The Laughter Arrives

There was something slightly wrong with Coffee and the Dead Canary.

Not wrong in any obvious sense. The evening was light, inventive, beautifully played. Little disturbances appeared and vanished: a dead bird, exaggerated mourning, bodies behaving strangely, grief becoming miniature theatre. The imagination kept opening small doors onto somewhere less certain.

Then the laughter arrived.

It was easy laughter. Warm, knowing, almost protective. The strange thing would barely have time to settle before becoming comic, and the room would move with it. Whatever shadow had appeared was given a little hat, a gesture, a song.

Perhaps this is one of the oldest arrangements between theatre and the psyche. You approach the thing that unsettles you and, just before it becomes too close, you laugh.

The dead canary remains there somewhere.

You begin to notice the small interval before the laughter — the moment when an image has not yet decided what it is. Something might be sad. Something might be grotesque. Something might simply be inexplicable. For an instant, there is no position from which to receive it.

Then everyone knows.

Laughter gathers the fragments.

And yet some images seem to resist being gathered. They remain at the edge of the room, quietly refusing the invitation to become amusing. Perhaps you find yourself waiting for the strange thing to be left alone.

Not another joke, but the moment when nothing arrives to rescue you from it.

There are works that carry you towards feeling and works that carry you away from it. Neither needs to be more truthful. They simply leave different traces.

Perhaps the door was never meant to stay open.

Still, afterwards, you cannot quite forget the canary.

Notitia — attending to what remains unsettled.