There are three masks: the one we think we are, the one we really are, and the one we have in common.” – Jacques Lecoq
I was awoken by a bright light. It was a milkman driving past my car. I was up on Dartmoor. It was October and I had fallen asleep in the front seat of my car with a large, white ape on top of me. It was 1993 and I was learning the true meaning of optimism. I wonder what that milkman thought. This is the story of what led up to me only having a large ape puppet to keep warm in my old estate car up on Dartmoor.
Years before ‘93, when Patrick and I ran Little Jest Puppets, we applied for a bursary to study puppetry. We got an interview and a member of the panel slept all through our interview. Being acute body language readers, we somehow knew we were not going to get that bursary. My response was that I was not going to let them off the hook so easily. So I applied every year. And after about five attempts, I got another interview and I got the bursary, which was one-off national award; and that happened to be the last time it was awarded. Many things emerged from that year as it turned into 1993.
One was that I decided to see if I could participate in any of the course at Dartington College of Arts. I went to see the man in charge and he told me he that he would think about it. When I went back to see him, he said that if I paid £50, I could do two of the degree modules. One in voice and the other in movement. Both courses were extraordinary and run by wonderful artists. Also, a long association with the college where I was to become a lecturer in Workshop Skills began in earnest. I also attended the International Theatre Workshop Festival in London where I did a course in Commedia dell’arte.
Commedia is an Italian form of theatre that has had a profound effect on all sorts of other theatre; not least one William Shakespeare. Travelling companies would purvey their wares internationally. There are stock characters who wear masks and play out scenarios that are scathing, political commentary that is satirical, farcical and slapstick. A novice, me, turns up in a studio in London with some 30 actors from renowned companies and a practitioner called Adriano comes in and begins the workshop. Within minutes, he picks me out. “You!” he says, “You are a perfect Arlechinno. Put on this mask.” I should explain that my main tool for survival in life seems to be the naivety of a fool. When I say “seems”, that is because between events and choices I forget that my guiding measure is not-knowing. So, I had chosen the Commedia workshop without any previous knowledge of what it was and a vague interest in improvisation. I had never donned a mask before. I knew nothing of the characters and I was completely unsuspecting that I may be in a workshop with actors from major London companies much less in the presence of a renowned international expert.
I began to put on the mask. Adriano immediately instructed me to turn my back to the audience, which were the other 29 participants who were sitting along the opposite wall. I heard him choose someone, a woman. I could tell by her voice as my back was turned and I was sweating underneath my mask from sheer anxiety. Adriano came up to me and gave me two further instructions, “Seduce her.” I began to make my first move towards an invisible tunnel of terror, “No words.” People often, when talking about workshops, speak of the comfort zone. They say that if you always remain in your comfort zone that you are unlikely to learn anything new. Me in that mask moving towards that woman was in the zone of ultimate discomfort. It did not take long for my fumbling sideway lurch towards the woman to be called to a halt. I emerged from the mask, a sweaty mess but with many learned lessons – even though in that moment all I felt was relief.
Strange to say but, from that moment, a Great White Calpinkian White Ape called Cosmo was born. A devised show was born about an escaped ape, a potion factory, the TV station TV HeeHee, a bad boss and oppressed workers – it had comedic business, improvised moments, puppets and two zoo keepers. At the same time, emerging from the Dartington courses another idea was taking root. A story emerged called The Optimists. Leaving behind the capers and mayhem that ensued around the improvised Great Ape – such as the first performance in a shopping centre and finding that the audience had all left by the end of the show; children being banned from watching it at a school by Christian fundamentalists who thought it implied an evolutionary perspective; the forgetting of character names and whole scenes during shows; and being hauled into the manager’s office at a tourist attraction because apparently a character had sworn (a complete mystery to us performers!) – leaving all that and more, and moving into the strange tale of The Optimists.
1993. I decided to write a puppet show about identity for a teenage audience. The show was set in the future. 2020 to be exact. In 2020, I envisaged a society in which the wearing of a mask was compulsory. This was because the air was polluted and disease was rife. The mask cult had developed so that teenagers were wearing whole face masks and people were generally scared to take off their masks in public places. The city, where the action begins, was in lockdown. There was an underground protest movement, which had been suppressed and hunted down with acronym W.A.M (Women Against the Mask). Two masked teenagers separately decide to break the rules and explore into the wilderness beyond the city limits. They are very different from each other. They meet and wander together into a strange house in the woods called ‘The Optimists’.
