ABSTRACT
Some of these may in fact exist already. By which I mean, have existed, been done by now. But the usual play is that everything is still in the planning: appearing soon. Imagined theatres, made up and still in the air. There is a bulletin board somewhere, along a corridor next to the stage entrance, down a spiral staircase behind a door just off a busy street in the town center, a piece of typed paper pinned to the wall: “Future Projects.” Impossible to say how long that piece of paper has been there. The list is not exhaustive and, as I say, some of it is likely to sound like something you have heard before, but then again, even if the ghost always does appear wearing the same face, there may be a different face behind it each time, looking out, rattling the chains, doing the noises. So, there’s the one about the theatre in which there would be time for a tree to grow, from acorn to branch. A hundred trees, even. Maybe more. Or a theatre where it’s not the actors that walk on stage but the characters themselves, at once locked into the plot and altogether disorientated; which is to say free—if only they knew it—to do as they like. There’s an idea for a theatre—or maybe it is just a play—where the currency that is exchanged in the on-stage buying and selling and making of bonds and paying of debts, is legal tender in the world beyond the stage, where the audience live and breathe. Another one—ambitious enough no doubt, and likely to involve some serious preparation—where everything is to be represented, not just the actions and events of the drama, but their causes and consequences, however far and wide they extend, wherever they are felt, suffered, enjoyed. Along with reflections on how the representations might be just that, representations, mere theatre if you will, and how the world could be imagined as very different to this. Of course there is also the one about a theatre that exists only in the present tense, immune to futures and pasts, but maybe that had been updated by the one that stuck with me most strongly the last time I saw the list for myself. An Exercise in Dying, I believe it’s called. A version of the old story where the singer goes in search of the lost beloved and he disappears, gets lost in the story, and it is we—the audience—that come upon her, masked and be-wigged and multiplied, a spirit of remainingness, of departure, between living and dead, but not able to depart quite yet. The simple idea is that we ourselves might enter the picture and be actors there, that it could be us that will let her go. I imagine they are still working on that one.
