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Playwright, novelist and poet David Storey was also a respected artist. Born in 1933 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the son of a coal miner. To support his parents and his time at art school, he played rugby league for Leeds. After graduating from The Slade School of Fine Art, he worked as a teacher in the East End of London while he strove to make his name as a writer.

The first major revival of David Storey’s The Mach on Russia is at the Orange Tree Theatre, in association with Up In Arms, until 7 October 2017. Find out more

Richard Bean on David Storey and The March on Russia

What I look for in a playwright is soul. What is soul? I guess it’s my shorthand for the real thing, the authentic, someone who writes from experience, and whose character’s scars are their own scars. A writer who learned to write by living and not by attending a Play Writing PhD. David Storey had soul.

My first experience of David Storey’s writing was James Macdonald’s 1996 revival of The Changing Room his Royal Court play set in the locker room of a rugby league game. We, the audience, never see the game, the subject matter is the life and lives around the game. I had never had such a profound and lasting response to a play. I felt privileged being there, as if I was spying, looking in through a window unnoticed, and indeed ignored. I still struggle to come to terms with the knowledge that what I had observed wasn’t actually happening as it were in the real world, it was just a play.

1996 was a time in theatre, and particularly at the Royal Court, where the wave of sensational and shocking plays was just, appropriately enough, beginning to disappear up its own backside — anal sex and eating babies seemed to have replaced French windows and “anyone for tennis?” as dramatic clichés. Here, in The Changing Room was the antithesis of this new wave, let’s call it hyper naturalism. It was profoundly unfashionable.

Slow, truthful, authentic action. The playwright is painstakingly building characters dialogue brick by dialogue brick. Even the communal bath scene, after the match, where the 13 players strip naked, bathe and josh each other managed to be the very opposite of sensational, it was merely natural and accurate, it was what happens at the end of a rugby league match.

The structure of The Changing Room was simple — we saw the team before the game, during the game, and after the game. A beautiful three act structure. Not everyone liked it. Noël Coward said the 1971 production wasn’t worth 15 acorns entrance fee.

To say that David Storey’s writing was prone to autobiography suggests some kind of ailment, but his level of self-mining was possible partly because he had lived such a rich life. For every job he’d had he wrote the play: professional rugby league player — The Changing Room; tent erector — The Contractor; teacher — The Restoration of Arnold Middleton; artist — Life Class; farm worker — The Farm and so on.

In this play, The March on Russia, the autobiography continues. Set in a bungalow on the east coast an ex miner and his wife celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary with their grown up children, one of whom, a writer, bought the bungalow for them. David Storey was the son of a miner, and bought a bungalow for his parents near Scarborough from the proceeds of This Sporting Life.

The March on Russia is one of a trilogy of family plays the others being In Celebration and The Restoration of Arnold Middleton. All deal with what I call the wear and tear between generations. Gargantuan gifts of suffering and sacrifice from the parents’ generation pop out of the dialogue like toys flying out of a kid’s pass the parcel game, and just as often casually discarded by the middle aged children. The play’s themes are thus guilt, atonement, redemption, despair. David Storey himself struggled with the guilt of disappointing his miner father who had always wanted him to go to university. Storey chose art college, which at that time didn’t count, it was a flakey, vain, and selfish choice. Colin, the writer son in The March on Russia, is a guilt ridden, dark portrait of a man, rootless, not belonging and yet everywhere he goes he carries his father on his shoulder - what the psychologist calls the Critical Parent.

In his book about Brexit Britain, The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart’s premise is that there are Somewhere people and there are Anywhere people. The Anywheres leave home, get educated, live and work away. He is describing all three of the Pasmore’s children. This conflict between the children and the parents, and the destruction of the past and traditional values is what makes Storey’s work still relevant. For any northerner who left home, went to university, came to London, and took up a flakey occupation (playwriting), and now visits their parents in a bungalow in Yorkshire where they have chosen, if it is a choice, to spend their last decade, this play is painfully well observed. My own father, the same age as Pasmore, said recently of my infrequent visits home “at this rate, you’ll see your mother fifteen times before she dies”.

This all sounds a little bleak, but fear not The March on Russia is perhaps one of the finest comic husband and wife sparring matches you’ll ever see. Rereading the play I found myself laughing out loud at the sheer talent the characters have in winding each other up, just like my own parents, who seem to have learned a music hall double act entirely made up of bickering, recriminations and mutual disingenuous incomprehension, by which I mean that they both play the game of making out that they don’t understand each other. This all in the service of what the writer son, Colin, calls “eristic” or discord deliberately created to fill a void. Now whose family is that describing?

The March on Russia is at the Orange Tree Theatre, in association with Up in Arms, from 7 Sep - 7 Oct 2017 Click here for more details

Richard Bean was born in Hull in 1956. After school, he worked in a bread plant before leaving to study Psychology at Loughborough University. Richard has worked as a psychologist and stand-up comedian. In 2011 he became the first writer to win the Evening Standard Award for Best Play for two plays, The Heretic and One Man, Two Guvnors. His plays are published by Oberon Books.

#davidstorey marchonrussia richardbean theatre

Panic Over? Not Quite by Zoe Williams

This article was written for the programme of Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic, playing at the Orange Tree until 25 March

In the mid-nineties, which was the bit before Tony Blair, and the bit before Things Can Only Get Better, so was effectively the Eighties, a vast survey was carried out. It was called What Women Want.

It was an open-ended question: what do you want? Your answer went on a postcard. If memory served, men were allowed to answer, but tended not to. The cards were distributed in the Body Shop.

In the mid-this-decade, whatever we call it, the survey was repeated. So little had changed. So little had been resolved. So many of the answers — about sexual violence, about objectification in the media, about body image, childcare, the pay gap, pornography — were the same, that the ossification was the striking thing. How, after all these years, have we not managed to sort maternity discrimination? Why are young women still asking for street lighting above everything else? What on earth has gone wrong, that a 22-year-old this year described herself as paying a “safety tax” — the taxi home, the gym membership in winter so she didn’t have to run in the park, the circuitous journeys? Back in the day, many of these issues had only just made it onto the political agenda. Now they’ve been there for as long as the characters in this play have been alive, and nothing seems to have changed. It as, above all, rather a depressing indictment of the cogs of politics, but one of the bitter clarities of 2017 is that we don’t have to look in the margins or tease out any subtleties to be depressed about politics.

The truth is, beneath the headlines, a lot has changed, and Low Level Panic brings the differences rushing back like bats screaming out of a cave. Body image was certainly a problem, back then; everybody wanted to be thinner, not just lose a few pounds, wanted viscerally to be lighter, to take up less space, almost as if true desirability lay in unshackling from the corporeal self. I remember, as a teenager at a neurotic single-sex school, a girl so light that she was lifted off the ground by a kite; it was the stuff of dreams. The admiration was unbounded. But it was complicated: nobody wanted to be objectified, or identikit, or conventional. To be a man’s version of a woman was to be diluted and surrendered, less than a self; to want to be a man’s version of a woman, and then fail, God, that was the pits. It was a contradiction that slayed us, objecting to the objectification, while simultaneously longing to look like the object. If you wanted to be empowered, you looked one way; if you wanted to be powerful, you looked another.

The difference, now, Susie Orbach described when she reissued Fat is a Feminist Issue last year: “The whole issue of empowerment now is about your own personal empowerment, how to get ahead, rather than have lives of meaning. Your body is part of your passport, part of your reconstruction of yourself as a neoliberal person. People used to know they had problems with their bodies and their eating and they would come for help. Now it’s just taken for granted, this is part of how I have to live, feeling shit about my body, scared of food. When I first started, not every woman had an eating issue, not everybody had a body dysmorphic problem. Now everybody has one but they don’t even bother to talk about it. it’s hateful, really, what the culture has done.” I hope that doesn’t sound too glum. Externally, nobody talks about thinness any more. They talk about going to the gym.

