Frida Kahlo’s diary

Tracey Enim’s hellter fucking skelter

Maddy Costa invited Selma Dimitrijevic, Samantha Ellis and me to Dialogue about labels some time ago. While it’s a subject we all have to deal with, there was also something about the topic that made the conversation feel a little more like work than play. – Perhaps because we would prefer to talk about the work itself rather than its label. We are labelled, or required to label ourselves and our work for marketing purposes, funders, theatres, audiences, our peers… Is it possible to talk about work without assigning it a category? Are labels used to exclude and dismiss? Can a label be anything more than an attempt to describe what’s in the tin? Does a label come with a value judgement?

For now, I’m not thinking about whether the substance in the tin is good or bad or tasty or deserving of its label; I’m interested in how the label itself can affect us and the way our work is seen, treated and discussed.

‘It’s not really a poem is it?’ – A statement often heard in poetry workshops.

Mimi Khalvati has structured a workshop around this question. She hands out several short paragraphs telling us that some are poems, and some are prose. She allows us to debate which is which. She puts columns up on a big piece of paper – prose versus poetry….and asks us to explain what makes a particular piece one or the other. At the end of the session she demonstrates that the titles at the top of the two columns could just as well be swapped over. The only thing differentiating poetry from prose is line breaks. Or the fact that the writer has said it’s a poem. If we look at a poem that doesn’t look like a poem through the lens of poetry, poetry might change, ways of writing it might change, ways of talking about it, thinking about it, teaching it, analysing it, performing it…

If the response of the tutor to the statement ‘it’s not really a poem’ were to be ‘yes that’s true.’ The next step would be to move on and look at a poem that is really a poem. This is a poetry workshop, we’re looking at poems, if it’s not a poem then we don’t have to look at it, we don’t have to engage with it, we don’t have to challenge our preconceptions, we don’t have to expand our ideas of what poetry is, we can keep everything as it has been and as we think it should be. We own poetry and we decide what is or isn’t a poem.

Frida Kahlo and Tracey Enim were/are visual artists. One painted her own portrait (using a brush), the other painted her own portrait (using a bed) – however the similarities between them are greater than their differences. The fact that Enim is described with the same label used to describe Kahlo expands the form. If Enim (as just one example) had been somehow prevented from showing her work within the context of visual art then the term ‘artist’ and its related field would not have been challenged as it has, she wouldn’t have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize and everything would have been much more comfortable for the visual arts establishment (Brief daydream to imagine what the world would be like if Enim called herself a writer.)

If we decide that something isn’t what it says it is then we put it in someone else’s box, it won’t be disruptive and it won’t force us to re-examine anything, it becomes someone else’s problem.

If we invent a new category every time a piece of work doesn’t look like work that has been made under the same banner in the past, then we lose a dialogue with history, we lose the opportunity for expansion, boundary pushing, reinvention….and we avoid having to engage with it on the terms it invites us to…it becomes someone else’s problem.

There are processes at work in the arts. For instance the process of getting a play from page to stage (as it is often put) – if the work in question doesn’t fit that process, it’s easier to suggest the work finds other friends to play with, other contexts to exist within (devised theatre, perhaps) than to examine and change the process itself. Changing the process could mean a job either needs to change or it becomes redundant –it’s no wonder the establishment resists.

An audience member going to theatre who hasn’t been to the theatre before, arrives without a label and without past experiences of what that label refers to. Rather than bringing their experience of watching theatre into the theatre, a non-theatre going audience comes to the theatre (or other place where performance is going to happen) with their lives as the experience they watch the work in relation to. David Lane suggests we need more of how we walk into an art gallery with how we walk into a theatre. I agree, and would extend this to needing more of how we walk through our lives with how we walk into a theatre. The odd thing is, the more I perform work, the more I find that an uninitiated audience, a non-theatre going/spoken word/poetry audience is far more responsive, far less self censored in their response to the work than the initiated. They bring their life experience to it rather than their theatre/poetry making and watching experience.

I was chatting with Jo Bell about this after Wordsmiths & Co the other night. She was talking about the problem that labelling something ‘poetry’ puts off an audience who might love the work. Likewise, the label ‘spoken word’ can do the same. She’s enthusiastic about trying to bring an audience that doesn’t consider themselves a poetry audience to poetry events… people who go to music events, and art galleries… How do we stop the word ‘poetry’ from putting off audiences? I think it’s about changing the associations/preconceptions around the word itself, rather than finding a different one.

We also agreed that the ideal situation is not to need a label but to have a name, as Lyn Gardner wrote:

Punchdrunk’s co-production of The Duchess of Malfi with ENO may have been called an “opera”, but I bet that most of the audience didn’t much care. As far as they were concerned it was Punchdrunk….It is the artists that increasingly engender loyalty, not the institution that produces them.

But it does take some time to get to the stage when people will come to your work because it’s your work…that involves drawing a new label, your own name…

I remember a conversation with Holly Pester about labels. ‘What do you call yourself?’ Someone asked her. ‘A poet’ she replied. And the poetry establishment must accept this; it’s the only way for the form’s boundaries to be pushed (or in the case of poetry in this country, to be kept open…they were pushed years ago but forced to constrict again). ‘A poet’, she replied, and it was a small challenge, a small ‘why, do you think I’m not a poet?’

