Dev Virahsawmy - Guest blog of Farewell

Dev Virahsawmy

In this characteristically outspoken and moving guest blog, Mauritian writer and political activist Dev Virahsawmy marks his farewell to public life.  He will, however, join us for the last of The Lockdown Dialogues with Peter Sellars on June 3rd.  Dev says that "Since Toufann, I have always felt as being part of the Border Crossing community."  We are honoured to publish his message of retirement.

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Whether we like it or not, human beings have always needed myths and will always need them. What is a myth? It may be “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events” or “a widely held but false belief or idea” or “a misrepresentation of the truth” or a combination of all these.

All societies generate their myths in order to come to terms with reality, to make life meaningful and to have a raison d’être and plural societies have several sets of myths which are often antagonistic. In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, a dominant myth was that Mauritius was ‘Little France’. The alliance between the new English masters and the local oligarchy led middle-class Euro-Creoles to rally around the French language and ‘Frenchness’.

At present, a dominant myth is the belief that Mauritius is ‘Little India’. This politically motivated myth is linked to another more pernicious one carefully nurtured to support a racial objective. It is to show that people from India belong to a superior race for they have succeeded where Afro-Creoles have failed although both groups experienced the same ill treatment. There is nothing further from the truth. Slavery and indentured labour have nothing in common. The story of my great-grandfather clearly illustrates this. He, a ‘coolie’, came to Mauritius as an indentured labourer and during his stay he was attracted by the beauty of a young lady and when he proposed, his proposal was turned down. At the end of his contract, he returned to his homeland, changed his name, bought a passenger ticket, returned to Mauritius, proposed again and was successful. This is how he and his beloved started the Virahsawmy clan. A slave did not have this kind of freedom.

A very strong myth concerns capitalism which is believed to be irreplaceable, has always existed and always will. The history of the human race shows that this is not true but billions believe it is gospel truth. Skilful and systematic brainwashing has produced the required effect.

I do not intend to condemn mythmaking or mythmakers for the poet that I am, is guilty of much of this.

• Creole is our national language and must be known as Morisien. Myth or reality?
• We can achieve universal bilingual functional literacy in Morisien and English, another creole language. Myth or reality?
• Artocarpus altilis (breadfruit) or madegonn or friyapen will one day become our preferred staple. There cannot be genuine food security without it. Myth or reality?
• It is possible to build a supraethnic identity. Myth or reality?
• Mauritius is a Maritime Republic. Myth or reality?
• Mauritius is a creole island whose flora and fauna have been transfomed by different waves of immigrants from Africa, Europe and Asia. Myth or reality?
• Marxism and religion are compatible. Myth or reality?
• Men and women are different but equal. Myth or reality?

For more than half a century, these ‘myths’ have fuelled my existence. Covid-19 and PPS now tell me to take it easy. How much time is left? Only God knows. One thing is certain: some day soon, like Hamlet, I will say, “The rest is silence.” I promise that I’ll try hard not to pester you anymore with my frivolous myths.

This is my farewell message.

God bless you all.

ORIGINS at the Globe - Guest Post by Mei Ann Teo

Madeline Sayet performs WHERE WE BELONG at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Monday night was an historic occasion, when Mohegan theatre-maker Madeline Sayet performed her solo piece WHERE WE BELONG at the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to a standing ovation.  The play, which deals with Shakespeare, colonialism, personal stories and shifting identities, sat wonderfully in this iconic space, which gave the event a very particular meaning.

Director Mei Ann Teo writes:

June 17, 2019. London.

The last day of our run at Border Crossings' ORIGINS Festival (visionary artistic Director Michael Walling) happens at Shakespeare's Globe. Every time I hear this story, another rich layer emerges, and this time, in this space, I am beside myself.

Maddy's story did something to that space last night. She was not only speaking to the people in the room, but all those who have passed through it, and are buried around and beneath. She was speaking to the walls, embedding them with new DNA. She was also speaking towards the future; speaking to enable us with the tools to have a future, speaking us into understanding, existence, survival, and into thriving/flying.

It wasn't a solo show, no. She was not alone. With her were the people she met in England, the family she came from, many others but most sweetly, the Mohegan chief Mahomet Weyonomon who has a rock memorial in the green grass at Southwark Cathedral.

