Bruce Birchall: Grandmaster of Creative
Thinking
Motto: I am human, therefore everything human is of interest to me. - Terence,
Roman playwright
Having corresponded with BB for some time, I had hoped to meet him and have a
real chat at MSO III, but didn't manage it. When I received an interview with
the man from Loki - the creativity columnist in the Independent - and had my
curiosity further piqued by Bill Hartston, I decided I had to get in touch. The
result was a steady stream of verbal and mental fireworks, and another
interview, that I could see quickly becoming a book. Here,
Loki speaks with a Birchall with an Olympic message.
Here, we spend some time with a man committed to doing things differently.
I was sitting beside Bill Hartston as he was
marking the Creativity papers at the MSO. Bill always has a story to tell, and
he was getting plenty of food for thought as he chuckled his way through a sheaf
of witty ideas.
>Call me unimaginative, but applying objective
criteria to creativity can't *really* be possible. Not just because of
measurement problems, but these creative types seem to know and respect each
other. Nevertheless Bill was clearly using a system, and murmured that it looked
like the defending champ, Bruce Birchall, had to settle for silver this year.
The topic of Birchall seemed to jar some
memories loose, and Bill began to reminisce - it transpired that BB had made an
indelible impression on Mr. Hartston, long before the MSO decided to award
medals for creativity. Bill was clearly trying to keep his mind on his work, but
Birchall-influenced images from the past kept fighting their way to the surface,
and a tale gradually emerged.
BB's record for creativity goes a long way back, and Hartston had been impressed
by the man from their first encounters, in university days. A BB production of
Peter Weiss' Marat\Sade made a particularly vivid impression. The play seems
well designed to stun the audience, as BB later explained to me:
"The play is set in a lunatic asylum at Charenton, fifteen years after
the French Revolution of 1789, i.e. just before the defeat of Napoleon. The
enlightened French bourgeoisie, still confident about their expansionism in
Europe, used to patronise these asylums to look at and be amused by the antics
of the lunatics. Weiss has the inmates, under the direction of the incarcerated
Marquis de Sade, produce a play (within-a-play) about the persecution and
assassination of Marat. It has some great songs."
The background evokes a piece that seems fully capable of etching its images
permanently into the grey matter, without much outside assistance. ("Great
songs"?!)
BB's staging guaranteed an enduring impression.
The cast of 53 actors playing madmen, dressed in white shrouds, outnumbered the
audience crammed into a squash court at Peterhouse. In this cramped space, the
lunatics mingled with the audience, often becoming menacing and having to be
restrained by guards (actors). All of this still sticks clearly in Hartston's
mind, and he appears to have a hard time shaking off the memory and getting back
to work.
So who is this Bruce Birchall, anyway? Even the basic questions quickly descend
into a thicket of lists and ideas.
Bruce Birchall grew up in Nottingham and went to the same school as D.H.
Lawrence once attended. After reading English at Cambridge, and being "radicalised"
in 1968, BB worked as a community theatre playwright and director and has turned
his hand to poetry, community video, typesetting, self-publishing, lunchtime
theatre, chess coaching and organising girls' chess and maths research,
investigating Pythagorean triples, as well as being an activist in Equity and
the Theatre Writers Union, and in squatters', tenants' and claimants' groups in
London.
To me, one of his most impressive feats was managing to remain on full pay for
four years without working, while Liverpool Polytechnic tried (and failed) to
sack him from a job as a Drama Lecturer. As BB drily points out, "I have
yet to write a first novel, but have at least got the material for the dust
jacket together."
His plays tend to be "a hybrid of serious content and popular entertainment
forms". HEROES FIT FOR HOMES, a potted history of the pension using Music
Hall tunes with new lyrics, for pensioner audiences, is his longest-running play
(236 performances in 1974-75).
There is one question that all of this forces out of me: How does a creative
non-conformist make a living?
A: (With difficulty!)
1) He avoids developing expensive habits like music, videos, tobacco, alcohol,
fast cars, fast women, foreign holidays, mortgages and designer label new
clothes. He makes his own music, prefers adrenalin to stimulants, gets his
clothes at Oxfam shops and puts up with the limitations of social housing
providers.
2) He gives up the lunacy of doing work he doesn't want to do to buy things he
doesn't need to impress people he doesn't like or have any respect for. He pares
life down to its essentials.
3) He develops a new art form: making grant applications. It helps if he is
articulate and sounds enthusiastic and is of an innovative turn of mind. Usually
the grants only last long enough for him to write the next successful
application from which to live off after the current one runs out.
4) When the Arts Council etc grants dry up, he lives off a grant from the poor
man's Arts Council, the dole, for as long as possible then does a bit of
part-time lecturing for as short a time as possible. He keeps on switching his
economic base and if he is wise has fingers in more than one pie. So that he can
switch fields of work to where there is temporarily a small pot of gold at the
end of a rainbow.
5) He never lets the state know what he is doing and is always "looking for
work" in a field of work he has actually given up or has no interest in
pursuing further, but more importantly, one in which the dole office would have
no idea how to find him work.
6) He lives off his wits but never off his friends. He abjures credit cards and
HP payments and doesn't buy anything until he can afford to pay for it outright.
He avoids forking out for insurance, inflated utility bills, and pension schemes
and hasn't paid for a TV licence or a haircut in 34 years.
7) He learns to do without and not to miss what he cannot afford.
