I haven’t really known what to say about Robin Williams.
Almost two days have passed and I haven’t said much more than a sentence about ‘what a shame it is’.

Which is odd because words about suicide usually come easier to me than shopping lists. My Dad killed himself ten years ago, and I’ve almost finished a book about it, and usually, now, I find spewing words about it as natural a part of my day as running a bath or taking the binbags out. I’m like a marine now in the writing about suicide. Through the applied articulation of grief I have written myself ‘well hard’. In fact most of the time I have to stop myself from banging on about death all the time because I don’t want to be a total drag of a loser of a sap of a dick and I am aware that not all of life should be about death. Some of it should be about…Life.

Sometimes I think mass outpourings of grief for famous people is an insult to all the people who quietly die every day without much note. Sometimes I think the tribal togetherness, the bowing to a totemic presence is what makes us collectively beautiful. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t really know them. It matters that for a while we all come together, before the world moves on again.

But for now the world is picking through Robin Williams’ biography. The iconic films, the dross, the zany personality, the improvisational genius, the struggles with coke and booze, the death. People and publications are all saying much the same thing. It’s hard to be original with post-humous accolades when the feeling left behind is so common.

Some people are even making jokes. Lovely Richard Herring got a bit of stick for tweeting a comment about Patch Adams. Cue a bit of ‘too soon’ uproar. Sometimes we just say things. Sometimes they’re not funny. Sometimes they’re just off the cuff and regretted instantly. Sometimes Twitter’s not the place. Sometimes it increasingly is. Reactions to death are all different and all natural. Richard says we should talk more about death. I’m with him on that.

I think perhaps the movies Robin Williams said yes to that earned him ridicule are perhaps just as important as the ones he said yes to that got him Oscar nominations (and one win). The mawkish over-sentimentality that he became more and more known for – perhaps that was him trying to reach out. Sometimes a desperation to express our softest parts isn’t always that elegant. Something in those scripts moved him to say yes to them. Perhaps there was a little of the ‘can’t turn the money down; one subpar movie every three years to cover the tax bill’ about it, but probably not much. But it’s hard to get that stuff rights all the time. The emotional thrust is sometimes well-intentioned, but in its expression artistically a bit rubbish. And sometimes that is as important. Humans don’t always have the luxury of refinement. Most of the time we’re a bumbling mess of shit. Rarely are we presented to the world in perfect array. Sometimes good intentions are all we have and the art doesn’t follow it through; doesn’t do our intent justice. Humans aren’t very artful, really. Art is a construct of ours. And the presence of bad art, in far greater proportion to the great, is the thing that allows greatness to exist. If everything was great, there would be no such thing anymore. We need the shit to remind us of that.

Robin Williams was all things, as broad as the emotions that blight a man that can eventually lead to him taking his own life. He was a massive spirit, a glorious beautiful mess of a man. How can this always be caught in perfect art, how can it be confined in an edited two-hour film? A film is the sum of many parts – its many departments – writing, directing, acting, and editing being only four. He wasn’t responsible for all that. He just said yes to some words and threw himself into it. He loaned his spirit to people. And who knows which of those silly box office flops was just him fighting the darkness, grabbing on to something to give him light, to hold him up, to distract him from his own thoughts. He might have been struggling during Mrs Doubtfire and rampant with happiness during Death To Smoochy (don’t ask – I haven’t got a clue either). We don’t know. And because his true self underlies all those films, somewhere, it means they are, in a way, all as important as each other. Because those films are segments of his life. Hidden in those films are flashes of his true self; his moods of the time; little flashes of whatever he was actually feeling. Little improvisational sparks that made the films better, that came from him, and whatever he was thinking beneath the script. In between doing those scenes, he sat quietly in a trailer and ate some food, eyes dipped in private thought. At the end of the day he went home and loved his family, he did his living, he felt whatever he really felt. All of it. Then he did some more scenes. And we get to keep those.

