This Is My World

Phil Smith

A first hand account of skirting around the edges of site-specific performance with Wrights & Sites.

In your own clothes walk down Prospect Steps and follow a shape together (based on Goddess With Light Bulb relief on Municipal Power Station).

There was a monstrous illusion present.

As you walk past the tables outside the Waterfront pub, Mangos and the Prospect Inn pause to talk to people sitting there: talk about: Wrights & Sites, the pilot performance on board a boat (give out leaflets), explain that the first part of the performance will take place just in front of them...

The boat sets off. Having waited by the quayside like an out of place auditorium. Most spectators arrived with tickets or reservations. Tickets on sale in a waterside shop brought in a handful of tourists.

Arriving early and drinking in the Prospect or Waterfront pubs, spectators may have seen or been approached by a gaggle of heritage stereotypes - a man in Edwardian boater and blazer, a female servant in all purpose medieval-to-Restoration black, a romantic Victorian heroine; all inspired by various City Council tourist publications (the unannounced irony will be lost on the audience). The heritage figures are accompanied by a man in cream suit and tourist guide cravat clutching a huge ear on a stick - requesting a hearing for his melodramatic staging of cut up parts of Bram Stoker's Dracula - including those references in the book to Jonathan Harker's visit to Exeter.

Mina: I must keep writing at every chance, for I dare not stop to think!

This place - the Quay - is a zombie place to me.

Mina: I can see nothing; it is all dark.

Servant: What do you hear?

Mina: The lapping of the water. It is like death. But I can see flies, hundreds and thousands, millions of them! And every one a life!

I know it as a Sunday afternoon place. A place for browsing secondhand bookshops when I don't want a book. Designated as a site of heritage it is a place of small businesses. History is hazy - a vague time travel. The voice-over on the Council's video is that of a Dr Who. Large Sunday lunches, a drink, the tourists drowsing over the knick-knacks, reproductions of older things, dusty books - fragments that assert their independence from material history by the bald assertion of their age - for me this is a place of the living dead. People shuffle and collide in the small shops like the mall zombies in Dawn Of The Dead. Life is reduced to cannibalised chunks.

I turn the performers into customers. Treat them to tiny budgets. This buys me time. They buy resonant junk. The site is dictating the dynamic and I don't like it.

On the periphery of their purchased entertainment the spectators half-see fragments of a fiction of the living dead dressed as heritage.

Floating on the edge - dressed as a ghost, but understandably misrecognised as a bride - her dress inscribed with lines from Stoker's novel - a woman clutches a Bakelite wireless.

Lucy: The whole thing about distance and foreign and not knowing / That somewhere was foreign... (reaching to her mouth, she has trouble speaking:) People on Mars / Or a satellite / Look how close they are! / I get confused about radio waves - how come they don't get muddled up and blown away in the air? / Is it going through our bodies now?

...she speaks mainly to herself in the text (but it was too intimidating and the space too intolerant to accept a woman in costume speaking to herself and alone - so I directed the performer ever closer to the main body of performers and we cut out the mumbling to herself - never found a solution to the freakshow problem for her) and then confronts the vampire actors with the performer's own associations triggered by the wireless property (chosen by the performer and purchased from a quayside antique (junk) shop).

The 'bride' not of Dracula runs off.

Servant: Our story begins here. Up on the moors. Where the waters of the Exe rise. History is everywhere.

The guide comments ironically on the ear - remarking on how its hugeness in the Wrights & Sites office has been diminished by bringing it outside. Following the heritage vampires, the guide climbs aboard and begins a commentary over the boat's own muffled public address; of buildings promised but not built, of reproductions without originals, of a waterway freed for commerce and travel by the dismemberment of a courtier's body. Along the way two dimensional (three, of course, but thin) representations of human organs and body parts are sited.

All this reads more coherently on paper than it was.

We were in our second chance site. We were in a compromise. We were in a plan we had once discarded, haunted by the ghost of an idea we'd already laid.

