Against Crawling Realism

Man, don’t you just love Saturday nights in the big city? They’re so full of culture and beautiful people and that sense of being there, where everything’s happening. Which is why, despite the amazing events of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and the end of the Inside Out Film Festival, I am enjoying the best Saturday evening ever: there’s homemade soup bubbling on the stove; I’m in my pjs (well, my ex-yoga pants and a Count Count T-shirt); and, er, I’m writing this column and making a birthday card. Don’t get me wrong, I went out. I was happening, I was beautiful, I was cultural, I was an Buddies seeing Volcano Theatre’s Hedda Gabler (of the sexy poster and starred NOW review) and after an hour and a half I had mental pins and needles.

Hedda spends the first half of the play saying how bored she is. Sorry, how boooooooored she is. She should have been sitting where I was sitting. I had spent the whole day at my computer, writing semi-nonsense about stuff that was practically nonsense in the first place, and I was pretty much in a fit of nostalgia for the glory of my Saturday afternoon by the end of Act 1. An afternoon, I might add, in which getting up for a glass of water was considered a bells-and-whistles highlight. As I sat there thinking alternately "Can I walk out without tripping over my feet and falling on the stage?" and "Why am I doing this to myself?" I thought "Why am I doing this to myself? Really?"

Once upon a time, I was a theatre junkie. When I wasn’t at the top of a rickety ladder hanging lights or scrim, or lying on the stage doing visualisation exercises, I was sitting on an uncomfortable plush seat last upholstered in the 1960s, taking mental notes. If there was nothing worth taking note about on stage, I’d take lighting notes. At one point, I was going to the theatre four nights a week, and spending the fifth night editing the student newspaper’s theatre section. There were train trips to London just to see shows at weird, out-of-the-way venues. Theatre was my life.

And now – well, there are still trips to London, but they involve planes and, yes, usually theatre. In Toronto, not so much. Maybe I was spoilt – or I’ve become picky in my advancing years. So I push myself, I try stuff. Like Hedda Gabler. Because – OK – I like Ibsen. Well, I like Peer Gynt and When We Dead Awaken. They’re full of magic and ghosts and actual theatre. Hedda Gabler is Desperate Housewives on smack: slow and ugly. It desperately wants you to believe it (and give it your money). Look – it’s so real! The piano makes real noises! The lanterns are genuine turn-of-the-century! Thrill to the period-perfect detail (apart from the wall made of red plastic tubing, but anyway)! Listen to the deep and meaningful, yet normal and universal, Judith Thompson© words tumbling from people’s mouths! They’re just like us! Middle-class, educated, fearful, straight.

Give me a fucking break. This is Buddies, right? Home of experimental queer cabaret (oh yeah, and semi-naked chicks). Did I leave before Act 3’s lesbian orgy denouement? Because I don’t care. I couldn’t take another minute of the mannered, drama school, act-by-numbers pretension to the real. Maybe I’m an insane person – no, scratch that, obviously I’m insane – but my world is not like Hedda Gabler. And if it was – the bits that are, where I drink juice and make small talk about hats – I don’t wanna see it on stage. Theatre, for me, is magic: transformation, dreamscape, the drama of one thing becoming another before your eyes. It’s the oldest debate in the book (at least in the film theory book I was banging my head against all afternoon) – the crawling realists and the soaring fantasists.

So put me in the latter group. I mean, duh, I like Buffy and weird experimental movies by a film-maker that my supervisor thinks that I invented (so she’s an African-American Jewish bisexual experimental feminist film-maker and poet – she’s expedient and brilliant, but does that mean she’s not real?) and this great film I saw at Inside Out called The Time We Killed, where nothing happened for nearly two hours and it was great. But I also think that fantastic art is far closer to the way that we – OK, I – experience the world. It’s not all rationality and clipped accents and chandeliers. It’s dreams and echoes and half-heard conversations and the sudden sensation of falling. It’s "that guy following me through the car park is a vampire" and when I fall in love or get sad or don’t eat for, like, eight hours, I know I’m transparent and the everyone in the world can see the blood moving around my body.

So screw the beautiful people. I’m staying in my own little world, which is richer than all their much-vaunted perfect performances and pretentiously "intelligent" set design can accomplish. All the world’s a stage? Who needs it when my head is the best repertory cinema on the planet? It even has sugar-free snacks and comfortable seats. And if I don’t like what I see, I can leave.

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