Abstract

This chapter documents the making of a performance in 2018 called A Fortunate Man inspired by the book of the same name by John Berger and Jean Mohr, which toured the UK. The piece is in three acts, Landscapes, Portraits and X-Ray. Berger said ‘to understand a landscape we have to situate ourselves in it’ so that is what we are trying to do. We set the scene (Landscapes) then we tell you about the people who live and work there (Portraits). Then in the final act we zoom into the doctor’s mental health more (X-Ray) and how he felt he was failing to care for his patients. In fact, there was a river that ran through the Doctor’s village and Berger tells us ‘There is a bend in the river that reminds him of his failure’. This chapter, like the performance it documents, is in three parts. The first part is an interview about the making of a performance, the second part explores the interviews I held with doctors today about the book that inspired the performance, the third part is an excerpt from the performance itself which aims to illustrate the inherent dialogue between image and text that Berger and Mohr explored in the writing of the book.