An hour earlier, when Holly and I were on stage, I’d been introduced with a slightly cautious string of labels, one of them ‘performance artist’. I’d so much have preferred just to be called a poet. For me it’s very simple, I write and perform poetry, and I also write plays. I wish to do the first within the field/establishment of poetry (which encompasses spoken word etc. etc.) and I wish to do the second within the context of playwriting.

The funny thing is, those of us who sit outside of traditional labels fight to reclaim them. While at the same time those more firmly placed under a label reject them – see ‘I don’t call myself a poet’.

On the subject of Holly Pester, I recently read an interview with her in 3am magazine in which she embraced labels and their changing, transforming, linking, accumulative meanings. When Steven Fowler asked how she would define her poetry she responded:

People can get either defensive or carried away around labels. I dig ‘em. I like thinking up new ones that mix-match media; Speech Poetry, Voice-driven Poetics, Intermedial Sound and Performance Poetry. But I’m not scared of just ‘poetry’. That’s mine too. ‘Avant-garde’ seems to be used quite territorially, in antagonism to the ‘mainstream’, like laying down the battle ground. And I’m guilty of using it in that way. But it is originally a military term so I suppose that’s fine. I’m wondering if you mean that there’s a discrepancy between the doing of avant-garde/experimental cross-genre practices and the reception or categorisation of them? I think the blurrings, the cross-overs, the intermedias and the hyphenated labels are important to both, as long as they don’t get stuck. They’re something that need to stay transient – and naturally seem to – for the sake of the work and its connectivity.

Perhaps it’s easy to get defensive or carried-away around labels because they are not easy, not easy going. Labels are political. We use labels to shape our world and our engagement with it. A label is used to evict, to dismiss, to ignore. When work doesn’t sit easily within the field it situates itself within, it is simpler to suggest it finds someone else to play with than to allow that work to change the rules of the game.

When we choose how we are described we have the opportunity to set the agenda, to ask the world we’re working in to look at our work through a particular lens and in relation to other work within the field. When we name ourselves we claim an identity that we can run with, when others name us we are often condemned to a box that prevents movement. The reclaiming of labels is empowering….queer, cunt, marriage, artist, playwright….

Labels often appear to refer to product rather than process. I am comfortable describing elements of my process as compositional and choreographic….but uncomfortable with being described as a musician or choreographer. Because I studied music for many years I know what being a musician or composer entails, I know that is not what I do and it’s not the context I wish my work to be viewed within, even though I use techniques and processes coming from that background. I’m more interested in simply describing the process as ‘writing’. I do a lot of writing on my own, but another part of my writing process happens collaboratively, in rehearsal, or through building a soundscape, or through games and ‘devising’. I’m interested in carrying over what we mean by ‘writing’ from the individual to the collaborative, from page to feet.

Maddy was surprised that both Samantha and I embrace the label ‘playwright’ – and choose it over ‘theatre maker’:

I’m really intrigued that Hannah and Samantha have both moved away from “theatre-maker” as a label for themselves, because in my head that has the openness one might want while “playwright” with its buried connotations of alone-in-the-garret feels more closed. No, actually, different from that: theatre-maker, to my mind, blurs, and has a possibility of all in this together.

For Maddy ‘theatre maker’ is wonderful because it is so open. I have nothing against being called a ‘theatre maker’ – I do use the term to describe myself quite often. I have nothing against it…partly because it is innocuous, I find it a little meaningless. It is unspecific. These are both its negative and positive properties. (I tried it out on a taxi driver and he thought it meant I build theatres.) I would choose to be called a playwright and director rather than theatre maker because I write and direct plays. I want to be commissioned to write plays and I want to be invited to direct them. I am also happy to be commissioned simply to make theatre….but that’s never happened….

If I call myself a ‘theatre maker’ the writing is invisible. Ruth Mitchell (on twitter) suggests that this is what she likes about the term, and that  it appeals to many artists because it ‘covers and ticks many boxes’:

I certainly don’t call myself one, [a writer] wouldn’t dream of it. Theatre maker covers up for the disciplines I am not so hot at.

Samantha talked about the ‘wright’ part of the word playwright, the craft within the word:

We’ve got this suffix “wright”, and we’re the only profession that’s kept that suffix apart from wheelwrights, and “wright” isn’t just writing; it contains the idea of making….So then I started thinking “playwright” is great because it also fights the idea that all we do is write in our garrets and then emerge for opening nights. The word “playwright” contains the idea that even when we’re dreaming up a story, from the very seed of an idea, we’re thinking about how many actors might do it, their entrances and exits, costume changes, set changes, where the interval might go. And all this stagecraft and collaborative thinking comes into its own when a director starts to take the play from page to stage.

I’d add that the stagecraft and collaborative thinking also might occur during the rehearsal process itself, the playwright might be involved in this, or the playwright might write a score for performance that is crafted in such a way it invites a director to wright with or in response to the text… Each playwright finds their own ways to wright.

I’ve only had to think about labels because so many different ones have been stuck on me, and occasionally I’ve experienced being labeled as a way of being rejected from the context with which I wish to engage.  (The literary manager calls me a performance artist, the poet calls me a theatre maker etc.)

I doubt that we’ll ever get to a place where the funding, reviewing, making and marketing of work is boundary crossing and label free. – We also have labels for career stage. My friend was quite surprised to see her Arts Council report littered with labels such as ‘mature artist’ – she’s in her thirties and thought she was ‘emerging’.

