"I died in front of you tonight"

After my late night last Thursday I was not looking forward to going to the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord to see yet another bloody Peter Brook play. After the underwhelming 11 and 12, I didn’t really see how a one woman show exploring questions of theatre was going to be in any way more gripping.


It’s odd how life can surprise you. Warum Warum was quite literally one of the best pieces of theatre I have seen in my entire life.

Ok, I’m just going to lump together every meeting from over the past week with Miriam Goldschmidt into one post. In fact, forget the events themselves; they don’t matter. I’m going to write about this extraordinary woman.

Miriam Goldschmidt was in The Mahabarata and Conference of the Birds and a bunch of other Brook plays. Before meeting Brook she was a highly successful actress in Paris and Berlin, having graduated from the Jaques Lequoc school of Acting. But she was bored. She was very bored with theatre. And then she read the empty space.

She’s the kind of woman who makes you understand everything. When I read Brook and his Holy Theatre of the Invisible Made Visible it could sometimes seem a bit pretentious. Through meeting this woman you realise what he means, and how little you understand about theatre, about acting, about life.

She does not know where she comes from. She was born an orphan. She has no origin so she has invented her own. She looks about 20 years younger than her true age. When she was a little girl she wanted to be a magician. She wanted to heal people with her hands. When she says hello or goodbye to you, she claps your hands as though you can take strength from her, and she from you. She holds and aura of intense power.

She lives completely all the time. She sees the patterns on the buildings and the people on the streets and the universe moving round and round her all the time.

“I am not an actress. I am an inventor of life”

Everything she does is acting and everything she acts is true. She doesn’t act, she plays. She shows. She is. She exists more completely than anyone else and lives more truly and she is dying all the time. In her mind, in her heart the world and all its intensity is killing her.

When she looks at you, you are sure she can see straight into your mind.

She loves so much and has lost so much. She connects to people automatically. She is connected directly to life. People gather around her in fascination. She is a teacher, a demonstrator. A shaman. And everyone who meets her is her pupil. Everyone who meets her leaves with the resolution to be more like her.

She carries so much age and maturity. Yet when she laughs she is like a tiny baby and when she cries it is like a wounded animal.

She bought a white rose from a street vendor and said it was for her daughter. Then she gave it to me. She began to cry. I took her hand and we sat for a long, long time, just her clutching my hand and crying.

Her daughter died 12 years ago.