At eleven years of age, I sat an exam that had been rebranded as a Verbal Reasoning Test, though everyone still called it the eleven-plus. I had practised versions of it for months, the way children practise things they sense will be used to sort them. I came third in my year. Two girls beat me. From that point on, I was a boy with promise, yet nobody asked me whether I wanted the label. I have spent most of the decades since, trying to live up to a standard I never set myself, and often not quite managing it, and yet somehow still trying.

By the time I entered the Upper Sixth form I had taken on everything a school could offer at once: three A-levels, a retake of an O-level I had failed, an O-level in Economics and the ubiquitous General Studies exam. The debating team, the clarinet in a youth orchestra, my first serious relationship, the stage management of a school production, and the responsibilities of being elected by my peers, Head of Sixth (the Comprehensive School version of Head Boy in the Grammar School system). I did not yet recognise this as a pattern. I just recognised it as another busy week. The breakdown that followed, mild by adult standards, devastating at seventeen, was the first time the promise and the person carrying it came apart at the seams. I did not get into Bristol to read the Politics, Economics and Philosophy degree I wanted. I went to an unremarkable, lesser-known college in Northampton instead to read Business Studies. I carried a romantic idea of academia I had mostly invented from novels, and built a life there I would actually not trade for the one I had planned.

Before I left the school for the last time, one of my final duties as Head of Sixth was to present it with a gift from our year group.

We had chosen, collectively, a framed print of Salvador Dalí’s The Last Supper. As far as I know, it still hangs near the Head Master’s office, nearly half a century later, though I do not know for sure. I have never returned.

We were the first full year group in a school that had opened in 1971, and for all our years there, there had been nobody above us. We were not following a path. Perhaps we were mistaken for one.

Financial services arrived the same way college had; not chosen, simply what remained. Britain in 1981 was not generous to new graduates. I answered an advertisement seeking six intelligent people, no salary, commission only, and the only qualification required was fifty names of people I could cold-call. I provided them. I became good at it, in the way that desperate, broke, newly committed men are often good at things they will later be ashamed of having been good at. The structure encouraged you to spend beyond your means so you would need to sell more to cover it, and for a while I went along with that too. I left to build something more honest, an insurance brokerage of my own, and for a few years it worked, until Black Friday arrived and clients began cancelling policies faster than I could write new ones, and the commissions I had already spent were clawed back from underneath me. I nearly lost a house that year. It would not be the only time.

What I have left out of that paragraph is not absent because it didn’t matter. The marriage. The daughter and son born not long after. The salaried job I took and didn’t love, then the one I did, for a decade. It is absent because this essay is not really about financial services. It is about what a person does with a verdict handed to them at eleven, and financial services is simply where mine happened to land me for twenty years.

Here is the part I did not understand until I started writing this down: the other thread never actually broke. While I was building sales forces and writing policies, I was also organising the visiting bands at my college, bringing in a street theatre troupe called 7:84, and once, memorably, U2, a booking I shared with a dear friend who knew them before I did, back when it was still a gamble rather than a certainty. None of it felt like a career. It felt like the thing I did alongside the thing I was supposed to be doing. You do not notice a thread like that until you are far enough along to look back and see it running underneath everything, unbroken, while you thought you were living a different story entirely.

I reached the Royal & Derngate Theatre through the box office, on a fraction of what I had earned before. It was only once I moved into the theatre programming department that I understood something about regional theatre that the people who had arrived through art college or a drama degree did not seem to want to say aloud. The commercial bookings, the artists with mass appeal and limited critical standing, the ones some of my more traditionally trained colleagues regarded with faint distaste, were the reason the producing work, the actual art, could exist at all. Tickets paid for ambition. I had come to programming sideways, through festivals and box offices rather than seminar rooms and the stage, and I felt that distinction more keenly than I let on. I do not think less of theatre for needing both kinds of work. I think more of myself for finally understanding that I had been doing both kinds, in different costumes, since I was eighteen.

I left the Royal & Derngate to enter a marriage that had never asked me to make that sacrifice. The marriage did not last. That ending was hers to make, not mine.

Those first eight years in theatre felt, more than anywhere I had been since my college days, like arriving somewhere I already belonged. I never left the arts. America just gave me another twelve years of it, and more to follow.

These essays arrive fortnightly. If any of this sounds like something you want to read, or something you are living through yourself, then I am glad you found your way here.

Steve Scrivens

Montpelier, Vermont

This is the first in a new occasional strand I am calling Dispatches: pieces that sit alongside my main Where We Start From sequence when a subject presses too directly on the wider culture, or on the life of artists and writers, to wait its turn.

This first dispatch looks at artists, technology, gatekeepers, and the search for an ethical path through disruption. A second will follow, looking more directly at artists already trying to work with new tools in serious and thoughtful ways.

This will set you free.

There is a promise that arrives with almost every new technology It may not use those exact words, but the promise is usually there. The old barriers will fall. The old gatekeepers will finally lose their power.

The artist will not have to wait for permission. The musician doesn’t need the record label. The writer no longer needs the publisher. The filmmaker opens their movie with no Studio in sight. The theatre-maker will not need the institution. The audience will be reachable directly, immediately, globally. Right?

It would be foolish to deny it completely because there’s some truth in it. It’s also true that many artists have been held back by old systems that were narrow, expensive, slow, complacent, class-bound, risk-averse, or simply closed to anyone without the right introduction. Any tool that loosens those systems is worth paying attention to. Any platform that lets a writer find readers, a musician find listeners, or a performer find an audience without first passing through a guarded door has already done something worth taking seriously.

