Status

Chris Thorpe, Rachel Chavkin

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786826091
• eBook ISBN: 9781786826107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Status is a show about someone who doesn't want his any more. About running away from the national story you're given. About who is responsible for that story and what might happen to it if you give it up. A globe-spanning journey of attempted escape, with songs along the way. Status springs from conversations about who we might be, and whether your country needs you more than you might need it. A new show from the multi Fringe First winning team that created Confirmation: written and performed by Chris Thorpe (Unlimited Theatre, Third Angel) developed with and directed by Rachel Chavkin (The TEAM).

So a few years ago, I went to Serbia. This was around two thousand and one. Maybe two thousand and two.

I was going there to meet a writer. Someone who’s become a friend now, but who I didn’t really know back then. So I flew from Manchester to Munich, then Munich to Belgrade, and then I got on a bus in Belgrade, and I headed to the smaller city he lived in, a couple of hours away.

And I sit on the bus, this old broken down Soviet-era coach, and I look out of the window at Banat, which is what they call the bit of Serbia the town I was going to is in. And Banat is very flat. Like, freakishly flat. The tallest thing you can see in any direction between you and the horizon is maybe a tree. And I’m thinking about how weird it it that only around three years earlier, during the NATO intervention in the war in Kosovo, planes from several countries, including my own, had been high above that flat landscape, bombing military installations and convoys of equipment heading south from here to Kosovo, and on one occasion a civilian train, and now here I was. Here I am.

And I get to the town, and the writer meets me from the bus, and drives me in his fucked-up old car to drop my bag off at his flat. And then we go to a bar.

Now the bar is that bar that any town over a certain size has. It’s the one where the bands play, but the bands that’ll only play in that bar, and nowhere else. The centre of the local music scene. And it’s a great place. I meet his friends, who are actually in a band with him, and we talk music and we drink, until we’re all drunk, but good time drunk. Like about to tip into incoherent, black-out drunk, but not there yet.

So it’s about nine pm, and two policemen walk into the bar. Which sounds like the start of a joke, but turns out not to be. The bar doesn’t exactly go quiet, but it definitely gets watchful. And the policemen walk up to a guy who’s drinking on his own, on the next table to me and my group of new friends. And as they approach the guy stands up, and one of the policemen punches him square in the face, and he folds to the floor, and then they start kicking him. Properly kicking him.

Now it’s clear at this point from everyone’s reactions that this isn’t normal. But it’s also clear that it’s far closer to the parameters of normal than I’d be used to at home. Like, this kind of thing is at the edge of the Overton Window for police brutality here.

And it isn’t where I’m from. The police don’t do this at home. Or at least not in public.

So obviously I do what any drunk British person would do in this situation and I get up and I ask the policemen loudly what the fuck they think they’re doing.

And the next thing that happens is I’m up against a wall with a forearm across my throat, and – I’m going to say the muzzle of some sort of machine pistol, but I know nothing about guns – the muzzle of some sort of machine pistol pointing directly into my face with the face of a very angry young Serbian policeman on the other end of it. And there’s a silence in the bar. The other policeman’s even stopped kicking the guy on the floor.

And in the silence my Serbian friend stands up, and carefully leans in to the policeman holding the gun and says – and bear in mind I don’t really know any Serbian, so he must be doing it really slowly and clearly because I understand every fucking word – says, you can’t do that to him. He’s British.

And it works. It works like magic.

It works because I’m British. But that’s not the whole story, obviously. It works because I’m British in a way that the policeman can quickly understand to be British. I’m not just a British drunk. Luckily for me, I’m a white British drunk, and that picture carries weight.

Even though it might not be specific knowledge in the room, in that bar, on that night, a few hundred years of Empire save me from a really fucking unpleasant experience. Here, in a country just beyond the edge of the European Union, in this bar, in this one minute, a phrase about my Britishness spoken slowly and quietly by a drunk Serb makes me too much fucking trouble to arrest. Because they speak English in Mumbai and in Adelaide and in Houston, and because we fought the Nazis, and because we starved all those Indians to death, and because I look more like the people who did the starving rather than the people who got starved, and because we won’t let go of the Falklands and we can put bombers in the sky that obliterated this guy’s national TV station, which at the moment it was obliterated was broadcasting Serbia’s most popular situation comedy. Which for some unfathomable fucking reason is Only Fools and Horses.

And so it goes away. They drag the guy out of the bar. Presumably to beat him up somewhere less public. And an hour or so later, when I’m throwing up with my arms around a tree out back, it’s like it never happened. But I am fucking magic.

If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. Every part of me wants that to be a lie.

This isn’t a Brexit show, by the way. And it’s not about me. It’s just a story about some stuff that happened to a guy called Chris. And a version of all of this really happened. Even the bits that seem magic. But he’s not me. I’m not even sure I like the guy. Then again, that might be my problem and not his.

The first thing that happened to Chris was three-thirty in the morning.

Three-thirty in the morning always happens.

It happens every day, but this one happens while he’s sitting on the flat roof of a building he lives in, in South London.

The horizon’s just getting light out beyond Canary Wharf, which is a few miles to the East of him. The sky to the west of him, towards Heathrow, is still completely dark.

There are three tower blocks between here and Stockwell station, and the sheer number of TVs still on makes it look like they have lightning trapped inside them. London, the whole country, hasn’t really slept. Everyone is processing the most momentous decision that country’s taken in a long time.

Chris is sitting on top of a building built around the start of the First World War. The date’s on the front of it. He thinks of that, and his hand goes reflexively to his stomach. Years ago, in the mining town he grew up in, he fell off the war memorial and cut himself open. There’s still a scar there, worming its way across, just above his belly button. He thinks today he can feel a chip of old stone trapped inside.

He can see the BT Tower at Euston, and he knows it’s pretty much due north of here. Beyond that, although he can’t see these things, there’s St Albans and Oxford and the Midlands and Manchester, the Lakes and the Borders and Glasgow and Loch Lomond and some islands.

He is looking at his country, which he is a citizen of.

And he’s thinking about that country, and what he’s thinking is, I want to get out of it, and want it to get out of me.

It’s not that something snaps, so much as something clicks into place. If you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. Well. Maybe. But rather a citizen of nowhere than a citizen of somewhere that’s just shot itself.

Chris stands. The sky is lighter now. What now, he thinks? Also, how am I going to look Gunther at work in the ey...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note
• Performance Note
• Chapter 1