online: 22 march 2013 modified: 18-22 march 2013 18 march 2013 in the garden theatre
at last... the new reappears in and as everyone...
...this is it says the writer... not knowing what's going to happen or is it already...
...he enters the hill garden...
...steady rain beneath slow moving grey cloud over most of the sky... very little sound except for the subdued roar of a jetliner (above the clouds) that soon fades into the semi-silence...
...unexpectedly the grey clouds begin to whiten and the rain becomes less and i sit waiting for scene one... (which never came because the play includes everything)...
...a solitary bird flies north across the terrace... and another bird follows... the rain continues steadily while a man with long hair drags an enormous plastic bag towards a bush that he begins to trim with a long-handled garden shears... apparently ignoring the rain... now he pauses to put a hood over his hair while i enjoy the drier climate inside the audience shelter...
...while the performance continues the rain pours quite heavily and the water table rises and the grass is becoming more squelchy...
...the performer walks about pruning occasional long branches of several shrubs in the scenery...
...sounds of voices off-stage as two men arrive wearing hoods and ask the gardener the way... and she replies in the voice of a woman... who now leaves the plastic bag where it is while she walks out of sight behind the actual shrubs...
...this is uneventful for a play but not for real life he thinks...
...the gardener has reappeared on the north side and is wading in the pond as she removes two plastic boxes which she carries to the south until she and boxes move out of sight again...
...i'm amazed at how interesting is this play of real life with no script apart from the many texts and instructions that the person doing the gardening must have read or been told during her life or education... and particularly the commands or wishes of a chief gardener or supervisor... if indeed she needed telling... (or is she inventing these actions as she performs them?)
15:50
...i'm still alone in the theatre of life and watching rain falling vertically and realising that i am playing an unpaid part as unpaying audience... while both enjoying the play and the opportunity to be an unrehearsed spectator without knowing it... while writing these words and pretending to be the playwright or even the creator...
...at which i open an umbrella and walk beyond the scenery towards the nearest bus stop where i play the part of passenger in a movie that i soon cease to see as the theatre of life... or even the cinema... but this is it yes it is if anyone says so... for that i gather is the nature of hermeneutics*...
*as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, second revised edition, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G Marshall, Continuum, New York 1999.
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