I’m not convinced however, that the gate ever disappears. The sign above it may simply change its name. The editor becomes an algorithm. Yesterday’s record executive becomes today’s playlist. The bookseller becomes a ranking system, and the critic becomes today’s metric.

The artist is told they have been liberated, and in some ways they have. However, they then discover that the new freedom comes with a new set of passwords with new platforms to learn. How do we feed the algorithm? What the heck is metadata? How can the title capture attention? We’re told to shorten the work. Keep people watching. Keep people listening. Keep people clicking. Keep people subscribing. We must be authentic, and also consistent. Originality is key yet we must be ‘deep’ but not slow. Be our true self, but preferably in a way that can be recommended to strangers before they lose interest.

In the middle of all this stands an artist, trying to keep pace. That is the person I’m interested in.

I don’t much care for the technology evangelist nor the professional scold. The person who declares each new tool to be either salvation or sin before anyone has had time to understand what it does to the work. I am interested in the working artist who has to make choices before the argument is even settled.

Most artists are not living in theory. They are trying to write, paint, compose, rehearse, record, publish, tour, teach, invoice, sell, edit, apply, promote, and begin again. They are trying to make something that has value on their own terms while the terms of value keep changing. This is not new. But it feels newly urgent.

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The Question is older than AI

The Music Industry has already been through several versions of this disturbance. Napster made recorded music feel detachable from the object that once carried it. Downloads unbundled the album. Streaming made almost everything available almost everywhere, which is a miracle until one noticed what this miracle did to attention spans.

For listeners, the bargain was irresistible. More music. Less cost. Less waiting. Less friction. But for artists, the bargain was more complicated.

A musician could release work without waiting for a record deal. That mattered, and it still does. No serious account of the last twenty-five years should pretend the old industry was a paradise of fairness. The old gatekeepers excluded plenty of people who deserved to be heard. The artist’s work was now more visible but that’s not the same as being valued.

The catalogue became effectively infinite. The ‘45’ gained power. The album weakened as a shared cultural form. Cover art, once held in the hand, studied, lived with, and argued over, became a thumbnail. One might also wonder what happened to album cover artists commissioned to produce iconic album covers? Hi-fi, once a common aspiration for those who loved music and could afford even modest equipment, became a niche enthusiasm. Convenience won, as it usually does. The song travelled everywhere, but it also became easier to skip, easier to forget, easier to treat as atmosphere. Who, these days entertains the idea of listening to ‘both sides’ of an album? Some generations won’t even understand that sentence because it’s no longer part of the listening experience.

It wasn’t all bad. As artists and consumers got used to the new world, the live performance became, for some, the place where meaning and money returned. The room mattered again. The body of work mattered. The audience was no longer purely a statistic but a gathering of people who had left their homes and paid to be present.

But not every artist can tour. Not every performer can withstand it. Not every audience is large enough. Not every kind of music sits equally well in that economy. And the artist at the lower end of the pecking order remains familiar with the old problem in a new costume: everyone can hear you, in theory, but very few may actually listen.

Books have lived through their own version of the same story.

Amazon and digital publishing opened doors that traditional publishing had kept closed. A writer no longer has to wait for an agent, a publisher, a sales meeting, a bookstore buyer, or a review column. Self-publishing stopped being only a last resort and became, for some, a route to genuine readership. That is real freedom too, isn’t it?

The answer is nuanced. The market became accessible and that in turn created a crowded marketplace where the gatekeepers did not disappear so much as change clothes.

Rankings, reviews, metadata, recommendation engines, category placement, advertising spend, price expectations, reader impatience, online visibility. These became part of the new storm for writers to weather. The book could be published; Yes…but would it be found? Would it be read? Would it be paid for? Would the writer survive long enough to write the next one?

Meanwhile, the physical book did not die. If anything, for some readers it became more precious because it was no longer necessary. Paper, cover, weight, shelf, margin, the small ceremony of turning a page. A real book became not only a delivery system for words but a kind of resistance to the dissolving screen.

The Pattern Keeps Repeating.

A new technology removes friction. People rejoice. Then, after a while, some of them begin to miss the friction.

Vinyl returns. Bookshops matter. Film cameras reappear. Notebooks sell. Long-form essays survive inside the same culture that keeps declaring attention dead. Younger generations, born into the digital abundance that older generations once treated as liberation, begin looking back toward analogue objects with a hunger that is not entirely nostalgic.

Perhaps some of it is fashion. Most things are, at first. But perhaps fashion occasionally reveals a need before we know how to name it.

The need may be for ritual. For texture. For limitation. For forms of attention that cannot be endlessly refreshed, swiped, skipped, or optimised. A record ‘side’ imposes a duration. A theatre performance asks you to sit in the dark with other people. A printed book does not notify you of anything. These are not necessarily inconveniences but they are part of the experience.

Theatre knows this perhaps better than any art form, though it often pretends otherwise while trying to sell enough tickets to keep the lights on.

Theatre has had its own negotiations with attention and economics. The long multi-act play with intervals now competes with shorter, sharper forms that promise impact without demanding quite so much stamina from the audience. Sometimes that is artistically right. Some plays should be ninety minutes without an interval. Some should be shorter still. Length is not virtue.

An interval is not merely a pause in the action. It is a social ritual. It is a conversation in the Circle bar over the second glass of wine. It is the programme. It is also, in many cases, part of the economic bloodstream of the building. Ticket sales alone rarely tell the whole story of how theatres survive. Concession and alcohol sales are not incidental to the institution, however much the purist might prefer to talk only about the art.

So, when we shorten, streamline, intensify, compress, and remove friction, we may gain focus. We may also lose something that helped the whole ecology survive. This is the reality and difficulty for the regional Theatre.

