So many ideas
Presented by English Theatre Berlin, 14-15 March 2025.
Voice: Marie-Gabrielle Arco
Violin: Miako Klein
Voice: Barbara Sotelsek
Glen Sheppard, Script / Direction / Room
Fritz Polzer, Dramaturgy / Video / Costumes
SO MANY IDEAS was an investigation into stasis, duration and the experience of being abandoned in a place: an attempt to create a theatrical situation in which the audience could experience something of the textures of real time rather than simply being told that time was passing.
The performance took place in an imagined crumbling portside hotel at the edge of civilisation, somewhere in North Africa or the Mediterranean. Three women – one terminally ill – have taken refuge together in a room from which there appears to be no immediate way forward. One plays the violin almost absentmindedly; another sings; the third murmurs, dreams, pleads and remembers. Their activities continue alongside one another, sometimes overlapping and sometimes drifting apart, producing a situation in which little conventional dramatic action occurs.
Rather than filling the performance with events, I allowed actions to take the time they might plausibly take within the imagined world. People speak, sing, wait and occupy the room. Small activities become perceptible because there is no larger dramatic machinery continually demanding attention. The work therefore tested the relationship between theatrical duration and real time, and how an audience might remain attentive to a world whose condition is one of abandonment and inertia.
The three women exist together in a state that is neither quite domestic nor theatrical. Their words overlap, complete and contradict one another, at times functioning almost like a Baroque cadenza: a proliferation of voices that is simultaneously an expression of culture, a nervous tic and an increasingly urgent attempt to make meaning. Their activity becomes a form of occupation of time – a way of continuing to exist when the structures that once gave that existence direction have broken down.
The title SO MANY IDEAS evokes an excess of invention, intelligence and cultural possibility, while the characters find themselves in a place where that abundance appears to have produced very little movement. Their situation becomes a compressed image of a contemporary malaise: a civilisation capable of extraordinary brilliance and creativity that nevertheless seems repeatedly to arrive at the same exhausted places.
The work drew on Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky and Wallace Shawn's The Fever, alongside Handel's GIULIO CESARE IN EGITTO. The latter provided a further historical layer, particularly through the situation of Cornelia, Sesto and Cesare after Pompeo's death: stranded in a strange place, uncertain of the future and simultaneously reluctant to return to the world they inhabited before.
As in much of my work, the site was treated not simply as a setting but as a condition. The hotel room was a place to be endured, and the audience was invited to experience something of what it might mean to remain there: attending to small changes, repetitions, silences and apparently inconsequential actions. The work explored how theatrical intensity might emerge not from an escalation of events but from sustained attention to a situation in which almost nothing is resolved.
SO MANY IDEAS ultimately used the condition of being stranded as a temporal and dramaturgical experiment. It asked what happens when an abundance of ideas, cultural memory and human possibility is confronted with a situation in which there is nowhere obvious to go – and whether simply remaining together in such a place can itself become a form of dramatic experience.
Voice: Marie-Gabrielle Arco
Violin: Miako Klein
Voice: Barbara Sotelsek
Glen Sheppard, Script / Direction / Room
Fritz Polzer, Dramaturgy / Video / Costumes
SO MANY IDEAS was an investigation into stasis, duration and the experience of being abandoned in a place: an attempt to create a theatrical situation in which the audience could experience something of the textures of real time rather than simply being told that time was passing.
The performance took place in an imagined crumbling portside hotel at the edge of civilisation, somewhere in North Africa or the Mediterranean. Three women – one terminally ill – have taken refuge together in a room from which there appears to be no immediate way forward. One plays the violin almost absentmindedly; another sings; the third murmurs, dreams, pleads and remembers. Their activities continue alongside one another, sometimes overlapping and sometimes drifting apart, producing a situation in which little conventional dramatic action occurs.
Rather than filling the performance with events, I allowed actions to take the time they might plausibly take within the imagined world. People speak, sing, wait and occupy the room. Small activities become perceptible because there is no larger dramatic machinery continually demanding attention. The work therefore tested the relationship between theatrical duration and real time, and how an audience might remain attentive to a world whose condition is one of abandonment and inertia.
The three women exist together in a state that is neither quite domestic nor theatrical. Their words overlap, complete and contradict one another, at times functioning almost like a Baroque cadenza: a proliferation of voices that is simultaneously an expression of culture, a nervous tic and an increasingly urgent attempt to make meaning. Their activity becomes a form of occupation of time – a way of continuing to exist when the structures that once gave that existence direction have broken down.
The title SO MANY IDEAS evokes an excess of invention, intelligence and cultural possibility, while the characters find themselves in a place where that abundance appears to have produced very little movement. Their situation becomes a compressed image of a contemporary malaise: a civilisation capable of extraordinary brilliance and creativity that nevertheless seems repeatedly to arrive at the same exhausted places.
The work drew on Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky and Wallace Shawn's The Fever, alongside Handel's GIULIO CESARE IN EGITTO. The latter provided a further historical layer, particularly through the situation of Cornelia, Sesto and Cesare after Pompeo's death: stranded in a strange place, uncertain of the future and simultaneously reluctant to return to the world they inhabited before.
As in much of my work, the site was treated not simply as a setting but as a condition. The hotel room was a place to be endured, and the audience was invited to experience something of what it might mean to remain there: attending to small changes, repetitions, silences and apparently inconsequential actions. The work explored how theatrical intensity might emerge not from an escalation of events but from sustained attention to a situation in which almost nothing is resolved.
SO MANY IDEAS ultimately used the condition of being stranded as a temporal and dramaturgical experiment. It asked what happens when an abundance of ideas, cultural memory and human possibility is confronted with a situation in which there is nowhere obvious to go – and whether simply remaining together in such a place can itself become a form of dramatic experience.
