About three-quarters of the way through Anthony Neilson’s latest production, there is a duologue scene performed into an old-fashioned, radio-style stand microphone, the actors have scripts in hand, and visibly amended scripts at that. It is certainly a Neilson self-reference, but it may also be entirely pragmatic. For this writer-director regularly goes into rehearsals with only general ideas about the work he wants to create with his cast; the script itself is written during the rehearsal period, right up to the last minute and sometimes beyond. It would not surprise me if this were a genuine “beyond” instance.
    
In Narrative, the characters bear the actors’ names, and it seems some of their biographical data also. Which is not to say that Oliver Rix has been cast in a Hollywood superhero movie opposite George Clooney, that Zawe Ashton is a serial over-investor in, and saboteur of, her intimate relationships or that Imogen Doel stabs Sophie Ross to death on an impulse and then grows horns. Er, yes: bison are a recurring motif… I’m not sure why, possibly as an emblem of the mysteriousness of uncertain narrative as traced (in an opening voiceover lecture with slides) back to the Lascaux cave paintings.
    
We see a series of discrete, often semi-absurd scenes: a man in a café is given a photograph of (forgive me) an arsehole; another auditions for a TV commercial for a computer foot-mouse(!); everybody suddenly bursts into David Bowie’s comeback single “Where Are We Now?”. It is soon apparent that the title and the opening homily are signposts that we have to construct a narrative, or group of narratives, ourselves to navigate through these scenes. What surprised me was the realisation, some way into the hour and three quarters of events, that we were doing so entirely naturally, not out of a sense of compulsion but simply as part of the way our brains process information. Character names: check. Roughly forward chronology: check. The occasional fantasy or fictional “cutaway” scene (as when a couple of characters appear from someone’s draft screenplay, or rather from suggested crass rewrites of it): check. Neilson didn’t (perhaps still doesn’t) necessarily know which way the story or stories are going, but he knows exactly how we can be trusted to make those stories out of the ingredients he and his company of seven give us.

Written for the Financial Times.