Yet there were no nuances of this death. The cadaverous reanimation of a threatened project was no doubt felt by all four co-initiators. But none of us made it explicit in our work.

For me it was all my work really amounted to in this pilot performance.

Misguide: The Quay is like a script. Its lines rubbed out and over-written. I don't know where the energy has gone. The seahorses are in Plymouth. The Museum is a thing of the past. It's not just the things that are gone, but the things that never came. The hotel in the warehouses. The tower on the Piazza...

Just as there were almost certainly huge pike in the shallows of the canal I never saw one. There had been a predatory struggle for space and site. But there was no explicit reference to one. Just as we had taken decisions at various points along the way not to complain publicly about our dealings with the authorities, now without jointly deciding there was no mark of our displacement.

(You ignore Lucy who is cycling across the Suspension Bridge on a bicycle of text. A huge cut-out of a decapitated head hangs from the bridge. The Servant sings a lullaby to the wireless.)

But just as I felt displaced on those Sunday afternoons on Exeter's Quay, grazing round the petit-bourgeois jumble sale, so I felt equally displaced in creating performance - performance which I habitually felt most at ease in, I who before I had a real flesh and blood baby referred to my shows as babies.

Mina: What am I to do? The air seems full of specks!

I was a shadow working in a shadowy world - all perfect material for this string of sights, this noose of landscape. Yet I chose to (failed to choose to do anything better than) work in shadows, in coded signals that went undetected, begging incomprehension, throwing autobiographical metaphors at miles of fields and pathway, trees, a boat, gas holders, sunsets...

Servant: The kid's lost her marbles! / Her entire body is compressed into this moment only!

So difficult had it become to command any contained site that we were now performing in a landscape, with a horizon, with distant hills, with high speed trains moving through it.

There is a narrative that explains the blandness, the indiscriminacy, the invisibility, the ephemerality of my images in Ghosts Writing...

...now that is a set of site-specific performances - in which the four members of Wrights & Sites responded to a series of unchosen environments and sought to re-express those sites back to their owners in the false hope that the owners would respond with similar empathy.

To the appropriate sub-committee of the City Council we delivered scripted speeches (rehearsed in Exeter's bus station cafe) adopting the characters of artists of the people, renouncing elitism and all its works...

Stephen Hodge and myself walked and cycled to a distant hall and room (because they had American and Canadian associations - connections to a festival that we were denied a part in) to hold phantom conversations with innocent janitors and community representatives. Sent by officers who supported our (site-specific) work 'in principle' but would only support it in practice if we agreed to work elsewhere.

Jonathan: I'll pleasure (handle) this, dear! Why can't you see new (it) my way! I have a right to activity...

The monstrous illusion.

That the specificity of site is a predominantly aesthetic choice.

Politics. Property.

The monstrous landscape of the river and canal. Like riding the back of a water snake.

The boat trip seemed such a good idea.

Servant: New new new (You mean those) pleasure (moonlit) new (beach) parties and new (those) rock n' roll pleasure (sessions)...

Spectators commented on the happiness of the setting. Its appeal spoke of discrimination and good taste.

For me, it was slippery panic, the scrapping of a whole universe of thoughts.

Misguide: Jealousy and envy are inevitably aroused in these mimetic situations. This is how violence happens. If we copy the objects of our desire from others we enter into competition with those who we model ourselves on. Every act of violence begins with a lifelike drama.

All my planning, two months of reading about electricity generation and the formation of the universe, visiting Goonhilly Earth Station, etc. was based on the perilous assumption that the City Council would allow us into the former Municipal Power Station - mine was a performance about energy and cosmology, the glass roof of the building leading the spectators' eyes up to the stars… there never were to be any such eyes. There was never to be such a performance - it's a ghost that only I have been haunted by.

Instead there were the pleasures of a boat trip - like a comfortable cushion. If you didn't like the performances you still had the pub visit.

Misguide: Beneath us now is where / X51 Sticklebacks and Minnows / Tiny submarines once rehearsed...