In a way, sexual violence and the preconceptions around it have changed the least: trust me, millennials, none of us ever thought that a stranger could lay a hand on you, and that would be flattering. Yet here, some progress has been made, I think, in the intercession of law and order. While it’s hard to divine any difference in predatory behaviour, while young women still carry that hunted, exasperated load, the unspoken, “I didn’t ask for this”, it would be unusual for institutions to shrug it off, to minimise. There is a new social solidarity — distilled in the Everyday Sexism project - that makes change seem possible. Yet the dark side of new media is more pronounced. We used to talk about pornography, and we would mean one thing, an improbable tableaux of Viking men and denatured women. Now, we don’t know what we mean; gonzo porn, new atrocities squirted in like condiments on an inedible burger? Is it bad because a 12-year-old might see it and think that’s what sex is? Is it bad because none of the players look human? Is it bad because it’s the wrong sort of porn, or the extras aren’t unionised, or because debasement was supposed to be niche, it was never meant to be the whole story? Without a coherent narrative of sexual equity, with the tensions between intimacy and exploitation not so much unresolved as completely capsized by a wave of the self as currency in a hostile marketplace, the old question — are all men bastards, or only some? — seems impossibly quaint.

All the questions lead back to one; is it better or worse to be a young woman today than one in the Eighties, more or less panic-inducing? It is one that I cannot answer. I can’t speak for the young women of today, and I’m not even totally sure I trust my memory. All I have are fragments, snapshots, sharp moments standing out of the cultural landscape, that vividly insist on how the culture has changed for a woman finding her place in it. Low Level Panic is one such sharp moment.

Zoe Williams has been a columnist on the Guardian since 2000 - previously, she wrote a column for the Evening Standard. She has appeared on various current affairs and discussion shows and written for a load of magazines. She was 2013’s Print Journalist of the Year for the Speaking Together Media Awards, 2011’s Columnist of the Year at the Workworld awards and is the author of one non-fiction book, Bring It On, Baby, about the politicisation of motherhood.

#theatre #zoewilliams #lowlevelpanic #feminism

Chelsea Walker on directing Low Level Panic

What first drew you to Low Level Panic? The characters really lay themselves bare – they’re honest about what makes them uncomfortable, what confuses them, what they fantasise about.

It’s an empowering play – one of the characters, Mary, is questioning and interrogating the objectification of women she sees all around her, and how that objectification has affected the way she thinks and feels about herself. It’s refreshing to put women onstage with no men, and it strikes a perfect balance of being deadly serious in its politics, and wickedly funny to watch.

How do you feel the play resonates today? For me, the ‘low level panic’ in the play is just as relevant today. It’s the feeling of being scared walking home in the dark, clutching onto your keys. It’s feeling anxious about how you’re dressed and whether it will help you to be ‘taken seriously’ at work. It’s deciding to laugh off the misogynistic joke rather than start an awkward discussion about it. It’s feeling unhappy with your body, and then feeling irritated that you’re affected by the images of women in the media. It’s feeling uncomfortable when you see an image of a woman objectified on a tube poster, or when you notice that the man next to you on the bus is watching hard core pornography on his phone.

How is the bathroom setting and the space of the Orange Tree special and what effect do you think it has on the characters and will have on the production? The play’s set in a bathroom because it’s a space where the characters can air their innermost thoughts and share them with the audience. A bathroom’s a functioning, everyday, shared space – there’s nothing glamorous about it – so the characters can be themselves.

The Orange Tree is perfect for this play. Being in the round gives the audience a chance to feel really intimate with the action, and there’s nowhere for the characters to hide. It’s an unconventional space – and its flexibility suits the formal inventiveness in the play.

Clare McIntyre’s sister Lesley came to talk to you in rehearsals. How did that inform the work you're doing? Lesley has been very generous in giving us her time and perspective. She and Clare lived together in their 20s in a chaotic, creative Brixton house – so she helped us to understand the world of the play – what it was like for women living together in London then, the fashion, the music, the icons, the Feminist movement, the everyday sexism. She told us about Clare’s background and about stories of them living together, which helped us grasp Clare’s sense of humour and why she wrote the play.

What's your approach to directing a play? That depends on the play, but I tend to start by figuring out what the play means to me, why it should be staged now, and what effect it’s supposed to have on an audience. Then I’ll identify the challenges and try to find ways to solve them.

Do you have any advice for young directors starting out in their careers? Assisting other directors is an extremely valuable experience, but you will always learn more by making your own work, so make sure you keep doing that too. And the best piece of advice ever given to me was work with people who will challenge you – they’ll surprise you and you’ll make better work.

Low Level Panic is at the Orange Tree from 16 Feb - 25 March 2017

Find out more and book tickets

Photo of Chelsea Walker by Helen Murray

#theatre #theater #directing #directors #feminism

The Uninvited Guest: Gabriel Gatehouse, Foreign Correspondent, BBC Newsnight on Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice is a classic tale of the ‘uninvited guest’: the introduction of a new character into the family structure exposes fractures long ignored. In Roland Schimmelpfennig’s collapsing universe, the ‘new character’ is in fact nothing of the sort; he is the return of something old.

“The past does not exist,” says Albert, whose already fraught family Christmas has been disrupted by the new arrival, adding: “It haunts us, and that makes it part of the present.”

Mark Twain, has something illuminating to say on the subject of past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Today, the pieces of the kaleidoscope seem freshly broken. Our system of western liberal democracy, having acquired an aspect of monolithic certitude in the years following the end of the Cold War, turned out instead to be a delicate vase, precariously balanced on false assumptions. Freeze-frame the start of 2017 and we find ourselves mid-shatter.

Rudolph, the ‘uninvited guest’ in Winter Solstice, is a shard of the past, punctuating the sclerotic bubble of early 21st century middle-class liberalism in Germany, a country unusually aware of its own history.

Interestingly, it is the play’s oldest and youngest characters who are most easily beguiled by the newcomer: the child, not yet cognizant of the past, sees not something old, but something new; the grandmother sees an opportunity to rebel against a loss of authority, a sense of creeping redundancy.

“I get the feeling I’m not wanted here. I am tolerated, but I am also humiliated,” says Corinna, the grandmother.

From Ohio to Dresden, from Budapest to Lyon, this is a sentiment I have heard expressed again and again — by people young and old — while reporting on the rising spirit of populist rebellion across Europe and America.

These rebellions take different forms in different places. But everywhere they share certain key features: a nativist backlash against a system in which the perceived traditional holders of authority have been stripped of their power to shape the world around them. It’s about ‘real people’ versus the ‘liberal elite’; it’s about ‘take back control’.

They have in common an antipathy to multiculturalism and political correctness, to globalisation and immigration — especially Islamic immigration. And after a tumultuous year of Brexit and Trump, they share a growing conviction that the winds of change are in their sails.

In Vienna, one evening in December, I met Martin Sellner, the leader of a youth group known as Identitäre Bewegung or Identitarian Movement. In this story, he plays the role of a kind of real-life Rudolph, the character as catalyst for revolution.

While not directly affiliated with the Austrian Freedom Party, Mr Sellner and his members are as energised by the rise of the far right in Austria as they are by the victory of Donald Trump in the United States and the win for the ‘Leave’ campaign in the EU referendum.

Martin Sellner spoke of reclaiming what he called a Leitkultur, an Austro-German-dominated ‘leading culture’, as part of a wider battle against multi-culturalism.

“We see ourselves as the patriotic avant-garde, pushing the envelope, the Overton window, between what you can say and what you can think.”