With her were all of us, witnessing, being transformed through the passion of her struggling with the question "where do we belong" and while there are never any easy answers and endings, I'm finding the courage to decide to make mine, "everywhere".

The Roman Tragedies - The Illusion of Participation

The Roman Tragedies

This photo is unusual for a theatre blog - I took it myself.  In Ivo van Hove's production of The Roman Tragedies, many of the rules about theatre and spectatorship seem to be thrown out of the window.  You can take photos.  You can tweet about the show as it unfolds through its six-hour span, and the tweets are flashed across the stage during set changes.  You can move between seats, and onto the stage, where you sit in close proximity to the actors.  You watch the performance both live (at various distances) and on live filmed relays, both on the large screen above the stage and on the many TV monitors around the space (including, if you like, in the foyers).  Given that the Shakespeare text is spoken in a contemporary, prosaic Dutch, an eye on the screen is essential as that's also where the subtitles are.  In one of the most thrilling scenes, Hans Kesting  as Mark Antony delivered his eulogy to Caesar very close to me, and once or twice locked eyes with me (the spectator as crowd member) - but I also had to keep looking away from him to the broadcast version, so as to check what he was actually saying (the spectator as receiver of the mediated).  You can buy food and drink on stage, and eat it during the show.  You can check out the make-up area, where the performers are prepared to go on camera.  There's an info desk about the company's work, from where the set changes are announced, complete with musak.

The Roman Tragedies - the onstage make-up area.

It could all be incredibly gimmicky, I suppose - and it is certainly fun - but it seems to me that this is much more than an experiment with audience participation.  And that the participation is not actually participatory at all.  I saw the production when it first came to the Barbican in 2009, and then I wrote that "there's an element of real democracy about the whole thing. It raises endless questions about theatre and politics - not least whether politics might be turning into nothing but performance."   Reading that blog today, it feels like a memory of a more innocent time, as well as recognising the production as prophetic.  In its current manifestation, the production opens with the Trump inauguration being broadcast on TV, while Volumnia and Virgilia discuss the absent Martius, their private conversation also being broadcast.  There seems to be no boundary between the public and the private.

The Roman Tragedies - spectators and TVs

On one level, this reflects our current "politics as show-biz" - the desire to feel intimate with public figures, to be aware of their private lives, to have them live out those lives as a public display (Antony and Cleopatra is particularly strong in this way).  On another level, it suggests the privatisation of public space - the way in which reckless magnates like Trump, Farage and (the most immediate example) George Osborne have come to treat politics as just another part of their self-aggrandising, self-enriching projects.  And this is crucial to the way the performance works - or, at least, it felt so in the charged atmosphere of 2017, far more so than it had in 2009.  Because the apparent agency this production gives to the audience is not agency at all: we remain as passive recipients of the play.  If, as I said in 2009, the production is "democratic" (and at heart I believe theatre to be a fundamentally democratic form), then it is through the exposure of what is so profoundly undemocratic in the current moment.  We have ceased to be participants, and become mere consumers.

Van Hove cuts all the scenes where Shakespeare has the common people speak.  The actors address the audience as "Friends, Romans, countrymen" - partly live but more tellingly through the medium of broadcast.  We feel as if we could be part of the story, as if our role contains the potential for action - but in fact we spectate.  The performance provides us with basic needs - we can work out when to take a loo break and the food is pretty good.  But we retain our role as spectators even as we are offered the illusion of participation.  For the last section of the performance, we are ordered back to our original seats, facing the conventional proscenium stage in a conventional hierarchical relationship - and of course, we unquestioningly obey.  Even the final ovation, leaping to our feet as one, is somehow disturbing in this most uneasy of performances.

In June 2016, the people of Britain responded to a marketing campaign based on lies, misinformation and the manipulation of prejudice, conveyed through broadcast and social media.  This led to the shocking referendum result, which has since been exploited as an expression of "the will of the people" to chilling effect - the Brexit process is being rushed through without consultation or democratic process.  Trump's antics are only an Americanised manifestation of the same basic thing.  Last week I was grateful to the Dutch for an election that stemmed the tide of populism, and for a piece of theatre that clarified just what is going on.

The Brussels speech

A speech given by Michael Walling to the EU's OMC group on the role of Culture in the Refugee Crisis: 14th September 2016.  

