For sailors, adventurers and those fools who loved to face their fears, cartographers would write on maps of unknown regions the legend ‘Here Be Monsters’.
Helpful information? Or did they just worship the mysterious, the unknown and the notorious?
I hadn’t worked in the theatre for a long time, when two years ago I decided enough was enough and took off towards my own unknown. I quit my office job, packed a change of clothes into a rucksack, left my phone and I-pod on the kitchen table and got on a plane leaving England for France.
From France I walked all the way across Spain, to finish on the west coast where the land meets the sea. It took me forty days and forty nights (and if that isn’t true, it should be.)
At the sea I had a choice – to return to my office job, spend all my time there each day, buy a sandwich at lunch, be allowed one tea break in the morning, one in the afternoon.
Or I could choose to spend as much time as possible doing what I love – writing plays. I hadn’t been involved in making theatre for three years. I looked at the map. ‘Here be monsters’ it said.
Scary as it was, I made the choice to return to a career writing plays. I stepped into unknown territory seeking liberation, with a smile on my face and an optimism bordering on insanity. Let there be monsters I thought. Let there be fear.
At the Drachengasse Theatre in Vienna, starting on May 3rd, will be the play I wrote for the directors of Imploding Fictions. It is called ‘Flap and Fear’.
It involves Lilly and Jesse, two pigeons who go on holiday to Vienna.
You know the way pigeons gather in the park? Then if you move close to them, they flap their wings in fright and fly away? What happens next?
They always come back.
Pigeons returning to the crust of bread in the park and me returning to pursue a career in playwrighting are the same thing. They are stories about the addiction we have to our fears. The compulsion, the obsession to test, sample, discover how close we can get to the fire before we burn our hand.
‘Here Be Monsters’ the map says.
Curious, we keep going to have a look.
- Darren Lerigo, april 2010
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Guest-blogger Darren Lerigo is a Madrid-based playwright and theatremaker. He has written Imploding Fictions’ latest play “Flap and fear” which will be performed as part of the Newcomer-scheme at Theater Drachengasse in Vienna 3rd – 22nd May 2010.