Those new overused labels are meaningless and only required for tick box funding purposes, but labels like ‘playwright’ and ‘dramaturg’ have power because they have history. To bring a label with a past into the present is to continue a journey. To abandon labels or use all embracing ones, is to avoid having to confront and question a lineage of work that in its time, was also fighting to be seen…fighting for validation, for its right to be viewed in the context it chose….It’s not really art, it’s not really a play, it’s not really poetry, it’s not really theatre….The fact that the work in question stood its ground and said ‘yes it is’ enabled artistic fields to develop, to widen, extend, challenge, question, morph.

‘Total Man’ part of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Commissioned by Penned in the Margins and Mercy.

Our tour starts on Friday! I’ll be performing alongside Ross Sutherland, SJ Fowler, music group ‘Outfit’ and special guests. Further details HERE

‘Total Man’ is based on the writings of Stan Gooch, who, in his book The Paranormal, describes himself as ‘a reasonably well-endowed psychic’. Gooch was a sociologist/occultist/psychologist and the author of thirteen books including the epic ‘Total Man’. He was one of the first exponents of the ‘hybrid-origin’ theory of evolution. Most of his books explore the theory that humans are the result of cross-breeding between Cro-Magnum and Neanderthal. This research can be traced back to an experience Gooch had during a seance in 1958; he saw what looked like a Neanderthal man, crouching in the corner of the room ‘breathing heavily, as if nervous’.

I’ve been in touch with Dr. Brent Logan, who corresponded with Gooch in the last years of his life. Gooch’s final years (he died in 2010) were spent living in a rented caravan in Swansea, surviving on income support pension. Dr. Logan has sent me copies of the letters, which provide an insight into Gooch’s mind, his depression, and his commitment to his work. Here are some previously unpublished extracts. The first is from 1992:

I have now published well over a million words, often to critical acclaim by in themselves influential individuals. I have never made any money, and have lived much of the time in what most westerners would describe as poverty. Furthermore, I have signally failed to influence either the academic establishment or the world of alternative, new age thought. I am far too revolutionary for the former, and far too critical for the latter. Heigh ho.

2003:

The reversals and set-backs throughout my career have been continuous, relentless and un-remitting, as to some extent you already know. It all goes far beyond the reach of chance.

And later in 2009 finally some proof (underlining Gooch’s)

Recent discoveries of bones and skeletons in Spain have proved that Neanderthal and Cro-magnon did interbreed… When widely separated species of animal cross breed the offspring have two conflicting sets of instincts, with which they struggle to come to terms. And that’s why we’ve got left-wing political parties and right -wing parties. If lions evolved there would only be one political party – the lion party. If horses evolved there would only be one political party – the horse party. But we have two opposed political parties. (And as I’ve said in my books, if members of the labour party and members of the Conservative party were examined there would be: more left-handedness among the former; a greater incidence of the big toe being shorter than the other toes; shorter average height; less male baldness; larger cerebellum; more red-headedness, and so on and so on…)

Time to measure those toes….

‘Less’ male baldness, did you say?

Reading Stan Gooch’s books has been a trial. As soon as I’m able to follow his reasoning, he’ll matter of factly mention something like vampires, as if they prove his point. He draws on everything: psychology, sociology, archeology, mythology, the paranormal….which makes his writing fascinating, but also impossible. It’s easy to laugh at Gooch’s theories, but if I’m honest, I believe in fate, and I’ve experienced a few things that would deserve a chapter in his book The Paranormal. As Gooch said, the only proof of the inexplicable is personal experience. And even if you do experience something, it’s much easier to ignore it than to attempt an explanation. No wonder Gooch often found himself tangled in Ariadne’s web.  Within his theories about the life of Neanderthals is an attempt to understand the contradictions of humankind.

Join me as I attempt to channel Gooch and dissect, reverse, layer and articulate his ideas and experiences:

10 MAY 2013   THE SAGE GATESHEAD

15 MAY 2013   ST GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL

17 MAY 2013   THE BASEMENT, BRIGHTON

18 MAY 2013   RICH MIX, LONDON

19 MAY 2013   THE CUBE, BRISTOL

22 MAY 2013   ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, MANCHESTER

23 MAY 2013   ARC STOCKTON

25 MAY 2013   NORWICH ARTS CENTRE

But now that we’ve gone through our development, rehearsal and production process, it has become a performance written in a space, with a creative team, and with you.

When my writing is occasionally published on a page it empties. As if the words have been stolen, type set, set in stone, an elegy, lost and concrete at the same time.

When I receive a book I have poems in, it sits for weeks before I can bear to look up my work.  When I eventually bring myself to do it, I skim them really quickly and never return to them after that.

I hate the finality. I suppose that the act of reading brings them alive again. I suppose when someone reads them they can live. But I don’t believe mine do, because I write for voice and space and people. Words can’t move when they’re trapped on a page.

Perhaps having a play published is slightly different, as the reader knows it is really just the blue print. I’d like to be able to give my plays to other people to play with. But still, the play text becomes final. A final word, I don’t want to have a final word on anything.

In conversation, in performance, we constantly adjust, to other performers, to space, to audience, even when it’s a quiet one. We adjust our bodies, faces, voices, intonation…it’s a constant search for communication. Even when the audience isn’t asked to respond verbally, it’s never a one sided conversation.