As an unhappy woman in my early 20s I fucking loved Patch Adams, the film that journalists and dear Herring are using as the comparative career nadir against the zeniths of his finest work. Patch Adams distracted me from myself. It was about a doctor who wanted to make his patients laugh. He wore a red nose on the ward, for fuck’s sake. That’s fucking great. It was safer to cry at that than at my own life. Since watching Dead Poet’s Society when I was about ten, Robin Williams had always been my Captain. I trusted him with my laughter and my tears. He always knew how to extract both from me. I felt safe with him. And I was a total sucker for his twinkly blues. Now I wonder if my Robin Williams marathons were sometimes slightly less to do with the specific films, the heart-pummelling of Dead Poets, the glory of Good Morning Vietnam, the mournful genius of Good Will Hunting, the snortfest of Mrs Doubtfire, than the ineffable things he brought to them. Was a little less to do with the construct of the film itself, and more to do with the truth he stowed in everything he did, even the shit. There was the pained light, the tortured defiance, the awareness of absurdity in his eyes, even when the rest of the film was letting itself down around him. Maybe that’s all I needed to see at times and the script could, actually, go suck itself.

Sometimes humans can. Sometimes humans can’t.

Robin Williams decided he could not, anymore.

I’m up here in Edinburgh, a city full of performers and comedians mourning a man that many cite as the reason they attempted comedy to begin with. Most of them would be happy enough to admit they don’t have even a quarter of the spark and skill and spirit he had. I am up here doing two of my plays. We are having a lovely time, audiences are lovely, but part of me also feels done with them. I want to write something new now; I think that’s how I know I am more writer than performer at heart. I wrote the plays while I was deep in writing my cheery little book about Dad. They are quite silly plays, in parts dark, in parts sad. I think I needed the escape. Suicide books are hard. I wrote the plays as an antidote to the suicide book, and now I feel ready to write something else. And I think it is because I know the plays aren’t wholly the truth. It’s hard to push them when all I’m thinking of is finishing the book when I get home.

An author friend of mine says there is no truth in writing, that words so imperfectly capture the ‘self’, that we can’t actually capture the ‘self’, that words fail the moment we write them. I sort of believe this because logically it is fact that we cannot capture the essence of our human spirit in linguistic cells we have constructed in the latter slither of our existence as a race, but I also sort of think that all writing is truth plus props. Writing exists for a reason. We created it for a reason. No matter what fictions we construct, there is always some truth of our selves hidden in there. That though narrative scenarios, arcs, journeys, characters, and dialogue changes on the top level, that there is always a bit of the self stowed away in the baser soil.

I suspect I have only one story I will ever tell. Everything else is just props assembled around the truth. And my truth is suicide. It wasn’t always. Until Dad did it, it must have been something else. But I don’t remember what it was. I am this now, and the truth of this is that it never leaves me, even in my lightest happiest moments, even in the middle of the most carefree laugh, half of me is still cast in shadow. Somewhere in the laugh is a streak of raw shock that I am laughing at all. I don’t know if this will be true for the rest of my life. And I am glad I cannot know.

Everything is suicide. It is with me every day. And I know lots of people who have felt and still feel similarly.

I had a messy day the other day. I went to see two plays that brought the stuff I keep submerged up to the surface. One was Paines Plough’s Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan. About a man who makes a list of brilliant things to keep him afloat through his mother’s depression and later suicide. Though the play is massively uplifting, brilliant, and, despite its subject, never very dark, it made me a bit of a mess. I rushed out at the end and spent ten minutes in a disabled toilet, pacing and crying. I knew I had to get it all out before I could get on with my day. I got it out, put some make-up on, had a bloody big red bull, and went and did my play. Later I saw another play, So It Goes, about a girl who had never been able to talk about her father’s death, and so had written a silent show about it, where she tells her story using a little whiteboard around her neck. I spent some more time in a toilet after that.

Then the day after that I almost died. I stood at the roadside in a daze and a bus sped past and I felt its force, its hard wind against my face. My friend pulled me back too late and we stood in shock at how close I was. There was a time a few years ago when I fantasised about being run over, yearned for the ‘perceived accident’ of a bus or car felling me so I wouldn’t go down as a suicide. I wanted to die. It’s all I could think of. Dad’s suicide had made me want that, but I couldn’t do it. I don’t want that now, and the nearness of the bus chilled me, but I know that at any point in my life I could feel that pull again. Wanting it.