My part of the pilot performance had been weirdly stretched. In the first stages of planning I would share the outward trip with Simon Persighetti, creating separate but interwoven events at different stages of the journey to and along the Exeter Canal. But Simon's work became a discrete piece at the Double Locks. So I had a huge expanse of time and landscape. My replacement imagery, my glazed responses to the landscape, became thinner and thinner by expansion.

When we moved from negotiating for Council owned properties onto the Canal we switched from the inertia of a bureaucracy to the volatility of a free market. Things were suddenly flexible and rapid. There was little interest in rules or legal niceties. We had money. But volatility could work both ways. What if we were outbid for the services of the boat?

One of the quayside traders had already demonstrated his commitment to our project. First as a member of our consultative committee, offering to supply sandwiches for an introductory meeting, presenting an exorbitant bill, then absenting himself not only from the project but from even acknowledging our presence on the waterfront...

Jonathan: He used to send flies - great big fat ones with steel and sapphire on their wings. Rats, rats, rats!

Servant: They want this place.

Jonathan: Who are they?

Men without reflections.

Our £97,000 of Lottery money created unexpected effects.

Misguide: There are forces we don't see - things like ideas.

We were suddenly in demand - our financial fluidity seemed to glow, to attract... I got answers out of people who had previously (and since have) failed to answer any communication, we entered into negotiations to co-write another project together. To bureaucracy we were a threat, a group of blackmailers sucking on tight spending, elitists who needed to be tripped into invisibility, or pecked at for a scrap, whose work could not be allowed to be both different and popular.

I don't think we ever quite realised how political our choice of site was. If we had redefined the use of The Quay as a site for public experiment we would have been turning around the civic project. Any chance we had of doing that was disrupted by the Council's animosity. We lost the momentum of publicity - denied matching funding and access to sites we had nothing to publicise for too long.

Once our Pilot had passed off without any news recognition we were left alone to be irrelevant to the public life of the city. Sites were opened up to us. Apart from some passing revellers most of the performances impinged only on those who chose to be impinged on. Only one of the six main season performances was acknowledged by the local paper. And we increased the takings and sociability of the Venezia bar and restaurant.

The Council's finest moment came when Stephen Hodge and Simon Persighetti were hauled in by the Chair and Vice Chair of a Committee, criticised for submitting an application which their Committee had already approved in principle, and told that the Committee might look more favourably on it if we agreed to dress up as pirates.

Misguide: What pulls us now at the end of the Age of Humanism?

At times during the run up to the Pilot we were having to meet every day. Each time to try to save our project from becoming site-less. We were cash rich and power poor. South West Arts had promoted Lottery funding as a way for 'writers' to get in control of their work but we hadn't yet made an aesthetic decision we could get to stick.

The Quay is a violent place. It's a place of leisure. With a tourist information office. Bric-a-brac. Old buildings. It's a violent place. Men sat outside the Wrights & Sites office religiously consuming case-loads of bottled lager. After our 'dress run' one tried to smash a bottle to glass another man's face. Then confronted us. Rehearsals and meetings were punctuated with the verbal abuse of any woman who crossed the bridge outside the office. It was a theatre of menace and anxiety. The performers requested another place to change before the show.

Misguide: These are my characters. The characters that are important to me. Possessed, infected, mimicked and implanted. Zombies, vampires and monsters. Put together from bits and pieces. The words they speak are from all over the place.

Was it a perverse desire to confront this horrible insecurity that led me to stage the vampire cut ups along the waterside to pub patrons? To people who had not chosen to be confronted by us? Why was I putting us through this purgatory? Rehearsing among unrepresentative tourists we felt the stare of the freakshow - curiosity and wariness. In the evening it would be drinkers. The big ear was a device to address the unwarned. A plea to be heard. A symbol of audience. The guide, me, asking each group if they would like to see a bite-sized piece of Dracula. Only one group - a family - refused. And then stayed to watch as we played to another group. We played a chunk to a couple at a table and when we finished we were saluted with raucous cheers by a group of off-duty soldiers outside the Prospect. I asked the performers if I should approach the soldiers. The performers were very keen. The soldiers were very keen. The soldiers gave the piece that special silence of engagement. As we left one of them said: 'O, can't you do the whole film?' What had he seen?