Good morning everybody – my name is Michael Walling and my friend and colleague here is Rosanna Lewis. We are very grateful to you for this opportunity to present the report on behalf of the Voices of Culture Structured Dialogue Group on the Role of Culture in Promoting Inclusion in the Context of Migration.

We are particularly grateful to the Structured Dialogue group for taking the shocking decision to choose as their representatives today two citizens of the United Kingdom. Not only is ours the only member state that is not taking part in this OMC group – it is also the only member state whose population has voted to withdraw from the entire European project – albeit by a very small margin in a non-binding advisory referendum that has yet to be debated, never mind endorsed, by our sovereign Parliament, the bulk of whose members in both houses are much opposed to its result. Just saying….

If the UK’s political class was largely in favour of remaining in the EU, the cultural sector was overwhelming so – and across the country, people working in the arts were devastated, disoriented, bereaved by the referendum result. In the cultural sector, the European project is deeply admired and loved – loved because of its idealism. Because it is fundamentally about an openness to the Other. Because it generates new channels of communication and intercultural dialogues, building empathy, understanding, a sense of common humanity – and peace.

These are also the great virtues of the arts and culture themselves. These are the reasons why the European project is at its heart a cultural project, and why culture has to be at the centre of all the EU does. And they are also the reasons why culture is so fundamental to the great challenge currently faced by the continent around migration and refugees.

This year, renegade Britain has been commemorating the fourth centenary of the death of William Shakespeare – whose theatre, even now in the 21st century, remains the model for truly inclusive, transformative and politically impactful cultural practice. Shakespeare’s theatre was called The Globe – it was not called The Island – and it was emphatically about creating an open space in which people from a huge range of backgrounds could come together and encounter people who were different from themselves. He puts into public space the elderly, the mentally ill, gay people, transgender people, the homeless, the displaced, Africans, Muslims, Jews. And in every case, he invites us to see beyond the simplistic label and into the common humanity that we share:

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

If Britain really wants to celebrate Shakespeare, then it needs to celebrate the European, the humanitarian, the dangerous border crosser. If we reject Europe, we reject culture. If we reject culture, we reject humanity. And if we reject humanity, then we will reject the refugees.

Both Rosanna and myself have been working on projects that run counter to this deeply disturbing trend. Rosanna works with the British Council, and has been one of the driving forces behind “Queens of Syria” – a theatre project that brought a group of Syrian refugee women to the UK, where they were able to tell their own, very personal stories of displacement and loss. And on Monday, I will be starting rehearsals for a pair of new plays jointly produced by my company Border Crossings and Palestine’s ASHTAR Theatre – plays that feature alongside professional performers from the UK and the Occupied Territories a Community Chorus of refugees. The plays, called “Ilium and Ithaka: Plays of Love and War”, are based on the founding myths of European culture – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. So the first play is about what it feels like to be caught up in a seemingly endless cycle of violence – and the second play is about what happens in the wake of war: post-traumatic stress, families rent apart, displaced people on the sea. At the very source of European culture, Homer speaks to the refugee experience of the current moment:

“If any god has marked me out again
for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.
What hardship have I not long since endured
at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.”

You’ll be pleased to hear that the Structured Dialogue group does not consist entirely of Europhile Fifth Columnists fleeing Brexit Britain, but is in fact very diverse, covering a range of sectors and member states. It’s particularly important that the group includes two people who are themselves from refugee backgrounds. One of these is a musician from the Southern Sudan: the other is a museum worker who now lives in Slovenia, where she fled with her family during the wars in former Yugoslavia. The testimonies of refugees from European conflicts – quite recent ones – are a very important resource in dealing with the current crisis. We need to listen to them when they tell us “The moment it all went wrong was when people started saying ‘Let’s segregate all the Muslims’.” If we allow the new citizens of our continent to be “Othered” in this way again – and it is already starting to happen, more than starting – then we could be looking at another Bosnia. The great symbol of the Balkans conflict is the destruction of the beautiful 400 year-old bridge at Mostar: a bridge of no real strategic importance but of great symbolic, cultural value – because it was built by Muslims, and because it was a bridge – a means of connection across a chasm. Fear and hatred destroy bridges: our role as artists and as cultural policy-makers is to build and re-build them.

