Samuel Kastin. It's a good question. Another good question is why not. There's something about February which is quite mysterious, that month that seemingly by magic gets an extra day every four years because of the earth actually taking 365 days and a 1/4 to fully orbit the sun. It sort of knocks the notion that time exists in hours and minutes a bit on its head. There's a line in some old notebook which reads 'life exists in hours and minutes as much as the universe does in metres and miles, which isn't to say it doesn't, because it does, but there's more to it than that'. Also, February is generally when the year begins to start, that's roughly where I would place Feb Hour, in that moment of the dusky dawning. Ideally Feb Hour would be performed outside of February, luckily enough there is also a show on the 1st of March.
LVF. What will the night consist of?
SK. A performance and a play and an interval and then another performance and another play.
LVF. Can you tell us anything about the performances?
SK. No.
LVF. What about the plays?
SK. The play by Samuel Beckett is called Rockaby and it was written in 1980. The Matchmaker was written by me in 2011. Both of them are short plays, neither longer than 15 minutes. You'll be in the pub within an hour.
LVF. Anything else you'd like to tell us about them?
SK. Not really, I think at £5 the audience should be willing to take a risk.
LVF. What if everyone thought like that?
SK. Maybe we'd get some better plays.
LVF. Do you think so?
SK. No, I don't think we're going to get many better plays, not within the theatres at least. The state of theatre is abysmal at the moment, nearly all new writing seems to have either been written by a social worker or the student from Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose. This is because people find it easier to engage with issues than with thought and feeling, as really thinking and really feeling requires you to challenge yourself and is not always comfortable, and nor should it be. I have heard theatre being described as moribund form and certainly it seems that the theatres themselves believe this, hence this stream of work focusing on the immediate, plays about riots (riots are intrinsically undramatic) and about Enron and Blair being on trial and things like that, it's sort of like reading The Guardian, the audience goes to it and exits thinking 'oh, so this is what I'm supposed to think about that, thank God I didn't have to figure out what I actually think out for myself'. This what we say is like flogging a dead horse, or if we want to be more precise with our similes (which is the point of similes), like fucking a dead whore. I don't mind something being pointless so long as it's meaningful, however, the mist of the work put on the stage these done is done so purely arbitrarily. It's a racket, it's a fix. It's a problem that the tastemakers in this country have no taste, just a list of things they're supposed to say and a clipboard with a few boxes to tick, and continue to program art as a commodity, froth with nothing more to it than the babycinno you can ask the professional barrister for. Hence why we have decided to use a steelworker's garage to put on the work, if the theatres themselves won't put on good work, we have to start doing it for ourselves, or at least try to goddamit. Neither of the plays being performed focus on the immediate, both of them are looking at the proverbial bigger picture (which likely isn't all that big) and hopefully have a timeless quality about them, which brings us back to the evening's name, February Hour-.
******
February Hour- is being performed February 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th at 7p.m. and March 1st at 2p.m. in Grace's Garage, Linscott Road, E5 (opposite the Biddles Bros). Tickets are £5 and available at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/dustyquintessences
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