The day Robin Williams died a man was on North Bridge, being coaxed down by the police. For hours one of the main thoroughfares of Edinburgh was shut off to the tourists and the performers and the natives, while they tried to talk him down. He was obviously quite determined, but something in him allowed him to be appealed to for a few hours. Later the news broke about Robin.

Suicide is everywhere.

By this morning I had to write this. Write something about all of it; the plays I’ve seen, the plays I’ve written to fight the book I’ve written, Robin Williams, Dad, crying in toilets, dredging it all out in a silent roar, and buses, and a man on a bridge. I didn’t think I would be able to get my words out in my play later if I didn’t. Suicide wells up every now and then and you have to process it or you get messy.

Robin Williams is lying cold somewhere, being medicalised, his body probed and treated, and there will be a funeral soon.

I don’t know what happened to the man on North Bridge.

The gentle dawn rain pattered as I lay in the rising light of the new day. Birds scattered their songs like ribbons between the brittle creaks of the trees, which were stretching, shaking off the night. The dew-dropped grass stooped like great boughs over nesting insects, who stirred upturned in their earth-lint beds, scratching their soft soil ceiling with their feet. Early morning life.

And I was dying.

I think what made me realise that I was dying was the fact I couldn’t breathe anymore. That’s usually a dead giveaway; not breathing anymore. I attempted some desperate sucking as my faculties slowed to comatose nothingness. Nope. Nothing.

I’d cloistered myself in the two-man tent overnight with a psychotically taut zip for fear of being eaten alive by mosquitos, but turns out that cider turns a girl to unwanted tang and they weren’t after my blood after all. Suffocation was to be my end. Hayfever + Storm Humidity + Actively Shutting Out All Oxygen = Death.

I sensed I had about twenty seconds left to do something about this. Twenty seconds to live, give or take. I chose Life.

I unzipped the gnat-defying fortress and flung the tent ‘door’ open with a dramatic flourish. “ARGH. I’M DYING. I’M ACTUALLY DYING.” I exclaimed to the dewdrops and the twigs. That was my contribution to the morning’s soundscape. Loud, self-involved, tedious drama. Nature tutted at me.

I dragged myself by my elbows out of the tent, tumescent with the moisture of the storm, and sucked in air like a rich Rockefeller drags at a rare cigar. My lungs filled. Air took pity. I lived.

In addition to saving my own life, I also heroically saved the life of my companion, my life wench Sarah. She too had been afraid of death by suffocation but had been too polite to wake me. We had both been lying there tight and still as sardines in faux sleep, dragging at the last remaining oxygen and timing our noisy inhalations to coincide with the others’, so as not to be ‘the annoying one’. That’s what love is. Killing yourself for someone else.

We might both of us have died there in that little pod of carbon dioxide in a Suffolk field if I hadn’t acted. It was my gallant action that saved us. My valiant rape of the morning’s tranquility. “ARGH, I’M ACTUALLY DYING.” (Splutter, cough, such heroic spittlings as went on in trenches and ‘Nam.) I hadn’t known I would be a hero that weekend, camping at Latitude Festival, I thought I was just going to get pissed and swear at some strangers, but I’m really glad that I got to save someone I liked and not some stranger choking on a bus or something. You can’t always choose who you save. Sometimes humanity is a gruelling moral test. I know at least three people I wouldn’t try and find air for if they were slowly deflating. I’d just watch and make vague noises of regret. “Ooh. I don’t know where all the air’s gone. Sorry.” (Actually – maybe four.)

Sarah is not one of them. She’s my life wench.

They say the true test of friendship is if you can assemble a tent, sleep in said tent, and then dismantle the same tent without (deliberately) killing each other. Our friendship has found itself in many situations, and to my knowledge we have never got sick of each other (if my column disappears next week, she may have killed me – how gloriously unexpected). We will be the kind of old ladies who sit on benches not needing to say anything much but with an unending technicolour inner movie of all the stuff we’ve done together beaming and clattering on great spools of memories inside. It’s like marriage, but better. We don’t have to live in the same house.