(From now on the accents are American. All of the 'characters' as if waking from a dream. They speak all the time as if they are acting in an American B horror movie...)

Outside the Waterfront on the last night - a large all-male group in fancy dress, two dressed as golliwogs - feel the uneasiness as most of the group wants to enjoy our performance and a couple of the blokes don't want us to set the tone for their evening - these two blokes - they know what we're doing - they're anxious/clever enough - we get through it and leave a divided audience - it's been two sets of uneasy stereotypes performing to each other.

It was always a relief to get on the boat. Even if the theatre sank, it was a theatre. Had no walls. Two crusties screaming abuse across the water, whatever it was dulled by the rumble of the weir.

Misguide: What will this next Narnia be like? An underground city of respectable tenants patrolled by guards?

Always a relief to get on the boat.

Get inside the monstrous illusion.

That the landscape is natural.

That we chose authenticity.

That I am here because I want to be.

Misguide: Perhaps we are actually coming to perceive ourselves as the fragmented, ephemeral constellations of thought and action that the Buddha saw as the truth of human nature.

(On the right hand bank before the pylon, between a clump of young trees and three dead trees, there is a skeletal proscenium arch with curtains - between the curtains stares a huge eye.)

At the end of the route we are shadowed by drunks in a Land Rover.

We are here because it's been made for other purposes. We are tolerated, we are ignored - that's how we exist in the space.

The performer in the inscribed dress is abused as she cycles.

My performing is over and I hide behind a pint down the side of the Double Locks Hotel. The Land Rover erupts out of a clump of ferns and plunges down the tow path.

Mina: ...you are now looking at the England within.

When introduced to an unprepared audience, performance that is not immediately explicit elicits an effort to understand. When not introduced it seems to provoke animosity - a childish desire to kick over the tower of bricks. The democracy of tagging everything with suspicion, marking territory with aggression. Public space is everyone's space; nothing unpoliced must be allowed to go unvandalised, untagged. A critical society - sceptical, anti-elitist, anti-aesthetic, anti-theoretical.

We were denied use of the Power Station a couple of days before we went into rehearsal for the Pilot performances. Overnight I devised an alternative piece to be created under the Fishmarket - the next day we settled on the boat trip - three ideas in as many days...

What did disruption yield? The Pilot was always going to be a manifesto performance. But I hadn't had time to form any beliefs.

So chunks of acting theory from Elinor Fuchs were intercut with melodramatic dialogue.

Jonathan: That's no way to talk to your Mother! / She relies on the urgent, mute signal of the total signifying power of her pain-vivified body!

The acting style might have been cool and detached. Instead, it was heated and demonstrative.

I invented myself as a guide and commentator so I could paper over the cracks with crowd pleasing poetry, gags and explanations that were non-explanations. Imagine my embarrassment when the company's own video quotes me unironically dedicating the performance to Buddhism, as ripples spread across the canal. The Council and the drunks had taken away any sense of aesthetic control in this landscape. I wasn't a citizen now. I was just making up alibis. I was doing the longest bit of the journey in the same spirit as I would speak to my parents for ages when I was drunk and sixteen - to prove that I wasn't drunk. As my parents now say: 'we knew he was drunk because he came and spoke to us.'

I walked up and down the river and canal in those first few days. I drew the lopped limbs of a body into the landscape. Asked for them to be made and placed.

The nose was hung opposite the meat processing factory. ...flies, hundreds and thousands, millions of them... To sniff the particles. By the second performance the nose had blown round the wrong way and stage management weren't going to correct it. The wardrobes appeared on their sides.

Misguide: New Britain, New Narnia.

