TASTE
Where my instincts come from — and why, when the work I want to see doesn't exist, I want to make it.
I’ve always been drawn to work that doesn't give up all its secrets at once.
Shakespeare is probably the clearest example. I love the architecture of his stories, the richness of the language and the extraordinary complexity of his characters. They resist easy categorisation. You can spend a lifetime digging into the plays and still not reach the bottom.
The best of them have become mythic — not because they are simple or universal in some generic sense, but because their originality, complexity and understanding of human behaviour continue to reveal themselves.
I find the same thing in Chekhov and Sondheim.
Sondheim fascinates me because of the perfect marriage of psychology, scene construction and music. Shakespeare uses verse; Sondheim uses music. Both are extraordinarily sophisticated writers, but neither sacrifices humanity to their formal intelligence. There is empathy, humour and an acute understanding of people, even when the world they inhabit is bleak.
I love Beckett for almost the opposite reason. His plays can seem stripped to the bone, yet they contain enormous complexity. His absurdist humour speaks to something I've had in me since I was very young. He also understands irony in the deepest sense: the collision between what we want the world to be and what it actually is.
There is something sculptural about the form of his plays. This structure becomes a metaphor for the human condition.
Lear says:
Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
Beckett gives us:
We give birth astride a grave.
Different writers, different centuries, but a surprisingly similar sensibility: humanity trying to find meaning in a universe that may not care.
And then Beckett can write a sentence as perfect as the opening of Murphy:
The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new.
That economy delights me.
Ken Duncum is another writer whose work I return to for a very particular reason. His plays are often puzzles. They need to be understood and unlocked before they can fully resonate with an audience.
I've always thought of Ken as the writer of epiphanies.
When everything aligns, his work can be ecstatic in performance. But all the pieces of the puzzle have to be perfectly in tune for the payoff to happen. I love that challenge.
I think the same instinct explains a lot of what I respond to outside theatre.
In music, I'm drawn to distinctive voices and artists who don't conform easily to an established template. Wilco, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell and Boards of Canada all create very different kinds of music, but they share a willingness to build their own worlds. There is complexity, poetry, surprise and, often, something strange or difficult to categorise.
I listen to albums rather than individual songs. I like the sense that I'm entering a world which will reveal itself over time.
The television I love has a similar quality. I, Claudius. Edge of Darkness. Monty Python's Flying Circus. The Singing Detective. Our Friends in the North. Twin Peaks. The Wire. Deadwood. Game of Thrones.
Again, they're wildly different. But they have something in common: a singular voice. They aren't simply examples of a genre. They have their own worlds, their own rhythms, their own rules.
I think that's what I respond to in art too. Monet, Picasso, Seurat, Rothko, Pollock, Matisse, Van Gogh — artists who see the world in ways that are recognisably their own.
And cinema: Kubrick, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, Brazil, Mulholland Drive. Star Wars. Boyhood. Beginners. A.I.. The Studio Ghibli films. The early Pixar films.
It is a fairly eclectic list.
But perhaps the eclecticism is the point.
I'm not particularly interested in categorising things as high or low art, serious or popular, theatre or television, comedy or tragedy. I'm interested in whether something has a distinctive point of view.
Whether it has something of its own to say.
Whether it rewards attention.
And whether, on seeing it again, I discover something I hadn't seen before.
What I don't respond to is the opposite: sentimentality, obvious story structures, moral didacticism, work that feels easy or shallow. I'm wary of anything that tells me too clearly what I am supposed to feel or think.
I want to be surprised.
But not surprised simply for the sake of surprise.
I want the unexpected thing to reveal something that, once I've seen it, feels inevitable.
Perhaps that's the best description I have of taste.
Recognising something I haven't seen before — and knowing immediately that it's true.