Jerome Hankins
V RAISES HER HAND
Viv raises her hand and calms the world's sound and fury. Because the world is her
house, and the house of all humanity. But when she performs this gesture, she also
brings a eerie hush to the house. The house where the audience sits. The house
invented by humans to house humans.
Since he first started writing, this is what Edward Bond has been proclaiming in the
face of our culture's pervading and self-indulgent hopelessness and dejection: a
hope on both your houses.
A hope on two houses which are used to interact and engender better understanding
of our situations.
Viv is one of Edward's most haunting characters. All the more so since she
disappears, buried under the floorboards at the very beginning of the play and never
reappears. But her presence and sense of her mission and responsibility (protect the
world's balance), inhabit the subsequent scenes in such an irresistible way that the
invisible, the forgotten, the neglected sear our retinas more vividly than the existing,
hysterical figures on stage.
I have performed The Balancing Act in varied and numerous venues: the Avignon
festival, professional theatres, gymnasiums, school halls, and other nondescript,
drab places French schools leave to pupil dramatics
Whatever the place, every time Viv does her "calming gesture", a particular silence
invades the site. Not in a flat, barren, stanislavskyan way ("shush and ye shall find").
But because the young people, even those who have never witnessed a play before
(they are legion in France), instantly know the gesture is directed towards them and
has something infinitely important to impart to them, the future inhabitants of the
world.
In subsequent workshops, they often diagnose Viv as mad. But they know this is
their madness. And that someone has tapped their innermost thoughts.
Mad, insane, irrational thoughts because they believe in offering the world a bit of
peace and quiet.
Working on Edward's plays is a revelation, and something of an apocalypse when
schoolrooms are turned upside down, chairs, tables and objects jettisoned in a
maelstrom of creativity and free discussion.. What this reveals is how artfully most
teachers, researchers in pedagogy (these are a specific French breed and have
more than seven bright ideas before each of their breakfasts — one should break
their cereal bowls?), anthropologists, philosophers, neuro-scientists walk on their
heads.
Or, in an opposite perspective, it tells us how easy it can be, and liberating, to walk
on our heads while the vast majority think their feet are on the ground.
It is a fact that, since the 80ies, Edward's work has had an immeasurable influence
on drama in France. But not for those who "have power to hurt": cultural bureaucrats,
"inspectors" and managers (Molière and Corneille's enemies), university
researchers, theatre essayists, theorists and specialists. Not for these but for an
anonymous mass of teachers in provincial schools, young, budding theatre
companies, trainee actors and directors. For the latter, and also for young people,
teenagers, students, children also, Edward's work is obviously the most important in
our age. When I premièred The Children in France with young people from one of
the toughest suburbs of Paris (once the performances were over, Edward kindly
advised me to stop working on the play because it could kill me), France Culture
organised a special program and the young actors were invited. The yps improvised
the play's first group scene on the air, and the Greek chorus was instantly
reinvented. The journalist then asked one of them: "C'est qui, Edward Bond, pour
vous?". One of them simply answered: "C'est le Molière de l'an 2000" (I suspect he
had carefully prepared this statement to the Nation).
Young people approach the plays with admiration but also amity, sympathy,
sympathy for this foreign devil, unknown to them in person, but whom they consort
with as if he were part of their ordinary lives. In workshops, I am always struck by the
obvious nature of the relationship between the author and the pupils. As an adult, I
almost feel jalous and left out, as if a secret bond was established between them and
an essential secret withheld. Am I too old?
The play and workshops unfold and the young people read them like Braille for the
sightful.
When we performed Tune in Rouen one day, Robert came though the cloth as the
"wall-figure" and one young girl almost fainted. Yet (and Edward was critical about
this) our set design had not hidden the fact that the wall was made of just a yellow,
almost flimsy piece of materiel. Then we began the workshop and all bedlam broke
loose, a fury of questioning and imagining and laughter. Then I almost fainted. The
noise, the energy, the explosion of wit and irony. I was old.
In Haute-Normandie, where I have been working now for many productive years
pioneering and translating Edward's and Chris' and Big Brum's techniques and
ideas, with the support of Élizabeth Macocco who administrates the Centre
Dramatique National, (there is no other experience like it in France), the yps who
worked on Tune recently acted in my version of the medieval play Everyman
(unknown in this country) which will be double-billed next season with Edward's
Stone. They are even now coaching their fellow students and helping them enter
new projects. They may even come to Coventry in November if we can respond to
Big Brum's generous and thoughtful invitation. This form of methodical, responsible
transmission should be at the heart of our European educational systems.
The many yps we work with in Normandy and Picardie now act, direct and write
plays with a sense of artistic responsibility which is almost painful in its acuity.
Painful because the school children and students who get most deeply and
intelligently involved in Edward's work are precisely those who are pointed out by
school authorities and parents as "unmanageable", "unruly" and "school deficient".
With Edward's "stuff" (as he calls it), one can always, absolutely always, count on the
"worst" pupils to best understand his ideas and metaphors with an almost
nietzschean joy.
And this the greatest disturbance of all that Bond's work brings. But also the
solemnest and most pressing opportunity he offers.
A hope on all our houses.
Jérôme
Hankins