Not all friction is useful. Some of it is waste. Some of it is snobbery. Some of it is gatekeeping dressed as standards. Some of it deserves to be destroyed.

AI’s Forceful Entry into the Arts World.

AI is not the first disruption. It is not the first tool to promise access, speed, scale, independence, or a way around the old guards. But it does reach further upstream than many previous disruptions. It does not only change distribution, sales, discovery, or audience behaviour. It has the potential to reach into the making itself.

It can draft the paragraph. Generate the image. Compose the track. Imitate the voice. Suggest the lyric. Mimic the style. Build the demo. Produce the mood board. Summarise the archive. Translate the text. Analyse the audience. Optimise the title.

The tool does not only ask artists to change how they publish or promote. It asks them to reconsider where the work begins and where authorship lives. That is why the argument around it is so heated and I understand why that frightens people.

Artists have already seen too much of their labour undervalued, copied, scraped, compressed, platformed, demonetised, repackaged and sold back to them as opportunity. Caution is not cowardice. Anger is not always reactionary. If a painter sees a machine produce images that resemble the work of thousands of unpaid artists, the painter is not being precious by asking who was used, who consented, and who got paid.

The same is true in music. Tools such as Suno and others may be astonishing in what they can produce, but the legal and ethical questions around training data, voice, style, ownership and compensation are still unsettled. There are court cases, licensing deals, denials, claims, counterclaims, and plenty of moral fog. To pretend none of that matters would be naïve. To call every concern a fear of the future is a bully’s argument.

I am also wary of the opposite certainty. The desire to declare the boundary settled before artists have even had time to understand what they are touching. The pleasure some people take in denunciation. The speed with which a difficult question becomes a purity test.

Art has never advanced by staying neatly inside inherited boundaries.

Artists throughout history have borrowed, trespassed, imitated, distorted, transformed, and reinvented. They have violated taste, offended propriety and fallen foul of censors. Artistic failure in public is the curse and the saviour of their existence, and sometimes in the process they discover their ethics by reaching an edge and realising that it should not be crossed. Do not misunderstand me, this is not a licence to exploit other artists. It is a reminder that discovery rarely begins with perfect moral paperwork. We need space to experiment and ask what responsibility looks like, and we must hold these two strands together, however inconvenient that may be.

Perhaps the most useful distinction then is between experiment and extraction.

Experiment says: I am testing a tool. I am trying to understand what it reveals. I am not hiding the questions. I am not pretending the machine’s work is simply mine. I am not exploiting another artist’s recognisable voice, likeness, labour or style without concern for consent. I am prepared to change course.

Extraction says: I will use whatever the machine gives me. I do not care what it was trained on. I do not care who is displaced, unpaid, or imitated. I will claim the result because the platform allowed me to generate it. I will call criticism nostalgia.

That distinction will not solve every argument. But it gives the artist somewhere to stand while the ground is moving. Copyright law is the temporary arbiter in such questions, but new technology is a constant thorn and the law develops slowly.

The Artist remains where the artist has always been

Between old gatekeepers and new ones. Between access and exploitation. Between purity and curiosity. Between the need to earn and the need not to cheapen the work. Between the fear of being left behind and the fear of becoming too quickly fluent in a language that does not quite belong to them.

This is where the older analogue examples still matter.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen were not important because they possessed conventionally beautiful voices. They remind us, in different ways, that a song is not merely a polished object. It is a voice carrying consequence.

Dylan did not sing like a man asking permission from a conservatoire. His voice could accuse, mock, hurry, prophesy, joke, wound, and refuse comfort. Cohen, especially in later years, often seemed to move below singing into confession, prayer, mutter, seduction, and gravelled blessing. Neither voice was neutral. Neither was merely a delivery system.

When Dylan asked, “How does it feel?” the force of the question did not depend on vocal beauty. It depended on pressure. When Cohen wrote of “the crack in everything,” the line carried the dignity of damage, not the sheen of repair.

Jacques Brel belongs in this company for theatre people because he often seemed less to perform a song than to enter it like a room where something terrible had to be said. Just watch his performance of ‘Amsterdam’ and the way he exits the song.

Nina Simone could make a song feel judged and transformed in the act of singing it. Joni Mitchell in a profile interview with the New York Times (03/17/91) told us that confession without form is not enough; feeling still needs architecture.

These artists remind us that imperfection can be part of truth. However, sometimes ‘the grain of the voice’, to borrow Roland Barthes’s useful phrase, carries the body inside the sound taking it beyond mere timbre or expression

A machine may produce a voice that sounds aged, weary, intimate, wounded, joyful, erotic, furious, or devout. It may reproduce the surface of the ‘grain of the voice’. It may even move us but does it ‘feel it’? Does it care if I feel it? Theatre has always known that artificial things can produce real feeling. A staged death can make us cry. A painted sky can make us feel distance. But the question remains; Is the crack in the voice evidence of experience, or an effect selected from a menu?

That is not a small question. It is not a technophobic question either. It is an artistic one.

This publication, too, sits inside that tension. Substack offers writers a direct relationship with readers. That is genuinely valuable. It gives space to work at essay length, to build trust, to publish without waiting for a newspaper editor or magazine slot. But it also brings its own pressures: cadence, open rates, subscriber counts, pledges, titles, restacks, visibility, and the temptation to let the platform’s signals become the measure of the work.

My own main sequence of essays continues at its fortnightly pace. I have my plan for my series of essays exploring my personal journey, but occasionally topics such as this inspire me to explore my thoughts and ask for your opinions. Not every thought belongs inside a neat canon. Sometimes the culture intrudes, and one has to make a place for it.

