Notes From A Factory Floor: How I got from there to here by Geoff Thompson

Author:Geoff Thompson [Thompson, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Urbane Publications Limited
Published: 2020-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

* In Judaic mysticism the three levels of Man are recognised as the vegetable realm, the animal realm and the human realm. The vegetable is where the herded and sleeping masses reside; the animal is the domain of the money-makers, the entrepreneurs, the businessmen, and politicians; the highest level is the human realm, this is the echelon of the spiritual adept, someone who has mastered the lower realms and seeks only to serve God.

12

Invitation to The Royal Court Theatre

I have to say that being offered a place in the Royal Court’s Young Writers’ Group felt like being invited to play for England when Gordon Banks kept goal and Bobby Moore wore the captain’s armband. I was elated. At my first meeting with the Court’s associate directors, Graham Highbrow and Dominic Hill I nearly burst into tears. Part of me was so indentured in the slavish ideology of my upbringing and my class that any validation, let alone validation from the theatre that had discovered and nurtured some of the best playwrights in the world, filled me to overwhelm. But it was also strangely and profoundly liberating. I wanted to run around London announcing my new position to the world. Later of course, validation from an outside source would be less enticing, in fact it would become unnecessary, even limiting. I’d learn to know my own worth. What other people thought about me, how others judged my work would be of small significance.

An artist should never be a member of anyone’s club.

But, now, at this time, as an emerging talent, validation was vital. I didn’t really know what I was doing still. I couldn’t tell if I was writing a powerful BAFTA-winning script or an illegible scribble for the milkman. I needed some kind of guidance. I hadn’t yet been introduced to my inner tutor, who would later become the only corroboration I’d need. For now, a nod from the establishment acted as both steer and rudder for me and for my writing.

Mere association with the Royal Court woke something vital in me, something urgent and real, and I was visited by the strangest elations. I had fleeting desires to paint my toenails black, like the great Boehme’s of antiquity, to buy loose clothing and wear canvas shoes without socks and drape wrinkled cheesecloth shirts over my shoulders, and coil oversized scarves around my neck and don a natty hat that I could doff at the ladies. In flights of wild fancy I would see myself writing in late night cafés, or New York loft apartments on Moleskin notepads with a Mont Blanc pen. I would stare achingly into the foreground, and ponder and bemoan, between paragraphs, the burden of my gift.

I felt, yet again, another part of the real me had emerged. The despicable, unworthy elemental, drummed into me at school, was defeated and disproved by my latest validation. It was forced to pack its bags, this unwanted house guest, and asked to vacate the premises.

At the same time my old friend cognitive dissonance visited again, only this time the confusion felt clinical.

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