Oedipus

Four weeks is a long time to live in emotional carnage, watching the calendar countdown to a moment that will define and (in)validate your entire existence as a worthwhile human being. It’s a long time to have the whole world as you know it compacted into a single day, beyond which you can’t be sure that the very concept of life will persist. A temporal ground zero is a daunting thing to have to live with. It consumes you. It translates you. It re-writes you. For a month we stared down the barrel of June 16th with tears in our eyes. Like nervous midwives gazing up the birth canal wondering how we were ever going to slash the umbilical cord with a dessert spoon. If all else failed we’d have to use our teeth. I’ve heard the sinewy flesh of the birthing cord is a taste that stays with you forever. Ergo there was much at stake.
In a strange way the cathartic come down of all the stress and anguish pre-Brixton began to set in before we’d actually achieved anything on the day. 6 hours of laying around in a room with your friends waiting for time to pass leaves one feeling predictably rural. The day had begun for us at around 12 with heads filled with essential prep that had to be done before the real work could start. The reality was quite different as the greater part of what needed to be done involved soul-cleansing trips to the pound shop and make-up/costume set-up, which would have to wait till much closer to show time. This time we had to ourselves, mentally separated from the work but comfortably settled into the physical space, was utterly purifying. Like a post-orgasmic reflection on what has gone before; frantic bodies become still and, as the dust settles inside the mind, the liminal space between calm and crisis becomes a haven. It was the first time in over a month that the task had appeared manageable, as something to be embraced as an artistic project rather than feared as a logistical nightmare.
As the hours passed this calm transformed from something friendly and purifying into something quite creepy. We were coming to the climactic moment of our whole project and with barely an hour to go there was nothing in the room. There was nothing. Only placid bodies. After all the tension and the screaming and the crying and the bed-shitting and the hate and the love and the medicine and the pain it felt like our baby was being still-born. The show would become its own funeral. They probably wouldn’t give it a grave. At 10.15pm, fifteen minutes after the funeral began, I took off most of my clothes, covered my face with a white rabbit and walked out into the street. I woke up the next morning covered in blood, with a fax on the machine praising us for having pulled it off.