During the last few performances of The Disappearance of Sadie Jones at the Bike Shed Theatre, and during discussions afterwards, I felt the work being taken by an audience, taken into their imagination, their bodies…and what they translated was often more beautiful than anything we worked out the play was about.

The work is given a new life by the viewer, it is born, something of it is taken away and it might transform, and grow and become something else. A performance is a gift that is given in different shaped pieces to anyone who wants to take it home with them.

The audience member is an artist (yup, I’ve no problem with that word), the audience member is the most interesting artist at this stage in the process, because they are new, they are questioning, taking in, helping a birth, assembling and assimilating the work within themselves. The audience brings the final stage of the creative process to the work. In the end they are the best dramaturgs. Audience members help us to see the work fresh, to see it from many perspectives, to witness that it is continuing to be written, every night. The writing is never finished. 

 Stephanie Greer playing Sadie Jones. Photos by Eileen and Chris Long

Dear people who have come and seen ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’ at the Bike Shed Theatre this week.

We have our last two shows today. We’ve really enjoyed talking to you about the work in the bar afterwards. I was looking back over my original Arts Council application and one of the many things I pledged to do was to make a space on my blog for feedback about the show. So, taking a risk that I’ll get no comments here at all….here is that space.

One of the things we’ve discussed in the bar afterwards is that it’s a play you might want to go away and think about, to sleep on, maybe it’s a tricky one to sum up in a tweet…you don’t have to sum anything up here….questions, thoughts, experience, anything welcome, we’d love to hear from you….comment section on this post is open!

Stephanie Greer and Alan Humphreys. Photo: Eileen Long

On our second night in residence at the Bike Shed Theatre, David Lane held a discussion on progressive dramaturgy, and the dramaturgical processes we went on with The Disappearance of Sadie Jones. This is a transcript of the event. 

David began by reading a poem by Billy Collins. It is a poem also quoted in an article on dramaturgy by Mark Bly called ‘Pressing an Ear against The Hive’ (Theatre Topics, Vol.13, No.1)

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I asked them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the wall for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
Across the surface of a poem
Waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.

David went on to contextualise his work with quotes about dramaturgy and a brief history of the role. I am leaving these parts out and jumping straight to the meat. What follows is a slightly abridged transcription of the session:

David Lane: Sarah Dickenson describes the dramaturg as a ‘situational role’: it’s always going to be different depending on the project you are working on. I personally think about it in two ways. Every piece of theatre has a dramaturgy, made up of its composition – all the elements contained within it such as acting, light, sound, music, text, staging, how the audience is cast, how the audience move through the work imaginatively, intellectually, physically….and we use the word ‘dramaturgy’ to define it as a dynamic system: all of those forces working with one another in different combinations at different times throughout the piece. The other way of thinking about it is as a process….

Dramaturgs in the UK tend to be working with new writing but not solely. The thing that separates the dramaturg’s role from the director’s is that not all directors know how to work with a playwright from nothing to a 3^rd or 4^th draft of a play: that’s a key skill, and it involves working with every writer in a different way in order to help that writer write the work they want to write. One of the reasons I’ll end up working freelance is that writers want someone to work with them who isn’t a theatre, because perhaps they feel they will get feedback that’s just about them and their work, rather than feedback delivered in the shadow of a particular artistic agenda.

I’ve worked in two capacities: the first is what I call a ‘desk dramaturg’. I do a lot of work with the script and writer, over the phone or in a room, with the writer, director, whole company….it will be about structure… you can see on the walls around us some of the ‘desk’ work, which is about introducing the play to the whole company by looking at its composition, what organises it, what makes it tick as a piece of work.

The other role is a ‘floor dramaturg’, or a production dramaturg…someone who is in rehearsal with actors, director, perhaps the writer – looking at it kinaesthetically, looking at gesture, arrangement of space, light, sound, stage, and how those languages are cohering with the text to guide an audience through a play, to shape a journey for the audience through the piece.

Different dramaturgs use different metaphors, I know one who always talks about cooking, creating a recipe…I’ve developed a metaphor recently, the thing that fascinates me about plays is that every play has its own map, is unique and the minute you walk into a play and say ‘I know what you should be and if you don’t do that you’re not a play’ then you’re in massive trouble, you’re going to miss signing the Beatles. By that I mean missing the play that’s doing something progressive because it speaks a different language from the one you’ve learnt, the one you’ve decided, in your infinite wisdom, is the only way to write a play. As soon as anybody in the theatre does that you’re not listening to the play – you are listening to what you are saying the play is.

One of the things that struck me about Hannah’s work is that it really required me to be inquisitive and to trust that something of real sophistication and confidence was going on in that script which fascinated me but I didn’t understand. I had two choices at that point. I could say ‘you need to write a three act structure here because this is a total mess and I don’t get it’ or I needed to sit down and say ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, I don’t quite get it but I want to understand it and I believe there is something in here that I’ve not seen before.’ That ended up being the journey we went on.

