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Illyria(some thoughts)By Kim Coull (Sept 2013)The PlayOk.Front row. Too close.Already I am in therapy.The gorgeous young things are so talented (and near): This is my first confession.They are acting out scenes of murder, torture, rape and sex. Each act of violence is translated through sinew and bone, the muscle memory of rehearsals aching now to speak, the grace of their bodies as they fall dead, or violated, or maimed, or dismembered, acting as a pivot upon which, for the next hour or so, we will all turn.Trauma slips right past our private guards.My second confession: I look away.My personal theatre is already full. I’m too sad to meet these truths with the rapture they deserve.My nerves are in uprising. My passport expired.I can never ever leave: Illyria is not a foreign country.I can see their acting eyes. Stalwart (even disdainful) against my nervous peeking.I can feel them breathing, certainly their chests heaving with performance, diligence, acute dedication.Taut (us both).I am a sympathetic trespasser.An easy acolyte.My amygdalae throb.Then, as always, without warning, the interpreter is shot dead. She and her words fall like water from an ancient Middle Eastern gourd. The journalist seems stunned.But that is how witnesses are silenced.How words become a corpse.All the more eloquent,Loquacious even, given this hour of meditation in the hole.Third Confession: I think of El Greco.Francis Bacon. What cannot be spoken stains the canvas.The art of repression released.Sex against the wall.They fall through an open door while blood trails across the set.The open palm a rouse.The spectral suitcases packed heel to toe with torture.The shoes laid out in the crescent of a vanishing moon. I think of Imelda (was I meant to?)There are gorgeous young men with booming voices, terrorists, freedom fighters, guards, brave and unwashed, starting their acting careers with gusto and brawn and brains. I think of what opportunities they will have and who will make it onto the big screen (I know, I’m off topic).I have my favourites already amongst the women.The tall handmaiden who acts from her body, not her head.The blonde cleaner who has to remember so many lines,who speaks with a confidence that even privately I cannot match.And Madame. Did you see her long red hair? Is it blood? Is it sex? Is it war? With which crimson lips does she speak?I want to lie down on her bed.The decor is just to my taste.They give her a sleeping pill. I open my mouth for one too.I thinkhow brave of her to wear white lingerie in public.Does conquest always require a pure woman’s body?Shoe her.Red and glistening. Click them Dorothy. Dance Karen.What will my daughter’s daughters choose?Staring at the concrete floor again.The audience behind me salutes.An insistent organism.I am an alien intrusion.The woman in white speaks from her ruby red lips.That hole again.No. Aperture. Cavity. Hollow. Chasm. Gulf. Abyss. Burrow. Void.Not a hole.But that’s the point.She will not gauze the wound.I feel myself opening up.My lips parting.Wet and primed.Blood oozing, the ever present rape forcing us to read and write and flow and stream and flood the stage...Wash away.Give birth.Level the world.War becomes peace.By the end my own disturbance is only an echo.I am the watcher.But who is watching me watch?The audience behind me is eager.I am not so sure.Last confession: What is the revolution’s resolution this night?To see these ‘bright young things’ tell me they know about the trauma of war, misogyny, ignorance, brutality, tell me that they care.That they know we are somehow all foreign and easily vanquished.That at the end, long after we have gone, they will know how to scatter the fallen leaves of our secret forests over our opened graves... ................
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