John Arthur Sweet is still waiting to perform for real at the Barnstaple Fringe. He had his bags all packed (well, no, but he was thinking about it) to head to the UK in 2020, but then, you know. And now it's 2021 and, well, you know.

In the meantime, here's a snippet of a show he's currently working on, a full-length monologue about the relationship between his (homo)sexuality and his love of theatre.

reflections on making theatre in the shadow of a pandemic..."

I first did the piece I submitted for the livestream as a recorded audio story that I sent out to various friends early in the pandemic. It was a way to stay in touch and maybe give them something that would take their minds off the pandemic. I was really happy with it, and with the response I received, so I then developed it and memorized it for the video recording I made for Fringe TheatreFest. This little story (which is part of a much longer monologue) is a purely "pandemic" production insofar as I have thus far never performed it in front of people who were physically present in the same space as me!

For me, the pandemic has mostly been an opportunity to work on writing, in the hope that, sooner or later, there will be a time for performing what I've written. I've done very little online performing. What was quite poignant for me, as I recorded this piece for Fringe TheatreFest, was feeling the butterflies in the stomach and realizing how much I've missed that adrenaline. Even though doing a video recording shouldn't be particularly nerve-wracking, because one can always redo it and no one will see any mistakes you made, there is still that awareness that someone will eventually see what you're doing, so even this anticipation of "contact" (however virtual and disconnected in time and space) becomes energizing.

The piece I recorded for Fringe TheatreFest isn't "perfect". There are a couple of points where I'm searching for the words I wrote. But this is theatre, not cinema, and that human quality of vulnerability is a big part of what theatre is. So, even though my piece is recorded, it's as live as can be, fragility and all.

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