Joseph P. Overton (1960-2003) was an American political scientist who is chiefly remembered for his eponymous ‘window’, which describes the range of ideas deemed acceptable in public discourse, from the unthinkable at the extreme end of the scale, through the radical to the sensible and popular in the middle.

The Identitarians have affiliated groups in several Central European countries, as well as in Italy, France and Germany, where they find common cause with political parties like Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the National Front. In each case, their activists are only a few hundred strong. But their power lies not in their numbers, but rather in their ability to shift the Overton window by speaking publicly about ideas once deemed outside the boundaries of the acceptable.

In his effort to preserve what he termed Austria’s “ethno-cultural identity”, Sellner told me of his proposal to confine refugees and migrants to “special zones” around Europe. My suggestion that such ‘zones’ sounded disturbingly like concentration camps was dismissed as an out-dated “Nazi-reflex”.

“At the moment we are reaching this tipping point of people daring to be an outspoken patriot. I think it has been in the closet for a while, [but] I think at the moment it’s becoming normal again.”

For the record, Mr Sellner and his Identitarians say they are not in favour of concentration camps, nor are they neo-Nazis. More than two million Austrians voted for the Freedom Party candidate in December’s election; they too would reject such a comparison. To label as Nazis those who support the various populist insurgencies now sweeping through Europe and America is neither accurate nor illuminating.

It was perhaps not despite but because he said things that would, in normal times, have disqualified a candidate from office, that Donald Trump won the presidency of the United States. His appeal, like that of other populists, is twofold: to some he seems to promise a return to a glorious past; to those too young to remember anything other than the centrist consensus of the ‘liberal elite’, any prospect of change may seem new and exciting.

And so the terms of the debate are shifting. Winter Solstice prompts us to look out through our Overton window, regard the vista and ask: how much of this is new, and how much is landscape we have seen before?

Winter Solstice is at the Orange Tree Theatre 12 Jan - 11 Feb 2017

An Orange Tree Theatre and Actors Touring Company co-production

#brexit #trump #theatre #germany #new play #new writing #newsnight #schimmelpfennig #afd

Jess and Joe Forever writer Zoe Cooper and director Derek Bond talk romcoms, Ovid and the magic of being a teenager, with Literary Associate Guy Jones

Guy Jones: Zoe, could you tell me a bit about why you wanted to tell this story?

Zoe Cooper: I was really interested in Ovid and magic and the power to transform. In Ovid women turn into birds, and trees; people shapeshift. At times he employs a mode of writing called free indirect speech, which he uses for female voices. Women and queer characters (although he wouldn’t have called them queer) don’t get a voice in work by his contemporaries. And then I was thinking about Norfolk, and that there would be something great about creating magic in landscape that was very flat, and grey, and isn’t cute or dramatic. And finally there was the magic of teenage-hood – the edge place, the last time you can really believe in magic.

Derek Bond: Also that’s when magic happens. Anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows that the transition from child to adult is seismic. You body changes, your perspective, the loss of innocence. You become aware of your body in a way that’s about fitting in and social norms, and people feel a growing anxiety about how their bodies are different to other people’s bodies. A lot of times it’s horrible and upsetting, but it could be magical.

GJ: As well as being about moments of change and transition, it also feels to me like you’re exploring what it is to be on the fringes of things in so many ways – in terms of your class, or geography, or sexual identity.

ZC: One of the things I wanted to do was write absolutely in my own voice. I live in Newcastle and I love writing for those theatres and those audiences. But with this play I wanted write a character that had my accent and was from my part of the world, which is Twickenham. Jess arrives in the play with a sense of her own superiority as a sophisticated London child but as she’s launched into this world in Norfolk she has to face up to the fact that she doesn’t know everything, and that in many ways she has had a very sheltered middle class upbringing. In a way Joe has a lot of authority – he knows how the countryside works. But in another way – because of his identity – he’s definitely on the fringes.

GJ: And for this play to have come to life and have a long run in London, followed by a regional tour – does that feel curiously appropriate for a play which explores the relationship between the centre and edge?

ZC: We talked about the Orange Tree from the start. We felt that it would be great for this.

DB: And we also said wouldn’t it be great to take it to rural communities. I grew up in a tiny village in Worcestershire. The idea that there are venues now which thanks to organisations like house and Farnham Maltings, can get theatre like this, is really exciting. We can take the play to places which wouldn’t normally get new writing.

ZC: It’s not just about good quality work. It’s about work which honours the fact that rural communities are not necessarily conservative.

GJ: The mode of storytelling in the play is distinctive. Where did that come from?

ZC: Jess and Joe was commissioned by Old Vic New Voices originally, and they had quite a clear brief for it: they wanted it to be an hour long or a bit over, and they wanted it to be for a younger audience. It coincided with what I wanted to do next. I’d started to employ direct address in my plays because I was a bit bored with the fourth wall and this felt like a play where the characters absolutely had to tell their story themselves.

DB: I’ve also become a bit bored of the fourth wall. I’m doing three shows this year, and they’re all in the round. I’ve found myself finding ways to break the fourth wall in all of them.

GJ: What is that a response to?

ZC: I wanted to write plays that acknowledged the audience. Because I don’t live in London, and a lot of my friends don’t work in theatre - or necessarily go to the theatre as much – I am always particularly interested to hear what they think of the plays we see together. One of the things they always seem to comment on is how strange and old fashioned it seems to perform whole plays without ever allowing the characters to acknowledge that they are being watched. I was also really encouraged by the work of other writers that have broken the fourth wall, like Caroline Horton, Charlotte Josephine and Lucy Kirkwood.

GJ: What were the challenges of this kind of writing?

ZC: Trying to create drama. With the direct address you have to make sure they don’t just say all their feelings. How do you create unreliable narrators in a way that’s interesting? I’ve wanted to write queer characters for a really long time, but the plays that I’ve seen are issue-driven plays - you have the monologue where a character says ‘I feel so alone, I just want to come out, transition’. I hate that, but with direct address you can very easily back yourself into that corner.

DB: What I love about a play where there’s direct address is that it makes the audience a character. They’re an actual part of the experience, a participant in what’s going on, not just a spectator. It makes me think of Daniel Kitson, who went from a world of stand up where you’re directly addressing an audience, to the work he’s been doing recently where he blurs the line between standup and theatre. There’s something really very pure about someone standing on a stage and telling you a story.

GJ: You mentioned romcoms. How much are each of you aware of genre when you work?

ZC: There’s something familiar about genre: the coming of age genre. Poets have it easy because they have, say, a sonnet, and that’s the shape of the poem. They can pour everything into it but there are limits. Young writers really need those limits. But in theatre we’re not always great at putting limits on things because we don’t do genre. Lots of writers have got rid of the three-act structure, but it’s really useful to have that shape.

DB: It’s useful to identify the form of the story: it’s a mystery. There is something that these characters are not telling us, and as the play goes on we get closer and closer to finding out what that might be. So it’s a murder mystery, but with something in the will-they-won’t-they of a romcom.

ZC: I had felt that I wanted to be taken seriously and so I shouldn’t write jokes. But I like romcoms more than I like any other kind of film. There was a chasm between that and the kind of things that I was writing. So I was creating work, not that I wouldn’t choose to go and see, but that wouldn’t necessarily make me go ‘Oh brilliant’.

DB: I think there’s a similar thing with directors. Up until a few years ago I was doing a lot of new plays in which dead children featured largely – abuse, grief. And then when I started to do some comedy, I found that I really enjoyed it. I realised that it was okay to make work that entertains as well as provokes.

