Whisper of God

It’s half-term for children and teachers up and down the country. After seven weeks of assemblies, classes, and extra-curricula activities it’s time for a break. In the drama department of my school, fifty or so sixth-formers will feel they’ve most certainly earned one. At the start of term these A’ Level Theatre Studies students were put into groups of between three to six and set the task of devising an original piece of drama from whatever stimulus their particular teacher chose to give them. Although the pieces were to be short, (the exam board stipulates around five minutes per candidate) this in some ways makes it harder since live theatre generally requires sufficient stage-time for a plot to be teased out or characters to be fully developed if it is to have an impact on an audience. Moreover, the project requires the students to work collaboratively with minimal intervention from the teacher. For both teachers and students this part of the drama syllabus feels designed to drive us all bananas or at least turn us against each other for evermore. The teacher is supposed to merely facilitate, acting as ‘a critical friend.’ In effect this role is akin to parenting stroppy teenagers; the students resent your intrusion when they think they’re working well, and then expect you to bail them out at the last minute when it all goes pear-shaped. Nonetheless it is fascinating to observe the group dynamics of each creative family as the problems of any and every community inevitably surface in each tiny microcosmic unit. There are the pushy leaders who try to seize control from the start, the passive ‘passengers’ who seem indifferent to any kind of creative vision and the earnest negotiators seeking to keep all on board. Having seen both the process and product of this kind of project for the best part of twenty years, I have noticed many common traps the students are ensnared by. Perhaps the most typical is the drive to be wildly experimental above all else. Any kind of conventional scene such as two characters interacting with one another in a recognizable setting is thrown out in favour of the weird and wacky. While one wants to applaud this attempt at originality, such innovation often leave an audience bewildered and thus ultimately disengaged. Moreover, the students obsession with style can mean a lack of substance and the teacher inevitably ends up asking them: ‘yes, but what’s it all supposed to be about?’ As their teacher, you long for them to find and trust their own creative voice rather than pretend to be cleverer than they are.

However, once in a while a group manages to really gel and create a piece of theatre which resonates profoundly with an audience of their peers, parents and the staff. This year two attractive girls and a strapping lad all wearing orange jump suits faced their audience and welcomed them to their unit three devised piece. They then went on to explain their mission:

“It’s not really a play; we haven’t got a set or scenes…it’s just things we think and feel, and things you think and feel.’

Now of course this approach could have been disastrous leaving the audience squirming in their seats at such embarrassing self-indulgence. However, in the ensuing twenty minutes one could sense that strange many-headed monster which fills up an auditorium becoming increaingly inspired and moved by the group's raw honesty expressed through profound and witty visual metaphors together with some fresh and unpretentious dialogue. One of the girls, Jess, pedalled furiously on an exercise bike on the right of the stage observed intently by Max who stood near by. As she pedals she explains:

“ I want to be one of the fishes in the pond…not necessarily a big fish, maybe just a different colour…a lighter colour..no..a brighter colour one with a stripe or a little…a little…a little…spot. Just something different. Because if I had that, then every body would believe in me and see that I can do this. They would look at me and say. ‘look at that fish with the bright stripe…wow!’ And I could just be this fish, you know? Just be me.”

Max then asks her how much further she has to go to get to where she’s aiming for and Jess gets off the bike and measures from the wheel to the edge of the stage and discovers to her despair that she has moved nowhere. “Oh” says Max, with evident concern for her. "Come and take a rest."
The other girl, Betsy hadn’t even scripted her part, but she brillintly improvised a series of monologues addressed to the audience in which she babbled incoherently about things she clearly hoped we would be impressed by: getting boys, bunking off school, ‘crashing’ parties and clubs. At the height of each excitble rant she would suddenly freeze, look at what she was wearing and rapidly exit in horror at her inadequate choice of clothing. The audience found this hysterical, due to Betsy’s delivery and timing and perhaps because we recognized a grotesque image of ourselves through the way we can fall at lightning speed from sky-high confidence to cringing vulnerability . However, by her final entrance at the end of the play, Betsy was only able to make unintelligible noises at the audience like a character from a Samuel Beckett play or The Goons. This again was both farcical and finally moving as she stared out to the auditorium and gingerly confessed, ‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ before quietly asking, ‘ Can I not just be?’ This was intensified further when the other two performers drew alongside Betsy and echoed this final question as the lights slowly faded to a blackout.

It’s always hard to analyse why a piece of art resonates with a particular audience, but in this case it may have had something to do with what I was saying earlier about the striving of so many of this group's peers (present among the audience) to devise a piece of ultra-sophisticated drama throughout the past few weeks. It may also have reflected a recognition of how hollow all our attempts at expression sometimes seem either in art or life: ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’ to quote Macbeth at his most despairing. I think, above all the final question 'can I not just be?' reflected a yearning we all felt to let all our strivings cease especially after such a busy few weeks. When the light had gone there was that wonderful silence in which you could feel some deep truth had dawned on us. It was a shame that the recording of a kazoo playing some jaunty circus music cut in so suddenly as I felt the audience wanted to bathe in the darkness and quiet of the theatre for longer before applauding. Nonetheless I left the auditorium exhilarated by the student’s work. All the best art leads us to the silence which brings a deeper realization of the human condition. It is a silence where we can, if we’re open, hear the whisper of God. On reflection, as I begin my half-term break, I think He may have been answering that final petition with a firm but gentle 'Yes!'