It’s a little after six o’clock on a cold February evening and I'm standing outside the Workspace, a block of rehearsal rooms behind the New Vic Theatre in Basford, waiting for someone to open the door. To say I feel nervous is an understatement, this will be my first contact with anything remotely theatrical since my last primary school nativity play.
The under twelves are wonderfully unselfconscious when it comes to performing, however badly, on stage. Adults with the sign marked fifty looming along their life course, not so much; not at all in fact. Before the evening is out my fears about looking foolish will be realized, surprisingly the sense of community I'll find with fellow participants will largely cancel them out.
What has brought me here is taking part in creating Man Up, a performance project about masculinity and mental health being planned by Restoke. As someone who has been an active member of two local mental health charities for several years this is an issue close to my heart, even if, like many men, I don’t wear that organ on my sleeve.
Restoke are a local arts organization who specialise in putting on theatrical events in abandoned spaces using a cast drawn from hard to reach communities. Last year they created ‘You Are Here' a dance and spoken word piece about immigration, identity and belonging.
Male mental illness is, perhaps, one of the few elephants left in the drawing room of things we don’t talk about. Even so it is a real and serious issue that sometimes wrecks lives.
The figures are stark, in 2013 out of 6233 recorded suicides 78% were males, and based on 2014 figures 16.8% of UK males showed symptoms of depression. Out of the 4% to 10% of people who experience depression at some stage in their life the majority of those who seek help are female. Male reporting of depression and mental health problems in general is stubbornly low thanks to entrenched social stigma.
(Source Mental Health Foundation)
Eventually someone opened the door and I made my way upstairs to where a group of men aged between thirty and seventy stood around drinking coffee and eating biscuits. The air was heavy with the unspoken awkwardness that overcomes British men when they fear they may be asked to step out of their comfort zone.
This feeling was to be proved correct because within ten minutes we were in a circle doing a warm up before embarking on some ‘movement exercises' involving throwing beanbags and then turning on the spot. Once we'd, sort of, mastered this it was time to have a go at making the same moves, this time without the beanbags in play.
Someone who didn’t want to frighten the horses might have called this dancing, the enthusiastic young man leading the session played safe by using the euphemism ‘moving to music’.
I'm not sure anyone would have described what I was doing in even those terms, I was moving and there was music in the background; but any relation between the two was purely tangential. At one point, someone asked me if my ‘mobility’ was OK, a question I didn’t expect to be answering for a couple of decades yet. I'd like to say that I replied Eric Morecambe style that I was making all the right moves, just not necessarily in the right order, but sadly that repost will have to go in the file marked ‘staircase wit'.
Despite the obvious awkwardness of most of the people taking part the atmosphere was relaxed. By the end if the session although I'm unlikely to be taking any work away from Wayne Sleep even I felt comfortable enough to spin round without wanting to drill my way to the earth’s core in the process.
All this dancing and throwing was, of course, only part of the evening, an extended warm up for the main event. Men talking to other men about their feelings and insecurities; their fears and their failings, and doing so without throwing off the chaff of macho posturing to fool the radar of embarrassment.
Honest statements about trying to negotiate the unwritten expectations of manhood like Steve's improvised rap about love list through stubbornness and Andy's story about learning to accepted difference as a good thing through sport. There was no shortage of honesty and enough humour to keep the awkwardness at bay.
This was what made the evening and, I'd hope the production it may have played a small part in creating worthwhile. An opportunity for men to be honest about being, sometimes, victims of confused societal expectations; and maybe agents of change without paddling about in the shallow pool of mawkish pretention.
Kevin, a former nurse who told me he'd given up a career in the mental health system because the demands had worn him out, summed up the mood of the evening best by saying the group should christen itself the ‘Up Men'. Up for being honest about their feelings, up for enjoying working together; up for a future that looks less limiting than their past.
The names used in this article have been changed in the interests of confidentiality.
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