I look at the mapping of the play, the logic it has, what are its rules, how does it work, what are its organising principles…around what is this writing organised …what’s driving it, where are its motors…is it around a person, a political idea, a theme, a philosophy …I think about plays as a universe….everything in a play is there for a reason, so it’s there to exert some kind of force or pressure on another element somewhere in the play….whether that is an object, an idea, a line of dialogue, a gesture , it does something…everything in the script has an active purpose…an object exerts a pressure on character….location on person…..there is a dynamic universe of elements whizzing around, knocking together. I look for tension, rhythm and tempo and ask what that tells me about how ideas are positioning themselves…. I aim to learn the language of the play and to never go into a play assuming I know how to speak its language.

Stephanie Greer. photo: Eileen Long

Every play should be like exploring a foreign language for the first time, and you very quickly discover structural echoes, things that are similar to your own language…it’s very rare I will sit down and read a play and not know any of its languages. I will know some of them, normally I will know 99 per cent of them. I think with this play I probably recognised about 60 per cent and wanted to know what the other 40 per cent were.

It’s about reading from the bottom up, asking what the play is trying to do ….and to approach it on its own terms. If you approach it from the top saying ‘this is what a play is’ then firstly you’ll really annoy writers and secondly you will only ever make work that looks like what you say a play is.

There is a short essay by Elinor Fuchs called ‘Visit To A Small Planet’ (Theater,
Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2004): the principle that Fuchs introduces is that you come to character last, and that’s a really different concept to how most of us go into a play…Normally we ask who is it about, what is their journey, what do they want?

Fuchs asks that you go into the play first looking at the world, because if you go in looking for character you’re going to miss the world that they are in. So her methodology is about the world they are in: not landscape in a physical sense, but how does the world work, does it obey laws of physics, are we in different places at once: reality, dream, a hinterland of imaginations, and reality at same time….How is the world socially or physically organised? The idea is that you try to get an understanding of how the world of the play works before judging what the people in it are doing.  They can only ever be operating in relationship to the world around them.

We have a real obsession with character driven drama in this country…we’ve learned from the schools of Aristotle, Freud, Jung, Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, who all place character at the centre. Actor training is delivered in the same way. A lot of actor training looks at character, psychological motivation, characters in a causal world, time moving in one direction: obstacle, journey, decision, choice, success, failure, play ends…We are deeply engrained that that’s the way a play works, that it hooks around character and it’s not actually true…which brings me to the progressive bit…

Tori Haring-Smith wrote an article called Dramaturging Non-Realism (Theatre Topics, Vol. 13, No. 1). She was looking at plays by Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anne Bogart: plays that don’t exist in the ‘real world’. She plays with the vocabulary we use to talk about plays. If  ‘character’ only means someone like you or me then you are cutting out loads of options of what a person on stage could be. You can have roles, figures, ghosts, echoes, outlines, a character that represents a myth, a city…if you think of character as one concept it’s limiting. Likewise language doesn’t just mean dialogue, but how text arrives in the piece…narrative doesn’t mean story necessarily, and in fact narrative, plot and story can be viewed as different things. I believe you have to start thinking about how they can be defined more loosely to allow a bigger conception of what a play can be.

The Disappearance of Sadie Jones

Julian Meyrick wrote a fantastic piece about dramaturgical development…he looks at plot, language and character being the three elements of a play but defines them in a very particular way. Plot is referred to as any sequence that arranges material in time and place: that’s not the same thing as story, that’s sequence….you might have a sequence of images, a room that’s empty that fills up: that’s a narrative of space, but it’s not plot in the way we think about character-driven, causal action. He then describes character as the points of deep understanding in a text – I think his exact wording is ‘the accumulative development of thought or feeling in time’ – ….so, if you think about Ibsen, Chekhov…we’ll come to understand their plays through these huge moments of choice the characters make….at those moments, the play contracts and action, theme, meaning all seem to condense into one choice, a moment of deep understanding….Meyrick’s idea is that this moment of deep understanding – this point of contraction – could come from music, image, the relationship between an object and people on stage…not necessarily human beings as character.

Finally language does not just mean dialogue….theatre might contain the language of space, light, sound, objects, puppetry, architecture….all these are our resources as a writer….sometimes those languages speak more clearly than the language I’m using now. Meyrick comes to language as that which serves plot and character: it’s ‘the substance, verbal, visual or behavioural, by which formal coherence is expressed’. Very often in plays, the world is made coherent simply because people are speaking dialogue – but there are many other ways that a play can make its world coherent to an audience.

I think this relaxing of vocabulary in the way we think about plays is one of the first ways of thinking about playwriting and dramaturgy progressively…because you are opening up your conception of what a play can be, which is important in terms of theatre being progressive and encompassing more ways of telling stories….look at multi-platform work using iPhones, projected text, online activities, multi-platforms that require new ways of thinking about what a play is.

I was recently running a course in adaptation at the Bristol Old Vic and one of the tasks I gave writers was to adapt a Picasso painting….though I was very specific about this. Don’t use it as inspiration for something you’d normally do – actually study the Poetics of the painting. What would it look like if it were a play? What happens to character and place and time and structure? We were looking at the the later Picasso…cubist, refracted images…Why can’t we write a play like that? Why do most plays look like photos not Picasso paintings? What are poetics of the image, of a Picasso painting?

You might walk into the Tate Modern with a certain set of interpretive tools: are these tools the same ones you expect to take into a theatre? What do you expect from an art gallery in terms of meaning, and how is that different to what you expect when you walk into a theatre? I suppose it’s my contention that we need more of how we walk into art gallery in how we walk into the theatre.