When the Structured Dialogue group – 33 people from across the continent, very few of whom had even met before - came to Brussels in June, we had only two days to address these incredibly complex and important issues, through what was in many ways an Open Space approach. Those of us who led particular discussion groups within that process have, slightly by default, ended up as the final authors of this report – but we have endeavoured to make it genuinely reflective of the many distinct voices in the room. Before the meeting, we had already been sent, and had given our individual written answers to, three framing questions from the Commission:

• Which recent initiatives best demonstrate the successful role of culture in promoting the inclusion of refugees and migrants? What were the key success factors and have these been
evaluated?
• What are the best ways to organise cultural activities to do this on arrival and after six months?
• What are the strongest arguments that can be made for the use of culture in this way?

While the three Parts of our report do not exactly follow this structure, you can see it underlying the main themes that have emerged. The first Part, dealing with the reasons why culture is such a crucial element in the creation of inclusive societies that embrace migration, is very rooted in specific evidence of projects known to the group from across Europe and indeed beyond. The third Part is about the crucial question of evaluation and how we can measure or assess the impact that cultural initiatives have in developing open and inclusive social and political spaces.

However, we did not entirely follow the structure that had been suggested, in that we felt it concentrated almost entirely on cultural work directly with refugees and migrants, rather than work about relating them to their new host societies. Our report does not in any way deny the value of direct cultural interventions – indeed, it is full of examples of projects that have enabled refugees and migrants to acquire language skills and cultural understanding, to recover from trauma or to develop their employability. But we were also mindful that such an instrumental cultural offer, presented on its own, could be understood by refugees and migrants as a simplistic programme of cultural education, even of indoctrination, positing an inflexible and monolithic European culture to which they, as new arrivals, are obliged to conform. It could be thought to place all the responsibility for learning and adaptation on the migrants themselves.

Cultural rights are human rights, and if people feel that their culture is somehow being rejected - that they are being asked to adopt a completely different way of being – they are likely to resent that. Research has shown that it is a sense of cultural rejection that fuels radicalisation: conversely, people who feel that they are accepted in a community for who they are - are not going to blow it up. And so we also emphasise the importance of cultural and artistic initiatives to introduce the migrants and refugees, their cultures, their stories and their sheer humanity, to the existing European public.

Building bridges. Narrating voyages. Embracing Globes.

Work of this kind is not just about generating the conditions in which new citizens can be accepted and included in European societies. It is also about enriching those societies. Throughout our history, cultural Renaissances have happened when existing cultural traditions come together, and people see all the exciting things that other people do – their imagery, their music, their dances, their poetry, their food. And so Part 2 of our report looks at the potential for art and culture to catalyse positive social change in the context of migration; to affect real transformations in peoples’ minds, hearts and lives; and even to create new policy.

In fact, I would say that only culture can do this – because culture is the only space where we can meet our new neighbours on an equal footing. Because politically – there is no equality. And economically – there is no equality. And socially, perhaps educationally, certainly in terms of health and wellbeing – there is no equality. But in the sacred space of art and culture – there everyone has a voice. So it is in the cultural space that we must begin.

Calixto's Forests

Forests

Calixto Bieito - the bad boy days....  I was there.  Even now, everything written about Calixto's work  still refers back to his ENO work, almost a decade ago: A Masked Ball (that's the one with the toilets) and Don Giovanni (sex and violence more generally).  I was his assistant director on both shows - and I also wrote the dramaturgical pieces for the programmes.  Today, as at the time, I have no idea what all the fuss was about.  I'd already directed my own Don Giovanni - so I knew that for the 21st century this had to be a piece about sex, violence, death and religion.  What else do people think that piece is about?  To my mind, Calixto's main achievement was to recover the comedy.  Masked Ball was a brilliant transmogrification, shifting the questions around radical political change into the era of the Spanish transition.  It wasn't really about toilets.

Anyway - nice to see him back on the British stage, and nice to see Christopher Simpson acting for him (Chris was B in Double Tongue - the play I directed just after working with Calixto on Giovanni).  Forests has elements of the old enfant terrible about it - although these days Calixto is pushing 50, so maybe he's just terrible now.  I felt very aware of his middle age throughout the piece: there's a sense of an artist dealing with mortality, aware that his moral fury is futile, a kind of tiredness buzzing underneath all the characteristic energy.  It speaks to those of us who work in culture and who value humanity at the present moment - it draws off our disillusionment, the existential challenge of carrying on our attempt to live well in a world which so clearly and decisively denies that aspiration.

