We split, we split, we split!

A little while ago I made a vague attempt to explain to a group of strangers my understanding of the possibilities of The Tempest. I wanted to use The Tempest as a frame and talk about connections (I was in the process of connecting with someone, utterly, for the first time in years); about the way the waters relate to the desert, about how they are both opposing landscapes with the ability to kill.

Influenced by Craig (who was nothing but a Quijote of his time), Peter Brook directed The Tempest three times (or two - I can't remember), pausing for decades between productions. I envy that silence. But more than anything, I envy the fact that Brook had the luxury to experiment, that his circumstances were such that when he treated the stage both as a refuge and as a laboratory (research), people understood, and did not question him.

In his version of The Tempest that I like the most, actors carry fragile ships on their heads and move inside perfectly empty spaces, watched, from above (a scaffolding?) by the rest of the cast. (I had made a little wood figurine with a ship attached to its head for that talk, but when the time came to reveal it, I hesitated too long, and the moment passed, and I felt foolish. I still have it - the figurine, not the foolishness - hanging from my chandelier, in punishment.

The Tempest. Later, John Gielgud (Craig's nephew, it turns out), played Prospero in Greenaway's exasperatingly beautiful Prospero's Books: "We split, we split, we split."

I split, I split, I'm splitting: between landscapes that seduce, and landscapes that kill; between endless and disappearing landscapes; between people who attract me, like the desert, and their treacherous side (the waters); between a desire to live forever, and a colossal fear of old age.

This is what this piece is about. My mistakes, my hesitations, my permanent status as an internal émigré. Somehow, mermaids are also involved. "Here by the rocks, in the foreground, a mermaid is to lie, half-dead."

And so the experiment begins: writing a script that is not a play, the story of a woman trapped between two landscapes, a film-and-reading spectacle of sorts whose nature will reveal itself to me later, because form follows content and has a responsibility to it, the way we have a responsibility for form.

Here, by the rocks, in the foreground…