In the eye of an unlatched world

I remember once going holiday with an Italian friend of mine. The kind who walk around with a hat screwed on head, smoking rolled cigarettes of Pueblo tobacco, with their words full of strange thoughts, ideals and utopias. Here we were in bonifaccio airport in Corsica waiting to catch our flight to Paris. Now just so that you understand the situation, you’re going to have to sit through a little description of the airport. It has got to be one of the smallest airports in Europe. So small you’d be surprised the planes didn’t confuse it with the local church as they attempted to land. A small building acts as the main body, with small check in booths and small departure gates and just outside a small café with a small terrace. Beside its size it’s also without doubt the emptiest airport in the northern hemisphere. It’s on this ridiculously small terrace that Leone and I were enjoying a soda in a deliciously warm sun with tightly swivelled cigs resting in our lazy hands. The landscape that lay before us seemed to have been carved to receive the sunlight. Of this sight, five hills were the main components and like in all tales, it was the tallest to which our gazes were drawn. Not due to its size but really because there wasn’t anything on it. It was covered by a luscious forest of dazzling vivid green that carpeted this lump of earth in such a way that it appeased the apparent odious vulgarity of its majestic stature.  My eyes plunged into the thick covering, dreaming what it would be like to laze at the stump of a tree, in the cool shade, filling your nostrils with the perfumes of musty bark and ruffled moss, in a world of disorder, where the grass is wild and the branches tangle and intertwine with each other, all confusing their canopies to caress the earth with shade. 

“You know we could go there. Leone looked at me with seemingly no care.

What?

- The Forest. If we really wanted to, we could just drop everything and go up there. On foot. What is it at most? Twelve kilometres? A good three hours walk and we’re up there.

 

- Yeah, we’d miss our plane, our parents would freak out in Paris, and then we’d have to buy new tickets and it would just be a mess.

 

- No Raph, you’re not getting me. We, as human beings can go up there. We can actually physically move our legs in such a way that we could walk up to that forest and sleep in a tree for all we care. I mean think about! Just a second… We see the world as 2 hour flight from city to city, we’re stuck in the comfort we’ve created and here we are, actually not doing what we want to do. Wouldn’t you like to go up to that forest?

 

- If only I could.

 

- But you can! We can drop everything and just… like… go! 

 

- Yeah… ok so what you’re saying is we’re trapped in the emptiness of our rules.

 

- You’ve missed the point.

 

- No I haven’t, I’m getting ya! 

 

- Prove it

 

- Fine”

I got up and walked across the terrace about 12 meters from him and called out.

“I have the physical ability to dispose of my existence as I please. What you’re saying is; we, as humans have let the society we created dictate us our movements only leaving the small satisfaction of modest gestures like walking across this terrace. What you’re saying is we should take back the conscience of our ability to do as we please.

 

- Take it a step further

 

- What do you mean?

 

-We actually do it. 

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

 

We, as human beings have the physical capacities to do as we please. But the sad outcome of this story is that we paid the bill for the soda, squashed our cigarettes and went on that plane. Much like this tale, I’ve had to wait for a teacher to give me his permission to write what pleased me. We are confronted everyday with the freedoms our bodies give us but everyday we repress them to satisfy the mediocrity of our rules. 

  So maybe I can write, write in hope, hope a promise, a promise made to myself that one day I shan’t catch the flight I was told to catch.

 

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

 

  Drama is a promise, a promise made in words. Words which are said to counter mute suffering.

“At me to someone is looking, at me to someone is saying he’s sleeping, he knows nothing let him sleep on” Vladimir – Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

 

  There are no rules or laws on stage. Well, there is one. I don’t know if you can call that law, nor a rule and hardly a convention of any sort, it’s more of an invitation.

All rules are made to be broken.

 

I don’t think there’s any other… Well, the others are just guidelines really; always face the audience, articulate, project your voice. Stuff like that. 

 

All is permitted on stage, and drama is that promise.  A long lasting illusion in which we don’t have a flight to catch. An illusion of freedom. A long lasting illusion. 

 

What’s an illusion? It’s 9h45, on a Monday night and according to the dictionary on my desk an illusion is “something that seems to exist but does not” (thank you Oxford). A play is therefore much like an illusion, it’s seemingly reality without being reality, a phenomena which is an attempt to clutch what we cannot. 

 

Theatre is trapped in its form which cripples and stops it from attaining and creating. Its form of fallacy, a new absolute rule, the one which reminds the actor that his text was dictated, that he’s just standing on a contraption of floorboards surrounded by curtains. The absolute rule cripples our run to the forest and makes us crawl back to the flight boarding gate.

 

But,

 

All rules are made to be broken.

 

The art that lives on stage must live, live in the sole purpose of breaking the state of illusion, breaking the rule of fallacy and becoming a fragment of the real. Drama is a struggle between these two entities and Theatre must constantly transcend its own form to exist. Theatre is beyond the stage it lies where its roots lie, in reality. It has only momentarily removed itself from reality to come back. Like a revelation.

Theatre is beyond the stage, it’s in the cafes where two men talk across a glass of wine, it’s in the street where people shout their trouble, ignoring the beggar who cries out for help, it’s in our families where love can break into hate, it’s in the sun where people slavishly linger, it’s in the cold where people clench their bodies as their breaths foam crystal windows; it’s in this entity we call world, culture, society, city.

 

The sole purpose of theatre is to remind us we have the ability to break our own rules and it is only through this art that the actor wakes to say “All the world’s a stage” and our lives free themselves from themselves to the point of breaking into the everlasting conclusion that the stage is a world, and it’s mine.

 

The first use of drama in this manner is Shakespeare.

Soliloquy of Jaques in As You like It by Shakespeare

 

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

 

This soliloquy sustains the idea that art is a continual act on reality. Shakespeare reunites all the aspects which still today describe a human being: His age, his state of mind, his thoughts, and his emotions as well as how it is extrapolated towards others. Including more schematical aspects such as his function in society, his job. With all this one constitutes a visual and living description of a human. This description being the work of an actor, the character he creates and brings to life on stage. 

 

On stage,

 

“All the world’s a stage”,

 

And our lives are nothing but an image of ourselves given to others, a visual description. As different existences intertwine the drama is created and our actions become nothing more than a theatrical endeavour towards the rest of the world. 

 

And “all the men and women merely players” shaping the drama that occurs on this stage. The endeavour of acting is a reminder that we shape our lives, like the actor has shaped one. That we have the freedom to create and recreate ourselves as we please, and as the actor does this on the stage which is a world, we do this on the world that is a stage.