Features Essays Published 17 May 2011

Fire exits and other stage directions

Michael Pinchbeck is a writer and performance maker based in Nottingham. Michael was a co-founder of Metro-Boulot-Dodo theatre company in 1997. They made shows about escape. Their logo was the running man from a fire exit sign. Michael left the theatre company in 2004 to pursue a five-year live art project. His current touring show, The End, explores entrances and exits.
Michael Pinchbeck

The piece started off as a sparse text on an empty stage but as it was developed in three different venues the off-stage furniture of those venues made it onstage. And so now they have two ladders, two lanterns, two microphones, a fire extinguisher, a heater, a fire bucket and a fan. Perhaps the most important object onstage is the text itself, that is read from and constantly refers to itself. Mole says ‘I drank too much coffee when I wrote this’. The performers read from the script. The Pilots has the aesthetic of the rehearsal room, the technical state of an unready theatre. The get in is the get out and the get out is the get in as lanterns are taken down. It reminds me of the stage lanterns gaffer taped to the wall in the church hall.

The Church on Rise Park Drama Group is no longer performing plays in the church hall. They are no longer performing plays at all. They recently discarded their set and props. I went to the church last year. The fire exit sign has been taken down. It has since in some ways become my logo, my motif, in contrast to the fire exit sign used by my former theatre company. It is a monument to amateurism and a need to leave the stage, or at least, to explore what happens when we do, as performers working onstage or prompts or fire officers sitting in the wings. I wrote this about the Fire Exit sign.

Somewhere between us / Between the floor and the ceiling / Between house lights and floodlights / Gaffer taped to the wall / You watched us enter and exit / You told us where to go / You told them how to leave / If they didn’t like what they saw / Or there was a fire or needed to know / Where the toilets were / You were a signpost to somewhere else / Somewhere offstage where the bear waits for its entrance / And we were waiting for Godot / And the toilets were down the corridor on the left / And your green paint / And your blu tac / And your frayed corner / And your yellowed page / And your history / And you’re yesterday / You’ve been thrown away / With costumes / And flats / And stage blocks / And broken doors / And wind-up telephones that don’t work anymore / And windowless windows / And make up / And an eyeliner we used to draw on crows’ feet / And scripts with brightly highlighted lines / And underlinings and crossings out in pencil / Never in pen / And folded corners to help us to remember / And all the dreams / You ever saw come true / On the stage below you / And the curtain falls / Black out / This is the end of the page

Michael Pinchbeck’s The End is at greenroom, Manchester, on 20th May and at the Brighton Festival on 25th and 26th May. For more information, visit his website or read his blog.

For  more information on this year’s Brighton Festival, read our preview.


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