for my daughter Penelope

I developed recently a preference for non-fiction.
While I was growing up I devoured fiction hungrily. My parents even used to ration me, to get me to read slower. As a lonely child, aged 8, Enid Blyton saw me through the endless boredom of long school holidays. Tolstoy helped me get through months of convalescence after a dire car crash aged 18, lying on my front with War and Peace propped up beneath me. As a drama student Doris Lessing opened me to feminism and the bid for creative independence.
I have been an avid reader of fiction all my life.
But for a while, I was drawn to the intensity of raw life, as it comes: awkward, untidy, incomprehensible and tragic, more than the tidy re-enactment of it as fiction.
Let me give you a vivid example of this.
Last year I went to the theatre with my daughter. We were both looking forward to this, and had stall seats in the iconic Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris. It was a production of slapstick comedy performed by two marvelous ‘physical’ actors we knew. We sat side by side, happy to be together, pleasantly waiting for the show to begin, the pre-show buzz sounding like music to our ears, our coats tidily piled on our knees. Fifteen minutes into the performance we were already intensely engrossed when our attention was taken by some startling movements and noises nearby. The lady sitting on the next seat to me, a slim dark-haired young woman dressed in red, had started jerking violently and making strange throaty sounds. It was clear to us as she fell back, shuddering, her arms shooting out at crazy angles, that she was in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
The show went on.
From the darkness a man whispered ‘Je suis médecin’, crawled forward from somewhere and crouched half in the air, half on what looked like someone’s head in the row behind. He rolled the woman onto her side and undid the top buttons of her blouse. He tucked what looked like a ballpoint pen into her mouth to check her tongue, and held her hands down. She writhed, she groaned. To see someone convulsing is deeply upsetting. You feel distraught. You feel helpless. It is a violent spectacle. I felt very badly for her and wondered how the hell to help.
The show continued.
The actors were obviously aware of the commotion but struggled on, concentrating on the precise timing of their physical gags and trying to keep the audience’s attention, despite craned necks and whispers. Finally, the theatre manager must have called an ambulance. Just as the young lady’s fit was coming to an end and her convulsions lessening, a second doctor, dressed in a sort of white astronaut’s uniform, came up the central aisle from behind the stalls clutching an officious folder and a huge walkie-talkie that emitted brutal little sounds of the kind you only seem to hear these days in TV shows about cops. The seizure ended. The young lady lay still, quite unconscious. The emergency doctor covered with a blanket. 
At this point my daughter and I tried to turn our attention back onto the actors, but found it impossible. The action on stage glided over us, making no dents, no impression. The emotion whirling within us was too strong. The actors went on, plainly disturbed. Physical theatre requires perfect timing, and an exquisite sense of comedy. Difficult when the audience is distracted: moving heads, shuffling and muffled conversation do not enhance performance. We were an inadequate bunch for their extraordinary talents: I felt sorry.
After a long while the young lady opened her eyes and was helped to a sitting position by the emergency doctor. Head bowed, eyes open, she sat perfectly motionless for a long time, slowly pulling back from the foggy hinterlands of her mind into our reality.
I wondered if she realized where she was, coming to her senses in a crowded theatre with hot lights shining down and the sound of intermittent laughter. Did the surroundings seem hostile? I hoped not. I wanted her not to feel afraid and wished I could put my arms around her and give her some comfort.
Instead, my daughter put hers around me, and whispered kindly -sensing my state-
‘it will be all right Mum’, which was the perfect thing to say. We both felt shaken.
The performance ended. The woman was helped up by the doctor: she seemed so fragile. She moved slowly, leaning on his arm, and they made their way out of the theatre.
Here was life colliding with make-believe. Here were two performances enacted simultaneously in a parallel universe, and no question as to which was the more compelling of the two. We were a mere audience for one: for the other we were highly emotional participants. For all their obvious talent, the actors on stage seemed like puppets. Our neighbor’s seizure represented suffering, played live: an intimate moment endured and publicly exposed, an imposition of fate that affected us intensely.
Similarly, events have been playing out on our world stage and in our most intimate lives centrally during the last year. We are actors in an unfolding series of performances. Reality is deploying a chain of life incidents, lethal attacks on our sensitivity, sanity, beliefs and understanding. We are not only witnesses, but actors on the stage of a pandemic outbreak; our storyline has been loneliness, isolation, death and tragedy, a surge in mental illness, chaos, extreme suffering and political incompetence that must impact our life-view forever. We feel powerless, angry, sad, bored, all at the same time.
There is no escape.
Next to this ‘life performance’, the ancient and revered art of storytelling feels remote and disconnected, even at its most refined.
I have closed the pages of my last book of fiction for some time now.
Our screens at home proliferate non-stop with news: tablet, phone, computer, television.
When I wake early tomorrow I will turn on the radio, first thing.

PhR April 2023