Exeunt is delighted to be the home for This Room, Now, a new short film written by and starring theatremaker Chris Thorpe alongside Tamara Lawrance, and directed by Gate Theatre’s artistic lead, director Atri Banerjee. It was written in response to the Gate’s newly-articulated commitment to staging international work that looks beyond UK borders. The Gate started above the Prince Albert Pub, in Notting Hill, in 1979, but now operates as a theatre producer rather than a venue.
This Room, Now is a piece for two actors, whose performances are separate but intertwined: “Two related things going on at the same time,” as Thorpe puts it. Below is a piece about This Room, Now by its two creators, whose perspectives are also separate but intertwined… Thorpe reflects on the state of international theatre in the UK; Banerjee reflects on photographs, real and imaginary, taken of his parents in different places around the world.
ATRI BANERJEE: I got into photography at an early age. See here, exhibit A. A boy, a girl, a glacier, ferns. Aotearoa. The nineties, judging by the jeans. Jazzy knitwear; snowflakes echo the landscape’s frizz.
CHRIS THORPE: Back when it was in its old building-based form, I was very supportive of the mission of the Gate. I had curated a takeover for Forest Fringe and I’d also written one of the Iphigenia Quartets and been a performer in Dear Elizabeth.
This piece came from a request to write a ten-minute piece that could be performed at a kind of relaunch for the Gate, which currently is not a building-based organisation. To think about, you know, irrespective of that lack of physical base, what are the things in the ethos and the aim of the Gate that endure? While the building is a wonderful place to be, the buildings are not the work.
The girl, her eyes are half closed. She turns her face away: the line of her jaw will find rhyme with the child, the child with the camera, in years to come. The boy, he lumbers, his expression anxious. The photographer is unpracticed, the camera may fall. Snap.
I wrote a piece for two actors, which reflected one of the things that I like to mess around with sometimes on stage, which is the idea of two related things going on at the same time.
It felt like I could find a very simple format, but one which was really close to the things that I’ve always perceived and respected about the Gate. It has an outsized reputation for and ability to make the case for the importance of international work, and international voices within British theatre culture.
A wedding day, a sari, bright red, a shock of curly hair set (accidentally) alight. A moment’s glamour; in a city preserved, Havisham-like in her quarters. Great expectations. Snap.
And when I say international work and international voices, I don’t just mean the huge diversity of heritage and backgrounds among British voices and people who live in the UK. I mean looking internationally, to represent conversations that are maybe happening in places that aren’t the UK and writers that are based outside the UK.
This is not a diversity argument. In an increasingly culturally insular UK – and when I say culturally insular, I mean that the country is turning inwards but also I’m saying the practical ability as a British artist to interact with the world is becoming more limited, particularly for younger British artists – the Gate is vital in keeping those channels open.
The child took this one too. Or so he thinks. A porch in Oxford. The red sari now a t-shirt. The girl leaning over the boy’s lap, laughing loud, open-mouthed, long hair flapping in the spring breeze, the boy’s mouth pinched in a laugh he too cannot contain.
This Room, Now is the story of a 12-year-old who is both overwhelmed and fascinated by the world. Someone who, like me, is a bit of a geography nerd. Someone who, like me, has a kind of curiosity about the places and the people who aren’t necessarily represented in the more mainstream spaces. Someone who is a fan of the deep dive or the background figure or the thing tangentially referred to in a story that isn’t the point of the story itself, but leads you to an interesting set of thoughts that expand your world – and the possibilities of your world.
So one of the performers is talking about the young woman, and the other one of the performers is simply listing place names, one from every country in the world. Not necessarily place names that have an immediate media resonance, not necessarily the best-known place names.
A kiss on the forehead, the Hollywood sign blurred in the background. The start of a new year.
I wanted to create something that was formally simple, that focused on both the kind of individual who I think, at some point in their life, the Gate’s vision could be important for, but also focused outwards into a sense of the world as a huge and varied place. To be clear, the intended audience for the piece and my idea of the Gate audiences is not solely composed of 12-year-old girls. It would be wonderful, though, if the real-world equivalent of her came to the theatre.
But actually, what it’s about is the curiosity of ‘where can I go to look at or to be shown parts of the world and the people in them?’ Not in a spirit of exoticism, but because of a curiosity about what people like me are like in the places that I don’t even know – or the people who are not like me. A curiosity about the world can be repaid in a way that is much more intense and useful.
There are other photos too, of course. Too many to count. A young man on a riverbank, eyes floating down the stream. The girl with her head on a woman’s shoulder (maybe her mother?) after poems sent across continents, and a moon glimpsed through an airplane window. A murmured assent, ok then, yes, I will.