I am trying to make more of my living from the work that has always mattered most to me: writing, theatre, producing, perhaps eventually projects that cross from page to voice to music. That is not a clean artistic fantasy. It is practical, uncertain, and occasionally embarrassing. Reinvention becomes less romantic as one gets older and takes on practical and time-bound qualities instead. It needs invoices, calendars, files, rights, collaborators, readers, and more stamina than the word suggests.

Technology may help.

It may help me organise an archive, retrieve old fragments, test an idea, prepare a draft, compare structures, translate a phrase, or understand where a line is not yet working. It may help resurface work stored long ago and badly filed or categorised. Used carefully, it may remove forms of friction that are merely clerical, expensive, or obstructive. Or just simply be an aid to a failing memory or recall system.

If it removes the wrong friction, it damages the work.

That is why the conversation around AI and art needs more room than it is often given. Artists should be allowed to be curious without being instantly condemned. They should also be expected to think seriously about consent, credit, money, labour, and the people whose work made the tools possible.

Grace is not the same as permission to exploit. Suspicion is not the same as wisdom. We need something slower than panic and firmer than innocence.

Perhaps each artist will have to find a working ethic before the culture agrees on a settled one. That is uncomfortable, but it may be unavoidable. A painter’s boundary may not be the same as that of a musician and so too, the playwright and the photographer. A disabled artist’s use of AI may transform a hitherto inaccessible idea and help them bring it to life.

It is tempting to be absolute and pure as we apply these tests to what now confronts us all, but I am suggesting that such certainty, so soon may not be in our long-term interests.

What we can ask, perhaps, is whether the work remains accountable.

Who chose? Who consented? Who was paid? Who was imitated? Who was hidden? Who was helped? Who was replaced? Where did the risk remain? Where did the artist stay present?

Those questions will not make the path simple. But they may keep it honest.

I’m afraid the gate will probably keep moving and new keepers may continue to stand in our way as they always have. As artists we will keep standing somewhere in the middle, irritated, tempted, wary, hopeful, compromised, curious, trying not to be made foolish by either fear or enthusiasm.

The task is not to stand still and call it integrity. Nor is it to rush forward and call it courage.

The task is to move carefully enough that the work still carries a human weight.

The tool may help.

The platform may help.

The audience may help.

The old forms may still help too: the book in the hand, the record side, the theatre interval, the imperfect voice, the lines that resist being made easy.

Somewhere among all of that, an artist has to choose.

And the choice still matters.

Steve Scrivens

Montpelier, Vermont

They say talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, and answering back is the second. I have always thought that a little harsh. In the theatre, we call it rehearsal.

This essay, indeed, this whole series, was meant to be about France: the plans, the practicalities, the imagined geography of a future life. But somewhere in the talking-through with friends, or with myself, often at 2am after a delayed airport transfer ride for one of my customers, the shape of it changed.

I realised I was not simply writing about moving country. I was writing about a life in motion: the way one decision alters the scene, the lighting, the cast, and eventually the part we thought we were playing.

The Rehearsal Room

When I began this series, I thought I understood its shape. I had arranged the essays into movements, partly as a nod to my early musical training and partly because the word itself seemed right. A movement is not simply a section. It has its own character, pace, emotional argument and resolution. It belongs to the larger work, but it must also breathe on its own.

That seemed a useful way to organise a series about leaving America after nearly fifteen years and preparing for a move to France. There would be the reckoning, the preparation, the threshold, the crossing, the first impressions, and whatever came after. It had structure. It had timing. It had, if I am honest, the comforting quality of a plan.

And I like a plan.

This is not a confession of rigidity, or at least I hope it’s not. In my experience, plans are less about control than orientation. They give me something to push against. I often make elaborate structures before I act, knowing perfectly well that life will interfere with them. The structure is not the destination; it’s the rehearsal room.

People who have worked in theatre understand this instinct. You begin with a script, a schedule, a design, a budget, and a set of assumptions about what the production is going to become. Then actors enter the room. The chair is in the wrong place. A line you thought would land does nothing. A silence opens where you had not expected one. The scene starts to tell you what it is really about.

That, I think, is what has happened with this essay.

At first, the title seemed straightforward enough: The Theatre Producer’s Eye: Reading a City as a Stage. I imagined writing about Montpellier, or France more generally, as a place to be read through theatrical instinct: the light, the streets, the rhythm, the public squares, the cafés, the markets, the tramline, the movement of people through space. I still think that is there. It is a good subject. It may even be the visible subject. But the deeper subject has shifted.

France has become less the destination than the setting. The real question is not simply, “Where am I going?” It is, “What kind of life becomes possible on that stage?”

Sightlines

I have been drawn to France for many reasons, some practical, some cultural, some emotional. Language helps. So does proximity to my children, Britain, and the wider European world that I still feel connected to. There is food, of course, and history, and architecture, and the possibility of living again in a place where public life happens at human scale. But none of those things, taken alone, quite explains the pull.

The more I have thought about it, the more I have come to believe that I am not looking merely for a country. I am looking for a different set of sightlines.

In a theatre, sightlines matter. They determine what can be seen, what remains hidden, and how the audience understands the story unfolding before them. A badly placed pillar can obscure a revelation, and make you wish you’d bought better seats. A well-lit doorway can prepare us for an entrance before anyone appears. Space teaches us how to pay attention.

Cities do something similar. Some places widen our field of vision. Others narrow it. Some encourage us to move privately from one sealed interior to another: house, car, workplace, supermarket, car, house. Others place us at eye level with life itself: faces, windows, menus, arguments, market stalls, dogs, buses, church bells, bicycles, cigarette smoke, stone, rain, conversation, impatience, flirtation, habit. The ordinary theatre of being alive.

