Yeh: this is a Thing I have been writing since we did all that... there's more to come but I thought I'd chuck this up so far.
It's also partly inspired by a conversation I recently had with an academic friend who remarked after I had laboriously and passionately described the work of The Factory: "... but - it sounds like you are removing all the theatricality..."
This was my way of trying to explain it from the beginning. So this is for her. (Though I won't show her until it is twice as long and three times as finished.)

PART 1 - WHEN SHE THOUGHT IT WAS AN ORATORIO

When Trude was not very experienced, she balked at calling herself a Writer. She refused even in a situation in which it would be impossible for her to be called to account, to call herself a Writer. She was just dipping her toe. It was quite brave of her, in a way, to dip her toe – she rather admired herself for it. It was good for a creative person to be brave – and she was terribly creative. Yes: she arranged shells and stones around the bath. She used candles every single day.

“I’m not avoiding the writing,” she would say to herself. “Why, given a fair wind I write through thirst and exhaustion and God knows I’ve sat writing at my desk for over an hour after I started to need a wee,” she thought, “and that’s when the bathroom was next door. No – I am avoiding the Responsibility which I don’t believe I deserve and for which I do not believe I am ready.” Believing modesty to be a virtue of some kind, she felt good about this view.

The time came when Trude, who was still, she insisted, a novice, wrote a play. It was four pages long. The truth is: it looked a bit like a play – but she was unsure if she should graduate from Novice Writer to something as specialised as Playwright so she called it Fiction. It was unusual for a piece of fiction, because it was made entirely of unattributed dialogue. It looked for all the world like a play, except it lacked the crucial column of character names down the side of the page. Also missing were the instructions in brackets containing words like: wildly or in tears, or perhaps he turns – by which means any actor would understand what was meant by the words that followed.

She was confused, though proud in a shy way, of this strange achievement – so she called it “a Spoken Oratorio”. This seemed to get around a host of potential accusations of irresponsibility or ambiguity. She felt a lot better that her work now seemed to fit somewhere neatly in the big, wide world of literature, albeit in a genre of her own making. She felt sure this new genre – as long as she didn’t publicise it – would be largely ignored, and she could carry on writing uninterrupted. It was like the difference, she comforted herself, between singing in the shower and singing on one of those talent shows on television. She didn’t want, after all her efforts to read and think certain things, to seem vulgar.

Through a series of rather surprising and unforeseen events – a bit like falling down a rabbit hole or pushing through some fur coats to the back of a wardrobe, she found herself, one night, in the position of hearing those same words, her words, the words that comprised the sum total of the literary genre known as ”Spoken Oratorio”, read out loud by some actors. She was sitting on the floor of a large and empty room – empty that is, of furniture, unlike most rooms she knew, and full of actors, also unlike most rooms she knew – and listening to her own words ricochet off the empty walls. It struck her that the vacuum in which she had been “working” had been exploded rather. And she wasn’t sure – she just really didn’t know if she didn’t like it one little bit.

The more she tried to articulate, for herself, this sensation, the more disturbing it became. It was not like hearing her own silly voice on an answering machine. Or even like losing her way in an aimless anecdote at a silent dinner party. She thought hard about it, searching for a metaphor that she felt sure she would not have the temerity to write down, to describe the simultaneous shame and chill of hearing those words said out loud, in the right order, by actors who seemed to believe that every word she had written was – what? – true? She wanted to interrupt and shout: “I was just being silly – it’s not a Spoken Oratorio – it is Fiction! Fiction!” It was strangely embarrassing, she felt ashamed, as though she had wet herself on the bus. No worse, as though she had started her period unexpectedly and, unwittingly, walked through town – past people she knew - whilst her skirt slapped around behind her thick with blood. Perhaps even worse than that, a scenario involving poo-poo or nudity! She gave up thinking of similes as they only seemed to make it worse.

As time went on, though she didn’t at first realise it, she became inured to the sensation of shame, certainly she realised no-one else in the room was interested in it and she couldn’t think of a way to benefit from it.