In ‘The Optimists’ there are three strange statues. These have been created by an older woman called Sheila. Sheila is a renegade, a founder member of W.A.M. who has moved out of the city limits and created the statues in a shop that sells nothing and is more like a gallery. She tells the two teenagers, one a boy who is more tentative and the bolder girl, the story of each statue. Each statue represents an aspect of society inside the city – money, sexploitation and addiction. Slowly, the teenagers are coaxed into removing their masks and seeing each other’s faces for the first time. Apart from being strangely prescient about 2020, the show was a bit of a disaster. It was performed three times and I gained much from the experience.
The first disaster was that during the writing of the show, my wife got ill for about two months. We had three children. I have a clear memory of trying to write the final scenes, whilst the youngest child, who was 4 at the time, climbed up my back and the other were demanding dinner. There were various mishaps with the casts. I suppose the worst was that one of them never learnt his lines. There was cast of three and I had directed the show. The second show was in an Arts Centre and was part of a puppet festival. I was booked to perform The Great Ape in a theatre and the cast were to set up the show in Arts Centre where I would join them later. I finished the ape show and rang the cast, who told me that our staging wouldn’t fit into the space. This is what I remember of the 24 hours or so that followed that phone call.
We sawed off the legs of the main staging so that it was an appropriate height. The show went on and I sat and watched. The discomfort I felt putting on a mask for the first time in that Commedia workshop, paled into insignificance as I sat and watched the show I had written and directed. On top of that, we had another show booked the next day up on the moors. We had hired a van from the aptly named Ben’s Van Hire. The van went but it wasn’t the newish, low mileage, average hire vehicle. The cast piled into the van with the show and I piled into my Toyota estate with my thoughts and an ape. We were to be put up on the moors by the arts centre in a residential centre. We got there about 11pm and there was nobody there. And to compound our situation, nobody was at the other ned of the contact number on the door. We were four on the moors. It was cold and we had nowhere to sleep. The cast said they would sleep in the van and I said I’d sleep in my estate car. I had no blankets and looked around the car for a solution. I sat in the slightly lent back passenger seat with a Great White Ape puppet on me. ‘This can’t be whamy work, my life is about?’ How could I have possibly called this fucking show The Optimists!!!’ It slowly dawned on me that I was being taught the true meaning of optimism. Rather easy to be optimistic if you have just won the lottery, a bit harder if the show you have just made looks like a complete dud and you are sleeping on a cold October night on Dartmoor in an estate car on the moors with a show looming the next day. I fell asleep and was woken when was still dark by the early morning headlights of a passing milkman.
The rest, a show and a workshop the next day, is a blur – obliterated from my memory. That was seemingly it for The Optimists. Then, many years later, one of the cast wrote to me. He was now living in Canada, or maybe it was Wales at the time, and wanted to rewrite and resurrect the show with some students. The show was reborn and got a good review. Not only that, those two shows became fuel for a whole lot of creations. They provided materials to make shows and workshops from and, more importantly, they gave me a very real sense of all that can go wrong so that when things now go wrong in workshops, they seem relatively slight. And, making that show taught me that it’s a waste of optimism to use it all up on the good times. Keep your optimism for when shit happens. In 2020, as we are now, shit is happening and in so many ways I have been reminded of The Optimists.
Lyrics to the song of the show
You develop style, you take an attitude
Shoot me with a smile, hit me with a mood
Some of us wear masks to hide
All of us are scared inside
We believe the mask avoids the risk
But this place is the optimists
This shop of rejects, that market of jobs
No opportunity, alone against the odds
Movement, change, bewildered space
Man makes time, woman makes face
Takes a stand and rejects the fist
And moves out here to the optimists
Oxygen, it’s the basic source
Fume filled air, dead to exhaust
Lifted positive, banged down low
This way, that way -we’re too slow
How can anything good come of this?
There’s no obvious solution
But then there’s the optimists
Spectacles and powers that rule your life
Here’s a rejection, there’s the knife
It’s a generation game that digs a path
Look me in the eye, take off the mask
Seeing things that don’t exist?
You’re probably down at the optimists
The money god that plays with you
Another life, the great break through,
Sit down, stand up; find a voice
Prisoner or powerhouse looking for choice
The masks, the time, the endless lists
The moon, the sun and the optimists