Where is Truth?

When I was a young drama student I was introduced to a question that has stayed with me over the years. I don't know whether Ian Ricketts actually asked it like this, but it was something I took from his classes. "How do you represent the truth?"

Note that in those days truth had a definite article - the truth - postmodernism hadn't really taken hold for us then.

At that time I was thinking about it in the context of acting and play and theatre - how do you represent the truth of a character or a relationship or a mood? All interesting in themselves.

Then, about six or seven years later I was introduced to the World Wide Web, where everyone could publish their own "home page" and tell the truth as it appeared to them. Suddenly the question became more sophisticated. How do you represent a truth that is triangulated from several aspects of the truth?

And of course now, some say we live in a post-truth world. But I'm still interested in it. I do believe there are some objective truths, that some things are straightforward enough to be the same to all people, or that even if multiple interpretations are possible, only one actually works in the real world.

So I'm starting to think more now about how the truth of the past gets represented in the present or the future. How do you take my truth from a few paragraphs above, the idea of this stuff forming part of my learning in drama school, how do you take that together with the experiences of my peers and my teachers and create something more, certainly something more complex, but how do you keep it truthful, maybe even more truthful even if it denies some people's recollections?

Yeah that, that's what's in my head these days (also still messing with people in the High St!)