Our rehearsals of Now You See It; Now You Don’t have been inconveniently, annoyingly and abruptly interrupted by Philip taking the well-wishing of our friends a little too seriously.
Break a leg, they said. And so he did.
Well. It’s probably not quite broken. It’s not removed at the hip. It’s not crushed and jelly-like. It doesn’t even have white bits of bone sticking out. So in that sense, the whole business is disappointingly un-dramatic. But the doctors say Pip’s leg is fractured and that he should rest for a while and not use it. So we have been forced to quit rehearsals and cancel the project.
This means we are not going to Amsterdam, not previewing in Oslo, not visiting the Ukraine, not currently planning another Rome-trip and not going to get the opportunity to take this particular project any further. Which is sad, of course. But life goes on and all that.
Then. When the cloud of disappointment had subsided, the thick layers of irony hit us. Like a slap in the face with a big fish.
Here we embark on a journey trying to make a show about failure. And fail.
We make a show about clowns. And Pip performs the perfect act of slapstick on the staircase outside where we’re rehearsing.
We set about creating a slippery landscape of tricks and fiction and end up physically slipping up.
In fact, we called our show Now You See It; Now You Don’t. And for a long time we could see it looming in the distance. Unclear, slightly out of focus maybe, but full of promise and bright colours and joke shop props and touring plans. Now, we can’t see it anymore. The show is off radar, it has entered the Bermuda triangle of theatre only reappearing like a ghost of memory – like the Flying Dutchman, perhaps, its journey interrupted, but its trajectory forever Amsterdam-bound… (How’s that for a syrupy analogy?)
We were making a show about what we laugh at and why, how we make something un-funny, funny. And it is with all this in mind that we suspect that this whole situation might in fact be a perfectly legitimate laughing matter. It is funny that this whole thing went tits up. Or leg down, as the case may be. We are waiting for the pain to recede – or, Pip is, I’m fit as a fiddle to be frank, waiting for the aftermath of cancellations to quieten down before we make our mind up about this. The laugh-worthy-ness of our current unfortune – does it deserve a five star rating or a meagre two?
But in the end I guess it is to be expected. Not Philip falling down stairs, of course (Well, maybe that too…). What I mean is: When you have the nerve to call your company Imploding Fictions… Perhaps it is only natural that in between the projects where a show successfully implodes the fiction of fake drama, or implodes the audience’s expectations of fiction, or implodes theatre’s fictional frame, or reveals a self-imploded fiction, or implodes the lies of reality and exposes the fiction of truth, now and again a project comes along and simply pops politely, in an imploding fashion, not unlike a balloon bumping unexpectedly into a needle – and folds up. Exactly in the way we imploders expect fictions to behave.
This particular project has – like the aforementioned balloon – popped. Retracted to its own crumpled, wrinkly shape, its true face revealed. It is not a pretty face. It used to be big, red and shiny (if perhaps a little bloated). Now it’s small, raisin-like and a little wet. (Yes, Pip, I’m talking about you again. Oh my god, is that blood? Nurse! Nurse!)
I’m writing from Pip’s bedside at the Norwegian A&E, anticipating a big bill handed over to me with a polite smile by a pretty nurse. (I hate people who smile politely and look distractingly attractive whilst they rip you off.)
- Pip, have you got your E111 with you? Your E111, the European health service… card… thingy… Bugger. Well I’m not paying, you’re the one who fell!?! It’s your fault that it has all stalled, isn’t it? I’m still standing!
But, come to think of it, perhaps I shouldn’t be quite as smug about the whole thing. After all, I was the one who pushed him.
- Øystein
PS. Thanks to all the people who have believed in this project; INSTED, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and the Norwegian Dance and Theatre Centre, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, International Publishers Forum in Lviv, the Norwegian Church in London, the Acting Department of the Film and TV-academy at the Nordic Institute for Stage and Studio in Oslo and of course our eminent producer Michael H. Sciarrone! We will be back with renewed strength before you know it… (After all, we aren’t broken. Only fractured.)
Tags: Imploding Fictions, Now you see it now you don't, Oystein Ulsberg Brager, Philip Thorne