Читать книгу Blink - Phil Porter - Страница 4

The basic story of Blink popped into my head one night a couple of years ago. Normally, it takes me a long time to invent a story that makes passable sense from beginning to end, but this one appeared pretty much fully formed. In the weeks that followed, however, I became wary of my idea. When I told people the story it sounded like a psychological thriller – a genre perhaps more suited to a film or novel than a play (in theatre ‘genre’ itself can be a dirty word). And the story’s suspenseful nature seemed ill-suited to the skew-whiffness that tends to pervade my work whether I like it or not. I filed the idea away in my head under ‘Stuff To Maybe Come Back To’.

A few months later I became a member of The Soho Six – a group of six commissioned writers that meet up at Soho Theatre every couple of weeks. For one of our early meetings we each prepared a presentation addressing, among other things, what kind of theatre excited us most. I decided (never having thought about it so directly before) that I was most excited by small, detailed theatre about big, philosophical themes. And I realised that most of my favourite theatre is quite silly and quite serious at the same time, daring to flirt with ridicule. I went back to the Blink idea. I began to think the apparent mismatch of story and style might actually become the play’s strength and lead to something pleasingly semi-ridiculous.

In the past, I’ve shied away from writing plays that require actors to address the audience directly. It always seemed too easy a way of telling a story somehow. But as part of the Soho Six experience we were encouraged to look at the entire programme of the theatre, including as it does a great deal of comedy, cabaret and other types of live performance, and to allow ourselves to be influenced by that work. In particular, I’ve been influenced by the brilliant Stewart Lee, whose comedy is a powerful testament to the potential complexity of direct address. His ability to make an audience laugh at him for sneering at them for laughing at themselves for laughing at a joke that isn’t even supposed to be funny is nothing if not complex.

So here it is. A small, big, silly, serious, semi-ridiculous play. I hope you like it.

Phil Porter