'Where people are shown what they could be'

Recently, I listened to a production of the Moomin book, Moominsummer Madness, which involves a floating theatre. There’s a quote in it that stopped me in my tracks:

‘A theatre is the most important sort of house in the world, because that’s where people are shown what they could be if they wanted, and what they’d like to be if they dared to and what they really are.’

Tove Jansson

It made me reflect on my love of the theatre, which Tove Jansson elsewhere described as a ‘palace of possibilities’, and decided to write about three of hundreds of significant plays that I have seen in my life.

I have loved the theatre since going to see King Lear with Ian Mckellen at the Donmar Warehouse. The entire run was sold out but I was in London for the first time as a 17 year old, saw the signs and asked. Returns had just been given in so my Mother and I watched it from the worst seats in the house. It didn’t matter. Sweaty in torn jeans and ripped T-shirt, I was hit by the blind force of the performance. Lear asks questions about humanity and the gods and yet gives no answers. He begins as a godlike figure and ends broken but more himself. The play allowed myself to ask questions about the reality of life and death, that I had kept from myself before.

A few years following this, I saw the legendary Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at the Liverpool Empire. I had never seen a ballet before and was deeply moved and awestruck by the movement and love between the two leads. It is still to this day one of the greatest things that I have ever seen. It seemed revolutionary to me that love could be so beautifully portrayed without words.

In 2018 I saw The York Realist at the Sheffield Crucible with Ben Batt and now the now uber-famous Jonathan Bailey as leads, George and John. It was a profound and tender love story across class and environment between the two over a production of the Mystery Plays. There was a wrenching loss in George’s final ‘Don’t leave me’ to John’s departing back, when what could have been is shown to have been impossible.

As Jansson said, theatre offers us what we’d like to be if we dared to, and what we really are. I wonder if when reading this, there is some experience of the theatre that you recall that showed you something about yourself, even for a second. Therapy, like theatre, can be a place to let that part of yourself out, even for a moment.