Jess and Joe Forever - a co-production with Farnham Maltings - is at the Orange Tree Theatre until 8 October then touring. Find out more

#theatre #zoe cooper #derek bond #jess and joe forever #orange tree theatre #new play #new writing

Not just a local theatre, or a London theatre, but a national theatre - Paul Miller talks to Maddy Costa about the evolution of the Orange Tree over the last two years and what the future holds

For a quick indication of how the Orange Tree has changed since Paul Miller became artistic director in 2014, look no further than Jess and Joe Forever, the first show in his new season. The difference isn’t in Zoe Cooper’s play itself, but the business behind-the-scenes: Jess and Joe Forever has been co-produced with Farnham Maltings, and when it finishes its run in Richmond, it heads out on a national tour to Newcastle, Norfolk, Colchester and more. There are some in the industry who question the merit of co-producing, as though it were somehow terrible that theatre should be made collaboratively, or seen by a few more people. Miller is not one of these people. As he puts it: “I want to get more of the world into the Orange Tree, and I want the Orange Tree to get out into the world.”

So far, it’s working: 2014’s surprise hit Pomona transferred to the Manchester Royal Exchange and the National in London; Miller’s own staging of French Without Tears is now travelling the country; and – something Miller is particularly proud of – the number of first-time ticket buyers at home base keeps on rising. He cheerfully quotes Pomona’s playwright, Alistair McDowall, appraising the Orange Tree audience as his “most diverse”, because it didn’t solely comprise new-writing aficionados. And while Miller is aware that there is a stereotype notion of the “core” Richmond audience – older, affluent and conservative, basically – he’s enjoyed discovering its broadness: “There’s a multiplicity of ages, backgrounds, opinions and experiences, and a much more inquisitive, robust theatrical sensibility than they’re sometimes given credit for.”

Responses to Pomona were enlightening in that respect. “It’s true it got up some people’s noses, but there were a whole lot of other people who said: this reminds us of the 60s, this is what we wanted, radical theatre shaking things up.” When people did react against it, he noted that often they were coming from “a liberal artistic background and sensibility, genuinely dismayed by the thought of a young playwright effectively saying you cannot be good in the modern world. That went against everything that a certain liberal cast of mind felt about theatre and about art: that art exists in order to promote goodness in the world.”

Miller has been finding a lot of inspiration in Richmond’s “strong liberal tradition – with both a capital and a small L”, and its “literary associations”, whether that’s a connection with Virginia Woolf and co’s Bloomsbury Group, or Horace Walpole writing the first Gothic novel in nearby Strawberry Hill. (“That’s what amused me about Pomona being here,” he says: “it was in its natural home.”) Liberalism translates in his programmes in part to an interest in “plays and voices and writers from our heritage, that tell us how we got here, both theatrically and anthropologically”. But the wastefulness of British theatre also bothers him. “There’s a whole load of living writers who had plays that were done once, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Let’s have a look at those: let’s see the work of Sharman Macdonald, Doris Lessing, Mustapha Matura.” Plus there’s a keen ear for contemporary voices: “Not necessarily completely fresh voices, but emerging writers whose voice is beginning to find itself.” The present season is typical, Zoe Cooper rubbing shoulders with Caryl Churchill, Somerset Maugham with Roland Schimmelpfennig.

This careful balance of old and new isn’t, Miller suggests, so very different from that struck by Sam Walters, the Orange Tree’s founder and sole artistic director for 43 years. “Inevitably the question arises of, is everything going to change? But there’s a thing about change and continuity – which is reflected in the kind of programme we do, that symbiotic relationship between looking to the past but heading towards the future. What we’ve been about in the past two years is thinking of Sam’s legacy as a baton that we’ve picked up and run with, rather than dropping it and haring off in our own direction.” What there has been is a shift in emphasis “towards the contemporary, so that the rediscoveries sit within that context, rather than new plays sitting in the context of a lot of rediscoveries”.

As a director himself, Miller’s jurisdiction is the heritage strand: as well as Rattigan’s French Without Tears he’s revived a DH Lawrence, the Lessing and a couple of Bernard Shaws. “I couldn’t in all honesty claim to be rediscovering these playwrights,” he concedes, but it does please him that there is a “whole generation of theatre-goers” coming to these works fresh. “There’s an excitement in being able to reintroduce rather than rediscover”, and especially in doing so with a work that doesn’t conform to type. A work like Sheppey, for instance, which he’s directing for the Christmas slot; there’s a gleeful, child-like simplicity to the way he says that: “People who think they know Somerset Maugham are about to be surprised.”

Sheppey is the only play he’s directing of the five main shows this season. He’s quite happy with that as a work rate: “My appetite for directing was never limitless. The best side of artistic directing is having pleasure in seeing other people do things. I enjoy making the opportunities for things to happen.”

In order to do that, first he has to make money. In the unlikely event that anyone missed this one, Miller in 2014 experienced what he calls “a nuclear fission moment”: his very first day in the job coincided with the announcement from Arts Council England that in the 2015-2018 period the Orange Tree would not receive funding as a National Portfolio Organisation. That was 25% of its overall income gone, with only eight month’s notice. “To some people it looks like a miracle that we’re still standing,” Miller admits. The truth is: “We are still in transition. We were in the fortunate situation that we do have a small amount of reserves, which we decided to use strategically for a couple of years while we changed the way we were doing things. That process is still continuing.”

Part of that process involved immediately streamlining the organisation to a smaller staff, “cutting our costs in a way that hopefully doesn’t affect people’s experience of coming to see work here”. He also initiated a fundraising drive – greatly boosted by the award, this summer, of Arts Council Catalyst: Evolve money, £75,000 spread over three years promised as “match funding for any new funds raised” through private giving. “We were really pleased to get that,” Miller says, “because competition for that programme was intense.” But it’s not enough to feel easy. “We need a certain amount of regular funding as a bedrock, in order that we’re not one production away from disaster. Because we had this tiny bit of reserves, we could take a risk like The Rolling Stone or Pomona. Without some regular funding, deciding to do that in the future will not be possible, because the risk would be too great.”

With this in mind, the challenge Miller has set himself is to ensure that the key characteristic of the Orange Tree isn’t just its auditorium’s architecture – “unlike any other theatre in London” – but its expansiveness: so that it’s not just a local theatre, or a London theatre, but a national theatre. “We’re trying to develop conversations between plays, between writers and between audiences,” he says – and looking well beyond his own doorstep to do it.

Maddy Costa writes about theatre and music. She contributes to Exeunt and the Guardian, blogs at Deliq, edits the blog New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood in association with Fuel, and co-curates Something Other with Mary Paterson. She is resident critic with Chris Goode & Company. @maddydeliqette

Visit the Orange Tree Theatre website to find out more about the season

#theatre #funding #paulmiller #carylchurchill #zoecooper #jessandjoe #somersetmaugham #terence rattigan #bernard shaw #roland schimmelpfennig #arts council england #pomona #alistair mcdowall

Ahead of the first revival of German Skerries, here is a look at some of Robert Holman’s plays in photos.

From top:

Making Noise Quietly (2012, Donmar Warehouse)

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky (co-written with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens, 2012, Lyric)

Jonah and Otto (Park Theatre, 2014)

A Breakfast of Eels (The Print Room, 2015)

German Skerries in rehearsal (Orange Tree Theatre, 2016)

Find out more about German Skerries, 3 March - 2 April at the Orange Tree Theatre then on tour

An Orange Tree Theatre co-production with Up in Arms, in association with Reading Rep

Chris Urch talks about his critically-acclaimed play THE ROLLING STONE ahead of its London premiere at the Orange Tree

Tell me about The Rolling Stone. What is the play about to you?