There were times when it did seem bearable to hear those words. Sometimes the actors would make each other laugh and make a great play of getting mixed-up and losing their place. Or they might become shocked by the swear words she had written and giggle and muck about - that was very funny. She felt much more comfortable when the actors behaved like actors. Other times the actors might say a line sarcastically, as though it had quotation marks around it – it was good to see the words held at arms’ length in that way.

The actors she liked seemed to be such experts with words, pulling them into line like truculent terriers. The actors she couldn’t quite make out seemed to make it up on the spot, but Trude felt that she had done the “making it up” and that now it was the actors’ job to make it look like those words she had carefully chosen, belonged on a stage. She wanted her words to sound sonorous and portentous when the scene was tragic or had content of an adult nature; she knew where she was when the actors spoke in the way actors speak and she felt then that she would certainly not say anything silly if asked about the work afterwards.

As often as not, and somewhat frustratingly, some actors strived to say the words as though they were being fed a line at a time into their heads. They allowed the words to trip them up. They said them differently every time according to how they felt and what they wanted to do with the words. They tried to use the words to ‘crack the other guy’s shell’, when perhaps they should have been concentrating on listening to the sounds they made. They did not keep to a pattern. In short, what was confusing for Trude was that they avoided letting her react in a way she could understand and explain.

The more she was confused in this way, the less she noticed the actors’ skill and the more she had to suffer her own words being flung back at her – she almost felt she was the butt of some very rude behaviour. She felt herself responding willy-nilly to the scenes she watched, not knowing whether to laugh or be quiet. Just watching became a responsibility she wasn’t sure she was ready for. This was something she had chosen to avoid. Indeed, she could have avoided it by simply not being there at these sessions – but it was too late, she had to admit to herself that she didn’t want the party to go on without her.

She grew used to the company of actors and came to feel that they were a perfectly likeable bunch of coves and it was perhaps a relief to discover that they were more interested in the words she had written than in her. She tried to explain the amusing story of the term: “Spoken Oratorio” and how it was a mask for her confusion about expressing her truest, deepest and most unaccountable self, but they didn’t listen terribly much. Or if they did she knew they would not retain what she said. She wondered that they were not interested in how she had come to write what she wrote: the amusing, yet cleverly oblique connections between some of the speakers in her “scenes” with members of her family; the way in which she had drawn on events and phrases from her childhood; the issues in her own life which were explored and portrayed in her writing. It seemed the only way to get through to these people was to write more Spoken Oratorios.

PART 2 – YES TO PUBLIC MENSTRUATION

So she did. And as she began to take for granted that the actors would read out her words, she became a little angrier and a little more vehement in her writing and began in a most distant way to understand what it might be like to feel that if one was to suffer the indignity of walking through a part of town where one knew several of the shopkeepers and neighbours, whilst unknown to oneself, one’s skirt hung behind one, thick with unexpected menstrual blood, one might just have to laugh and relate the story with hilarity to one’s girlfriend and finally screech the words: “Fuck it!” with her, while laughing uncontrollably, because at the end of the day – what did it really matter? Although she was still not bold enough to write freely about such things – this quality, this cheek and this undignified candour did start to creep into her writing. How else could she possibly get it off her chest?

She learned more as she watched, she began to realise that she actually missed out when the actors acted the words. When they assisted the words say, by looking sad when they said they were sad; when they turned to the audience expecting a laugh when an amusing line cropped up. Basically, when they made space for the audience to respond in a polite and neat way – well, she began to feel this was condescending and not part of their job. She also realised how her own words were erased if the actors “assisted” her work in this way. How they were in effect writing over her words with their expressions and gestures, rather than allowing the words to have their own life in their poised, ready and organised actors’ bodies. She came to prefer, and to understand why she preferred, the actors to let their truculent terriers loose. She realised that she would never, for instance, read a novel by copying it out.

