The space I have to perform in at Northern Stage is big. As the tour has worn on Bartelt and I have worked out that the larger the space the... well, the better I am. It's a pretty enjoyable performance and then we have a Q&A afterwards. Lots of the Northern Stage folk stay for it, and we have a marvellous moment where one of them asks me whether I'd've done a show if Kate had died another way. I answer as honestly as I can, and then the questioner covers his mouth and doubles up. He cannot, he says, believe he just asked me that. Oh, how I LOVE this show! This guy has overstepped his own boundaries without realising it until way after I have answered what is - for me a very tame, yet interesting, question.
It's incredible how this show opens people up, but it is even more amazing to Bartelt and me the level of people's discomfort with asking other people questions. Children ask questions all the time, but by the time those children are adults they have learnt that to ask questions is somehow rude. But this just leads to rooms and rooms full of elephants, as far as I'm concerned: endless stuff we want to know, but are afraid to ask. So, instead of asking, we presume, assume and judge, rather than just finding out from the horse’s mouth. It's no wonder we end up with terrible prejudices and people living in isolation, what with all these elephants and horses.
Then something even more touching happens: a woman begins to tell us all her story. This is another extraordinary thing about this show: somehow, because I have just told my story, people feel empowered to tell their story, and often their story would be as unwelcome as mine over dinner, but Bartelt and I have prepared the ground and somehow given permission for all the scary, painful, messy stuff which constitutes life. This woman's brother had died five years previously and she knows no one whose sibling had died. She says a great deal, but the most wonderful thing she says is that she is jealous of me because I have a surviving bother, whereas she has no other sibling. I want to cross the room and hug here there and then – I do hug her later – what she has just said is so important. Important because she felt is, but also important because we have all of these difficult feelings, often layered over one another.
I didn't say this to her at the time because I didn't want her to feel I was in any way telling her she was lucky/had things to be grateful for/was better off than me, but when she spoke about her nieces and nephews, tearfully as she experienced her grief again and in another context, I wanted to say that I am jealous of her. I am jealous that he brother lives on in various small and ineffable ways in his children: my sister, who wanted children so very much and for so long, died without issue. She's so gone.
But this is for me, and as this woman apologises for expressing her emotions, rawly and without interference, a truly remarkable an delightful thing happens: everyone in the room tells her not to be silly, that we hear what she is saying, we feel for her and there is nothing inappropriate about her expressing her grief and desolation here, with us. As with so many other members of our audiences, I know tonight again, that if she were the only person we had touched, the show has done something beyond my wildest dreams.
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