One of the things we talked about on that course was that as soon as you are in a theatre and a human walks on stage, you are working against an assumption of us being in reality…there’s a human in front of us in our real world and you have to work with or against that….a Picasso painting is its own thing and is not sitting in relation to anything apart from what we bring to it. In theatre we expect this thing over there, on the stage, to do all the work for us….I’m not sure that’s the only way to encounter writing, or to write a play.

With Picasso we are immediately removed from assumptions of realism and naturalism…it’s got its own world, its own rules…it is expressive of its subject. Someone criticised Picasso by saying he couldn’t paint a tree. He replied ‘no, I can’t: but I can paint the feeling you get when you look at a tree’, and I think that brings us back to The Disappearance of Sadie Jones.

I think what Hannah is really good at is writing the feeling you get when something happens rather than the thing itself: that’s the lens this play gives us on the world. And I think that’s a really hard thing to take as an audience sometimes, because you are anticipating a play to give meaning – in an art gallery you’re not. Where are the plays that sit in the middle of that? That say ‘move towards me audience, maybe you will come out with multiple meanings and that’s OK.’

Jackson Pollock, 1912 – 1956. Number 7, 1951

If you take a Jackson Pollock – who holds the authoritative meaning on what a Pollock painting means? We are uncomfortable of theatre doing the same thing – containing hugely multiple meanings, expressing the act of expression itself – we often think with plays that there is something wrong with it, because it’s not being clear. It’s performance art, or installation, or ‘not a play’, which is reductive to this idea of progressive dramaturgy.

On the Old Vic course we also talked about structure using the language of music: recitatives, phrases, movements, sequences, chorus…all of these elements exist in writing and help structure work but often what we watch on stage is linear, with characters doing big things, making big choices that make sense to us at the end. Which I’m not sure is the only way to create stories.

So that’s just to give an introduction to in some way, the openness that was required for me coming to Hannah’s play. When I read the first draft I was excited because I knew that if I were to work on the play with Hannah it would really push me, I wanted to move towards the work and work it out, it was a challenge. One of the first things I did was to write down loads of words that came to me, and we ticked them all off – not a checklist, but an assurance that the two of us believed the play was exploring the same sorts of things….it was about all of those twenty things, yet I still had loads of questions about what was holding the play together.

Alan Humphreys playing Danny

Taking Fuchs’ idea of worlds, the way I organised the draft in my own head before I had a notes meeting with Hannah was to basically section off the play when I thought we moved from one world to another. The play moves between different worlds, worlds of imagination, worlds of reality, worlds of the imagination that are controlled by characters, worlds where the characters were out of control, worlds that might be at odds with the previously established time-frame of the play. There are also moments in the past that we re-visit but are fractured in some way. We’re moving between lots of worlds, so I suggested this was the organising principle of the play. So why is that, and where do we go from there…? Which is a good place to bring Hannah in…why did you want to work with a dramaturg and where were you in your process with this play?

HS: I think at the time David came to work with me, I’d actually written the play two or three years before that and had taken some time re-writing and re-drafting, and I had sent it out everywhere. I purposefully didn’t write stage directions into the script, I wanted collaborators to come in and bring their worlds to it, I wanted to work with a director and designer and I didn’t want to set what all of those things would be, I wanted that collaboration…I sent it to theatres, the usual new writing places, I got some good feedback, some ‘completely didn’t get it’ feedback, and I was really at the stage of giving up…on the play…But I also knew that if I didn’t do this play I would struggle to write the next thing…I had to see it.

So I invited David in, because he was the only person I’d met who looked at the play on its own terms. I had experienced various meetings with people who asked me a stock set of questions which I wasn’t able to answer, didn’t want to answer, and couldn’t answer until we saw the play with performers, until we’d gone through the kind of process that we’ve gone through now, which has been a month of time with actors as well as a lot of time looking at the work. It seemed that if I couldn’t give answers at that point then I was demonstrating that the play wasn’t working, I also found it hard to find someone who would give it the time it needed. I would have a meeting with a literary manager or director and they would say ‘I’m afraid I’ve only had time to have a quick read, but this is what I think…’ They didn’t say ‘this is wrong,’ but the way they approached me was hostile towards the play, and me; in some cases I wasn’t being seen as a theatre maker but as a kind of beginner writer who needed to be told how to do it, or as a spoken word performer who should stick to that and devising.

Stephanie Greer, photo by Eileen Long

DL: If you ever read a play properly it should take half a day minimum…I can spend 5-6 hours on a script, or a whole day, and only then do I feel confident enough to talk to the writer about it. If I don’t go in understanding it as best as I can then I’m no use to them, I can go in with questions, but in order to see it on the play’s term and the writer’s terms, you need to read it at least three times.

HS: Yes, so you came into our meeting having read it three times, with three sets of notes after each reading. And that was different to how anyone else had approached the work. I’ve been thinking about this, and partly it’s because David is great and would do that for anyone, but also I was paying him for his time myself, whereas everyone else I’d met, it was usually their job of course to meet writers, but I felt because I had said to David ‘I want to work with you and I will pay you for your time,’ that then I really got the time.