She learned other things: there were a lot of times when the words she had written were like narrow planks and all the actors’ energy went into staying balanced on them. She knew that at her desk some of this had appeared to her to be her cleverest writing: exchanges which could have come straight from something famous. Sometimes it was because the subjects and people in her scenes were difficult to write down – harder to hear somehow because they were deeper inside and further away – and she had had to be content with guessing at their words – hearing those words out loud was like watching someone chase wet soap. Then there were the times when she had written scenes that were particularly persuasive – whose sole aim was to be persuasive - but watching those was like watching someone else’s dinner party with the sound down, a lot of table-banging and pointing but no reason to listen. Worst, worst, worst of all, and she wondered how she would ever stop this happening – was when she knew that as she wrote, uppermost in her mind had been the need to show anyone watching that she was a Very Promising New Writer.

And Trude began to understand, or at last admitted to herself that the reasons she wrote anything at all – never mind her Spoken Oratorios was simply because she couldn’t quite be this person who laughed about indiscreet public menstruation. She could imagine what it might feel like to be pathologically intemperate and knew that although she wouldn’t become this person in person she could write like this person. This person could be her spokesperson.

In fact it was crucial to allow this person to speak without shame and with joy.

She started to admit things to herself on lined paper:
“I write because I am afraid of being interrupted.
I write because I am frightened of being misunderstood.
I write because I don’t know what to do with my face while I am talking.
I write because I only ever think of what to say or ask on the train home.
I write because I am afraid of forgetting.
I write because, like any other human being, I am afraid of death.
That’s a lot of fears – but I do not write to manifest those fears.
I write to turn the light on and explain the shadows.”

And there it is: Yes. Thank you. Yes, she thought: Yes – silly thing – you don’t write in a whisper.

PART 3 – NOT WHISPERING

It was like handing over a baton in a race.

There was not a word she had written for an actor to say out loud that she did not want to hear ringing from the rafters. This was, in fact, all she asked but it was a lot to ask: to dare with voice and body what she had dared on paper. For the actors to understand that her daring had been no small thing – and to ask for the actor to match it. For them to understand that she knew, like anyone, the persistent voices in her head better than her own voice out loud. That when she wrote, those nemeses were more eloquent than she was. That if the actor misunderstood that point and tried to deny the text, or horrors, tried to organise it into something palatable rather than simply hold it up, say yes to it, they would destroy that terrible balance. That the actor must dare to say out loud what she did not dare to say herself.

And the actor was so beautifully equipped to do that. The actor was a person who had dedicated their life to using the abilities we all have and take for granted: the ability to walk, talk, use scissors, hold a glass of water without spilling it and to use these amazing minds and bodies responsibly. They were responsible. They were responsible for taking nothing for granted about the room they took up in the world. It was a wonderful calling.

And now she wrote questions. She sometimes felt she was hunting for a solution and sometimes felt she was hunting for a way to phrase the question. She wanted to take part in the creation of simple moments really, many of which strung together might for an audience make a story. Her goal - to write from the heart with nothing to prove, and the performers' goal to speak and act from the heart, trusting that each successive moment would look after itself, became an obsession. The chance of uniting in those goals - an addiction. She was driven by the need to solve something and not prove anything at all. If the writer and the performer's work collided in that mission - then something happened that the audience could not possibly be expecting. That totally unexpected nudge could gently shunt anyone watching into a moment whose definition and purpose was completely theirs to own.

One night Trude sat in an audience watching one of her own short pieces. A simple monologue about a wish she once had. She watched the actor handle the words with respect and simplicity - so true and easy he was – and allow the audience to find their way into the piece in their own way. The actor was so steady– loving really – and she saw how he was quietly surprised by the pictures coming from him like a Mother noticing a child’s new words.

Trude felt that the words themselves had been taken away from her. That there was no way she could have put it any better than that actor did. And that not only did she no longer own it – but neither did the actor saying it – the baton had not only been handed on but now she was watching the last runner chuck it, end-over-end, off a cliff and into the sky.

And slowly, of course, she started to understand, in the tiniest most childish way, and she knew it was a dawn that might take a lifetime to break, that none of it was anything to do with her. At all.