angel who’d do anything for you. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. What I did know was that Clément was an actor who understood acting as a performative experience for the actors and for the audience.

In the Clément School the audience know that the actors are acting, the actors know the audience knows, the audience knows the actors know, and on and on. Nobody breaks rank. Which means everyone is transported through the narrative together in a collaborative experience of multiple mental states all encapsulated in a play. It’s a communal experience.

Within this elegant arrangement there’s a small and beautiful space that opens, a strange and intangible space where the real magic happens as actors push and prod their roles, and themselves, and the audience, daring each other to reveal their edges, to reveal the nature of their own reality, and to challenge (or reinforce) the norms of the historical and cultural time. And people think about themselves and their roles. Art reflects life, and life reflects art.

There was something very human about Clément’s performances with his barely hidden vulnerability, and his subtle yet shrewd implication that we are all being performers, and audiences, all of the time.

These were the things going through my mind as I sat hypnotised by her eyes, whilst her hands were seemingly shooing away small birds and the landscape flew by like never-ending depth-of-field zoetrope.

I realised I hadn’t been listening, and the fact that I hadn’t been listening became a thought, and I was then struck by the thought that love is such an deep spectral experience and I thought about how happy she was to find that top in a flea market, and how I felt happy just to witness her happiness, and then I felt the idea forming that, when compared to Clément’s time, the relationship between actor and audience has changed. It’s not as collaborative anymore. Somehow, the nature of screen acting with its broader spectrum of conscious capture, and its powerfully manufactured intimacy, had somehow demoted the audience.

Now it feels like audiences are invited to drown in the performance of the actors, they’re asked to forget that actors are acting and they’re transported through the narrative all alone, as individuals. Somehow, audiences have become less valuable to the performative experience, no longer essential in the same way. The social collaboration has broken in some mysterious intangible way. That little space has closed. Audiences have gone from actively sailing in the wind of theatre to being transported along in company ships, expected to passively look out the window and merely enjoy the view.

And the thought occurred to me that this breaking down and closing of social spaces happens in so much of life now. And then I noticed a wistful pensiveness beginning to brew underneath these thoughts, so when, at that very moment, the train once more dove into a tunnel and the world vacuumed away to blackness, as if a curtain had fallen, I chuckled silently as I thought of the theatrical beauty of the universe and its never ending tricks.

2.

“Ok, I wasn’t listening. But it’s not my fault,” I say with a glint, “There’s a guy down there that looks exactly like Jacque Clément…”

“Who is Jacque Clément?” sipping her tea, half-listening and half looking through her bag for earbuds.

“…some actor from the past, doesn’t matter, but his Jacque Clémentishness buried me in an avalanche of thought. It’s his fault. He’s to blame!”

“So, there’s a guy down there that looks like some actor from the past, and it’s his fault you’re not listening to me, because he buried you in an avalanche of thought?”

“Mmmmmmmm…that’s…yep.”

She smiled, genuinely smiled, and popped her ear buds in, raised a finger and pointed to an ear, beaming away. I’m listening to this now. There’s plenty of time. We could come back to this later. It was now a thing. Something to be resurrected, given life, something to play with. A little space opened.

3.

These thoughts didn’t come entirely unbidden. I had been running a small engine in the back of my mind for a while, trying to solve a riddle with my unconscious, which, after all, did most of the heavy lifting anyway.

I had been pondering the cultishness of work places. The perpetual demand to perform within such narrow social constraints and to always act as if the feudal attitude at work was unquestionably legitimate. The expectation to perform the role of both actor and audience in a play called Work without ever acknowledging the theatrics of the whole endeavor. Why did so many internalise and merge so fully with their roles? Especially when the balance of power and control was so against them.

I didn’t want to understand passion, or commitment, or love of work. These things were obvious. And I certainly didn’t need to understand the raw economics behind work. That was even more obvious. I wanted to understand why people actively yielded to values that eventually hijack their independence of mind? Why they so readily became inseparable from their work?

I glanced across the table and looked at her, lost in her ear pods, as the world absently flew by, I saw a human natural aligned to building relationships, to paying attention, to listening, to standing up for those who need it. I saw her ferocity in her defending dignity, her acceptance of the value of each and every one. And I saw that even though she worked in a place that was partially aligned with her, at least to a bearable degree, she still kept a healthy distance. She kept her autonomy of mind. That made sense to me. That I understood.

But to relinquish essential independence and instead internalise and identify with some random workplace value system, to so readily assimilate. That I could not understand. Maybe I only understood acts of subversion. Even small, seemingly pointless nods toward the theatre of it all.

Then, when I saw Jacques Clément’s lookalike, for some reason it came to me like a revelation. People internalise their work role depending on their innate tendency to accept or reject their own colonisation. It’s about subjugation.

Work is a feudal and colonising experience. People react differently to finding themselves locked into a work landscape. Some acquiesce and start playing the role expected by the “colonisers”. Others rebel and become elusive and hard to know, adopting a time-honoured, anti-colonial act of defiance against the totalising and objectifying gaze of the coloniser.

And in another of those theatrical tricks of the universe, the less powerful they felt, the more likely they were to acquiesce and internalise the rules of power, which in many ways made them even more powerless.

And maybe, just maybe, those who internalised their roles had forgotten that the work place is just theatre. They’ve become like modern audiences and forgotten how invaluable they actually are to the experience.

Whereas maybe, those who kept a distance from their roles have never forgotten how to sail into the wind, have never stopped feeling essential for who they are, and not what they do. Maybe they’ve recognised the dangers of dancing with power and resisted psychological invasion by standing back, creating distance, and reconnecting with the reality of the world outside work. Maybe they need the dignity of those small spaces that allow them to ponder the nature of their own reality, and to challenge the norms of the historical and cultural time. Or maybe they just couldn’t tolerate sitting passively and staring at the view.

And as these thoughts appeared, I found myself gently floating into my own personal tunnel.

4.

I was coaxed from dozing by the sound of an announcement, like a knock at the door at an unexpected time. Something about the next station. And then there she was, listening to the announcement through one ear and her podcast through the other. Our eyes softened as we caught each other and pulled faces at the announcer and his rude intrusion into our peaceful world.

“You’ve been asleep,” she says.

I shake my head.

She nods hers.

“Is Jacques Clément still on the train?” I ask.

“I hope not, I won’t be able to get a word in edgeways if he is.”

I smile.

She smiles.

“Well, if he is, I want to ask him about the universe and its never ending tricks.”

She smiles again and says, “Go back to sleep you idiot.”

So, I do.

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