Tetragrammaton

Tetracketka

When I began my practice, the reason I chose to try to respond to a primary text, a play, was broadly because I didn't feel confident to write the text myself at that point. I wanted to

read and learn as much as I possibly could. And my instincts took me towards a practice of

responding to a primary text, a play, with an environment.

At the time, this was the mid-90s,

and broadly what was on offer in England, where I was practicing,

was a prescribed set of options, let's say.

You would either be recreating like a film set and then figuring

out how to, because you're not, you don't have the benefit of a camera moving from place

to place. How would you go from one perfectly rendered environment to the next? And this became

quite acute because in the mid-90s,

societally, we were at a point of very low investment in the British film industry or practice.

So a lot of wonderful young film writers were instead writing scripts for small theatres where they knew

they could at least get the work spoken. They could get the words out. So they would write

64 scenes and it would go in the car, in the back of the car, in the supermarket, in the bedroom, at the Coliseum, and written as if they had all the

full faculty of film shoot. So that was brilliant in a way, because there was no way I could do

all of that stuff on a 2,000 pound budget above a pub in West London.

So it meant I had to find a strategy to get to the essence of situation.

And I began to understand that what was important in a scene was not the actual physical environment in which it had been imagined to take place.

But the situation, what's the situation?

And therefore, what's the essence?

...