ABSTRACT

It’s a kind of airborne daydreaming, that’s how I imagine it. A sort of viral performance reflex, you wouldn’t really call it a theatre thing, although theatre of a sort can come about when it hits hard enough. It is known to infect people who spend significant parts of their time in transit. People on ferry boats particularly, I’ve noticed; although that might just be to say that the typical outcome of all this—the terminal symptom, if you like—is not theatre after all but anecdote, and that the performance that takes place there is only ever on its way toward its point of arrival in a telling, a report, a passing on from one to another, even when that other is yourself. This could mean also that much of what was at stake along the way, for the actors, the performers at the time—getting through, getting by, getting paid, getting off—is in one way or another done with by the time the final accounting comes round. There is something pitiless about that. Then again, maybe the anecdote is itself a sort of script for the imagined theatre that is still to come. I don’t know if I believe that, but it may be the case. As it is, the instances that come to mind are all of workaday onboard entertainment. The staff on the cross-Channel car ferry who earlier had been checking our tickets and the like, and who later re-appear on the small stage in the ferry bar dressed in giant banana costumes, doing a musical routine straight out of the queer strangeness of 1970s UK peak-time Saturday evening light entertainment TV. Or the man on the Bosphorous ferry last month who took off his work jacket and came back into the middle of the cabin for twenty minutes or so to demonstrate to all the wonders of the hand-held vegetable peeler he was selling, a proper stand-up act with catch phrases and everything (he sold quite a few of the devices). But not just working people either. There were the passengers making the journey from Helsinki to Tallinn and back all those years ago, slabs of wholesale butter stacked up in the shop below deck, Finns and Estonians taking it in turns in the bar to tell jokes in their respective languages at the open mic, one half of the crowd laughing at a time while the other looked on. I watch, I listen, and my thoughts wander. I wonder who these people are. I look around at all of us. I can only see the ones who are here. Others I have to imagine. I want to say something about them, about other boats and such places where the performance virus is not felt or acted upon, or falls in ways I cannot conceive. But I am amongst the crowd for now, and its limits are also my own.