My panic became a sort of pomp and swallowed up most of the design budget - I had to drop half of what I'd drawn. The portrayal of fragmentation was fragmented. In the paper-recycling warehouse the manager met us in his office and offered us his polite contempt and the time to show us round tight strapped and shredded maps, pictures of flowers pinned on the wall and the uncut pages of a Sherlock Holmes mystery opened out like a picnic cloth.

Halfway through the final performance the microphone started to cut out so I spoke without amplification. Wished I'd done it half and half all week. The residents had got used to our timetable and were waiting in their gardens and at their windows. As I pointed to the sky and encouraged the audience to see factories up there a little boy on the bank heckled: 'There are no factories in the sky.' I explained that everything in our bodies bigger than atoms of helium and hydrogen had been created inside stars. 'O yeh' he replied, sceptically. Why were we provoking this wilful refusal to suspend disbelief?

Lucy: You stand around being intellectual and then you stuff your face with the meaning of life!

At performances in theatres, in those controlled spaces, I feel perhaps more relaxed and at home than anywhere else I know. In this pilot I only felt relaxed in the few moments when I could walk alone behind the boat collecting the staked quotations that Stephen Hodge's piece left along the towpath. I could play my own character in the dusk, tracing the detritus from Cathy Turner's piece - soap suds, a discarded violin - and as long as I was ignored I could carry round the control I wanted - to make the meanings I had been unable to make in Ghosts Writing.

(She runs off the boat and disappears screaming.)

Servant: 'Even her manuscript is gone, destroyed, years of work and the record of her experiment - gone.'

Jonathan: 'As it should be - there is a power greater than science that rules the earth and those who twist and pervert knowledge only work out their own destruction.'

I followed with the ear.

I can still feel the fear, the unease undiminished by walking away.

Fear and unease almost overwhelmed everything else at the time. Now I can see that the disruptions from politicians and contempt from small businessmen, the unmanageability of the landscape, the alien novelty of the aesthetics and my loss of control over site and events had forced me, more in panic and desperation than anything else, to make a leap. Perhaps I wouldn't have made it any other way. A leap made firstly in self-defence. To explain. But a leap that has now taken me into a new phase, brought me to a new identity. Sites where I land may be familiar, but not from this perspective. I've been map maker where now I'm orienteer. I'm become one of my own directions, loose in the map. I, the writer, have entered my own text.

When we were making provisional visits to possible sites on The Quay I had an immediate and powerful response to one in particular - a room downstairs in the former Maritine Museum. It was and would be in use for the Reflections In Time exhibition throughout our main season.

Why the response? - because I dream about the sea, I am fascinated by the illusion of history and the pretentions of exhibitions, I am amused by the showmanship of half studied pasts, I haven't resolved my own feelings about living things like crabs and lobsters and birds. Frankly they frighten me. I dream about them. I dream of huge bodies moving just under the water's surface, of the movement of water created by a shark passing by - (a police horse once galloped past me unexpectedly during an anti-Poll Tax demonstration and my first thought was of a shark passing through water).

There were images here of the seaside; sand, fishing boat. I was running from an interrogation of character and into autobiography. The seaside has played some major part in making me.

Birds seem somehow apocalyptic. And that is part of my imagination.

I wanted to work inside this exhibition with its mixture of live and stuffed animals, to manipulate its combination of artefacts and 'fun'.

A window was painted as a sea with fishes and I liked the idea of an exhibition under water - a thing here could be both the thing itself and an exhibit of it. Here was a site I could work in - where I could manipulate simulacra without being obliged to abandon my materialist, modernist approach.

The authorities were wary, but didn't say 'no' immediately. They did eventually. I had to move upstairs or out.

Exhausted by the uncertainties before the Pilot I accepted the upstairs room.

Negotiating 'site' had brought us as a group into conflict with exactly those forces of property and commerce that I spend my time avoiding in order to create aesthetic space in which the working of those forces can be articulated, in which the movement of invisible forces can be made visible and in which the alternative potential of bigger, self-created, self-dramatised selves can be performed.

