Spirits of Place, Responses to Trauma

Friday 4th April 2025 - Actors East, Haggerston

Present:  Andrew Boyer, John Chancer, Colin Ellwood, Sian Macfie, Jamie Newell, Susan Raasay, Dale Savage, David Whitworth

GHOST TRAIN - Simon Jaggers 2024/5;  LOVEPLAY - Moira Buffini 2001

Great to be back at ACTORS EAST in their fantastic new - and rapidly developing - Haggerston 'campus' which is beginning to feel like the true heir to the recently filched ACTORS' CENTRE. An absorbing day exploring two very different plays each rooted in the significance of place and the persistence of trauma
 
The morning started with Simon Jaggers’ latest play GHOST TRAIN.  Jaggers is an extraordinary playwright, his work both exhilarating and compassionate, powered by a love of music, and often delicately attentive to the fragile hopes and dreams of young people transitioning to adulthood. His plays acknowledge the darkness of the world while celebrating friendship and human potential.  The vision is unusually and hearteningly positive.  He is able to conjure a sense of distinctive and complex communities with minimal resources through networks of brief allusions. Perhaps most unusually, his 'dramatic universes' gesture towards a spiritual dimension that is often fashioned – cargo cult-like - from the jetsam of contemporary popular culture, with this 'detritus' somehow functioning as an instrument of true belief for his idealistic young characters.  Are these pop-culture expropriations character-generated spiritual placebos or an overarching theatrical metaphor/analogue…or might they even be face-value assertions of the playwright's belief system? The ambiguity adds to the impact….as if we are being offered a choice of engagements, each consistent with the same performative 'myth' and with any idealistic reading being masked and supported by our more cynical perspectives. Perhaps the most heartening take is that the idealistic 'investments' are instances of  young people's infinite capacity for belief and unquenchable desire for meaning. Such instances are rendered  more poignant and fragile by the apparent inadequacy of the 'vehicles' themselves. Jaggers is also fantastic at lovingly creating vivid and highly individualised characters whose potential exceeds their immediate environment, and he has an ability to fashion situations that exquisitely and delicately draw out the key moments and decisions in his characters' lives. He loves all his characters in the way that Dickens does, and he has the same relish for drama that Turner had for paint. It is all hugely refreshing.  His dramas are the opposite of desiccated.  
 
If there is an area where the plays' ambiguous metaphysics seem to consolidate into something more straightforwardly declarative it is in the recurring evocation of ‘Albion’.  This features in different and often very inventive forms in several plays, including GHOST TRAIN, perhaps his most innovative and ambitious works yet. That is a kind of folk-horror palimpsest meta-theatrical masque, mapping long-embedded historical trauma in a particular location (and cultural genre), and focusing in particular on the transition from England/Albion's folk culture to the commercialised popular culture that was accelerated by the advent of the railways and then further transformed,  a century later, in the virtual world.  The relevant pop-cultural phenomenon here - that is invested through belief with something darker and more fundamental - is the ghost show/ghost train, functioning as the vehicle of primal fears and possibly beyond that, as the conduit of human feeling and human exclusion since time immemorial
 
The play involves the journeying of four distinct historic groups to the same small patch of ground on which ‘Castleford Fare’ has perennially been held: A 1897 group of travelling players looking to perform at the fare get lynched amidst accusations of diabolism in their show (which we get a direct glimpse of); a group of teenagers from 1997  attend the fare and disappear on the ghost train that is the commercialised descendent of the kind of travelling show of the earlier group; subsequently a chatroom of internet  ‘sleuthers’ attempts to solve the disappearance of the 1997 group and are ultimately tempted towards making a real-world visit,  with possibly similar outcomes. Slowly, we realise that we, the audience, are a fourth group, with the actual performance we are watching a further manifestation of the ghost-show/train  'rite' that claimed the earlier victims

Beyond - or beneath - these historical 'waves', as the performers of the 'present' show, is a chorus who seem to be the embodiment of the underlying primal folklore 'lost boys and girls', and who are (partly at least) the ‘orchestration' of the universal fear that ‘leads is to the divine of feeling’.  This fear is related to the primal human trauma that it is suggested has haunted the place since an originating destruction of innocence in the form of a baby, the plucked heart of whom was buried there. Arising from this, recurring in different identities throughout the ages - from Dionysus to Peter Pan and Slender-man - is 'The Shape', who we see encountering the various 'waves', for example coveting the baby who is with the 1897 group
 
​Gradually, as the stories ‘flood the zone’ of the actual performance, we get a sense that all lostness, loneliness, all sense of alienation and deprivation of love, is somehow trapped and reflected in this space and centred on the avatar of The Shape.. The performance culminates in a hugely effective and disturbing psychedelic mash-up of glimpses of individuals from the lost groups, and that ends with the hint that we the audience have the possibility of leading The Shape finally into the light…..we are the ones who potentially break the cycle, who escape….

So, all hugely ambitious. There is something about its performative ‘presentness’ as layered masque that is hugely exciting….and also with Jaggers' identification of the moment of transition from folk to popular culture, the intersection between magic and science, folk rites to ghost shows to ghost trains. The latter is a wonderful 'fault line' on which to situate the drama
 
A challenge of the piece (as was suggested in our session) might be that the combination of chorus and 'sleuthers'  tends to a preponderance of telling over showing…and to a lack of space to let characters 'breathe' and develop. Accentuated by the horror genre's tendency to position them as victims-in-waiting, this might lead to a lessening of audience connection.  Having said that the most vividly alive are perhaps the internet sleuthers. They are presented only through their 'masking' internet chat, and yet with them we get a glimpse of Jaggers' characteristic ability to attend intensely to the originality, flux and particularity of fragile lives

In the afternoon, following on from Moira Buffini's epic WELCOME TO THEBES from last month, we read her LOVEPLAY - written for the RSC Pit in 2001 - and also focusing on a single patch ground over millennia (it was probably written to mark the Millennium?).  Ten historical 'moments'  are each allotted a lightly drawn dramatic sketch, evoking pop culture conceptions of each era through differing kinds of love/desire - all on the same turf.  The result is a playful exploration of the evolution of society and of the amnesiac effect of time, as well as the nature and variety of human attraction and inhibition, emotional and physical.  As with GHOST TRAIN's reference to and - perhaps deliberately ambiguous - identification with the 'horror' genre, LOVEPLAY makes use of a genre - in this case an 'impro' sketch form. Also whereas the former play professes an aim to generate a sense of gratitude and wonder by invoking its negation - fear, LOVEPLAY often allows moments of genuine vulnerability and love to emerge contrastingly from the wittily deployed period clichés.  These are further intensified by being set against low-level echoes of the trauma that the darker instances of desire and exploitation have also visited on this place.  In spite of - or perhaps because of - its facetiousness, LOVEPLAY provides a solid frame within which the 'charge' of real feeling can spark, whereas GHOST TRAIN with it's more ambitious and ambiguous relation to genre, makes it more challenging to connect with the fully human dimension of character and response.  

​Overall, a great day with some sparkling readings