Our Man from the North
Direction is important to me. It’s fundamental in my movement work. I work towards North, South, East and West in physical work. I work with in front, behind and either side. My body is central to that and because the centre anchors me, those directions and their subtle interplay are tangible. All feel very different. If you physically walk north in space it feels very different to walking south and of course it depends where I am facing from my central position. It’s complex. But it opens up a possibility for dialogue within the body. Tensions and contradictions abound when one tries to hold all four at the same time with different degrees of pushing and pulling. This is my training and forms the basis of the dramatic work I still create.
In my work room at home, in a studio or rehearsal room and indeed in the outdoor site, I need to know where north is. It helps me orientate myself. It matters where gardens face doesn’t it? It matters, which way the wind blows, doesn’t it? When I was developing my play Birnam Wood the wyrd sisters hailed from each of the four directions and I embraced Hecate despite the controversy surrounding her inclusion, the lady from the West. I needed four winds for the ideas and concepts in the adaptation to work and for the drama to unfold and flow. The world we and my collaborators created was not unlike the current political maelstrom we find ourselves in now in the UK. So let’s be more specific.
Where is the North? I mean in terms of England? We used to joke about North of Watford meaning North. That was when I lived in the middle of the country. Now I actually live in the North I know better I think, but someone from Scotland may think quite differently.
I have been struck by the latest left, right, centre political shenanigans around the Starmer-Burnham guessing game that will come to a head this week in a tiny little corner of this little island somewhere near Wigan and just before you get there on the train, that’s if you are on Northern Rail heading North West. In that tiny little corner somewhere between two little stations a tiny little saviour is born.
Once upon a time I believed in another saviour and it all went horribly wrong. Now potentially we have another saviour, another leader and perhaps even another general election. Yes, ‘another one’ (said West Country accent).
So, what do we actually mean by the North? Andy, our man from the North, is that a precise description? No, he’s from Greater Manchester. No, he was born in Merseyside. Or was it Cheshire? Hang on, when exactly was he born? Whichever of the three, it’s still different to hailing from the North East (Newcastle or Gateshead), or even Humberside and what about Yorkshire? Even Yorkshire has its own north bit. How is our Andy going to marry all those centres with each other, all those melting pots of identities vying for his attention and his focus? Who will he speak for in Westminster if he gets there? And if he does, will he still come back only on Fridays? And what is more, how will Greater Manchester cope without him four days of the week? How will all those other northern needs, hopes and dreams fold into that mix?
It’s that important and it’s that particular. Monthly, I receive a Northern Writers’ newsletter, but I have discovered it’s not aimed at me at all. It’s all about what goes on in the North East and I am in the North West so it seems irrelevant, or at least exclusive to them up there or over there.
This Andy, Angel of the North, our man from the North, is he? How does he speak? What is his language? I use the masculine here because I learned at Sunday School that angels were men and in this instance, it’s another man offering another solution to another problem that might not have been there had everyone knuckled down and got on with their jobs. Now we’ve got a stereotype operating in plain sight; a media-driven drama that holds us to ransom like it did with all the others. Each week something dramatic has happened and Laura tells the tale on Sunday mornings which then gets echoed all around by everyone else while we wait. We wait. We wait. We wait…for something to change. I would not like to be in Andy’s shoes once he becomes the establishment.
The challenge for any future Labour leader from the North is not persuading the South to accept northern leadership; it is persuading the different Norths that they are represented by the same project.
That’s my conclusion, witnessing this current fiasco that seems to be side-tracking us out of one muddle into another, thinking we are choosing when we are not. Only the tiny pocket of people in Makerfield will do the choosing and then it’s open to the card carriers and their choice in the end. I would not like to be walking in Makerfield’s shoes when this wind blows over. What if they get it wrong? Will they be on Laura’s show explaining themselves?
And at the end of the day it has nothing to do with real choices because unless you are leaning left (is that West?) in my work room, it’s on the left unless I’m facing South, then it’s right, I mean East. Either way unless you nail your colours to the sail throwing caution to the wind you won’t get a say in who leads the crew, nor who gets officer’s rank. It’s sort of cockeyed democracy in my book. It’s not taught properly at school, so no one gets the rule book really unless they sign up and pay their dues, and even then we’re still confused not knowing the real difference between a councillor or an MP, though maybe we do now after the last local outcome when they rammed it down our throats.
No matter who becomes a leader, unless you are prepared to get your hands dirty and put your hand up, you can’t really complain can you?
We made our choice two years ago and the ‘best team’ won. They have to get on with it.
It seems the dramatic form of the soap opera is contagious though. It can’t find its conclusion and there’s always another episode to go after being left on the brink. It all just goes round and round in circles, like a merry-go-round of hellishness.
It’s disappointing that the foreground, the main parts, the principal actors are playing up their personal stuff instead of just playing out their roles. There’s too much busyness around resigning, repositioning, chess playing, or perhaps cleverly keeping shtum until the dust has finally settled before the next round on the carousel.
I am shocked that people are happy to depart their posts in preference for ramming letterboxes with numerous leaves from fallen trees. I am shocked by proud selfies captured by ardent campaigners playing so far away from home when they might just need to be on call for their own constituents. And I’m sort of glad I’m not personally funding this particular endeavour even if it’s just a short one.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Andy, he’s a sound bloke and he’s worked hard in Manchester, which is becoming Great again. But I do think you can’t really reduce opinion so easily by presenting a solution that will slip us back into what could or might have been before what is. Everyone has their own version of ‘the money ran out’, the 14 years of austerity, the war, the this and that. I think Andy, if he finally gets there, will have his work cut out speaking for us all up here to all them down there. Besides, we didn’t get that railway line, our helpings up here are larger and at the bakers call batches barms. I learned that one quickly.
Perhaps the trouble is that we keep looking North for answers when North is not a place but a whirling cauldron of directions. Every community faces their direction differently, from their own centre according to which way their particular wind blows.
And so the wind bloweth,
how it doth blow,
particularly up north.