Rather than creating a renewed aesthetic I found the process of negotiating sites was largely 'pre-aesthetic'. As a group we needed to charge admission to our sites. Tiny amounts of money, but these dictated a very specific commercial relationship with any space we intended to use.

The offer of a 'bogus' site - an empty room above the site I really wanted - appealed. It was a retreat from 'site' into theatre. But it was also a taking control of aesthetics, an opportunity to embrace the 'bogus' and the fictional, a bunker theatre - an opportunity to restate a private individuality against the uninspiring and slippery forces of public trust and private profit. But it was also a shrinking from further anxiety.

We were given very little working access to the space - a couple of days.

At every turn we were driven away from sites - even this 'bogus' one. Aesthetic choice seemed to work in reverse to bureaucracy. To specify a site was to render it inaccessible. It was only possible to work in metaphors of specificity. But by now I was grateful for the aesthetic distance. 'Site-specificity' had come to mean council corridors, contemptuous small businessmen and aggressive drunks.

I was working with ghosts again - to the empty room upstairs I transferred the shape of the room below - not literally, but metaphorically. A fish tank became an altar-like TV showing a blue test picture. A sand pit became a beach. A large boat became a stage. (I'm not sure how many of the audience recognised this transference, although they all entered through the downstairs exhibition and were encouraged to dwell there before climbing the stairs into the performance space. Too immersed in criticism - a mistake carried over from the theorising of the Pilot - I had prepared the space to be read critically without letting the audience in on the conceit.)

I retreated further. Developing the show in isolated rooms in the University.

Justification to myself for the increasing distance between 'site' (the actual exhibition room) and the places of development, rehearsals and performance: I would express an ironic tension between authentic site and the artifice of theatre.

Where Ghosts Writing had been an incoherent assault on mimetic character, The Lollipop Guaranteed For A Thousand Licks was to be the fruit of a violently rekindled theatrical prejudice. I would appear again - not this time as ironic guide and foolish theorist. But as a version of myself, taking time out to imitate an Uncle.

I had set off on this whole project with the intention of renewing my performance-making through the authenticity of site. In the end the authentic site I chose was myself.

But I couldn't resist theatricalising that site also.

I would characterise myself as The Boy Vicar - played by a woman performer.

I would provide many of the show's artefacts from my own sentimental collections - and from a store of props collected while on holiday in Cornwall earlier in the summer.

I had no inhibitions about creating characters. This was not a return to naturalistic characterisation, but an attempt to unite fragmentary elements into total, synthetic identities.

I had a company of my own choice.

In my museum/non-museum I would explore my attraction to an anthropology based on ambiguity of mind.

Notes to performers. Basic Themes: I am interested in the way that when museums display and organise objects (and even living things) they reflect the basic structure of the modern mind; cognitive fluidity (in which forms and designations can be interchanged, objects and living things can become confused)... on the one hand this is a very positive process; a creative process in which original ideas are generated, transforming one kind of knowledge by bringing in material from another field. On the other hand there is a destructive capacity in the very same process; cognitive fluidity can lead us to regard other living things (other animals, other humans) as objects...

Where in the Pilot I had been driven by Elinor Fuchs's The Death Of Character, here I was inspired by Tadeusz Kantor's writing on autobiographical theatre and archaeologist Steven Mithen's The Prehistory Of Mind.

I was still drawing on diverse and gothic quotations - from H. P. Lovecraft and the Fortean Times - but now they were quotations that had passed through my digestive memory. They were not present theoretically. I had returned to the desire to make an organic totality. I wanted to arrange fragments to make artifice rather than experiments.

I sat in the exhibition. I recorded the associations evoked by the artefacts and layout.

I sent the actors to the exhibition - guided by certain images - and then asked them to devise physical responses to the exhibition (I would never know what their associations were - only see the physical expression they gave them). I then used these to create three individual and one group movement sequence and a vocabulary of over 40 physical actions which I gave titles like Washing, Who? Me? and Indian Birds, describing my own associations when I first saw the actions. These physical actions were one of the disparate sources (my own associations, the shape of the original site, fragments of previous autobiographical writing, etc.) from which I constructed a rehearsal text.