I do not want to caricature America here. Vermont has its own visual poetry, and I have been grateful for so much of what it has given me: space, reinvention, work, landscape, new long-term friendships, a degree of independence, and a kind of practical self-reliance I might not have learned elsewhere. But there comes a time when a setting that once supported a life may no longer support the next version of it. I don’t see this as failure, and as my recently departed mother would often say: “It is what it is.”

A theatre producer learns to ask certain questions. What is the rhythm of this room? Who is holding the attention? Where are the entrances and exits? What is visible? What is merely decorative? What does the space allow, and what does it prevent? Where is the energy? Where is the deadness? What story can be told here?

These are not always conscious questions until we start answering them in our minds, and the older I get, the more I realise that I have been asking versions of those questions for most of my life.

The Wrong Production

Music and theatre were there early. I played clarinet from childhood into early adulthood, with enough seriousness to perform in orchestral settings and at National Youth Orchestra level. I sang in choirs. I performed in school productions, stage-managed, debated, organised. Then, for a long interlude, I entered financial services, a world that might seem, at first glance, far removed from theatre, except that it too required performance. I designed presentations, explained investment ideas, spoke to rooms, translated complexity into something people could sit with and understand as they too faced a new beginning; a new stage.

Later came music festivals, theatre festivals, promoting, programming, and the long, persistent pull of producing. Even the detour that went spectacularly wrong, the nightclub I bought when I was really looking for a jazz venue, taught me something about audiences, atmosphere, risk, and the danger of mistaking one production for another.

I had imagined a certain kind of room: mature, musical, smoky perhaps, though by then smoking was already vanishing from public interiors; a place for jazz, food, conversation, midlife reinvention. What I inherited instead was drum ‘n’ bass, trance, RnB, late nights, drugs, younger crowds, and a harder, more chaotic energy than the one I had set out to create.

It was a rash move, and it ended badly. I lost my home and a long-term relationship. There followed many dead-end jobs, moments close to despair, and a period when I was not far from homelessness. I do not write all this to dramatise the fall. I am generally wary of turning private difficulty into public theatre. But there are some facts that matter because they explain the later shape of a life.

What interests me now is not the collapse itself, but the instinct that followed.

When I needed stability, dignity, and a way back into the world, I found myself drawn toward theatre. A job at the Royal & Derngate in Northampton, England began at the box office, on a fraction of the salary I had earned in financial services. Soon after, by one of those strange reversals that only looks neat in retrospect, I moved into the programming department, having previously been the second choice for the role and latterly became the Programming Manager curating seasons of work across five performance spaces.

I went from a fifth-floor two-room apartment, no car, no credit cards, and the remains of a bruised life, into a world where the questions that had always interested me suddenly had professional names. What belongs on a stage? Who is the audience? How does one production sit beside another? What does a season say about a theatre, a town, a culture, a moment? How do people gather around stories?

I did not want to become a theatre producer because I had always followed a clean, direct path toward theatre. I came to it after detours, collapses, improvisations, false starts, and recoveries. Perhaps that is why the phrase “theatre producer’s eye” matters to me.

Recast

This is where Shakespeare becomes unavoidable. “All the world’s a stage,” says Jaques in As You Like It, “And all the men and women merely players.” It is one of those lines so famous that it risks becoming ornamental. We quote it because it sounds grand and melancholy, a little wise, a little resigned. But the longer I sit with it, the less decorative it feels.

Shakespeare’s speech is about the seven ages of man: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, old age, and the final shrinking of the body toward dependency. At first glance, it can sound almost cruel. We enter, we perform, we decline, we exit. But there is another way to read it.

We are not one fixed self, moving through a stable world. We are repeatedly recast.

Son. Brother. Schoolboy. Musician. Debater. Advisor. Presenter. Divorcee. Nightclub owner. Box office clerk. Programmer. Producer. Immigrant. Taxi driver. Writer. Late-life beginner. Expatriate. Each role arrives with costume, language, expectation, status, and timing. Some roles we audition for. Some are handed to us. Some we resist long after the scene has changed.

Montaigne understood this better than almost anyone. He did not write a theory of reinvention; he observed himself in the act of changing. “I do not portray being,” he wrote, “I portray passing.” That sentence feels almost built for later life. It rejects the idea that the self is a finished monument. We are not statues. We are weather. We are movement. We are revision.

If Shakespeare gives us the stage, Montaigne gives us the changing actor.

The twenty-year-old self who played music seriously then gave up, the man in financial services, the rash nightclub owner, the exhausted survivor, the theatre programmer, the person who crossed the Atlantic to Vermont, and the person now contemplating France are not simply the same actor in different costumes. The actor himself has altered. He has learned, lost, hardened, softened, defended himself, opened again, and misunderstood himself more than once.

That may be the part of ageing we discuss too rarely. We speak of ageing as accumulation: more experience, more memory, more knowledge, more scars. But ageing is also subtraction. Certain ambitions fall away. Certain illusions become too heavy to carry. Some friendships disappear, some identities no longer fit, and some futures quietly close. The question is not only what remains, but what can still begin.

The Empty Space

This is where the great producer and director Peter Brook becomes useful to me, though I do not want to drag the reader into theatre theory. Brook’s great insight in The Empty Space begins with the simplest proposition: an empty space can become a stage when someone crosses it and someone else watches. Theatre does not begin with scenery. It begins with attention.

That idea has influenced me because it changes how one looks at places. A café is not merely a café. A taxi rank is not merely a taxi rank. A railway platform, a market square, a rehearsal room, a Vermont road in winter, a tram stop in Montpellier: all can become charged spaces if one pays attention to what is happening between people.