Much has been made of Calixto's Shakespearean collage of a text - and it's quite fun in a sort of crossword-puzzle way.  But it's not about Shakespeare.  It's not really about the text either - except perhaps the language as music.  Rather the work unfolds through a series of extraordinary images and contrasting energies, unravelling rhythmically like the movements of a symphony.  At times the acting is very generalised - perhaps that's an inevitable side-effect when there are no characters and the text is only an approximation to the mood - and so some of it can seem trite.  Youthful enthusiasm takes up a substantial amount of time at the start...  but the latter sections, dealing with the nightmare world we have made and the fact that somehow we have to come to terms with dying in it - these are extraordinary.   

Maori Troilus and Cressida

I was at the Globe last night to see the second and last London performance of Troilus and Cressida in Te Reo Maori, as part of the World Shakespeare Festival.  I've refracted Shakespeare through the prism of "other" cultures quite a few times myself over the years, from the Indian Tempest to the Native American Dream, via the Mauritian Scottish tragedy...  so the whole undertaking has a lot of resonance for me - and this Maori show is particularly exciting, given our ongoing work with the London community, and my recent trip to New Zealand for Origins.

The play fits very readily into a traditional Maori context, with Greeks and Trojans as warring tribes, and a great deal of macho display, ritualised combat and haka war chants.  What's particularly exciting about the coincidence of this with Shakespeare is the way it allows for an honest rendering of heightened text, with even private moments rendered into rhetoric and accompanied by gestural language.  Like Mnouchkine's Asian-influenced Shakespeare, the production provides a way into a world removed from our own, which by its strangeness serves to comment on our own.  

It was also a great social occasion for our friends at Ngati Ranana.  At the curtain call, the haka from the stage was answered by an incredibly vigorous one from the Globe's Pit, which suddenly became a totally vibrant part of the performance.  The direct communication between actors and audience was very Shakespearean - as so often, performers from a non-naturalistic tradition revitalised the theatre space, and their audience responded in kind.  

Rustom Bharucha

After several years of email friendship, I finally met Rustom on Friday evening. He's in London for a huge Shakespeare conference at King's, and clearly enjoying it enormously. Conversation with him is a stream of highly sophisticated consciousness: "These guys really know their stuff. We had Stanley Wells talking this morning. Amazing. About the Sonnets. And there was a woman from Canada who really challenged the canonical thing - asking whether we should abandon the numbering of the Sonnets. It's always numbering and ordering. Like the system which forces you to do lighting cues in a particular way. It's all being exploded though. When I was young in India we were taught John Galsworthy. Galsworthy! Then in 1978 Edward Said came along and everything changed. Everything. And now, they're approaching Shakespeare through post-colonial theory, through feminism, through queer theory.... I saw As You Like It at the Globe. Apparently it's one of their better productions. But I couldn't get the radicalism of the text I was hearing to fit with the safety of what I was seeing. I mean, in the end, the production becomes an affirmation of heterosexual marriage..."

I'm parodying, of course - it's exciting to be in the presence of somebody whose mind is so incisive and so eclectic. And great to feel that he's so supportive of all we are doing. He's really delighted about the notice Theatre and Slavery got in The Drama Review.

As part of the conference, we see an extract from a version of The Merchant of Venice performed by the Taiwanese BangZi Opera. This is a new form on me, though it has a great deal in common with Peking Opera (percussive puntuation) and with Yueju (sheng boots and a largely female cast). Shylock (a Saracen merchant in this version) is played by a tough little woman in a false beard, and is presented as a comic figure. Portia is romantic, Bassanio heroic, Antonio tragic. The naivety of the whole thing is actually rather refreshing, and we're reminded that, for centuries, this was how the play was done in the West. I never thought I'd actually see it like this!

American Dream

My production of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened on Lake Tahoe last night. Although it's not a Border Crossings production, it (perhaps inevitably) reflects a lot of the concerns in our work, particularly in the way we engage with Native American culture and spirituality. Watching the ending, as the cast go out into the auditorium with their smudge sticks, Kelvin plays his flute and Art speaks his Washo prayer, as the moon shines above them and reflects in the lake, is extremely moving.

