3 Life-Changing Moments

NEWSLETTER #10 | October 2023

I’ve had three life-altering theatrical experiences. Three moments in theatre that radically changed me.

Or did they?

Let me explain.

No.1: August, 2002

An aspiring theatre director, I’ve made the predictable pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe where I’m watching A NIGHT IN NOVEMBER by Marie Jones. It’s a play about one man's struggle with national identity during The Troubles, against the backdrop of the 1994 football World Cup.

For 2 hours, the actor (Marty Maguire) plays a cast of 20, switching roles on a dime, split seconds apart. No set, no props, no costume: one actor, an empty stage and a story. Traversing time and space, bringing a whole community to life through an epic and intimate tale.

I’m on my knees from the start and my feet at the finale.

And as I emerge into a dreich Edinburgh evening, I realise it is exactly the kind of theatre I want to make.

No.2: August, 2014

12 years into my career I’m at the Festival again - now Joint-Artistic Director of Paines Plough - launching Roundabout.

An empty space for three actors to tell a story in an hour, Roundabout is a circular amphitheatre that - as our earliest itinerate theatre companies did around campfires - travels to its audience, not vice versa. Unlike those troupes of old however, it has taken five years, cutting edge technology and about a million quid to create.

So I’m sitting there, sweating with anxiety at my first preview of the opening show; Duncan Macmillan’s LUNGS. Spanning time and space, the play is about a couple deciding whether to have a baby, telling a whole lived life of loss and of love.

And as the performance begins and the laughter starts then the tears arrive and 168 people collectively hold their breath before finally rising as one, I realise this is the kind of theatre I set out to make 12 years before.

No.3: August, 2019

I’m in Edinburgh for a final time marking the end of an era: my last day of 20 years as a Director. I’ve handed in my notice with no idea of what I’ll do next.

Newly unemployed, I work it out as I walk, as I often do: away from Roundabout, out of Summerhall and onto the Meadows.

I think about the contribution I have always tried to make and I notice I seek out idealists to whom I can lend pragmatism; empathists within whom I can ignite ambition; extroverts who enjoy my introversion. A life lived as one continual opportunity for collaboration.

Then I think about the impact I aspire to have - at home, at work, as a friend: to help others be the best version of themselves.

Suddenly the leap to a new career, a whole new chapter, doesn’t feel so big. Whatever I do next, I’ll be doing the same thing anyway - collaborating with other people to help them do their best work. It’s written through me like a stick of rock. It’ll just be a different colour on the outside.

Change is the unknown becoming known

Here’s what those three life-changing theatrical experiences have in common: nothing changed.

Marty Maguire was still Marty Maguire inside those 20 characters; the power of the performance came not from what changed but from what was continuous. And my visceral response didn’t alter the work I wanted to make: it articulated in theatrical form a desire that was already there.

On the one hand, Roundabout was the planet’s first pop-up, plug-and-play portable amphitheatre. On the other hand, it was just a circle to surround for a story. Roundabout didn’t transform theatre: it did something old - ancient in fact - in a new way. Within it, LUNGS wasn’t anything novel: it was the kind of theatre I’d wanted to make all along.

And when I closed the door on two decades as a Theatre Director, I didn’t ditch what I did: I just did the same things with a new intention. A career change enabled by a clear sense of what was changeless: my contribution and impact. My purpose.

Nothing changed. Or rather, everything changed. But only because I saw with clarity what was the same. Like the sculptor revealing the statue that was always inside the block of marble.

Great theatre, any great cultural experience, changes us not by making us into something different, but by making us more of our selves.

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Radical change is not about transformation; it is about discovery.

The word radical comes from ‘root’. Root as in essence. Foundation. Source. The heart of the matter.

So radical change isn’t a deviation but a return.

To who we are. To who we were all along. To who we’ll always be.