Visual metaphor and worshipping the imagination

I have noticed that my work as a director has become increasingly reliant on visual metaphors. Particularly in the last 2 years, it has been through conversation and numerous drafts that the designer and I have found the visual world together, searching for symbolic ways of visually delineating the play. In the past I haven’t always had a set designer – budget constraints saw me putting on many of my earlier shows in non-traditional venues and using the existing architecture of a space as the ‘set’ – an element of which is still present in more current works (such as Forgotten Places). But for When The Light Leaves, the importance of co-creating the visual world through conscious identification of key visual metaphors became particularly important for making sense of the play.  

The play itself was a trauma play with the porous, (un)structure of memory. It was about death, dying and control, but also about the beauty of life and death. The writing had poetic moments, domestic moments, existential moments, everyday moments. It jumped back and forth in time. And that was one of the things that appealed to me – reading it and wondering how you stage it (what’s the point of doing a project if you already know how it will turn out!).

There were many conversations with designer Stu Brown about what it could look like. But really, the seeds of the design started months before the first sketch, with a lengthy discussion with the writer about the title. The play had previous titles which whilst captivating, from my point of view didn’t give provide a clear sense of the central idea or metaphor holding it all together. Eventually we excavated the core concept of ‘light’, hinted in one of the lines in the play, which seemed to be satisfying: “I want the breath in my body and the light in my eyes to go out at the same time.” The line easily suggested light as a visual metaphor for life. 

The neo-celestial tube lights. Photo by Stu Brown

This clarified one component of the design, which saw some LED tubes hung at the back of the stage in an almost neo-celestial fashion. Further to this, we knew that lighting design was going to be incredibly important. This is where the magical, shadowy lighting design of Gina Gascoigne to sculpt out the pockets of memory came into play. Light is typically used to help focus attention, define and shape space and place, as well as suggest atmosphere and mood. In When The Light Leaves, it did all of these things, whilst also serving as a visual metaphoric thread, making sense of the play as it unfolded through strategic shadows, minimal colour and very close attention to punctuating the play’s rhythm. The light said something clear about the main character’s life stage in every scene. In other words, if you followed the light alone, you would have a sense of where the character was at in his journey.

The second layer of meaning in the abovementioned line points to the desire for control (indicating what the character Dan, who says it, longs for). Without realising it at first, the other key aspect of the design spoke directly to the control aspect of the play. It was an elegant, simple and poetic concept that emerged out of a combination of pragmatics and a desire to establish a non-naturalistic aesthetic: a few simple props hung from the grid with fishing wire. This was when the power of visual metaphor became most clear to me. The objects, when hanging, didn’t behave as they normally would, their relationship to the earth renegotiated, the movement through space-time reconfigured. A graceful solution to the problem of the play’s events being non-chronological, content being everyday and larger than life and a classic modest indie budget. 

But my favourite thing about the hanging props concept is that it also tied together both ‘control’ and ‘light’ through its centrepiece – a hanging pendant lamp downstage centre. The interplay of light and control through this prop became synonymous with the concept of the precariousness and unpredictability of life itself. 

The pendant light swinging in the scene. Photo by Stu Brown

I believe it was only through visual metaphor that the dramaturgy and logic of this play could be experienced fully. A naturalistic staging, in my opinion, would have made it less likely to give a theatre audience an experience of the play’s structure and the unifying message. That is, an experience of being unable to control and of understanding the beauty and fragility of life. Control held the piece together dramaturgically: from the unpredictable switching between past and present, to each character’s journey of seeking control over the uncontrollable, to the whole of part 3 (after he drinks ‘it’). I felt it would not be sufficient to rely on the actor performances of text alone to give that experience on uncontrollability physically for the audience. I think my job as the director is to find ways of allowing the play to speak to the audience on many different levels, to create layers through which audience members can access experience. It was through the hanging props that the play’s dramaturgical theme was elevated. This was because the props were not controllable: they asserted their own associations to the scenes as they moved with the mostly forgotten blow of the heater, or the charged air of actors zipping past, or unexpected collisions with other objects. In this way, a sense of instability and unpredictability became part of the visual fabric of the play.

The power of visual metaphor lies in its ability to ask an audience to meet the play halfway, asking them to make associations, bring their imagination to complete the picture and hear text differently. In an era of fast paced plots and sensationalist, gruelling or plain shocking viewing on Netflix and the like, the theatre has to be really clear about its point of difference. Visual metaphor gives the theatre an opportunity to be less didactic, more provocative; less realistic, more imaginative. This last one is really important to me – it’s not that realism can’t be imaginative, but that I feel compelled to work in the abstract, the expressionist, the heightened or plain bizarre realms because they more easily lend themselves to transformation (at least with how I work). What I mean by that is, I find realism limiting, because the focus often becomes about representing what is, according to most people; the measure of success is often about how ‘realistic’ it was. But more importantly, I think film usually does realism better than theatre so I’d rather leave it to the film makers to work in that style. In theatre, it’s so obviously not real (though the same could be said for film to an extent), the repetitious nature of a season, the artifice of lighting, set, and just being in a theatre and being oriented in the dark toward a lit space with real life people playing roles is not even a little bit ‘real’. It relies on everything and everyone making an imaginative leap, a transformation into another realm, to be able to work on our minds and bodies, hearts and souls.

Theatre is a place to worship imagination, to celebrate it. Whether that’s through drama, comedy, music etc., the craft of theatre relies on a labour of the imagination from actors, directors, designers, technicians and audiences. In creating a space that is full of symbolism, metaphor and association, everyone is invited to meet the experience wherever they are and find space or entry points in all the layers for themselves to become participants, co-creating the ‘reality’, ‘meaning’ and resonance of the play. 

I find visual metaphor a more affective way of creating visceral experience too. Perhaps it’s because, from my experience, it feels as though the body and the subconscious can respond before the intellectual brain can get to interpreting it and assigning it ‘meaning’. I love this experience when you have made sense of a thing without being able to linguistically identify what that ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ even is. It was interesting to read various reviews and notice those reviewers who identified their bodies responding to the uncertainty and lack of control exhibited by the hanging props, and those who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) decipher why the props made them feel uncomfortable – some summarising them distracting or plain annoying. Of course this is me speculating, and perhaps they did unpack these things themselves but found them annoying nonetheless. It’s worth considering though, for many people the lack of consideration for the potential of visual metaphor in the theatre and a cultural obsession with visual realism makes theatre like the kind we create, all the more challenging – but hopefully all the more rich too. It asks audiences to complete the picture, so that it can become more revealing and more personal.

Visual metaphor requires time to process, to make personal connections, to allow for one’s imagination to open up. It enables us to access vertical time or spiral time, where linearity and logical sense making are irrelevant. It is the antidote to the fast-paced, optimised, fast-results, attention grabbing world. Visual metaphor can be frustrating for viewers who want to know what it means straight away – but metaphor, by definition, does not show you what it is, rather suggests what it could be like. Visual metaphor allows you to access something you might not have experienced, through a visual language that holds layers of meaning, association and significance that you might have experienced elsewhere. It enables a coalescence of previous and present experience. Through visual metaphor, the theatre asks us all to participate in a gentle act of worshipping the imagination. It asks us to contribute our imaginative selves to the space in a quiet and nourishing way as we connect with the layers offered to us. It brings us all into ourselves more fully and maybe, towards each other too.