Life with the right gal can feel like one big adventure. Building tents and businesses and making silly plays and going on trips and camping and breathing and living and saving each other and laughing and being too polite to ruin the others’ sleep and finding your way to wherever, and eventually…Adventure’s end.

We meet for coffee first. Because you’re not serious about anything in this life if you don’t have coffee first. I pretend I’m going to have it black because it feels double serious, but at the end I sneak some skimmed milk in. But the way I stir it, hard and unforgiving, shows anyone in the queue who was doubting how serious I am that I am really serious; I just like it with milk.

We carry those corrugated cardboard cups to rehearsals above our favourite pub The Alex, like we mean business. We do. We do mean business. The business of Art. But first we have some essentials to get out of the way.

“Teddy Pip? What was the name of that stuff that makes your spots disappear like magic and gives you the look of someone who’s just had a light chemical peel?”
“I’ll send you the link, babe. It will literally change your life.”
“Thanks. I think it’s the nerves making me break out like a teenager. I don’t think it’s all the chocolate and wine this time. I definitely think it’s just because things are so mental?”
“Babe. I’ll send you the link.”

(Teddy Pip knows how serious skin is. It keeps all the organs and juicy bits in. He knows this, and much much more. Like how to save coral in Belize. Almost no one knows how to do that. Do you know how to do that? No. Teddy Pip does.)

We get up and crack on with the rehearsal. Because we are incredibly serious artists who are aware that we are taking two plays up to the world’s biggest and most important arts festival which could, if it goes well, go some way in shaping our professional futures. We don’t so much as ‘go into the zone’ as ‘take over the zone before vacating the zone because it’s not good enough as a zone before MAKING A WHOLE NEW ZONE THAT DUMPS ALL OVER OTHER PREVIOUS ZONES’.

At some point during our busy important zone work an obscene stack of food is carried past, steaming with an opulent greasy tang. Part of me bristles at the injustice of the interruption just as we are cracking the innermost truth of perhaps the most emotionally charged scene of the entire play. Then I remember the chef is one of my best friends, and I’m not Alan Bennett at the National.

“Hey, Drew. What the frick is that?”
“It’s the Man Vs Food Monster Burger. It’s essentially five cows and a shedload of chickens all in one bap with a bit of lettuce. Oh, and some pig. And onion rings. Aren’t people disgusting?”

Naturally we all stare at it like it’s an abomination of nature, very convincingly because we’re actors and that’s what we do – we stare at things convincingly – but as a conglomeration of people who have between us given up meat, wheat, and eating in general, we’re secretly salivating.

We carry on with our very important work. We manage to have a laugh in between being serious because by Christ we’re supremely human too. Then we finish with a run of both plays. We are relieved to find that we know most of our lines AND where we should be standing when we say them. We exhale weightily, like actors. We show the sort of relief that would make bomb disposal experts look a bit lacklustre in comparison when they manage to save the day and are hoping for a pat on the back or a bonus or something. (Their bonus is not getting exploded. Ours is making middle-aged women cry when we get to a sad bit then being congratulated by them, still weeping, in the bar afterwards. Sort of on a par with bomb-disposal, importance and bonus-wise, really.)

We leave rehearsal feeling at long last ready to do our plays, blow goodbye kisses to our friends Paul and Drew who each week watch us earnestly discussing our characters and rehearsing our plays, who see scenes out of context and never so much as raise their eyebrows at our weirdness, who don’t abuse the CCTV footage of us limbering up, even though Teddy Pip’s buns would probably cause a Youtube sensation. Who let us come and go like we belong, making our strange noises in their place of work, and on occasion getting in their way. Who will still be here for us with beer and obscenely massive burgers and nice non-judgemental smiles if the plays float, fly, or sink up in Edinburgh. It’s a nice feeling. It’s a real feeling, beneath all the pretend stuff of ‘Art’.
Even beneath all the real stuff of it, too.

Sadie’s plays The Bastard Children of Remington Steele & The Secret Wives of Andy Williams are being previewed in a double bill by Old Trunk Theatre Company at The Alex pub, Southend, on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th July. 7:30. Tickets £8.

Teddy Pip features heavily in both. You’re welcome.