The play takes its title from a newspaper which was circulating in Kampala, Uganda in 2010. They were outing men and women who they believed to be gay, and pictures of those people, their names and addresses, were printed. People were killed, some people had to flee, leave their families. It destroyed their lives and their families’ lives. I was already aware of the laws about homosexuality, but I read an article which said that if you knew a family member was gay and you didn’t report them then you yourself could go to prison. I thought ‘What if that happened to a family?’ So it’s a play about family. It asks ‘How far would you go for the people that you love?’ It has a love story between two men running through it, but fundamentally it’s about family. I feel everyone can relate to it – ‘What would I do if that was my brother or mother or my sister. Would I report them? Would I stand by them?’ The play is fictional, but it used that real life event as a starting point to go ‘what if?’

Why did this story feel important for you to tell?

What was going on with this publication and the community in Kampala strongly resonated with me. On a basic human rights level. I just knew I had to write about it. I guess it was a gut reaction really which wouldn’t go away. Whenever you start to write a play you have to ask yourself, ‘Will I still be interested in this story or subject in three, four, five years from now?’ It can sometimes take a long time for a play to hit the stage. I hope it’s clear in the play that we’re not saying ‘Uganda is this’ or ‘these people are evil, or uniformed’. What we’re trying to look at is ‘How have we got here?’, ‘Why is there so much hatred?’.

What do you want an audience to take away from watching The Rolling Stone?

It’s not for me to say what an audience should take away from the play. Everyone comes to the theatre bringing their own stuff to it – that’s the medium – you have that dialogue afterwards. It sparked a lot of debate in Manchester – people were angry at the situation, they weren’t aware of how extreme it was. What’s exciting is when you’re hearing people laughing in the audience, and the next moment you’re hearing them gasp. It’s nice that obviously they’ve connected in some way. So I’m just raising questions. For me a play is about presenting a story, for an audience to go away and think, or to come up with some answers themselves or propel them into doing something. Or take them onto the train being entertained. Of course it’s political – life is political. I’ve tried my best to put the politics through the personal. Fundamentally it’s about a family that has all the banter and the comedy that you have with families, and the love and the joy and the laughter. As well as those heated arguments.

But it’s a family living in a different society to the kind we know. Religion plays a different role in their lives.

Halfway through writing this play I swore I’d never write a play which deals with religion again. It’s such a minefield – it’s so difficult to get your head around, let alone write about. There aren’t many new plays that deal with religion, and maybe that’s why. Usually I think when you see a play about religion you see what the writer’s viewpoint is – but the last line of the play is maybe not what you would expect. And it might or might not be what I believe – it’s a lot more complex than that.

How did you go about – as a British playwright working in London – imagining Uganda?

I was very nervous. It’s not my culture. But I think we’re in really tricky waters if you are only allowed to write about your demographic – you’re really limiting yourself. Your duty as a playwright is to immerse yourself as much as you can in that world. Of course it’s ideal if you can afford to jump on a plane and go to that country, but if you don’t have the resources you have to read as much, speak to as many people as you can. I got as many people around me who knew more than I did.

Casting was really important – getting actors who knew more than I did and could say ‘This character wouldn’t say this word’, or ‘They would choose this phrase’. The thing that made me feel brave is that I submitted it to the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting. It’s completely anonymous, it’s judged on the work and not who you are. So I feel the play has got where it has on its own merits.

And so where did the characters come from?

I’m so aware of trying to not go for clichés or stereotypes. You might think you’re going to have the Ugandan boy who’s going to be not sure of himself and his sexuality, whereas actually Dembe is really comfortable with who he is – he just can’t openly express that in public. The only character who’s not from Uganda is Sam. He has Ugandan heritage, but was brought up in Northern Ireland – it has it’s own complicated history, but is somewhere you are allowed to be gay. But it is him who actually is struggling more with who he is and what he wants.

I also wanted strong, truthful female characters. The sister Wummie sacrifices a lot, and she’s the one who makes the big calls in the end; she’s the one who holds the family together when her brothers are falling apart. The women make stronger decisions, because they’ve had to fight to have their voices heard.

Were the people you got in touch with from Uganda happy to share their stories?

It was difficult and sensitive territory to begin with. A lot of people didn’t want to speak. They were worried that their Facebook or email might get hacked. They didn’t feel safe, and of course I didn’t want anyone to put themselves in jeopardy by talking to me.

There were two lesbian women who changed their minds and got back in touch saying ‘We’re going to tell you how we feel, what our worries are, what life is really like in Kampala, stuff about the Rolling Stone and things that had happened to our friends. We can’t tell our story so we want other people to hear it.’

You start thinking to yourself, ‘What good is a play going to do?’ There was a play which went on recently in Uganda about homosexuality and the producer was put in jail because they didn’t have the free speech we do. We’re lucky to have free speech here, damn right I’m going to use it. In my mind the power of a play should never be underestimated.

Chris Urch was in conversation with OT Literary Associate Guy Jones

Find out more about The Rolling Stone - at the Orange Tree Theatre from 14 Jan - 20 Feb

Deborah Bruce and Charlotte Gwinner discuss The Distance

How did the idea for The Distance originate? DB: I wanted to write a play about female friendship. I felt that I hadn’t seen a version of female friendship that I recognised on stage, about my generation of women, and I wanted to write about that very close, unconditional, very loving relationship. I wanted to imagine something happening in that dynamic where everybody is slightly frozen in their ability to support each other – the issue of somebody leaving their children seemed to be a decision that people couldn’t just wholeheartedly support.

That was the beginning of the idea, but I feel like I’ve ended up writing about more than that – I got really interested in the gap between what we imagine our life is going to be and what it is, and how from very small beginnings the big, major events in our lives unfold. You can meet somebody very randomly and they become this very significant person in your life, as happens at the beginning of the play.

Why do you think the issue of women living apart from their children is such a taboo? CG: The character of Kate in some ways personifies the assumption that lots of people make about mothers and children and that relationship. I think that everybody, or certainly everybody in my peer group, would make that similar assumption. Why that exists is hard to say. I think there is a huge social transition that’s happened in the last 50 years where it’s much more acceptable for women to be in work and traditional family structures have slightly shifted; we are in a transition. What’s interesting is that men who leave their children aren’t taboo. I think that when either parent leaves a child it is equally shocking, but one is a taboo and one isn’t.

The question is – have we been able to shake off traditional family structure as we know it, or as we’d like to believe, or is it still there? This is something the play asks, and equally, is it somehow inhuman and non-natural for a woman to have the urge to leave?

DB: We assume that a mothering instinct is just that, an instinct. And if we look at the idea that it’s not instinct then it’s very frightening for us.

Do you think that The Distance is marking that transition you were describing? CG: I think it’s marking a time when we can have that discussion, I don’t think any true changes have happened, I just think that things are starting to be made more overt. It’s not that suddenly lots of women are leaving their children now more than ever, but somehow we’re able to talk about it.

DB: It’s not that I’m saying that for equality, women ought to be able to leave their children too, but what I am saying is let’s look at this idea that some women may find motherhood too difficult and it may not come naturally and it may be so much of a struggle that it feels impossible. And if that’s the case, how do we look at that, how do we deal with it and what’s the impact? If we think of it as something ‘inhuman’, do you think that perception will ever change?

DB: I don’t know – if my cat had kittens and then walked away from those kittens, I would be horrified. It’s like Charlotte was saying, it’s about survival. Whereas if the cat that impregnated her never turned up again, you wouldn’t think twice!

CG: It’s coloured by your own understanding of parenthood, or mothering. As in the play, it’s very hard for one of the characters to change her ideology about what it is to be a mother.

DB: And what does it mean if it’s a choice all along? Though there are male characters on stage, the focus is very much on the female characters and their friendship.