Perhaps that is why cities matter so much to me now. Not cities as postcards or lifestyle accessories, but cities as living arrangements for attention.

The kind of place I am seeking won’t be perfect. France will have bureaucracy, cost, loneliness, taxes, language frustrations, housing complications, and all the usual backstage machinery that beauty tends to conceal. A life in France will still involve forms, appointments, bank accounts, winter mornings, misunderstandings, and the ordinary disappointments of being human. I am not auditioning for someone else’s French fantasy. But I am asking whether a different setting might draw out a different attentiveness.

After years of work organised around usefulness, survival, transport, deadlines, clients, income, and practical necessity, I find myself increasingly interested not in luxury, but in texture: the difference between passing through a place and inhabiting it; between scenery and stage; between being surrounded by life and being arranged at a distance from it.

That may be why the practical relocation essay I had planned didn’t grip me and no longer felt sufficient.

There are many useful pieces to be written about visas, healthcare, renting, language, banking, cost of living, tax, residency, and the administrative choreography of moving from one country to another. I may write some of them. They matter. Paperwork can obstruct a life. Money can limit choice. Health can narrow the possible. Romantic essays do not survive contact with consulates.

But paperwork is rarely the deepest obstacle, and I am more drawn to issues of identity, which is where the deeper questions lie.

The Reckoning

Who am I when the work that defined me changes? Who am I when the country that hosted my most recent reinvention is no longer the place where I imagine staying? Who am I when the habits that helped me survive may not be the habits that help me live? Who am I if the next act requires less striving and more attention? What role am I still playing because I know the lines, and what role might I now need to learn?

This is why the first movement of this series is called The Reckoning. I am not sure I fully understood the title when I chose it. Sometimes titles know more than writers do. I thought the reckoning would be about departure: leaving America, making decisions, confronting practical realities, preparing the ground. But it has become something more interior.

A reckoning is not only an account of what has happened. It is an encounter with what is true, and the truth, at least for now, is that France is not the story. France is the device that allows me to examine the story.

That does not make France less important. Quite the opposite. In theatre, the setting matters enormously. Change the room and you change the behaviour. Change the light and you change the mood. Change the distance between people and you change the emotional temperature of the scene. A city can invite certain versions of us forward and leave others stranded in the wings.

I am interested in what France might invite forward.

Not a fantasy self. Not the old cliché of the expatriate reborn through cheese, wine, shutters and late afternoon sunlight. Those pleasures exist, and I do not intend to be nobly indifferent to them. But they are not enough by themselves. The more serious possibility is that France may offer a stage on which the next version of my life can be more truthfully performed: a life with more language, more looking, more writing, more theatre, more proximity to history, more acceptance of limits, and more willingness to revise.

That last word may matter most.

The Cue

Revision is often treated as correction, but in theatre it can be about discovery. A production discovers what it is by entering the room. A life may be no different. We think we are implementing a plan, but reality keeps rewriting the scene. Italy becomes France, as it did for me. A relocation essay becomes an essay about transition. A practical series becomes an inquiry into ageing, identity, memory, belonging, and the strange persistence of hope.

Montaigne would not be surprised. He would probably warn me that wherever I go, I take myself with me. That is true, and I have acknowledged this in earlier essays. France will not abolish my contradictions. It will not edit out my past, solve every practical problem, or hand me a more elegant identity at the border. But a change of country can still change the questions we ask of ourselves.

Will this be enough?

Perhaps.

The theatre producer’s eye is not only trained to notice what is on stage. It notices what is missing, what is misplaced, what is over-lit, what has gone dead, what has unexpected energy, what needs cutting, what deserves more space, and when an entrance or exit has arrived.

Maybe that is what I am doing now. Not escaping America. Not idealising France. Not retiring from life. Not pretending the next act is already written.

I am reading the stage.

And the more carefully I read it, the more I understand that the move itself is only part of the drama. The larger work is the life that has been rehearsing beneath it: the music, the failures, the recoveries, the theatres, the roads, the conversations, the plans revised and revised again.

All the world may indeed be a stage. But at this point in life, I am less interested in the grandness of the metaphor than in its practical wisdom. Every stage has limits. Every role has a duration. Every production teaches us something, even the ones that close badly. And every so often, if we are fortunate, we recognise that the scene has changed before the curtain falls.

That recognition is not an ending.

It is a cue.

These essays arrive fortnightly. If any of this sounds like something you want to read, or something you are living through yourself, I am glad you found your way here.

Steve Scrivens

Montpelier, Vermont

If you prefer, you can support Where We Start From with a one-off coffee.

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You probably thought this was going to be some refined exploration of French literary tradition. You gave me the benefit of the doubt and came on in anyway, so let’s be honest with each other about what this is. Three novels that explain France? A country that has been explaining itself to itself since Voltaire, that revels, frankly, in the argument for its own sake. The premise is absurd, and I know it’s absurd. I am going to make the case anyway. So…we begin, of course, with an American poet.

Robert Frost, who was born in San Francisco and became, like me, an adopted New Englander, wrote a poem about standing at a fork in the woods, sorrowful that he could not travel both paths. The poem is almost universally read as a celebration of the road less travelled, the braver choice, the rugged individual striking out from the herd. Frost was laughing. The two roads were, as he wrote plainly, worn about the same. The choice was arbitrary, and he knew it. What he was really writing about was the story we tell ourselves afterward, looking back from some imagined future, claiming with a satisfied sigh that it made all the difference. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, suggests that human beings unconsciously compose their lives according to the laws of beauty, turning coincidence and distress into patterns that appear meaningful in retrospect.