Just as I was asking performers Charlotte Hawkins, Jane McGinnes and Ross Mullen to engage their physical subjectivity in response to chosen images and site, I was asking composer Millie Taylor to do the same thing musically. I was trying to release my collaborators' subjectivities inside a shape made by my own. Just as I had half-chosen the physical site, I was now outlining (perhaps half in control, maybe a fifth) the aesthetic site.

Boy Vicar, Uncle Frank and the Clown Curator start the Museum Sequence as moving mannequins - stiffly and on their toes, making a clicking noise - to the space behind the Aquarium Church 'station' and there whisper irritably, then move back in to the main area stiffly...

The performance room was set out with five stations reflecting the shape of the exhibition in the original site on the floor below:

Guesthouse. Like the Reception at Jeff and Joy's guesthouse in Paignton - friends of my Nan and Pop's. I would get taken out of school and driven down there and my sister would be told I was on manoeuvres with the Territorial Army (I was about eleven). This is where I got my love of out-of-season seaside towns. The bleakness of the beach, the mercifully closed tat. The warmth of being spoiled. The trips out to catch mackerel from a cold sea.

The Aquarium Church. Religion has always seemed like liquid to me. I have witnessed total immersion baptism. Once you're a believer you're underwater. You're a different kettle of fish.

Home Sweet Home. Christmas family get-togethers in the 1960s were warm and magical events - in which my astounding and unsurpassable great aunts and uncles would drink, smoke and speak of a far off world which for years I completely failed to realise was the same as mine. When disillusionment came it was bitter.

Boy Vicar: I got out before the annual Danny La Rue versus Morecambe and Wise argument. Uncle Jack is the only one who wants Danny La Rue. Who he thinks is a woman! I feel like I'm dying up there, Jordy! I want it all to burn up. If Jesus walked through the door they'd call the Police.

The Beach. I love bleakness. The detritus of a beach. I love the fragmentation of things caused by the beating of the waves. I don't mind disintegrating. I don't mind the universe spreading out and coming apart.

Death. This was a scene I saw at Coverack earlier in the summer. The floor of the harbour covered with the mutilated bodies of hundreds of spider crabs. This was not the fragmenting death of the sea's action, but commercial wastage. The capacity to murder industrially.

The Central Unit. A stage - a quotation of theatre performance, inside which were secreted a chalked skeleton of an archeopteryx like a crime scene chalk outline, a supine detective and numerous mementoes of my own childhood and adult political activism.

Uncle Jack: Lenin was in a shrine he never wanted. The museum sold fossils of Marx.

The characters were to be synthetic ones - created from different people or different animals or the variations on the same character but at different times - so the Boy Vicar wore the dog collar of the Vicar he never became, the Boy Vicar's first girlfriend (the Clown Curator) was half stuffed bird of prey and half seaside Pierrot...

Clown Curator: Her basic costume is a traditional seaside Pierrot costume with huge sleeves - as part of this she has a large white flapping lab coat. Sometimes one of her hands is a feathery set of talons. Also wears a cone shaped Pierrot hat in one scene.

...and Uncle Frank the private detective was an uncle of mine and a crustacean version of William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Millie Taylor impersonated my Nan - as Nanna - and accompanied the action on electric piano. I was me and Uncle Jack - really my Pop but also based on a Great Uncle, now dead; I had a suit of his and wore it as the main part of my costume.

Clown Curator: In the brain there is a secret architecture - a place that has no location - an invisible cathedral in which all the doors are open. Watch any child's cartoon - see how we enjoy talking animals, inanimate objects that sprout legs and walk... effortlessly we understand a world that breaks every natural law, endlessly we love metaphor and analogy, we create, we synthesise, we sympathise with animals by imagining they feel like us, we give motives to the weather... crossing from one chapel into another...

