by Joshua King (writer of JUMPER 24th - 28th May 2022)
It is with something like fondness that I think back to the first quarter of the pandemic (fondness behind anxiety and regret and horror, but fondness too, nonetheless).
I miss the gentle and naive optimism that caused people, in their collective consciousness, to become fascinated by the fact that Shakespeare had written King Lear during a period of quarantine. The ipso facto logic, you’ll remember, led everyone to the conclusion that pandemics are the ideal time to create a magnum opus, at most, and any piece of ambitious art that you had previously not had time to, at least.
I admit that I too was swept up in the desperate rapids of wanting to create something worthwhile during the lockdowns. Wanting to write my King Lear. I had the benefit of having been gifted a project to work on just before the country closed down, too. I was asked by Sycamore Productions’ Will Charlton to write a play where characters are trapped on a train carriage on the London Underground. The idea excited me quite a bit, because as an avid avoider of the tube, I was eager to mine my nightmares for the feelings that might come if I was ever unexpectedly trapped down there among the dust and the mice.
I miss the gentle and naive optimism that caused people, in their collective consciousness, to become fascinated by the fact that Shakespeare had written King Lear during a period of quarantine. The ipso facto logic, you’ll remember, led everyone to the conclusion that pandemics are the ideal time to create a magnum opus, at most, and any piece of ambitious art that you had previously not had time to, at least.
I admit that I too was swept up in the desperate rapids of wanting to create something worthwhile during the lockdowns. Wanting to write my King Lear. I had the benefit of having been gifted a project to work on just before the country closed down, too. I was asked by Sycamore Productions’ Will Charlton to write a play where characters are trapped on a train carriage on the London Underground. The idea excited me quite a bit, because as an avid avoider of the tube, I was eager to mine my nightmares for the feelings that might come if I was ever unexpectedly trapped down there among the dust and the mice.
Of course, it didn’t quite play out how I had naively expected. I was swept up in King Lear fever, sure, but I was also swept away by it. I continued to write, but could not face writing anything important, or anything that might require any analysis of the days we were living in. To me, JUMPER fit into these categories. I didn’t want to face anything political, anything topical or anything that would confess the intense anxiety I was feeling to a reader or viewer. Who knows why this was. Tiredness, maybe. Fear, perhaps, that I wasn’t able to do it anymore. My suspicion is, however, that I just simply did not know how to feel about the world, le alone present it on stage. Should I be pessimistic that it had got this way? Optimistic that better times were to come? I would have to wait to see how I felt, I decided, because even Shakespeare, though King Lear is as confused and mad as they come, could not have written King Lear if he were in a confused state himself. He was of sound mind, I am sure, when he wrote it, despite it being his great quarantine achievement.
For me, however, the darkest days of the pandemic did then come to an end (some say they are still to come to an end, but for the sake of this, let’s say they already have), and I started to become slightly less paralysed, enough so even to be able to engage once more with the story of JUMPER. My idea of it had changed along the way, obviously, in the same way that London and the country had changed, and now I had come to realise what it was that I wanted it to be about and how valuable that period of confusion had been. It really clarified and crystallized the central idea of JUMPER. People being trapped in a tube carriage. And the interesting part of that story, I realised, is not in the fact that it is a tube carriage and that different people are forced to interact in close quarters, but the fact that they are trapped, figuratively and literally, in the exact same way we all were during the pandemic. The question that interested me then was: how does an individual cope with being trapped? Trapped on a train, trapped in the class system, trapped in a job? How does it make them feel about themselves as a whole?
That question of how to cope with being trapped, then, became the driving force behind JUMPER, in the end. Whether or not this is the takeaway from the play is irrelevant really, but it was the feeling that swept me back up from the midst of the dark pandemic days.
For me, however, the darkest days of the pandemic did then come to an end (some say they are still to come to an end, but for the sake of this, let’s say they already have), and I started to become slightly less paralysed, enough so even to be able to engage once more with the story of JUMPER. My idea of it had changed along the way, obviously, in the same way that London and the country had changed, and now I had come to realise what it was that I wanted it to be about and how valuable that period of confusion had been. It really clarified and crystallized the central idea of JUMPER. People being trapped in a tube carriage. And the interesting part of that story, I realised, is not in the fact that it is a tube carriage and that different people are forced to interact in close quarters, but the fact that they are trapped, figuratively and literally, in the exact same way we all were during the pandemic. The question that interested me then was: how does an individual cope with being trapped? Trapped on a train, trapped in the class system, trapped in a job? How does it make them feel about themselves as a whole?
That question of how to cope with being trapped, then, became the driving force behind JUMPER, in the end. Whether or not this is the takeaway from the play is irrelevant really, but it was the feeling that swept me back up from the midst of the dark pandemic days.
As for King Lear, as far as my brief research has told me, it is more than likely true that Shakespeare wrote it during a forced quarantine during the bubonic plague. The Globe had been shut for 78 months and mass gatherings were frequently banned. It was, all in all, probably a much worse experience in general than we have gone through. For one thing, there was no Netflix to lessen the blow, and there was certainly no hand sanitizer (though I am unsure how effective that might be against a flea-infested rat). Shakespeare did, however, have one advantage over me: he was Shakespeare.
But there is one important thing that we collectively overlooked during that time. It was not the extra time and isolation that allowed Shakespeare to work on and complete King Lear during those months, as if an extended deadline was all he needed to scribble it down. No, King Lear exists because it was informed by and born from a time of great misery. Without the plague, it wouldn’t have existed as it does.
JUMPER is the same. I admit, it might not survive for 400 years like King Lear has, but it was at least born from similar (but again, much less severe) circumstances. Though I am no Shakespeare, it seems right to say that I can, in some small way, relate to the creative mindset that Shakespeare himself must have felt. Despairing, yes, but ultimately motivated by a time of change. It is reasonable, of course, to want to create something during a quarantine period, but impossible to remove yourself from the context of being in one. As I said above, JUMPER changed hugely from the play that I had originally envisioned and I can only hope that, having been created during a time of stress and fear, JUMPER came out the better for it.
Is it optimistic or pessimistic? That’s for you to decide when you see it. But it is, at least, a product of these times.
JUMPER is showing at The Bread & Roses Theatre 24th - 28th May 2022, tickets available here
But there is one important thing that we collectively overlooked during that time. It was not the extra time and isolation that allowed Shakespeare to work on and complete King Lear during those months, as if an extended deadline was all he needed to scribble it down. No, King Lear exists because it was informed by and born from a time of great misery. Without the plague, it wouldn’t have existed as it does.
JUMPER is the same. I admit, it might not survive for 400 years like King Lear has, but it was at least born from similar (but again, much less severe) circumstances. Though I am no Shakespeare, it seems right to say that I can, in some small way, relate to the creative mindset that Shakespeare himself must have felt. Despairing, yes, but ultimately motivated by a time of change. It is reasonable, of course, to want to create something during a quarantine period, but impossible to remove yourself from the context of being in one. As I said above, JUMPER changed hugely from the play that I had originally envisioned and I can only hope that, having been created during a time of stress and fear, JUMPER came out the better for it.
Is it optimistic or pessimistic? That’s for you to decide when you see it. But it is, at least, a product of these times.
JUMPER is showing at The Bread & Roses Theatre 24th - 28th May 2022, tickets available here
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