I spent the last day or so of rehearsals wondering about the strangeness of the audience in this open-air space. Never having directed outdoors, I wasn't really prepared for the way in which the daylight in which the first half of the play is performed makes the audience far less passive, far more likely to move around, to chat (admittedly about the play), to eat and drink. To begin with, I found it irritating, until we got to Act 5, the play within a play, and I realised that Shakespeare himself portrays an audience which does exactly that. The Dream was probably written for a wedding, so the party element at Tahoe is very much in keeping with the play. Realising that, I began to realise how the early part of the play, which is full of conflicts, actually serves to subvert the conventions within which it was placed. Realising this, we were able to rehearse a much more jolting, intense approach to the early scenes, which really energised the play, and set up an inspiring dynamic between the stage and the auditorium. Space educates again....

The great outdoors

For the last couple of days, we've been rehearsing the Dream on the stage at Sand Harbour, Lake Tahoe. It's the first time I have ever directed in the open air, and I am truly loving it. I think the experience of visiting Athens and (especially) Epidauros last year has made a big difference to my understanding of outdoor theatre. I've become much more aware of the power that performance can acquire when it sits in relation to landscape.

Of course, there couldn't be a more perfect play to display this than the Dream. Titania's great speech about climate change acquires a whole new force when there are real mountains, forests, beaches and lakes for her to refer to. And the fact that she is wearing a Native American costume makes it doubly powerful. You become aware of a ritual connection between the performer, the text, the land and the indigenous culture. It's very multi-layered, and at the same time astonishingly simple - because it simply requires the stating of what is actually happening in the moment of performance.

I'm also really enjoying the experience of directing American actors in Shakespeare. The discipline of verse seems to me to be better understood here than it is in contemporary Britain. UK drama schools have just about given up teaching verse in the interests of the fast-track to TV. Maybe that's true of some places here too - but America is a big place and there are enough people with specialist knowledge and detailed training for some masterly iambics to be spun by the lake.

A Tale of Two Lakes

I'm in Nevada, USA - on caucus day. On my way to a meeting yesterday, I passed through the University in Reno, and who should be there but Barack Obama. From the conversations I've had here, I suspect he will win in this state. It's rather inspiring that people here are talking a lot about the need for real vision in politics, and seem to be sick to death of pragmatism.

The reason I'm here is that my old friend Jan Powell, who I worked with at Tygres Heart Shakespeare in Oregon during the early 90s, is now Artistic Director of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, and has invited me to direct A Midsummer Night's Dream here in the summer. I could hardly say no.... Tahoe is an amazing beauty spot - an Alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada. At this time of year, it's surrounded by thick snow. I'm staying at the Cal-Neva hotel (on the border between Nevada and California), which was the haunt of Frank Sinatra, the Kennedys and Marilyn Munroe. And, like everything else in Nevada, it's a casino. There are slot machines everywhere - even in the airport and the supermarkets.

Partly because of the amazing landscape, and partly because of what we've been doing with Origins, I've been drawn to the idea of using the Native American spirituality which is so powerful here, and relates so well to the landscape, as a route in to the magic of the Dream. I'm also, of course, very aware of indigenous protocols, as a result of our work on Bullie's House and since. So Jan, Catherine Atack (the Festival's Executive Director) and I bundled ourselves into a car and set out to meet the Paiute nation.

This involved a trip into the desert. Nevada is astonishing: the distance from the Alpine Tahoe to the lunar landscape of Pyramid Lake is really very short. Yet the contrast couldn't be greater - look at these pictures! Pyramid Lake is fed from Tahoe via a river, and the Paiute people have been fighting against its damming and to protect their environment for a full century now. At their beautiful museum near the town of Nixon, two Paiute men, Ben and Ralph, talk to us for a long time, with that incredible generosity of spirit shown by so many First Nations people, when the listener shows a bit of open-nes and interest. Ralph, the elder of the two, tells us stories in his own language, and then translates them into English. He talks about the 10,000 year history of his people in this place, about their brief relationship with white America (the first contact was 1844), and about the prophecies of global warming and climate change (see Titania's great speech at the start of the Dream). It's them, not us, who suggest that there might be ways to collaborate on the production, to involve them in our process, and to bring the children of the tribe to see it.

It's one of those rare, privileged days, when you remember just why theatre matters, and how cultural dialogue rally does have so much to give.

My visit here is very brief, so Jan and Catherine will have to contact the Wahoe people, whose traditional land is Tahoe itself, after I've gone. If the response is similar, we'll really be on to something.