Somewhere between Remembering and Forgetting

Abstract

Inspired by Hamlet, The Middle (2013) was a one-man show devised for a theatre foyer - a liminal space between the outside and the inside, the real world and the theatre. Hamlet is a character caught in a limbo between ‘To be or not to be’ and by casting his father, Tony Pinchbeck, to play the title role, Michael Pinchbeck sought to explore time passing, staging ageing and the relationship between father and son. Tony studied Hamlet when he was at school so he is stuck in the middle between the fading memory of reading that play 50 years ago and reading it now.

For this article, Pinchbeck reflects on the complex dramaturgical process of working with his father to revisit his performative memories. The contemporary dramaturg's job is to look for and after something that is not yet found. As David Williams tells Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt, ‘you don't really know what is being sought’. As such, the dramaturg is in a limbo, or in the middle, between finding and looking, knowing and not knowing. The Middle (2013) speaks about the themes of liminality, ageing, stasis and mortality and the archiving of memory and explores this space in between generations, between stages, between ages.

This article reflects on concepts of memory, time passing and ageing with Professor Michael Mangan, who explores these themes in his publication Staging Ageing: Narratives of Decline (2013). The article weaves together Pinchbeck's dramaturgical experience of making the performance with a father, and Mangan's experience of watching it through the lens of his research, and touches upon recent casting choices in order to explore issues of age and ageing and reminiscence theatre. The article is in two acts to be read without an interval.

Notes

1 Where indented quotes with the name Tony or Michael appear they are taken from the original performance text of The Middle (first performance Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 23 January 2013). There is a video of the piece here https://vimeo.com/77051942

2 Michael Pinchbeck devised three performances inspired by Shakespeare plays, The End (A Winter’s Tale) in 2011, The Beginning (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in 2012 and The Middle (Hamlet) in 2013. They were later shown as The Trilogy from 2014–2016.

3 The Shipping Forecast, a BBC Radio broadcast which details reports and forecasts of weather around the British coasts, has developed into something of an icon of British traditions. Its rhythmic litany of mysterious-sounding places attracts hundreds of thousands of Radio 4 listeners, both seafaring and land-locked, who tune into it on a daily basis. It has been suggested as a useful tool for helping people to get to sleep.

4 Angela Monaghan cited former Labour leader, Ed Miliband, as describing ‘a “crisis of confidence” now gripping Britain’s squeezed middle, as insecurities about jobs, pensions and the future financial wellbeing of the next generation prevail’ (Monaghan 2014).

5 Jane Turner describes Barba’s approach as ‘the score and subscore built through their response to the director’s initial material using improvisation’ (Turner 2018: 32). Michael Pinchbeck used this technique too in inviting the casts of The Beginning and The Middle to remember their first performances of the texts they were revisiting.

6 To make some kind of distinction, Mick Mangan will follow the speech-tag designations and use the name ‘Michael’ when he is referring primarily to the character that appears onstage in the three devised performances of The Trilogy. When he is talking primarily about the author/director/deviser of the plays, he will call him ‘Pinchbeck’. When both are clearly co-present he will use the name ‘Michael Pinchbeck’.