Thanks to Steven Mithen I had come to see human beings in a new light. Many of our contradictions become understandable (and redeemable) through his theory of cognitive fluidity - a crucial development of mind when the early human brain gave up the efficiency of enclosed specialist areas and developed an overarching structure in which different specialisms could be fused and confused - hunting became harder, but religion and history and art became possible.

I wanted to exploit the scientific pretensions of the former museum, by staking my own anthropological claims through a performance. But I wanted to internalise them as a piece of my own history, to make the museum myself, myself the main exhibit from my own past.

My frame of mind was survivalist. Imaginatively I was in some post-apocalyptic museum. I sought to insulate myself and my cast. I was trying to protect a dynamic, hopeful take on human culture and creativity in a hostile environment.

What had started in my mind as a medium-scale public project balancing experiment with populism had become an intimate event played to small audiences sat on picnic mats, performed by a cast I deeply trusted.

Setting out to be public I had become private.

Public, space, sites - these had become areas of menace and contempt, at risk from a very English cultural animosity to and suspicion of overt theory. During Ghosts Writing when empiricism erupted from casual passers-by and among the performers (who were they, stripped of the usual fictions, asked to repress their training?) I responded with a blustering melodrama of fragments.

The melodrama 'worked' when it was mistaken for the real thing, didn't when it wasn't, in both cases obscuring the content of the theory.

The fragmentation of character in Ghosts Writing was carried over into The Lollipop Guaranteed For A Thousand Licks as a precedent for a new kind of organisation of identity.

I wanted to get back more control. I wanted more in common with the audience.

I wanted the contract back - the agreement to come, the agreement to enter into conventions. I didn't feel that was possible without retreat, without defences.

I drew on popular theatre, Pierrot, archaeology, hymns, gags, improvisations, 19th Century Symbolism, autobiography, eschatology, old scripts, unperformed scripts, cuttings... and what had seemed like the closing down of possibilities suddenly became a liberation.

But what kind of liberation? The video tape of an accident rewound?

The theory of the Pilot had become a trampoline into the indulgence of being personal again, the panic persuading me to enter my own text. In Ghosts Writing I had always felt the audience were able to understand my role - because it was partly theirs; a confused visitor trying to give things meaning, to sort one thing from another.

In The Lollipop Guaranteed For A Thousand Licks I withdrew a little, still a misguide within the text, but starting to rebuild the edifice of fiction, a made-up autobiography with fantastical animal/relatives and half-remembered girlfriend/selves.

By using myself as the site I could make subjective and thus more empirically acceptable to the audience the organicism, the use of theory, and the attempt at totalisation that is so precious to me. By forefronting what for some theorists is the most constructed process of all - a lifetime of 'free will' - I could set in dynamic the real and unreal, narrative fiction and fragmentation, character and non-character, the documentary and the fantasy, and in their relations make visible the invisible workings of images and ideas of power.

Relations between subjective associations within a controlled field make the invisible workings of ideological construction visible (though not necessarily easy to read). I'd learnt this from working with students making Symbolist Theatre. In The Lollipop Guaranteed For A Thousand Licks I was applying the lesson to physical actions and text.

In this practice the play-wright-ing becomes not a vehicle to a dramatic world, but the terrain of that world, with the Wright inside the territory, occasionally and apparently in control in a way that only his or her subjective identity could be, at other times at a loss like everyone else.

Life was more comfortable for the performers, though once or twice with Ross Mullen and Charlotte Hawkins I tried to over-organicise their parts and they were forced to do violence to their performances where they could more comfortably have played the fragmenting and metamorphosing if I had given them the text and direction to make the contradictions within their character/parts explicit.

Finally...

In a society in which 'public' is increasingly problematical the collective act of theatre (arriving together to suspend privacy in a shared fiction) is logically in question. Moving away from the theatre building is to follow the 'real Christians' from chancel and nave to the house-church movement. Or the militias to their paranoia bunkers. The vagaries of The Quay Thing directed me towards an ambiguous space that was both public and private, collective but also secure, and towards a hopeful dramaturgy into which I could begin to write myself.