The Distance is also written and directed by women. This is relatively unusual, do you think this is changing, or is it still difficult for women to make a mark in British theatre? CG: On paper there are lots of women running big theatre buildings in the country and doing very high powered jobs in the theatre, maybe not at board level, but certainly on an artistic level. There are not enough female playwrights on big stages, but there are lots of female playwrights being commissioned, so clearly there are changes that need to happen.

It doesn’t feel like The Distance is a political play, it feels like it’s a deeply truthful and psychological piece and it’s character driven. To have rich characters that have all the flaws and perfection of some of the canon of male characters in theatre, in a play told from a female point of view, is really exciting. It goes beyond ‘women need more power, women need to be seen’, it just is powerful and that feels new and very novel.

DB: It focuses on the female friendship because that was the starting point of the play, but the male characters are very present in the story and the relationships are all entwined. The men do all the childcare in the play, on stage and off, I was interested in looking at that modern model of a relationship where the domestic work is unquestionably equal. I wanted to look at what that actually means in practice.

What reaction did the play receive when it premiered at the Orange Tree in 2014? DB: People seemed to really recognise the issues, multi generationally, not just the younger generation or my generation, but the generation above too.

CG: When the play premièred the audience at the time, and this may change, but the audience at the time were a much older audience and it was incredible to see how the play connected with them. They felt these were the kind of experiences and debates they had when they were bringing up children and that was a really exciting thing to discover. The expectation was that it was a particular generation in the '90s who lived an extended youth, and actually you realise that no, this has come before.

I think it was so loved because it turns on a sixpence – the comedy, the pain and the pathos is so quicksilver. One of the most memorable things was sitting in the audience and seeing people laugh and then fall absolutely silent within a second.

DB: I think in the same way when you have young kids and you’re at a toddler group and you dare to say ‘god isn’t this a nightmare, I’m really struggling’, there’s a kind of collective ‘hooray’ that somebody says it. In a way the play had that effect, which is really lovely, you felt the audience go ‘thanks for saying it’.

The thing about the juxtaposition of the comedy and it being something serious and difficult to hear – that’s how conversations work in life. You’re not thinking ‘right, this is the serious bit, we must all stay serious until we get to the funny bit’ – everything is peppered with both and it’s funnier if it’s in the context of something quite dark.

The play is set in 2011, not that long ago, but do you feel any difference between the atmosphere now and the atmosphere then? DB: I hadn’t really thought that, so maybe the answer is no, but I tried to draw a parallel between this buried anxiety and rage that burst out in those 2011 riots, and the character of Liam. We live with simmering trauma or unrest in our lives and it just takes a little moment for it to burst out, so that was the parallel I was trying to make and that still feels like a significant thing.

CG: It doesn’t feel that different, unless something majorly changes about how Skype works. Part of the exciting nature of that political event threaded through the play is that it takes on a poetic status, so it’s true to that role of a teenager within the play, or that it connects to Liam. Parenting a teenager is as universal as parenting a toddler – different points in parenting are chronicled in the play, so I think it’s timeless in that way.

Do you have a favourite moment or line in the play? DB: I really like the character of Liam and I like the moment where he is talking about his relationship with his father – that is a moment where I tried to take the lid off the pressure cooker, that was always enjoyable and it always got a big laugh, it’s a release and I always enjoy watching the actor play that.

CG: I can honestly tell you I love every single moment in this play because every single moment leads to where we get to at the end - you feel like every moment is sacred and I try to make the actors feel the same.

The Distance is at the Orange Tree Theatre from 26 Nov - 19 Dec

Discussion chaired by Assistant Director Celine Lowenthal

The Distance is a co-production with Sheffield Theatres

Sharman Macdonald, playwright & screenwriter

We’re staging the first major revival of Sharman Macdonald’s 1988 play When We Were Women from 3 September, in a co-production with Snapdragon, directed by Eleanor Rhode. Here is an article by Elizabeth O’Reilly on her incredible career.

Sharman MacDonald's career as a writer had an interesting start.

As a young actress working in London in the 1970s and 1980s, she was plagued by stage fright and desperate to give up acting. She and her husband Will Knightley had one child, Caleb, and although MacDonald was keen for another baby, they could not afford to expand their family. She turned her attention to writing plays, and her husband made a bet - if she sold a play, they could afford another child. Consequently, MacDonald wrote her first play,When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (1985). It was a success - and also led to the birth of her daughter, future actress Keira Knightley.

MacDonald's plays are domestic and emotionally poignant, contemplative rather than action-packed. She is skilled at emotional exploration: her characters are authentic, complex and multi-faceted, and her dialogue is quietly penetrating and captivating. Thus, while MacDonald's plays are quiet and gentle on the surface, she delves sharply into the emotional and psychological depths of her characters' lives. She regards the family as a microcosm of society, and thus her intimate domestic portraits indirectly comment on the wider world: 'If we don't study the family, how can we understand the wider power plays in society? It's in the family that it all begins' (MacDonald interviewed in The Guardian, 17 March 2005). Her main emphasis is on the lives and experiences of women, with a particular empTasis on mother-daughter relationships, and the tensions and difficulties that tend to be embedded within these relationships. Her settings are frequently grey and dreary Scottish towns, which heighten the intensity of the family dramas.

When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout was inspired partly by MacDonald's relationship with her own mother, although the story is not autobiographical. It features 30-something Fiona and her mother Morag, on holiday together in the same Scottish coastal town where Fiona had experienced a cold, lonely childhood. The story goes back and forth between the present time and 17 years earlier, when 15-year-old Fiona deliberately got pregnant in order to sabotage her mother's plans for re-marriage. The absence of Fiona's deserter father makes the one-to-one nature of the mother-daughter relationship all the more intense. Like most of MacDonald's work, When I Was a Girl de-mystifies mother love, offering a raw and honest look at its intensity and self-sacrifice, along with the resentment and bitterness that can hover beneath the surface, and the mother's need for validation from the child:

'MORAG: The midwife held you up. You looked right at me. You didn't cry. No, madam. Not you [...] You wouldn't suck. I tried to feed you. I did everything that was proper. You'd take nothing from me.'

(When I Was a Girl)

MacDonald continues to explore domestic themes and family relationships in subsequent plays, such as When We Were Women (first published in When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout and Other Plays, 1990) and All Things Nice (1991). Another of her most well-known works is The Winter Guest (first published in Plays One, 1995), which was adapted into a feature film in 1997, starring real-life mother and daughter Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson. Again it explores an intense and ambivalent mother-daughter relationship - Elspeth is visiting her recently widowed daughter Frances, and though the former wishes to offer support, their relationship is fraught with tension. MacDonald once again is not afraid to show that mother love does not always come easily, nor does it always flow unconditionally. As Elspeth looks back on giving birth to Frances, she articulates not only the shock of new motherhood but also, later on, the equally painful process of letting go of one's adult child:

'ELSPETH: Looking after a person, being responsible for them. That's hard learnt [...] You taught me to care, my God. Demanded that I ... that I care. With your screaming and your crying and your wee hands that beat at me and grabbed at me [...] Just because you're all grown up. I've to stop? All that caring. I've to stop?'

(The Winter Guest in Plays One, 1995)

After Juliet (1999) is MacDonald's own sequel to Romeo and Juliet, following the story of Juliet's cousin Rosaline after the death of the two famous lovers. It was commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme for Young People, and has proved particularly popular in school drama departments. MacDonald's approach, with its accessible dialogue, believable teenage characters and moments of comedy, gives the story a fresh appeal for a young, modern-day audience, as After Juliet reveals the fragility of the truce between the two families:

'VALENTINE: I see a spitting cat / In your eyes, Rosaline. / I don't see a truce' (After Juliet)

The Girl With Red Hair (2003) has been highly acclaimed. Once again, it explores mother-daughter love in a Scottish coastal setting, though this time it is more tragic: 17-year-old Roslyn, the red-headed girl of the title, has been killed in a car accident a year previously, and the play explores not only the devastating grief of her mother, but the impact on the whole community. The intensity of the subject-matter is lightened by touches of humour and the gradual suggestion that the bereaved may begin to heal, learn to love again and move forward with their lives.

