What’s important?
I was in a boy’s bed the moment I found out I had made it into a Royal Court Theatre writing programme. I was 21 years old and he was the one I’d cried over in my room listening to Slow Dancing In A Burning Room on repeat, willing John Mayer to draw out every tear in my body. In 2011, he felt like the most important thing. And suddenly, clutching my phone in my hand, re-reading the email just to make sure, he wasn’t.
During that summer programme, I was taught to decipher what felt important enough to channel into dialogue. The programme was called Unheard Voices, and each year they would focus on a marginalised group usually less championed by the arts (and theatre in particular), and 2012 was the year they called for East and South East Asian writers. I was the youngest in the group by about 10 years. Stepping behind the scenes of an institution I had been so invested in felt – or perhaps it made me feel – important.
I had written and directed two plays at university. The first was about a daughter who, whilst grieving her late father, discovers that he had been in a secret relationship with a younger man for many years; the second, my dissertation and the script that got me into the Court, was an eat-the-rich critique on the power dynamics that plague the British upper class through the story of five university graduates engaging in a manipulative game of truth or truth at the end of their final summer of freedom.
The importance of these plays was layered. The fact that I’d written them at all was hugely important. That I’d had the opportunity to cast, direct and co-produce both of them was important. The themes that they explored – grief, secrecy, shame, privilege, power, greed – were important. But I do remember that summer feeling confused about what I thought was important enough to write about – or rather, what I thought was important enough for people to care about.
Throughout the programme, we gathered every week to workshop, discuss and write. We were all working on scenes for a play that we’d need to hand in at the end of the summer, which was to be assessed by the Royal Court Theatre as both a way of offering feedback, as well as an opportunity to get your play produced. At 21 years old, and knowing the legacy of young female playwrights at the Court, I felt overwhelmed by the internal pressure to write something important. The play I was working on was a two-hander between two young lovers who seal themselves into their own world, pulling each other down by trapping themselves in each other. I had just seen The Effect at the then Cottlesloe Theatre, and I too wanted to explore the way romance and obsession interacted with our brain’s invisible chemistry. This was years before I fell into a deep depression, before I knew the depth of that well (although I had probably started falling already), and around the same time that mental health became a prolific topic in theatre, literature and cinema.
Everyone in my programme was writing about Asian heritage and immigrant culture, and their complicated feelings about race whilst living in the West. I remember someone curiously asking why I wasn’t exploring that in my play. “I guess it just hasn’t felt like a tension I need to explore,” I replied.
Of course, as I got older and dug into myself more intentionally, these tensions surfaced. And now, this part of my identity is probably the most important thing to me. I’m so fascinated by how unaffected I had felt by something so important and inherent; yet that’s what I love so much about writing. It illuminates what you might have kept in the dark; it forces you to confront the things that feel uncomfortable to discuss.
I feel like I’m grappling with a lot of ‘I used to think this, but now I think that’ energy. It’s a byproduct of getting older that I knew would happen, but I never connected it with the reality of how that might shift things deep within me: politically, bodily, socially. And not just shift but accumulate, so that these layers of importance stack and stack and stack, which can feel rich and edifying but equally insurmountable and like it might topple me over.
When I am writing about a question where one word stands out amongst the rest, I usually find myself digging into the definition and etymology of that word so I can make sure that I am explaining myself clearly and, I guess, correctly. I find it interesting that some definitions refer to necessity, others worth or value, and many that use the words influence, power, effect or consequence.
As a word, ‘importance’ feels like a stoic, static, rigid word. Perhaps even slightly onomatopoeic: its lack of sibilance, its staccato syllables that exit the mouth like a force. But importance – and all of the other words we use to describe it – are inherently fluid. Our individual and collective definitions of the word will ebb and flow depending on circumstance; our own, or that of the world.
I suppose the skewed way I’ve always defined importance – as it relates to my actions – is whether it feels impressive (or at least makes an impression). I guess that is the tension of importance: what we deem as important, and how what we do relates to that definition. Because of this intrinsic tie between importance and perception, I often find myself wondering whether what I’m writing really matters. It’s easy to fall down the hole of nihilism when you ponder this topic too deeply. At some point, you have to accept that both nothing and everything matters, and if it feels truly important to you, it might feel important to someone else.
I think about Tetsuya Ishida, the Japanese artist who died too young. I think about what he said to his ex-lover, Hiromi Toyoda, a defining decision of importance: “I'm so happy being with you that I cannot paint anymore.”
Apart from the very obvious (family, friends, freedom, identity), these are things that are strangely and deeply important to me:
– The conversation between Alice and Larry in the strip club in Patrick Marber’s play Closer. Especially the line “PARADISE SHOULD BE SHOCKING.”
– The fleshy part of my body that sits softly between my legs and my hips.
– The opening bars to A Certain Romance by the Arctic Monkeys (the demo version).
– The salty slicked first morsel of a bowl of rice doused in soy sauce and sesame oil.
– The freckles on my father’s forearms.
– The way my mother pinches me to say I love you.
I continue to dedicate time to things that are technically unimportant: worrying what people think of me; rewatching Suits; laying awake at night worrying about falling in love.
As I write this, the playwright Jeremy O’Harris is looming over my table, talking on the phone. We walk out of the cafe together and I nervously stop him, because I think it’s important to tell him how important I think he and his work is. The moment feels like all of those other words: significant, valuable, worthy, impressive, influential and powerful.
This is so good. Thank you for writing it ❤️