The Story of the Miracles at Cookie's Table

Griffin, At the Stables Theatre.
The Story of the Miracles at Cookie's Table, By Wesley Enoch.

This play won the Patrick White prize. In a year I wasn't involved, I should say.

I'd read it a few times but that was a while ago; and as we know the experience of seeing a play is watching an altogether different text.

What I noticed in the theatre is that there was a tension at work in what Wesley was writing; ostensibly the play is a sequence of 'stories' associated with the table in question. It was cross-generational and fluid in relation to time; early-on the actors had to play a number of roles representing the various matriarchs of the family. But in the end the play wasn't interested in the stories of the table, the play wanted to be a mother and son reconciliation drama. I had missed this when reading it. The stories aren't the play; they're like a long preamble or back-fill to the core drama. And that got me thinking that the core drama isn't actually the reconciliation of mother and son, it's the horror vacui of there being no future generations to carry on 'storytelling'. It's as if that's what Wesley's proposing; that families are in the end only the stories they tell. So when the character of Nathan, possibly never to leave offspring, imagines burying said table it's actually a provocative proposition. It's the end. It's putting a full stop to cyclical behaviour, to the sins of the fathers being visited on the children...but it's also the end of the stories. The whole play has a melancholic sadness to it.

He's a interesting theatre artist, Wesley Enoch. The two great pillars of his work are really emerging now; indigenous experience and the great Protestant cosmology. Both of course deeply rooted in family. I thought his production of 'Paul' at Belvoir street this year was very, very intriguing. The play itself was risible and had a disappointing materialist second act. But the sincerity with which Wesley appraoched the character of Paul himself (via Rob Menzies, specialist in tortured souls, 'his eyes hollows of madness...'), it was as if he was resolutely turning his focus to that New Testament realm of faith and despair. His own name has it all; the great founder of Methodism, Arminian patriarch of a rational, reductionist, suppressive faith that also encompasses exhilarating song. And Encoh, a blurred, distant Patriarch from the far reaches of Genesis, ancestor of Noah, metamorphosed into an angel. He carries that great, but now anaemic, Protestant tradition with him; hard work, fire and brimstone, the smear of sin, anxiety, anxiety...all his works have an anxiety to them, about the absence of God, the absence of family, the absence of a future, the absence of love. Yet he still posits a warmth in his families. Even sentimentalises them. Outsiderdom matters to him; blackness, gayness, being a cheeky provocateur, estranged from his saviour, being outside the big narrative yet one of its tellers...but what is the last storyteller called? If he's the last, the table-burier so to speak, then he's not just a teller of stories. He's a composer of eulogies, for people and ideas that are fading...

I usually try to think of my experience in the theatre as a conversation with the 'author'. For me that author is usually the director because it's her or his voice I hear loudest. But in this case it was Wesley's presence in the room. This is not to dismiss the work of all others involved in the show. Marion Potts directed it finding rhythm where there was none (!) and keeping it paced. But in the end the range of options open to a director or designer on this stage is so limited, most productions end up resembling each other. That's why the quality of writing matters so much, and why the Stables is an appropriate space for a new writing theatre.

Gee I've had some good times there over the years. The way the lights flare before they dip. The weird relationship you form with the audience members in the bank opposite you; for a while there you know them well. The slightly precious sense of its own history redolent in the foyer. And last night was typically Griffin; a play about the eclipsing of grand narratives, while outside at interval audience members watched earth's shadow slide across the bright moon over King's Cross...