MacDonald's next project was a screenplay, originally called The Best Time of Our Lives but eventually re-titled The Edge of Love. It was released as a feature film in 2008, starring MacDonald's daughter Keira Knightley along with Sienna Miller, Matthew Rhys and Cillian Murphy. Set during World War II, it is the story of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas and their friends, Vera Phillips and William Killick. The Edge of Love was not intended as a biopic of Dylan Thomas' entire life story, for it spans just a few years and focuses on the dynamics between all four characters. MacDonald uses this period in the poet's life as a vehicle to explore the boundaries, ambiguities and complexities of friendship and sexual relationships. She is particularly interested in the friendship between the two women, which is complicated by the fact that Vera was Dylan's childhood sweetheart. The research for the screenplay was aided by film student Rebekah Gilbertson, the real-life grand-daughter of Vera and William.

Elizabeth O'Reilly, 2010, from the British Council website

When We Were Women opens at the Orange Tree on 3 September. Find out more

#sharman macdonald #theatre #scotland #literature #when we were women #orange tree theatre #writing #playwriting

3 of the 33 scenes that make up buckets

Free Time

We could go to the park.

No.

Ride our bikes.

No.

Go for a walk?

…

Shall we just watch TV then?

There’s nothing on.

We could see a movie.

I’ve seen all the good ones.

Shall I put some music on?

…

While we decide.

I’ve got a headache.

Come on, let’s go to the park.

I hate the park.

Are you sure you don’t want to play again?

…

Play a different game?

…

Let’s eat something.

I’m not hungry.

We could get an ice cream. Or something to drink. How about a milkshake one of those malt ones they do at that place you know where they mix in chocolate bars and it comes in a huge metal

I feel sick.

Oh! There’s that thing you know at the community centre with the giant statues.

God.

Well what do you want to do?

I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.

Don’t get angry.

We’re wasting time. We finally have some time and we’re wasting it.

Well then let’s do something.

WHAT THOUGH?

I don’t know you don’t want to do anything I suggest.

We didn’t plan anything. We should have planned something. We should have planned something and we didn’t.

It doesn’t matter we just need to pick something now that we can do.

It’s too late. It’s too late to do anything good. It’s too late. It’s too late.

Journalism

‘A Cruel, Uncaring or Absent God – The Indefensible Suffering of a Terminally Ill Child’.

It’s maybe a little long, for a headline.

I mean the piece is beautiful.

Thank you.

It’s articulate it’s honest it’s specific it’s moving it flows it disarms you it’s even funny in a couple of places and at the end I was genuinely brushing away tears.

Right.

But it’s not what I asked for.

I just thought maybe, when you saw it done this way

I wonder if you’re doing this just to spite me

I’m not I

Just to make a point.

…

What we want – and you know this, but I’ll say it again – what we need is lists. People like lists. They share lists. And when they see lists, in their Facebook feed or whatever, they click. They come to our page, we show them adverts, we get paid. That’s it. That’s the whole equation.

It’s just so

‘Ten Things I Learnt From A Dying Girl – Number 7 Will Change Your Life’. Then rewrite the copy as a list, one strap-line for each point then two, three pars underneath, plus images of course or least some pretty credible suggestions, an animated GIF somewhere if you can, and make number 7 something about living for the moment, do it now because tomorrow might not come, it’s not the number of breaths you took it’s the moments that took your breath away. Kind of thing.

But she didn’t say any of that.

She doesn’t have to have said it. It’s not just about her. Put yourself in the story. What did you learn from her?

I didn’t learn anything from her. She hasn’t changed my life. She barely spoke – she can barely speak – she’s not stupid but with all the drugs and the pain she can barely think straight let alone form lucid cogent arguments about the meaning of existence, and I mean she’s just not sharp, mentally, she’s hardly had a day’s schooling in years.

What about serenity then? The inner calm you can find in the face of immense suffering – whatever experiences life deals you, you can take it well you can take it badly

She’s not serene. She twists in pain. She grimaces. She cries. She’s moody, uncommunicative, fidgety

Acceptance? Knowing that death is inevitable for all of us sooner or later?

She doesn’t accept it. She thinks it isn’t fair. She’s dying far too early and she knows it.

Well help me out here. Find a different list.

I could break the illness into 10 stages?

What about a bucket list? Every dying child has a bucket list right? ‘This List of Ten Things Cancer Girl Melly Wants To Do Before She Dies Will Make You –’

She’s not called Melly.

‘Names have been changed’, don’t use her real

And she only has one thing on her list – she wants to get better.

Melly’s a good name.

…OK I could deal with the things I didn’t know about childhood illness. About paediatric care, the difficulty of getting the right diagnosis, life in a children’s ward, –

Things that made you angry. Things that aren’t right.

The lottery when it comes to which drugs you can access – which trials you can be part of.

‘Thirteen Shocking Things I Learnt…

‘…When I Made Friends With A Dying Girl’

Made friends.

‘Number Six Will Make You Want To Start A Revolution.’

I hate it. But I’ll do it.

Good. Decision. First thing tomorrow?

Right.

How’s your daughter?

Fine.

Handful?

Not really.

You should come for dinner. Both of you.

…

I’m on your side you know.

I know.

You have to accept the world as it is. Play the hand you’re given.

Minecraft

I don’t get it why do you do this?

I like it.

What’s the point? How do you win?

You don’t win. You just build stuff.

But how does it end?

There isn’t an end.

Then what’s the point?

It’s fun.

Games are meant to have a purpose. A goal. It’s competition. You compete against other people or against the game or against yourself even but the point is you either win or lose. You achieve the object, or you die trying. This is stupid. There’s nothing to play for.

You don’t get it.

You’re right I don’t get it.

…

What’s that for?

You use it for moving soil or water or lava or milk.

I suppose it’s a bit like building sandcastles.

It’s nothing like that.

But that has an end. It ends when you leave the beach, or when the water comes up and washes them away.

buckets is available as a play text from Nick Hern Books

buckets is at the Orange Tree Theatre from 28 May 28 to 27 June. Click here for more information

★★★★★ in the The Times for Doris Lessing’s Each His Own Wilderness

Sam Marlowe 20 April

This drama by the Nobel prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing received one semi-staged performance at the Royal Court in 1958. That it has waited until now for a major revival is frankly criminal. Like Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, which preceded it by two years, it is fuelled by rage – though here, the incandescent source is an Angry Middle-Aged Woman rather than an Angry Young Man.

Its potent cocktail of family tension and firebrand politics also recalls Arnold Wesker’s landmark trilogy. Yet it brings to its ethical arguments a gimlet-eyed, feminist perspective, lobbing astute observations about sex and gender into the fray along with intergenerational strife. The results — packaged as neatly as a parcel bomb — are explosive. And Paul Miller’s production grips like a vice.

Tony (Joel MacCormack) has just returned from National Service. His mother Myra (Clare Holman) has hardly hung out the flags; in fact, she’s forgotten he’s due home. She’s preoccupied with her activism, in particular campaigning against the H-bomb, and she has a young lover upstairs, Sandy (Josh Taylor), the politically ambitious son of her friend and comrade-in-arms Milly (Susannah Harker).

All of this — the tireless fury and idealism, the dalliance with a man nearer his age than hers, the inattention to conventional niceties such as housework and grooming and, not least, to him — disgusts and exhausts Tony. Myra, meanwhile, despairs of his rudderless apathy. When her old flame Philip (John Lightbody) brings his young fiancée to stay, the precarious household topples.