Asking and paying someone to work with you is very different to the feeling of being a lowly writer going to a theatre for that meeting. David’s approach to the play was entirely different and restored my faith in it, and everything that he said about it, in that first meeting was just such a relief…that’s what I thought I’d done! Thank you! And his response was the opposite of the other responses I’d had. It looks weird on the page, and others had said, it’s just poetry, there’s no characters, there’s no emotion it’s just clever…but David saw the emotion in it, on the page, it’s very hard to see that and hard to read a play that doesn’t look like a play. And that’s not really a criticism of those readers, because I find it very difficult as well, it is really difficult to read a play that is not written for the page. So many plays are written for readers who know how to read a play and know what they think it should look like, but there’s a big difference between writing a play for the page and writing for the stage.

DL: Just as an industry perspective –often, script reading is one of the first jobs you get in a theatre, and I think that’s really problematic, if it’s one of the first jobs you get, what are you bringing to that process? If I’d read Hannah’s play when I was a script reader at twenty-two, I probably would have said the same things, but reading at at thirty-three after eleven years of writing my own stuff and working as a dramaturg as well, I knew what its theatrical potential could be, and that’s what you should be looking for…if it works on page that’s fine I’ll go away and read it, but how is it going to work in space and time with actors? So after we had that meeting Hannah said, I’ve got some money to do two weeks R&D at Beaford.

HS: I applied for money for the whole thing, first I got development money from Jerwood and I used that to apply to the Arts Council …because I had realised, no one’s going to accept this, no one’s going to produce it, I really want to do it, I’ve got to do it myself, direct it myself, and I’m going to get the money. And that’s actually a brilliant position to be in as writer and director, I can choose who I work with and can do the project on my own terms. Basically that involved three weeks development, two weeks at Beaford arts and one at CPT….Then we’ve gone quite quickly into this production, since last week. It’s a very empowering thing for writers to have some kind of control over your own process….because I’ve done quite a bit of work in theatre and performance, and studied directing, I’ve got some of those tools that a lot of writers are nervous about, but it’s very important to find a way to see your work and not just write play after play after play that doesn’t get produced.

DL: So we met up, Hannah said, I’ll pay you to come in for first day and a half. In our first meeting I asked open questions – what does success look like at the end of R&D? What images do you have in your head about how we work on it? What does the room look like? And through those open questions I devised a process that would make the dramaturgy of the play visible, in the room. That’s what this stuff around us on the walls is – making the dramaturgy visible.

Because part of our concern was that all of those things Hannah has described about literary managers, script readers, the things that I’ve talked about in terms of having quite a narrow conception of what a play is….might we have performers in the room who are also having those struggles, those fears? So one of the first things we did was ask the actors to write on post it notes what they were most frightened about and excited about, and there were a lot of things ‘what if I don’t get the play?’ ‘what if I don’t understand the characters?’ ‘what if I don’t get how Hannah’s work is meant to work?’.

So we got rid of all of that at the very first stage and found ourselves on an even keel, all five of us sitting around the room going ‘we need to work out how this play operates and what its universe, world is so we can discover a common language and vocabulary’, that’s what we wanted….a way of talking about the work, because talking about ‘story’ or ‘plot’ wasn’t going to work, that’s not what drives the play. The play is driven by experience, image, memory, gesture, musicality, poetry, dreamscapes, those are not  ‘plot’, in the way that we think about cause and effect, linear plot…so we did a couple of processes…we had a read through but what we asked the actors to do after they read was to respond on paper, and brilliantly, they nearly all drew pictures, that says a lot about the play, the things that resonates are images rather than words…

We wanted to know what the play meant to the actors in room, what did they think they were making, all of those things were consolidated into this…I made a record of what the five of us agreed….skeletons and outlines, clocks and circles, a sequence of progression rather than a plot, we see things from different perspectives, it’s a play about someone’s insides…This was just the first day, trying to work out what everyone in that room agreed on about the play, what was contained in the play.

The other thing we did was we tasked everyone in the room with breaking the play down into movements or phases, where did they feel there was a shift between one thing and another? Just to see what they thought was organising the play…We got back together and my job was to navigate these perspectives into a common consensus on how we moved from one place to another, we ended up with a working understanding of the play’s composition….I took that away over night and drew the play on a page, so this is something I’ll do with my own writing…map the play out, so you can see…we ended up with four movements, which were broken down…We had 17 sequences of something in the play…it enabled us to understand the play’s structure collectively, to make it visible, available to everyone in room…that was what I did on first day, find a way of helping the company access the play and its construction.

I’ve only discovered today that this was then produced….Taking the principle of mapping the company did this…it’s very long…let’s put it down that way…(unravelled on table) can I put you on the spot Lizzie…could you tell us what this is….

Lizzie Crarer (actor): It’s funny looking at this now as it’s actually quite sparse, we did it again at the beginning of last week and it’s much more detailed…So basically it started to become clear that there was some linear narrative, a real time real life sequence of events that happened to these people….which as performers we needed to know as well…On one level you need to know who these people are and what they are doing so that you can then see what the strange associations between things are…so I think this side is what’s going on in the imagination and the upper side is what we worked out what had actually happened to the characters..