I am recommending three French novels as the road less travelled. I am aware of the irony. I am telling the story anyway, because the story, as it turns out, is the point.

But first: the pork pie. The proper sausage roll. The bacon that was not fried to a crisp, the Sunday roast that nobody here could quite replicate, the particular comfort of meat and two veg on a grey afternoon. I have been there, standing in a Shaw’s supermarket in my current hometown of Montpelier, Vermont, willing pork pies into existence through sheer force of longing. I’ve felt the ‘shame’ of being told, “we don’t cook limp bacon” when asking a waiter if my bacon cannot be cooked to a crisp. It’s not one of my finer moments, and yet, I’m not sure I would trade it. The familiar has a strong magnetic field, and I have felt it pull harder with each move, each new country, each fresh unpacking of an accumulated life. The seductive desire to give in and let the familiar catch you is the most human response to displacement there is. The Brit who spends two weeks in the south of Spain drinking warm ale and eating a Full English every morning is not a fool. He is managing the displacement with the tools he already has. Barthes noticed the same instinct in his own countrymen: the French abroad reach for steak-frites as a patriotic act, a way of temporarily repossessing the culture they have left behind.

The question is not whether you will feel it. You will. The question is whether you let it become the whole story.

Which is where the novels come in. Not as a map or guidebook. And certainly not as an approved reading list for the relocating expatriate. But as Mirrors. Kundera gives me the theory: that we compose our lives backward, arranging accident into beauty. But Flaubert, Camus, and Proust give me something more practical. Each shows a version of the self that France will, sooner or later, test. One, in particular, evoked some wonderful long-held memories for me, as you will discover.

I have read Madame Bovary a couple of times, and what struck me each time is that Emma is not destroyed by provincial France, however much she imagines herself trapped by it. She is destroyed by a longing for a life she has never actually lived, a phantom existence so vivid to her that nothing Yonville can offer stands a chance against it. She fills her imagination with romance, sophistication, intensity, Parisian elegance, and grand passion. She receives them first as literature, fantasy, and atmosphere, just as we look forward to leaving, and assemble our pre-departure ‘mood-board’. The picture-postcard version of a life we plan to inhabit. The reality of France; of any new home, inevitably, arrives slower.

Emma’s tragedy is not that she chose wrongly. It is that she could not stop mourning the imagined lives that reality could never fully equal. Most of us do this in one form or another. We arrange accidents into narratives. We construct parallel versions of ourselves who made the other decision, took the other train, stayed in the other marriage, moved to the other city.

As Kundera implies throughout The Unbearable Lightness of Being, living only one life can feel strangely insufficient, as though we are forever haunted by unlived alternatives. France, perhaps more than anywhere else, seems culturally comfortable with examining this tension openly. Its novels, films, cafés, philosophy and conversations return endlessly to the same quiet question: not merely “How should we live?” but “How do we live knowing life will never entirely resemble the story we imagined for it?”

Most of us arriving somewhere new carry a version of this. The imagined life in Lyon, in Bordeaux, in some particular arrondissement of Paris, full of possibility in a way the lived version will not quite match. The novel does not fix this. It shows you the shape of the trap before you walk into it, and oddly enough, there is something liberating in recognising that.

Every culture has its unwritten rules about how feeling should be expressed in public. France simply enforces its version with more precision than most. When to grieve visibly, when to participate, when to signal that you understand the room: these are not minor social niceties. Camus knew this. Meursault, the protagonist of L’Étranger, does not commit his greatest offence in the courtroom. He commits it by failing, consistently, to perform the emotional responses his society expects of him. The verdict is really about that.

If Camus reveals the social codes of belonging, Proust exposes the private ones. Taste, scent, ritual and place attach themselves to memory in ways that are almost impossible to explain rationally. In In Search of Lost Time there’s a scene in which the narrator tastes a small madeleine dipped in tea, and the taste does not merely satisfy hunger. It unlocks memory, emotion, childhood, place, family, architecture, and an entire vanished world.

As I read it, I am transported back to eleven-year-old Steve and his first encounter with France in the small community of Port-Sainte-Marie, and the still vivid memory of the extended family dinner given in my honour as the exchange student d’Angleterre. I can still remember the scenes of preparation as the dining room was set for fifteen guests and the afternoon light that poured through the French doors, draped from ceiling to floor with lace curtains. I can still smell the garlic-infused aroma of a chicken spit-roasting in front of an open-hearth fire in the kitchen.

As a young boy from England, I was totally unprepared for the formality of a traditional French dinner. I did not, of course, consume a glass of Vermouth, though watered-down wine was introduced at some point. I eagerly consumed the nuts and small savoury bites handed around during the apéritif, all without knowing quite what else would be put in front of me: the soup, the main course of roasted chicken and my first taste of garlic, the vegetables, and then the salad. The salad after the main course was a surprise, but it arrived right on cue to refresh the palate before the cheese, with freshly baked bread. So many cheeses…No crackers? All topped off with the most extraordinary crème caramel I had ever tasted. I believe that meal lasted five hours, though that may be my failing memory, or the extended sense of time of an eleven-year-old. Nonetheless, as you can no doubt hear from the retelling, that evening had a profound impact: fifty-five years later, it remains the most memorable meal of my life.

All this is to say: the French take their food and wine seriously. While that particular meal was staged as a special occasion and times have moved on, there is still some truth in the observation that where we in the UK or the USA often eat to live, the French live to eat.

As a newcomer to France who may come to be invited to such gatherings for special occasions, being prepared for a version of this may serve you well. Know also that it could feel every bit as long for you as it did for me, as you attempt to follow conversations and assemble your hastily translated sentences only to realise the conversation has already moved on. You may be exhausted by the end of the evening. But as the years pass and you become accustomed to such gatherings, it is my hope that many years from that first experience you will remember it just as vividly.