The drawing-room setting is shabbily genteel, but what happens there is savage. MacCormack and Holman’s connection is charged with fierce love, contempt and a whiff of Oedipal passion. If sex means freedom to Myra, to Tony it’s a weapon, one he wields with shocking cruelty. Each accuses the other of childishness; but Tony’s vicious petulance masks a desperate longing for stability. Theirs is a devastating battle, and Lessing twists and tears our sympathies in all directions. Painfully raw, and utterly riveting. Box office: 020 8940 3633, to May 16

Find out more and book tickets

Responding to Play Mas

We asked the Orange Tree Writers Collective to respond creatively to our production of Play Mas by writing about independence.

Declaration of Dependence by Afsaneh Gray

Monday morning. Good time for a new start.

The hairdresser looked concerned. All off? he said (and from the way he said it she imagined all the women who had been furious with him over their haircuts, I didn’t say that much, I just said a trim, and now look) but she was adamant. All off. As short as possible. A shaved head.

Emerging with a strange lightness into the sunshine, she was overwhelmed by the possibilities. Blue and green, perhaps. Or just turquoise, her favourite colour. Or perhaps the blue that painter used, Yves Klein. Yes. Just a rectangle of that.

The woman in the tattoo parlour was puzzled. A flag? she asked. On your head? (and from the way she said it she imagined that no-one had ever asked for a flag to be tattooed on their bald – no, shaven – heads before), yes, she said. A flag that I’ve made up. That I’ve designed. The flag of the Independent State of Me.

The woman used her heavily inked arm to push over a piece of paper. You need to sign. It says you’re not on drugs.

An hour later she emerged, an Yves Klein blue flag (or was it just a rectangle?) inked onto her head, covered with clingfilm, a definite headache.

Through the pounding she considered her new constitution.

She would no longer:

Suppress her anger at the world, at people, at whatever got her angry.

Pretend to like children when she didn’t.

Wait for other people to ask her to have sex when what she really wanted was to ask them.

Wax her bits.

Allow herself to be financially exploited (she wasn’t quite sure how this one was going to work, practically speaking, but she could flesh out the details later).

Most of all, she was no longer going to pretend to care when she didn’t, when she actually didn’t, when everyone could go fuck themselves.

A man called out on the street: you look like a lesbian.

She was constitutionally obliged to reply: maybe I am a lesbian, what would be wrong with that, dickwad.

What she actually said was nothing. She looked away from him, at the pavement.

She wondered how she was going to enforce the rules of her new state. Where were the police, the lawyers, the judges? Case for the defence: years of social conditioning. Case for the prosecution: you fucked up and you know it. Bang! Guilty as charged.

Tuesday morning, early, stuck in a lift going up to the eighth floor of a soulless building somewhere near Heathrow to her job on a contract that always seemed to be running out putting numbers into a spreadsheet for pay that barely covered her rent living with five other people who regularly failed to do the washing up, she caught the eye of the woman standing opposite, holding (why?) a baby in her arms. The baby, dressed all in blue, looked at her expectantly.

She found herself smiling at him, at his annoying, slightly alien face (Bang! Guilty again).

He likes you, said the mother. Usually he hates men.

Her phone rang. Reception? In a lift? She checked the name, her mother, of course. Her mother was not to be denied. She picked up. You didn’t do that thing you said you were going to do did you? Shave off all your hair? I did, she replied. You’re going to kill me, her mother said, sounding really ill. With your haircuts. (And then I’ll be sorry, won’t I? Bang, sentence for life.)

#Afsaneh Gray #play mas #mustapha matura #new writing #theatre #new play #declaration of dependence

Actress Melanie La Barrie on Mustapha Matura’s Play Mas

Can you tell me a bit about your character, Miss Gookool? Ms Gookool is a mother. Simply that. She is also a businesswoman and a survivor. She is a product of her time, of her race, of her environment, of the politics and of her circumstances. She has lost her husband and lives and works with her son and she can be rather overbearing. She believes in this one idea, 'Work above all else, let politics happen elsewhere'. She holds some opinions that are very much of the time in which this piece is written.

How well do you identify with her? I identify with her in as much as I know her. I understand the language that she speaks. I appreciate her desire to keep order and to battle against the tide of great political change that was just about to wash over the nation. That change would bring chaos to the status quo, it would bring the unknown. Her world was small, and she wanted her tiny life to remain 'just so'. However, I would like to think that I hold more inclusive views on race, given that my own background is so diverse and rich and the Trinidad I grew up in was a very different one to the one in which Ms. Gookool lived.

How much does this play resonate with you, given your own background and the pivotal moment in Trinidadian history covered by the story? The thing that one cannot get away from is the Trinidadian love and command of language. And this is what Mustapha has brought so beautifully to life in this and many of his plays. We love to talk and, boy!, we could talk about anything! This play reverberates through my bones when the language is spoken. The humour, the picong (verbal sparring), the parlance, the to-ing and fro-ing, the word play and the light-hearted one-upmanship affects me on a cellular level. Also, I am a product of the political change, the independence, the oil boom. My world was made large because of that moment in history. How can I not be in awe of that? And most importantly, this play places at its centre the Carnival - the greatest show on earth. My first foray onto the stage was at the age of 8, as a calypsonian. I sang the music of Carnival, hung out at the mas-camps, played in strips of fabric, glitter and glue. I have had my music played by a few 100-strong steel orchestras and performed in front of audiences of tens of thousands all waving flags and partying. I have sung for eight hours on a music truck accompanying the costumed revellers. Trinidad Carnival is in my blood, as much a part of my genetic make-up as the language. For me, being a part of this play was like someone striking a tuning fork and placing it at the base of my spine. From first reading, I have not stopped vibrating.

What it is like working with Paulette Randall and the cast? I have known and loved Paulette Randall for many, many years, but we have never had the opportunity to work together. I am so thrilled that she decided to have me, because there is something phenomenal about how she works. Her humour is second to none and her love of actors and the theatre is unquestionable. She is an understanding, phenomenally creative and inventive director and she inspires me daily. And these people I get to share these words with, gosh, I don't think I've stopped laughing since we started rehearsal. And they bring real fireworks to the proceedings. Their characters tickle me, terrify me, infuriate me, sadden me - this team and Mustapha's words are pure magic. It is a real pleasure to be working at the Orange Tree and to be here with a play that gives me so much joy.

Play Mas is on at the Orange Tree until 11 April For more information click here

Rehearsal photo by Robert Day

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Preparing costumes for Mustapha Matura's PLAY MAS, opening 11 March. Images from our Costume Supervisor Katy Mills

Find out more about Play Mas

#play mas carnival mustapha matura costume theatre trinidad orange tree theatre

Darcus Howe, legendary broadcaster, writer and civil liberties campaigner, came to visit the Orange Tree on Tuesday this week.

Originally from Trinidad, Howe arrived in England intending to study law, where he joined the British Black Panthers, the first such branch of the organisation outside the United States. He came to public attention in 1970 as one of the Mangrove Nine, when he marched to the police station in Notting Hill, to protest against police raids of the Mangrove restaurant.

Mr Howe, a long-time friend of our director Paulette Randall, came to talk to the Play Mas company about the political history of Trinidad. Darcus spoke to us about the origins of Carnival, the impact of the Second World War and the arrival of US soldiers in Trinidad, the climate of the country post-independence in 1962, and what it felt like to live under a State of Emergency.

He gave the company an incredible insight into this truly remarkable period in history and we all felt very honoured!

Find out more about the first major revival of Mustapha Matura's Play Mas, opening 11 March

#theatre paulette randall darcus howe trinidad play mas mustapha matura carnival black panthers

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