Mice Do Theatre.

I’m hoping to do a talk on Clowning in Counselling; in itself a triumph of arrogance over experience, but theatre, clowning and counselling are all about how we strut our stage in an effort to make our chosen role more authentic. This last weekend I did a training in Playback Theatre. It’s a form of theatre where ordinary mice play the stories of ordinary mice back to ordinary mice in a series of improvisations. No script, no director, no rehearsal, just step off a cliff and go. There are groups all over the world and we’ve been struggling this last year to set one up in Sheffield. People have come and gone and now we’re a settled team working on, well it’s hard to say. After giving it some thought over the morning’s washing up it’s about being really there. I some times think if on my deathbed I’ll think ‘if only I had been there.’ I’m not talking about the Taj Mahal or somewhere, just about being there, being present. It’s a deceptively difficult concept. I mean what of myself is present: The father, the toy inventor, the husband, money earner, the laconic urbane punctilious proud yet sardonically humorous well-dressed persona? Or me? And what is me without these cloths? Am I a man or a mouse? Well obviously…. And somehow in this long process of mousification I find myself more loved, a strangely unexpected benefit. And yet it’s obvious enough. We’re all involved in a constant process of reverse engineering each other, like ‘OK fine, but where exactly is this person really coming from?’ I mean it takes so much energy! And that’s just the beginning. We then have to create strategies to counteract the strategies other people are using to counteract ours. It would make Deep Blue go limp at the AI thought of it. So that’s what we’re working on, mousification. It’s a technical term. Anyway the weekend was delightful and as we stood in a circle at the end I was me. I lifted my T-shirt and proudly announced to everyone, “This is my tummy.”