Wordings Twenty-Eight: Dad

Reflections on my dead dad show

It’s just over a week still I start the London run of John-Luke-A-Palooza. I’ll be performing all ten of my solo shows over two Sundays (October 13th and 20th) at the Pleasance Theatre in London - you can get tickets here. You can buy tickets for individual shows, or you can buy tickets for a whole day and get 25% of the already very reasonably priced shows. When people ask me which of the two Sundays they should come to I say “why not come to both don’t you love me?” Then, as they try and work out what to say next, I take their questions seriously.

I’m doing five shows on each Sunday, and I’m doing them in chronological order. So on the 13th, I’m doing my shows from 2010 to 2016, and on the 20th I’m doing my shows originally from 2017 to 2022. The second Sunday (20th) is obviously the better representation of who I am now (as an artist, as a person), and has the shows I feel most affinity with, and think of as the most complete and mature work I’ve made. Shows 9 and 10 (It Is Better and A World Just Like Our Own, But…) in particular sit very easily with me now, as you’d expect, because I didn’t make them that long ago. I love performing those shows. And, if you only come to one, I’d love you to come to It Is Better, because (as it was made in lockdown) it’s not actually been seen by more than a handful of audiences, and it still feels fresh to me. It’s scored with wonderful music by John Chambers, and it’s great to perform a show which manages to be quite elegant and totally stupid all at the same time.

I love the shows on the 20th because they feel of me now. But I love the Oct 13th shows for basically the opposite reason - they don’t feel of me now. And that, theatrically, is what’s interesting about them - you get to see me now, performing these other mes’ shows. I can’t do the original shows as they were, too much has changed since then, so I allow myself to footnote the shows as I go, commenting on them, saying what I’d do differently and, occasionally, I allow myself to change them - always letting the audience know when I have. Each show becomes two shows in one - the “show” show (the original show) and the show of me showing you the show. At their most satisfying, the audience get into both versions of the show fully. That’s a really fun type of attention to play with.

They all lean into that “then-via-now” dynamic to various degrees. The video recording I have of the original Show 2 (Broken Stand-Up) is missing the last 10 or 15 minutes, so I had to make a new ending. This new ending folds in on itself - it’s all about the idea of memory and the idea of trying to perform work from another time and, basically, about the project as a whole. Show 5 (Builds A Monster) is full of topical references based in 2016 - although, as it was made just after the Brexit vote, and as the hard right seemed on the rise across Europe, and in the shadow of Trump’s (impossible, surely) autumn election loomed… these topical references land upsettingly well. In Show 1 (Distracts You From A Murder) there are videos which are supposed to have been recorded during the performance, but are of me, from fourteen years ago (quite visibly fourteen years ago).

Show 4 (Stdad-Up) is probably the show that has been most transformed by this framing. For those of you who haven’t seen the show, here’s a quick summary. It’s a show about my dad, written and performed less than a year after he’d died. He was, among other things, a tyrant and a bully, and I processed the conflicted grieving that came with his death by dressing up as him in a grotesque balloon filled suit, and performing him as an insult comic, hurling abuse at the crowd. He treats the audience members as his children - and is capricious with them, one minute heaping them with praise, or sweets, the next minute explosively berating them. He has two catchphrases. The first is “apologise!” He barks this at audience members until they say sorry, usually when they have done nothing wrong, and often when the blame lies with him. This was something my dad would really do - you’d find yourself being forced to apologise to him when he had behaved appallingly. The second catchphrase is “It’s not bullying, it’s just teasing!” In real life, this is how he would defend himself after relentlessly and cruelly, yes, bullying someone - often my poor old, doddery grandpa. This second one becomes a call and response, with dad shouting “it’s not bullying” and the audience shouting “it’s just teasing.” The dad on stage is my real father, pushed through a contorting vaudeville lens. I like to think of this stage dad as my real dad, seen through the eyes of a four-year-old me: enormous, monstrous and terribly dangerous.

The show ends with my father shouting at me in the mirror - he tells me off for only telling the audience the bad things about him, not the good, and then - in the original version of the show - he lays in to me, barking a list of my faults at his/my reflection.

