I can hear the laughter from the other end of the building. They’re meant to be working on some nuanced point of the script but the energy has clearly broken out and rampaged down the stairs.
There is under a week to go before we take the raw new show for a first outing to the Ukrainian community in Bradford. It’s part of that process, as the Brazilians would say, of understanding ourselves through the gaze of others.
We are working on a comedy about isolation, abuse and uncertainty.
Driving home later that night the neuroscientist Sophie Scott is talking about laughter on my car radio:-
‘It’s a behaviour we think is about amusement but actually its about affiliation and agreement and affection. You’re showing the people you are talking to when you are doing this fabulous act of speech that no other animal can do like us, none the less, we drop into laughter, this really old mammal behaviour to show the people we are with we like them, that we love them, that we agree with them that we are part of the same group, that we understand what they’re saying.’
I just hope that we haven’t been booked into the silent coach on the train north.