There is a version of expat life that involves retreating almost entirely into the familiar: the enclave of people who share your references, laugh at the same things, and require nothing of you in the way of cultural adaptation. I expect to want some of that, and to use it. The question is one of proportion. Retreat into isolation is not neutrality. It is a position, and it has consequences. The expat enclave becomes a problem only when it substitutes for the harder, slower, more rewarding work of belonging somewhere that does not yet recognise your face.

Here, then, is what I think these novels are actually for. Not maps. Not primers. Not cultural homework assigned by some imagined Taste Tribunal. They are, in Kundera’s phrase, a chance to inhabit experimental selves: to live briefly inside the lives we did not choose, to test the roads we could not travel. Reading French fiction before you arrive in France is the closest available approximation of living a life you have not yet chosen.

The polite thing, before you walk in, is to have at least listened a little.

These are the costs of choosing a life that crosses borders, and just getting on with it… Non, je ne regrette rien.

These essays arrive fortnightly. If any of this sounds like something you want to read, or something you are living through yourself, I am glad you found your way here.

Steve Scrivens

Montpelier, Vermont

If this essay resonated with you, you can support Where We Start From with a one-off coffee.

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There is a moment, somewhere between deciding to leave and actually leaving, when you look around at the accumulated evidence of your life and wonder what on earth you are going to do with all of it. Not the furniture, that problem solves itself eventually. The other things. The habits and the loyalties, the ten-year-old loyalty cards and the neighbours you keep meaning to invite for dinner, the particular quality of light on a January afternoon that you have somehow internalised as part of what home means. You cannot put these in a box. You cannot leave them behind either.

There is an old joke — Irish, in most tellings — where a lost tourist stops a local and asks for directions to Dublin. The local thinks for a moment, scratches his head, and says: “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” It is, on one level, completely useless advice. It is also, on another, the most honest thing anyone has ever said about reinvention. We would all prefer to start from somewhere less complicated. Less encumbered. Somewhere the past had been neatly filed away and the future stood open and uncontested. The problem is that there is only ever here. Here is the only place any journey actually begins.

I know this more precisely than I once did. A number of years ago, before I had any serious intention of relocating to Vermont, let alone France, a health scare forced a reckoning of the kind that has a way of clarifying things remarkably fast. I will not make too much of it. What I will say is that it showed me, with some urgency, that aspirations left unacted upon have a way of running out of runway. There is a phrase I have carried since the early years of my working life; feel the fear and do it anyway, and I can tell you now that for a long time I applied it to everything except the things that actually mattered. After that, I applied it differently. A romance that might have remained a pleasant memory became a leap of faith. A life that might have continued its familiar orbit tilted, decisively, toward something new. I came to Vermont not knowing whether it would work. It did not, in the end, work in the way I had imagined. But I stayed, and the staying taught me things the leap alone could never have.

The philosopher Alain de Botton has written, with some elegance and more wit, about what he calls the gap between the place we imagine and the place we arrive in. We pack, he suggests, an idealised version of our destination, the light, the pace, the version of ourselves we expect to become there, and then are faintly surprised to discover ourselves standing in it, still anxious, still distracted, still carrying everything we had hoped to leave at the departure gate. This is not a failure of imagination. It is simply the nature of the situation. We travel with ourselves. There is no other option. The suitcase can be emptied. The psyche cannot.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard understood unpacking as something far more than a logistical exercise. Every house we inhabit, he argued, becomes what he called a shelter of the imagination. This structure, not just of rooms and walls but of the inner life we arrange within it. When we unpack in a new space, we are not merely emptying boxes. We are, in his terms, performing a kind of topoanalysis; a sorting of the self, from the rational upper floors down to the subconscious cellars. The new house becomes a vessel for everything we carry. What goes where says something about who we are choosing, in this new chapter, to be.

There is a particular kind of longing that attaches itself to the distant and the not-yet-arrived. Rebecca Solnit calls it the blue of distance. She noticed the way the horizon holds a colour that vanishes the moment you reach it. The mountains are only blue from far away. I have thought about this often, looking at France from Vermont. The imagined version of a life there is luminous with possibility in a way the lived version, inevitably, will not quite be. This is not a reason not to go. It is simply worth knowing in advance. The arrival will be different from the approach. It always is.

So how does a dismantled life become a home again? The writer Taiye Selasi offers a framework that I find more useful than most: what she calls the three Rs: Rituals, Relationships, Restrictions. A place becomes yours not through a passport or a postcode but through the slow accumulation of the ordinary. The particular baker who comes to recognise your face. The route you walk without thinking. The corner table, the market day, the neighbour whose name you finally learn. It is repetition, unglamorous and essential, that transforms unmarked space into somewhere that holds you. You do not belong to France on the day you arrive. You begin to belong the day you find yourself walking somewhere without checking the map.

This publication takes its name from a line in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “The end is where we start from.” I return to it often. It captures something true about a life lived across disciplines and countries. The twenty years in financial services, twenty more in theatre, and now this, whatever this turns out to be. Every end, if you are paying attention, contains the seed of something that comes next. I am leaving Vermont in 2027, heading for France, carrying what I have learned here and setting down what I no longer need. I do not know, with any precision, what I am moving toward. I know why I am moving, and I know that here - complicated, encumbered, imperfect here - is the only place from which that journey can begin.

These essays arrive fortnightly. If any of this sounds like something you want to read, or something you are living through yourself, then I am glad you found your way here.

Steve Scrivens

Montpelier, Vermont

Buy me a coffee