Tim Bannerman's The Theatre Chronicles – Part Six: Labyrinth II
“Anyway, then came the New Job,” I wrote in a letter to my parents in mid-June 1983, “and I’m loving it. A Mohican punk, a dyed black ‘heavy’, a green girl or three , and others, all quite different and initially elusive, but after a week and a bit, despite the boring but well-paid BBC break, I feel I’m beginning to be trusted and we’re getting to know each other in a unique way.”
“When I sat down a few weeks ago to try and write yet another play – for the National Youth Theatre competition – my brief was to write about the dreams and despairs of 16-19 year olds, largely stuck in dole-queue limbo – and I realised I knew nothing about them, not how they spoke or what they spoke about. And suddenly – wham-bam – here I am! We discuss everything from sex to cybernetics and try, on the whole successfully, to translate frustrated energy into creative force.”
“Despite the travelling and lack of prestige, I think it’s possibly the most valuable job I’ve yet done, or started to do. The money, as always, is a problem and I’ve got to get some sort of commitment on (the course organiser’s) part to provide me with at least a decent percentage of my travelling expenses which they initially said they would provide. Still I’m sorting out a tax problem and no doubt it will all sort itself out in the end.”
“Meanwhile, I bask in the New Forest sun and grapple empathetically with the agonies, ecstasies and paralyses of late adolescence.”
Hitch-hiking my way to Basingstoke railway station of a weekday morning, I had learned to recognise some of the cars that passed me in the country lane as I walked in the early hours, praying and cursing, come rain, come shine, hoping I’d be there in time for my best train down to New Milton.
Best moment by far was an awareness of a looming presence, approaching and then slowing with a kind of sigh behind me. I looked round and there, its iconic radiator gleaming like the gates of heaven, floated a vastness of dove grey over cream Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, driven by a Homburg-hatted god dimly smiling at me and indicating that I should climb aboard.
What he did or who he was, I never did divine, but over several journeys at identical times, I would hear the sigh and hop aboard. We would travel in silent state with only the occasional “lovely day” or “rather damp” to break our peace.
Once arrived at my destination, it was a different story.
Bedlam or sulky silence, we would start the day with exercises to wake us up and get the blood moving. The very physicality of these exercises, mostly of the hectic spurt and stop, tag variety, helped to create a trust and comfort with each other, so that touching became a natural part of living and working together. Less so for me with them, perhaps, given a level of care and discretion not to get over-familiar with these vulnerable people, for all the tough, devil-may-care attitude of some. But Trust Exercises of the lean-backwards-with-your-eyes-closed-till-you-fall-and-someone-catches-you kind were a key part of building confidence as was building an awareness of self in space either moving en masse at speed or being guided, blindfold, by someone else through this space. And responding to movement and sound round the circle, sending objects round one way, then another, adding sounds, a made up language – “dickity dah, dickity dee” – and so on, spinning round, across, forward, back, stopping each time it dropped, learning to follow each other and respond faster and faster to each connection.
Gradually we started working towards building a show, evolving it together, indoors in the Arts Centre and outdoors out in the Forest after rowdy trips singing and laughing hysterically in the smoky old Transit minibus.
Our deadline was the Gazebo Youth Training Scheme Festival in Birmingham and we had 6 weeks to put the show together. I think it was Linda who came up with the idea, unless it was one of the kids – they were always coming up with surprising things from nowhere it seemed – “What about Theseus and the Minotaur, you know, the Labyrinth at Crete? We could do a dance piece.”
“Who, what, where?” came the clamour of questions. Classical myths, Latin and Greek, let alone the great Ovid himself, hadn’t been high on the agenda for most of them in their education to date. And dance?! So Linda explained, with a bit of help from me, about the story.
The Minotaur, for those who might not know or need reminding, was half-man, half-bull, the consequence of a bit of bestiality engineered by the Sea God Poseidon between Pasiphae, wife of King Minos of Crete, and a prize snow-white bull which Minos was supposed to have sacrificed in Poseidon’s honour but didn’t – hence the beastly bit of engineering through the Oberon trick of making Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. She then took this a stage further by doing a kind of Trojan cow number on the bull by getting inside a custom-made cow starkers and encouraging the bull to have it away with her while so disguised.
There must be a word for this particular fetish of pretending to be something you’re not in order to attract another species altogether. Come to think of it, that’s not far off what the Ophrys genus in the Orchid family does to attract a certain kind of insect to mate with and thus pollinate it, uncannily imitating flies, bees, wasps, spiders and the like, but only to produce more fertile seeds of the same flower, not something half-insect, half-flower. Much better leave that kind of dodgy genetic-engineering to the manticores and minotaurs of the mythical past and the chimeras to come – the present is scary enough, thank you very much. Our story didn’t really deal with any of that anyway, however many adolescent giggles it provoked in the telling of it beforehand.
What we did decide to tell was the story of how Theseus, son of the King of Athens, took it upon himself to end the ritual slaughter of the seven young men and seven young women who were sacrificed to the Minotaur every year in King Minos’ revenge demanded from Athens ever since the death of his son who had been killed in the Panathenaic Games, a sort of Olympiad, held in Greece at that time.
It wasn’t just the Minotaur that was the problem. There was the Labyrinth at Knossos as well. It had been constructed so fiendishly by the legendary craftsman, Daedalus, that once you entered it, you could never find your way out again. So the beautiful boys and girls, despatched from Athens and doomed to enter the labyrinth to honour the blood debt enforced by Minos, would be picked off helplessly, one by one, to be mangled and devoured at leisure by the terrifying beast within.
Fortunately the day Theseus arrived in Crete along with his fellow victims-to-be, he saw and instantly fell in love with Minos’ beautiful daughter, Ariadne – and, alleluia, she with him. So later that night, the eve of the day he was due to enter the labyrinth, she tiptoed over to his room under cover of darkness and gave him a ball of string and a sword and, who knows, a goodnight kiss to boot. The sword was to kill the Minotaur, obvs, and the ball of string was so he could find his way out of the labyrinth again.
And that’s the story we told in a stylised, symbolic kind of way – except in our version there was one critical difference. And it’s a really good one, I think, certainly as far as keeping the dramatic tension up, even if it begs a freer interpretation of the story.
You see, in our magical mystery tour of the tale, we never knew who would win in the fight between Theseus and the Minotaur. Sometimes it was one. Sometimes the other. And somehow it never mattered. They were sort of interchangeable. Everybody cheered. Everyone went home to Athens or New Milton or wherever, even the loser. It’s a play, after all. Who cares who wins or loses as long as it’s a good fight. And it always was. With that added tension of never knowing who would come out on top. A bit like the Grand National, without hurting the horses. Or losing any money when the favourite comes in last.
It started a bit like that. A bit of a joke. A silly story from a million years ago that we decided we would find a way to tell over the next few weeks using the skills and ideas we had and maybe finding some new ones along the way.
At first, I thought – we’ll never do it. Never get everyone to work together without someone sloping off for a fag, or saying they were tired and needed a rest or just laughing and fooling around or simply refusing to join in.
I’m not sure at what point it became something different. I expect we had a showdown or two, or three along the way. I’m sure there were tears. Plenty of them. More than once. But at some point, something happened. Something beautiful.
And it all changed.
