A Love Letter to Theatre in Ten Acts
Wind In the Willows, National Theatre - 4 years old
A trip as far back as memory will guide me. My grandmother, austere and always impeccably dressed. A life-sized doll’s house rising from the earth. A world revolves and I wonder if I could live in it.
Rent, Shaftesbury Theatre West End - 11 years old
I didn’t know then I was crying for my own community but I cry all the same. Wishing I’m sitting next to anybody else as I hold all the whoops and gasps and adoration of everything Angel so tightly close to my chest that nobody can see in.
King Lear, Almeida - 15 years old
A stiletto heel gouges out an eye. She wipes it cleans, clinical, unbothered. Femme Fatale and I have a new hero. A storm blows the theatre walls off. And I sit in a world transformed.
Murder in the Cathedral, National Youth Theatre - 16 years old
A chorus of women, teenagers like me, move as one and yet I see every single face, body, limb. They’re not who the story is about but they’re my protagonist. A sense arises, a wisdom of the ensemble that will one day teach me more about life than any leading role.
De la Guarda (Fuerza Bruta), Roundhouse - 17 years old
The show-to-party segue so seamless that I’m not sure when it happened but I’m dancing and it’s raining. Raining in the theatre as Lumidee Uh-Oh blares out of the speakers and I didn’t know being free could feel this good.
Pina Bausch: Tanztheater Wuppertal, Zellerbach Hall - 20 years old
I watch from the wings - I’ve snuck out mid-show and gone to the other stage - a coven of women move between the grotesque, the hilarious and the beautiful. The images fall chaotically one after the other after the other, nonsensical, but somehow nothing ever made more sense.
Masque of The Red Death (Punchdrunk), Battersea Arts Centre - 21 years old
Did you get taken into the cupboard too? I leave my friends behind and disobey all the rules only to be rewarded in my rebellion, each false turn arriving upon another devious welcome. I map my brain onto the floorplan of the BAC and vow to make this my home.
The Waves (Katie Mitchell), Samuel Beckett Theatre - 22 years old
The cameras make me sceptical. And yet the apparatus of screen to speech to sound to mouth flow as if conducted, moving between interiorities so dexterously, like a tuning into a deep chord of notes I didn’t know I could hear.
Ruined (Lynn Nottage), The Almeida - 23 years old
Sometimes I worry that a play could never paint a world as richly as a novel and then I see you. A story so expansive it carries politics and plot as if it were 500 pages long. I leave the theatre with those characters so firmly lodged in my head, I had to check if they had always been there.
Inextinguishable Fire (Cassils), LIFT - 29 years old
We all know they are going to be set on fire. What we don’t know is the preparation. The painstaking preparation. The meticulous preparation. A lead up to an event like no other. A dramaturgy so perfect, I wonder
why we sit out here when the choreography of backstage is so beautiful
why scene changes happen in the dark
and I think back to that rising revolve when I was four years old
and realise
I have been living inside it all along.
Tommy Ross-Williams’ work strives to embody a more just world. They are a writer, director, filmmaker, community organiser and intimacy coordinator.
www.tommyrosswilliams.com