Festival preview: Alan Bissett; The Red Hourglass

For a school research project I learned the facts: leg span, habitat, hunting methods. My local pet shop in Falkirk stocked tarantulas (and, of all things, monkeys) so each Saturday I’d go in and look at them, rapt by their otherworldy stillness. I even asked for one as a birthday present. My mother turned me flatly down. On a holiday to Portugal, I sat for an hour, watching a tiny jumping spider stalking a flea. The flea batted stupidly against a window pane, the spider positioned itself. It leapt, missed, tried again, over and over, but its patience won the day. I almost cheered when it landed on the flea.

At some point in my childhood, however, I found myself in bed, facing a portable television, which was showing a nature documentary about the trapdoor spider. A camera on a thread was a sent down a tunnel to observe the creature waiting to ambush its prey. I’d never seen the face of a spider up close.

It filled the entire screen. Ten oil-drop eyes. Huge, hooded fangs. Tufts of coarse hair. It stared at me. I stared at it. Cut to a grasshopper wandering past the trapdoor. Pounce! The spider dragged the insect into its hole, where it mashed the struggling thing with its fangs.

This was nothing like an amusing jumping spider/flea scene. This was writ large and hideous. The trapdoor spider embedded itself into me, as though it had bitten my subconscious, as though I’d been the trusting grasshopper all along, and my relationship to arachnids darkened. I have regular nightmares in which I’m in a locked room, being chased by tarantulas the size of cats. The scenes in Harry Potter which feature the giant spider Aragog are more terrifying to me than The Shining.

Arachnophobia is the most common of all fears. Ask people why they’re afraid and (after a shiver) they’ll usually tell you they don’t like the creepy way spiders move, that weird ripple of legs that resembles no other creature’s gait. Add to that the bulbous web-sacs, the hairiness, the speed and silence, the too-many eyes, and, of course, the poisonous bite and we have, ladies and gentleman, the scariest creature on Earth.

Arachnophobia is so ingrained in our culture that it’s the basis for films, nursery rhymes, even pop songs (“the spider man,” as The Cure once sang, “is having you for dinner tonight.” Shudder). Sometimes people suggest to me a course of treatment which will culminate with me holding a tarantula. That, I tell them, is never going to happen.

For this reason, I have devised a Fringe show, The Red Hourglass, in which I play several species of arachnid – a tarantula, a black widow, a recluse and a common house spider – delivering monologues from their point of view.

For research I’ve had to look at an awful lot of horrible pictures (tip: never Google-Image “spider bites”). For the performance itself, I have to think, talk and move like a spider. It hasn’t cured my arachnophobia – if anything, it’s made it worse – but it did lead me to cogitate upon the nature of fear itself.

There are two theories about arachnophobia. The first is that it’s evolutionary, nature’s way of helping us avoid danger. The second is that it’s culturally constructed. Since my fear emerged from a television programme framing and editing a brutal attack – spider snuff, basically – the latter is persuasive. Countries which are actually home to large spiders, such as those in South America, have lower rates of arachnopobia. They even feature in the cuisine of some cultures (a more appalling idea I can’t imagine). It’s estimated that, in European countries, 18 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women suffer from arachnophobia. Given that spiders are equally harmful to men and women this suggests gender conditioning. Young girls are surely taught to be wary of spiders, or inherit the fear from their mothers. The nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet is an obvious example.

Curiously, however, many of the stories and myths about spiders involve them being female. The term “arachnid” comes from the Greek legend about the weaver-girl Arachne, who was turned into a spider for challenging the goddess Athena. Tolkien’s giant beast Shelob, in The Lord Of The Rings, is female. Half of the black widow population, of course, are male, yet they are so named because the female eats her mate. This speaks of a male scientist’s fear of women. Misogyny and arachnopbia, it seems, have a subconscious link.

Once I realised this, another level – a trapdoor, if you will – opened in my play. I wasn’t just writing about spiders, I was writing about demonised social groups. We only have to pick up a tabloid newspaper to imbibe cultural prejudices about women, “chavs”, Scots and immigrants. The spiders in The Red Hourglass became the marginalised and their monologues started to drip with revenge. The premise of the play is that several species of them are locked up together in a glass tank, in a facility, watched and experimented upon by unseen researchers. The audience become the observing scientists, setting up a power disparity between audience and performer, human and spider, that mimics, say, the class system. The play then exploits this tension.

I’m taking a risk, obviously, that the very basis of the show won’t repel the huge amount of arachnophobic Fringe-goers. I wouldn’t appreciate someone handing me a flyer which features a black widow in attack mode. But I’m hoping that watching the play will be a way for phobics to explore what their fear means, just as writing it was for me. It’s a refusal to understand that forms the basis of all socially constructed fears. At the least, we should know our enemies. Perhaps in this case just don’t let one into your bed.

Alan Bissett; The Red Hourglass, National Library of Scotland, Wednesday until 25 August. www.alanbissett.com