Training is about helping people to be more familiar and more comfortable, and ultimately more expert in the tasks they need to perform. It is about passing on knowledge and skills in policy, process and techniques and it is therefore an essential and important part of working life. It’s just not what I have ever wanted to do. The ambition that Lawrence and I shared in 2006 was not to train anyone in anything.
When I watched Ian McKellen on stage, with just white light and a door frame for company, he created a world with words and with suggestion that was just as real as if I had been washed up on the shores of Illyria myself. He didn’t train me to feel like this, he didn’t instruct me to reveal certain emotions at certain times, but he created a space and gave me the opportunity to be more of myself than I had ever felt before.
At the time I was just a boy and I can assure you I was not piecing all of this together and making notes for my future career (to be honest, I wouldn’t have known then what the word “career” meant anyway). And I certainly did not rush home that evening to tell mum and dad that I’d had a bit of a moment and it might shape my thinking for the rest of my life. However, something very important had lodged in my heart that day and it has never left me since.
A few months on from this day in a small theatre in Frome, with Twelfth Night now being revised so hard that I can still quote from it today, I had another theatre experience that was even more profound. This time it helped me to see something so precious that I am worried I won’t have the words to tell you about it in the way I would like you to feel it too.
It was another school trip, this time to Bath, to see a performance of Death of a Salesman with Warren Mitchell as Willy Loman. Please remember, I am just a teenage boy doing my O Levels. I have not yet kissed a girl and I am far too shy to notice if anyone might want to kiss me; although, to put it another way, I am totally convinced that no one in their right mind will ever want to kiss me. I am six foot tall, but thin as a rake, and I have a perennial spot on the side of my nose that makes me feel like I’m attached to a cartoon car horn. I don’t do conversation because I don’t feel I have anything to say. I dress not to be noticed and I worry that I do not have opinions on anything. I can’t quote Monty Python sketches word for word and I can’t get into the heavy metal music that my classmates bang on about all the time. Instead, I quite like ABBA and so this becomes something else that I cannot say out loud. If I could just quietly watch a Test Match on TV from first ball to last, that would be my happy place. This is my introvert world where I have hardly read a book that I was not asked to read by a teacher, where I have never been on a plane and where London feels like a place that only really exists in films and on TV.
It was this boy who went to see a play about a middle aged-man losing his job, watching his family fall apart and then he dies. However, the boy who left the theatre that night, who had cried and cried through the pain, and the love, and the dignity, and the shame, and the honesty, and the hopeless relentless pressure of poverty, and the hope of providing a better life, and the hope of redemption, and the power of enduring love; well, that boy was different and he would never, ever, be the same again.
I have been to every UK production of this play ever since. The last time was with Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as his wife Linda. I cried again, of course I did, I cried for the boys, for Willy, for Linda, for their struggle and their fate. I cried for her indomitable love, pride and dignity. I cried for Willy’s weakness and loss of self. I cried for the pain an indifferent world can create, and I cried because all that was needed was for the world to show them just a little more understanding, love and kindness, and to respect the dignity of one inconsequential family’s suffering.
As a teenage boy walking away from the theatre in Bath, with no discernible direction of travel for his young life, I realised a few things that I had not quite realised before. I now knew deep in my bones that everyone counts and that everyone struggles. I knew that no one is free of pain and that most people can hide their pain really well. Life is hard. Good people screw up sometimes. And love, real unconditional, selfless love, can hurt like hell, but without it we are lost.
I also knew that beautifully written words can change lives. Arthur Miller’s words changed mine. Beautiful words that create such powerful feelings will also connect us to our own sense of self, of belonging and of needing to be ourselves. I owe Ian McKellen a great deal, but I owe most to Linda Loman.
When Lawrence and I sat down together in 2006 to write the first LBCambridge programme, we were never ever going to create a training event. We only ever wanted to make people feel something that would be just for them, not for their bosses or for their organisations, but for them. We wanted to help them feel that they had not even begun to understand the shape of their potential and to start believing in their power to explore it.
In 2006, like my teenage self, our first event was awkward and shy, but as the years have rolled by we are more certain than ever that our purpose is not to train, but to connect people to their potential, to help them grow and to make their difference.
If you will allow me therefore, please let me hold your hand in this performance space in our exhibition, where there are no pictures to show you, just the white light of a small theatre in Somerset in 1978. If you feel that you can gently and safely reveal a little of your soul, as Ian McKellen and Linda Loman encouraged me to reveal a little of mine, I believe you will find a feeling of certainty and truth, of love and trust, that will stay with you forever.
May I also share with you this thought, that how we make people feel is something we should notice. How we want people to feel is something we should influence with care and kindness. And knowing how people would like to feel around us, is a gift from them to us that we should treasure and hope that we can fulfil.
To be continued
Take care. Paul xx
