A cycle of four monologues that explore connecting with different types of anger – personal, interpersonal, generational, and neurological. They invite movement and physicality, and can be performed together by multiple people or individually. The headings are for the purposes of organising and not meant to be spoken.

If you would like to perform any of this material, please get in touch.

I’m bitter

I’m bitter, and that’s that!

I’m a bitter man. No-one wants to be a bitter man. Or be near one, even. And yet, how can I be? How can I even be a man? Or bitter at all? I’m a millennial! I can but be a perpetual child. Time is broken for us all. The roles associated with time don’t fit. Not like in the past. People wore jackets and dresses. They were shrewd, or they were schmucks, so I hear.  

If cousin Louie was a schmuck or was mad, at least he was somebody! I’m not - don’t misunderstand me - I’m not hankering for some oppressive age, or looking for a tradwife. I’m not a TERF. I'm not seeking want the masks that they wore, or a life in that world. But I’m not sure what's been bestowed, hyper self-awareness, tech-addiction and ADHD are the identities I want to be remembered for either. 

So, with no mask, no role to play, I’m a little naked. 

To be bitter, that’s a role… of a sort. And of a time. There’s a rootedness in it. It’s very un-millenial. Otherwise, I have to invent my own mask - invent a whole world of masks so that I’ll have somewhere to live! To be someone, as they used to say. Or to be bitter? That is the question. 

More anger!

I don’t know if you’ve ever had third parties butt in unnecessarily, turning friendly exchanges into belligerence? Today, someone picked a fight with me. There are reasons why the air in our office might be thick with dread and awkwardness, but it rains from on high, not from me, and I see no need to add to it. If ask someone to move their conversation away from me so I can concentrate…

Wait. This is bile,  isn’t it? OK, so someone took my request personally and gave me a mouthful but… you’re not here to hear me spill my guts, are you? But I was right! I don’t know how to stop telling myself that. Even cycling through the ways I could have been wrong… that I shouldn’t arrange my work as such, or that I’ve outgrown the place, or that I was never good enough for it in the first place… they're still angry reflections. Can you hear that?

I don’t want this anger. I didn’t conjure it. “Repair!” - my Instgram reels hiss in unison. “Don’t hold on to hate in your heart. Rebuke your neighbour!”, Maimonides tells me. 

Well. It’s too late for that. She’s gone. And I’m here. ‘All of a sudden we’re not allowed to talk in the office anymore?’ I guess not.

Family Reflux

I don’t know what it means that my family all get reflux. Our esophageal sphincters don’t work well, so foods and gasses race back up our windpipes from our stomachs and we get heartburn, or sore throats. My voice gets tired and I have to stop speaking. No singing along. Ironic perhaps, because the other thing that runs in the family is that we eat our feelings. 

Specifically, the types of food that we gravitate to - our comfort foods - chips, chocolate, and warming spicy hearty dishes, meats, soups, sandwiches - are the big culprits. 

It’s as if our bodies are saying, ‘No! I’m not going to hold that in. You can’t bury the feeling, find another way to express it!” Except not speech. “Move! MOVE INSTEAD!” 

My whole family. Perhaps it’s anger at being shoved around by the haughty disinterested,  gusts of history. Disinterred guts of the societal psyche that throw up and reject the warmest, spiciest, heartiest people. 

Did you know there’s a correlation between migration and heartburn? I googled it. There’s a type of roodtedness, I think, that changes your diet. The type where you have a garden, a place, and perhaps it literally nourishes you. 

I wonder if there’s a way I can break the chain. Is there shadow work I can do that will steer me away from my love of fried chicken, crisps and pastries? Is the anger to be expunged recent or ancient? 

It’s an anger that makes me feel as though I’m not at home and that the journey to find it will be impossible. And maybe, the release I am seeking, is the bashing of hammers and keys that send ink flying onto typewriter pages. Building a home out of paragraphs, inhabiting myself. So that we - all of us - , my ancestors and I, may speak again. 

A fuzz-brained question

What do you see when you close your eyes? Not, ‘what are you imagining?’ but what is actually there, on the back of your eyelids? A dark abyss? Nothingness? I have echoes, like music videos from the 80s. Echoes of what I’ve just seen. And of blue sand drifting in symmetrical dunes. 

I can make them now. Negatives, silhouettes of you all, are fading into those sandy spaces like dreams that run from the morning’s outstretched grasp to remember them. 

They say TV static - if you’re old enough to remember - is cosmic background radiation, the noisy signal left behind by the Big Bang. The grandest echo. That’s sort of what I see when I close my eyes. 

If it’s like a TV signal, maybe if I put tin foil around my head, it will go away! But it won’t because it’s just the noise my brain makes. It comes from inside of me. Buzzzzzssssshhhh.

If, eyes open, I peer into dark holes and crevices, it’s there, in the dark spaces, my brain’s big-bang-like buzz, staring back at me.

Anyway, I’m sorry for wasting your time literally talking about nothing. Nothingness. I just wanted to know if you , anybody? experienced it too.