BLOGGERS – THE SHOCKING TRUTH!
Wonderful to meet at last the animateur behind that questing innocent abroad, Augustine. Natalie & I shouted at each other in a Greek Street pub full of jabbering PAs, tucking away a last glass of Chardonnay before heading off to catch the tube to London’s outer reaches.
We remarked first of all on the unique peculiarity of fitting voice, face & body to a hitherto spectral soul about whom one probably knows more than is the case with any five real time, real space friends. I likened it to penpals meeting after years of letters exchanged across the ocean. But it’s an unsatisfactory comparison because the blogger’s context is communal & most of the communication between pairs who may find much territory in common is witnessed & indeed commented upon by others.
Most rewarding was the fact that we communicated as easily face en face as we always have from blog to blog. The risk in such meetings must be that, lacking the opportunity for reflection before making an utterance that digital dialogue permits, the conversation might wither & cease within minutes. But Natalie & I turned out to be as garrulous in voice as we both are on screen. (I suspect I had the edge there & I promise, Natalie, that when we meet next I shall defy the male stereotype & talk less & listen more!)
The excuse for the encounter was, as already announced, a play at the Soho Theatre – Bloggers – Real Internet Diaries. Prize winning journalist & ITV producer Oliver Mann had hit upon the gloriously simple, why-didn’t-I-think-of-it-first idea of trawling the blogosphere for material & then, somewhat in the manner of playwright & film director Mike Leigh, collating blog extracts into a set of sequential, interlacing monologues.
Covering the waterfront from sit-com through soap to the master of the eavesdropped utterance Harold Pinter, these extraordinary narratives translated brilliantly from pixel to performance. Middle-aged sex addict, skater dude schoolboy & would-be stud paraded their confessions & impressions, hilarious & moving in equal degree. Lust, despair & loneliness were consistent themes as each blogger recorded his or her struggle to achieve a personal goal, or simply to get by. But redemption, expiation, closure of one sort or another come to pass for most of these disparate bloggers & each blog is wound up in a spirit of hope & new departure.
Natalie & I laughed a lot along with an audience presumably largely ignorant of the world of blogs. And I must confess that, although I’m a reasonably seasoned blogger, much of what was delivered surprised, delighted, shocked &, ultimately, heatened me as much as it did the non-blogging audience. My acquaintance with the confessional blog is slight since my particular interests have kept me, by & large, within the broad territory occupied by, first the Salon bloggers in which community I fired up my first blog, & subsequently those outside Salon whom chance or research brought my way. Bloggers – Real Internet Diaries provided me with the first real opportunity I seem to have had since embarking upon this peculiarly compulsive activity to actually see the wood for the trees.
A couple of footnotes. Last night’s performance was by invitation only. I’ve mentioned already that I taught Oliver – Olly - Mann at St Christopher School (this in the days before the current Year Zero administration came in to asset strip virtually every quality that made the school unique.) He was a student in both my GCSE Drama & A-level Theatre Studies classes & he appeared in a number of the productions I directed. It was clear throughout his time at the school that his remarkable talents as actor, director, scriptwriter, entrepreneur & general renaissance man of the performed event would carry him far beyond the St Chris Theatre. It’s rare to find so potent a combination of talents in those operating within the performing arts & it’s rarer still to find someone who takes such hearty delight in his own talents without any evidence of the conceit or arrogance that might seem its natural corollary. Olly was then, & clearly still is now, self-effacing & modest &, is for all his acerbic sense of humour, a compassionate observer of human foibles. I was pleased & gratified to have been invited to the show & I’m eagerly awaiting word of Olly’s next project.
I was very pleased too to have Natalie as my blogger companion amongst the uninitiated all around us in the audience. Next time let’s find a quieter pub, Natalie, in which to continue the dialogue that started three years ago across the ether & has now come down to earth!