The piece mentions Isfahan [a nuclear facility in Iran]. There’s probably a brilliant play to be written about the bombing of Isfahan, now, or the bombing of anywhere. The bombing of anywhere that we haven’t heard of, or anything that happens in anywhere that we haven’t heard of.
But in a way, that’s shutting the door after the horse has bolted. The idea that, you know, the world repays our curiosity about the world only when something particularly fucking egregious happens somewhere.
What we should be doing is inculcating that sense of curiosity about the world and the places in it that are normally invisible to us. And creating a world in which we’re curious enough, and we are outward-looking enough, not to just hear about places when the Israeli airforce drops a fucking bomb. Or the Americans.
On the shoulders of his father, the child marches through the streets of Florence. His baby brother in a stroller. Rainbow flags flutter with ‘PACE’. Like his mother’s hair.
We can all be better at pre-emptively resisting these narratives. Because by the time we hear about somewhere because it’s been caught up in what we perceive as normal political turmoil or military threat, it’s already been othered.
It becomes the burden of writers with diasporic experience to present the alternative narratives, the ones where the countries aren’t just war-ravaged and/or destroyed. Speaking as someone who doesn’t have a diasporic background – who is much more the perceived default of the society we live in – we leave the telling of those stories to the people of that background. Which is not making a case for non-diasporic backgrounds telling diasporic stories, which both puts an unreasonable set of expectations on those artists, and it allows all of us, but particularly artists and audiences who don’t share that background, to lazily assume there’s no need to be curious because we’re being told what we need to know.
So it’s a question of where do we, as a default, learn about these stories and engage with them meaningfully and usefully, not lazily?
He took all of these. Yes, he’s sure he did. The child feels his optic nerve fizz, an impulse straight into the amygdala. An archer shoots an arrow into the eye of a fish. Snap. A corporation razes a continent to the ground, snap. In hospital wards from Luxembourg to Lesotho, a baby is born, is born, is born.
In the grain of the photograph, history holds its breath.
Which is not me advocating for people telling other people’s stories, so much as distributing the burden. Creating a theatre that distributes the duty and the burden of curiosity across a range of people. So we can all bring and talk and listen to our different perspectives. So that when the world tries to tell us a story about somewhere else, we are predisposed – no matter who we are – to question and resist that story if it needs resisting.
In Bengali, a promise is made every time a home is left – ashchi, I’ll be back. A moment’s resolve to commit, in the departure, to the return, a loop – snap.
So that when the world tries to tell us a story about somewhere else, we are predisposed – no matter who we are – to question and resist that story if it needs resisting.
The past clings to us like damp. The future is rewritten as we live it. The child doesn’t know the words for ‘vicissitude’ or ‘mutability’ in Bengali but if he did he would use them now.
You know, I’m not trying to fix that problem in theatre with this piece. I’m not trying to fix any problem.
In Arabic to love someone is to call them ai-yooni, my eyes.
But what I think the piece is saying is something related, which is we need to create a theatre that encourages forming a habit of curiosity about the parts of the world that we aren’t usually shown.
Through the camera’s lens, we see that although realities might shift, the love offered can be constant, unblinkered, steadfast.
I think about the work that I’m doing at the moment around nuclear disarmament, and the distinction that I often make between theatre as activism, which I think it isn’t, and theatre as normalisation, which I think it is.
Activism is activism. Theatre sometimes fools itself that it’s activism in the sense that they think if you make your pronouncements loudly and clearly enough, it will have the same effect as an act of protest, and it will encourage people to go out and take action. I’m not entirely sure that's the most effective way to do that. I think the most effective way to protest is an act of protest.
But what theatre is good at, is a way to normalise the conversation about subjects we don't talk about enough in the real world.
Even if he hasn’t always understood how it might work, the child knows he can try.
What is the equivalent of doing that in terms of, say, putting on plays in the languages in which they were originally written and fostering the idea that it’s perfectly normal to do that with surtitles, in English. Well, I guess: just do it. Just do it by degrees.
Like, what does an evening of surtitled extracts of plays look like performed in their native language. How does that feel as a taster? How do you lead people to normalise the idea that going to something like that is as much of a simple choice you can make, that it doesn't carry any particular extra weight compared to seeing a play in English? Well, you lead them by degrees.
We can know the past but not be bound to it. This here, this is the present. Life can be fervent, honest, enormous and true. Life can be life, more of it.
I can’t remember who the quote is from, but someone says to a person who used to be rich, ‘how did you lose your fortune?’ And he says, ‘well, first, very gradually and then all at once.’ You know? It’s a much more positive version of that. That's how you do it. It’s the normalisation of the idea that it's an ordinary thing to do.
A pledge can be made: to refresh; to relate; to rehearse; to re-solve. To see eternity in a pixel, or a frame. A promise, not yet waylaid -
It would make us richer rather than more destitute.
To come back, to come back, to come back.
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