I have a video recording of the original Edinburgh run, and I watched that recording to prepare for the new run. I think it captures a successful show in a lot of ways, and a show I’m proud of. The structure of the show, the way it hangs together, the funniness of the show, the complexity in the subject matter it manages to capture - these are all things that the show did well. But it was a difficult watch for me, and I think it would be a difficult watch for anybody.

And, of course, it should be a difficult show. But when I say “difficult” now, I mean it in the sense that… I’m worried for me - that me, younger me, just-lost-his-dad me. The audience, on the recording, seem worried for me too. I don’t seem, necessarily, ok. There’s a real anger to the show, and a lack of grounding. Playing dad, shouting at the audience, it all seems so … unprocessed. It’s not safe, and over the years I’ve built up a strong belief that narrative art, and certainly performance art, should keep the audience and the performer safe. The stage is a safe place to tackle difficult, sometimes horrific, things. It’s not about replicating those things, it’s about considering them.

At its heart, art is about humans meeting humans (you heard me, AI. Fuck off, AI, and don’t come back). Art is about sharing experiences, and finding points and spaces of contact in magical ways, in ways we couldn’t do through simple conversation. It’s especially meaningful for me when the show meets people who have similarly difficult relationships with their fathers - to have my terrified inner child meet someone else’s terrified inner child and have both terrified inner children feel like they’re not alone in it. What good is having ACTUAL terror when it comes to building a space that can hold that meeting?

There’s a moment in the show when (as dad) I start insulting an audience member with a very long insult about Frankenstein - as I do it, I get more and more irate, and climb through the seats and the people until I’m leaning right over him shouting into his face. It’s relentless, it’s too much, and it’s funny. Once I’m finished, I walk back to the stage, and I make him apologise. One night, in the original Edinburgh run, that audience member refused. He was visibly furious with me - the joke had missed him, and he wasn’t going to let himself feel small. So, I’m shouting “apologise” at him, and he’s not doing anything. I, reckoning that my dad wouldn’t back down, didn’t back down. I kept pressing him to apologise, driving up the awkwardness of the gig, and the menace of the character until, finally, incredibly reluctantly, he did.

I had successfully made the audience feel a small sliver of what it felt like, as a kid, to be bullied by my dad. What I’ve realised since is I didn’t have to - that can be communicated better if the audience feels safe, and if the show is always performed as a game. I am just playing at being my dad, I’m playing at the game of terrorising the audience - there’s no need to actually terrorise them. In fact, it’s counter-productive. To really listen, to really think, our nervous systems need to feel they are in a place of safety.

So, this time round, I put this feeling of safety at the heart of the thing. Before the show starts, I talk to the audience about what’s going to happen - I tell them they don’t need to do anything my dad tells them to do, I tell them they can leave any time they choose. During the show, I break from character whenever I need to, to check in with the audience, to reassure them. In the second Edinburgh performance, one audience member refused to say sorry and, after hectoring her a little, I took off my father’s beard and glasses, quickly explained that I wasn’t going to carry on letting dad berate her, and then moved on.

I changed the show to make sure the audience feel safe; I also had to change it to make me feel safe. The show originally ended with my father shouting at me in the mirror. This time, I stop him. I tell him that I’m not going to do it - that all it’s doing is playing out the lie I told myself as a child: that if one of my primary caregivers - this man who was meant to look after me and nurture me and love me - if he treated me and the people I loved so cruelly, then he must be doing it for a reason, and that reason must be because there was something bad or wrong with me. I stop him doing it, I give my ten-years-younger self and my thirty-five-years-younger self that grace. The show now finishes with us talking, with me filling my father in on my life in the ten years since he’s been gone.

In 2015, Stdad-Up was a show where my then 29-year-old-self met his childhood self in conversation with his father. Now, I’m in there too: my 39-year-old self meeting the me of ten years ago, and of thirty-five years ago, and joining them, with grace and compassion, to really make fun of our dad, like, absolutely stick the boot in. I’d love it if you could come and join in.