Writer Steve Waters on Out of Your Knowledge
Submitted by Patrick Morris on Wed, 16/07/2008 - 10:03.
It’s three years since actor Patrick Morris and I staggered exhausted into a rather dusty village North of Peterborough after a ninety mile walk along the margins of the A1. To what end you’re probably thinking. Well, I was too at the time, especially as the object of our pilgrimage, the poet John Clare’s cottage, proved to be a Teddy Bear shop, firmly closed and it began to rain torrentially. This was the good old days when the Arts Council invited you to apply for money rather than whisking it away from you, and I had conceived the idea of generating a play from a walk.
Walking and writing are hardly new ideas but fairly new as a basis for making theatre. Our walk was to follow the lost paths trodden by Clare in 1841 as he set out from his asylum in Epping Forest, followed his nose North, arriving home in a delirium three days later having eaten nothing but grass and slept under the stars. Let’s be clear, we are not the first to walk this route in search of Clare; there’s a whole community of Clare acolytes who cycle, walk and trace the spoors of their hero, the most recent of which is writer Iain Sinclair. Why another walk on a path now lost under new towns and tarmac?
Well, my idea was less to find Clare and more to see the modern landscape through his eyes. Impossible of course. It’s presumptuous to try and enter the mind-set of a man raised within a tiny rural world of passionately known botany and arduous field-work, of squalour and land-grabs, of poverty barely experienced in modern Britain. Yet what resonates for me in Clare is this dream of the locally embedded imagination; his poetry as has been noted by critics such as Jonathan Bate is being rediscovered as pioneering in its ecopoetics. His astonishing attention to the land, to the work within it, to detail is something sorely missing from contemporary life, lived in the glare of the PC monitor and a world glimpsed at high-speed through windshields.
Our walk was a kind of arduous object lesson in this. What we saw was nothing remarkable and is happening all over Britain, indeed all over the world – the continued enclosure of space, the privatisation of land. We staggered through London’s endless outskirts, crossed new roads and old ones, passed through shopping malls and tracked the increasingly bland and faceless landscape of modern England. But we also visited perilous enclaves of something else – nature reserves, embattled patches of woodland, fly-blown common land – residues of what Clare would have known and recognised. And more importantly we met people – embittered birders, civil engineers, bankrupt farmers – and the play is the record of those encounters.
Fittingly for a show that tried to tell the story of a slog through a hostile landscape it’s taken a while for that experience to become something for the theatre. Central to that has been workshopping the show around Patrick Morris’s performance. We took a rough hewn version back to the places we visited, to nature reserves and village halls and field study centres, even to Clare’s old village itself, to show it to the people from whom it had come. Then Paul Bourne and Menagerie took it over to shape it to what you’ll see in Edinburgh – it got pared back in design to its core idea and with the addition of Denise Neapolitan on fiddle, suddenly the text came to life as a dialogue between the past and present, between the audience and the performers, between music and language. It’s taken longer than three days to get to the Pleasance but the journey has been an instructive one. We hope you enjoy the trip.
