Make Better Please // Projects

Make Better Please has been commissioned by Bristol Old Vic, Theatre Bristol and BAC, and will be developed during 2010.

You shake hands, introduce yourselves and take your places at a vast round table, with a map of the local area painted on it. As at a Quaker Meeting, you wait expectantly in silence, for someone to feel moved to speak, to bring to the table the matters for tonight?s Make Better Please to address, to answer or resolve. Each night the performance will be responsive to this open meeting, between a temporary Society of Friends, performers and spectators alike.

Tea is served and you begin to discuss what haunts you, memories of dreadful events and petty gripes, from knife-point muggings and rucksack bombings to uneven paving and the state of the city?s transport system. You?re given a flag to write on and place your urban horror story amongst the traces that have already accumulated, adding a layer of personal memories to this collective representation of the city.?

Just as you?re asked to pass the milk, the person sitting by your side leaps onto the table, turning over the sugar bowl and scattering bone china cups, spitting tea like she?s frothing from the mouth. This heart-stopping outburst begins a strange dance of transformation, through which she becomes quite unrecognisably other. Opposite, someone falls backwards from their chair and starts to convulse, as if possessed. Images flicker into light behind us, beautifully constructed tableaux of violent acts, which come into appearance momentarily. These traumatic memories are summoned, like demons, in order to banish them from the city?s psyche, to make them disappear.

Uninvited Guests call-forth ghosts from the city?s past. They mingle with recent ghostings, in an archaeology of the present day. Our memories of the area and those of local people, a first kiss at a bus stop and a fatal stabbing witnessed on the High Street, encounter anecdotes of past times.

Later, you return to the map and drink tea again. This time you use the flags to attach memories of love and beauty to places and these stories are spoken, in a magic act that might conjure-up more such moments, make the city better. As a temporary community, invested in this event, you go through something cathartic and curative with us. You are spooked-out and shivers run down your spines. But, after something like a s?ance or an exorcism, we end in celebration, coming safely through together to the other side. Back out in the ?big bad world?, with the memory of warm parting hand-shakes, you imagine romantic encounters round each corner and feel a little less afeared.