Exeunt Into Reality

At one o’clock on Monday morning, as I turned onto my road, there was a middle-aged man, wrapped up and tracksuited, running. An unusual sight for that time of night, made all the more interesting in its echoes of The Long Road, which I had seen a week before at the Soho Theatre. In Shelagh Stevenson’s play, the father talks of endlessly jogging to escape the pain of his son’s murder. On my road, seeing this nocturnal runner, an entire fiction presented itself. Like Kafka’s short on two men running past, an array of questions sprung to mind. From what was he running? Why at this time? What was so repelling at home?

I love those moments in real life that seem to step off the stage and into reality. Here, for a second, parallel possibilities co-exist, both equally fictitious. Multiplicity reigns supreme and characters linger on long after the curtain to mingle amongst the audience in the bar and beyond. How many Hamlets are wistfully wondering around London at this moment?

A while back, on the Jubilee Line platform at Baker Street station, I saw a man in a gorilla costume. I could not but think of Claire Marshall similarly suited in Bloody Mess. It goes to show that anything can belong onstage, because, no matter how obscure or theatrical, it doubtless exists in real life.

Further along the platform, appropriately, was a poster that quoted David Lynch: “Life can be complicated so art should be allowed to be complicated too.”