DL: One of the definitions I read at the beginning is appropriate: ‘the dramaturg is facilitator of dramaturgical thinking’ – that thinking was applied again at the end of the process, in my absence. Looking at this now it occurred to me that the play has an associative structure: what I mean by that is you have moments that brush against one another….you are required to make associations between a gesture in minute twelve that comes back in minute sixty seven…an object, a line, relates…you are moving through a world picking up on connections, associations, lines, phrases…something Hannah is very insistent about is that it is OK for an audience to come out with different understandings of the play they have just seen, and that they are experiencing something, not just watching something…

I suppose I will say a couple of things that have happened over the time from starting at Beaford to going into production and working as a ‘floor dramaturg’ in the last two weeks. I’m also interested to hear from Lizzie and Stephanie too about their experiences as actors…but certainly, a couple of key changes occurred through having an outside eye coming back into process….There are a few moments of narration in the play, it’s a tiny tiny thing, but I felt that the audience needed this narration in the past tense rather than present: it’s a common thing to create an off-stage world for the audience, but you have to be very careful about how you position it in space and time in our imaginations, because if you get it wrong we get totally confused and we lose it. I was insistent about the audience being able to position this off-stage world which was being revisited….but the narration of what we were watching was delivered in the present tense. So we switched it and those moments transformed…

I suppose those interventions have been co-directorial but also keeping a close eye on the text, and saying to Hannah, I really think we need this bit of text lifted up as it’s an anchor for the audience, it’s a moment when we are going to make those synapse connections….thinking about gesture on stage…allowing the audience to map the play in the same way we did at Beaford. We need to go into that space and to come out feeling that we can map that experience, going ‘I’ve got a map of that play’ and it means this: those maps might be different person to person, but that doesn’t matter. Is that fair?

HS: Well I think personally I don’t need people to be able to map the play, I think that would be quite hard actually, on a first viewing, but I want them to be able to feel it, and to come out feeling that something has changed in the gut…and then when they remember the play to remember that sense of being in a particular place in a particular atmosphere and what it felt like…

DL: I suppose maybe mapping doesn’t necessarily mean tying down narrative. I suppose by mapping I mean that you come out having been able to connect things, and, having been given that opportunity – perhaps through us identifying those anchors, those associations, and putting them more at the forefront of the production language – we are therefore able to feel more deeply those emotions you want us to be feeling.

HS: Yes, and it could be making connections between events happening on stage or between what you’ve experienced yourself or seen yourself and connecting that with what’s on stage. I love seeing work that enables me to write as a viewer….When I used to watch a lot of dance work, it was as if streams of text were coming out of my head provoked by the relationships I was seeing on stage, and for me it was telling me lots about what it is to be human. I think if something you are seeing triggers or tells you something about how you feel or resonates…that’s exciting…

I think everyone has a different mind, a different way of thinking; ‘mapping’ could be the way a lot of people think, but other people don’t…I was going to say, something to mention is that I didn’t understand the play either, it wasn’t that I understood it and no one else got it , it was that I liked it, but I didn’t really understand it and it has taken me a long time to get to the understanding of it that I’ve got now, now I feel confident and clear about what it is. I think I knew all of that intuitively, I had it in me, but it took quite a long time to piece things together, and when we got there it was very exciting, because that’s the process of constructing meaning and understanding, which is  the same process which happens when you watch work. Because I wrote it from an emotional place… I had this thing, I liked it, I didn’t want to re-write it to make it make sense, I wanted to understand what I had written and it did go through different drafts, but not the kind of drafts we are told to write, not drafts imposed by an outside idea of what a play is, but drafts that helped the play become what it was.

DL: One more thing about structure….I don’t think dramaturgs or dramaturgy necessarily holds the elixir of amazing theatre: it’s theatre, it happens all the time anyway, there are many directors brilliant at dramaturgy, it’s part of what they do.

There’s something about form I wanted to demonstrate with three [different shaped] glasses. Say you’ve go a certain amount of content in a play, and that’s the amount of content there….. I can put that same content in this glass here or this glass here or this glass here, but each of those containers will tell you a completely different story about what that content means…there are different associations with each shape. Something that I’m really interested in with plays is looking at expressive structure: structure is not a stiff thing you hook content onto but it is active, it does something, forming the structure of play is part of how meaning is constructed. Caryl Churchill is fantastic at doing this, the shape of her plays, the form of her plays, is part of what they mean, it’s not just that those plays are in three acts, boom, done…

Something that Hannah does with The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is that structurally it’s incredibly sophisticated, because the shape of the play expresses….to me it’s the closest thing to that ‘Picasso play’ that I’ve read. It expresses an emotional experience and uses different shapes to do that.

LC: You were asking about the experience for the performer….the word ‘mid wife’ came to mind, the dramaturg’s role is like delivering a baby, certainly that initial few days in Beaford, it’s interested being reminded about it because I think it set the tone for the way in which we were to approach play, which was establishing an attitude of openness, inquisitiveness, curiosity…which I think is something that Hannah is excellent at doing, which is being very objective, ruthlessly objective of your own work…but I think it’s really good to include performers in that and having a dramaturg in the room opens up that dialogue and it’s a really great starting point, and then again last week and this week, it’s been really helpful to have someone who is not the director, not the producer, but an objective third party to come in and ask helpful questions which you can get lost in when you’ve got into your own process…we’ve created this world, we’ve gone into it, it makes total sense to us now! Well not total sense…but we’ve built a kind of logic and it’s really useful to have someone say.…have you thought about this?

DL: Watching you do a run through on Tuesday, you could see how the physical, vocal, spatial language had absorbed this structural understanding…it was amazing to watch actually, before the lights or sound or props were in the mix the performers’ bodies and voices were moving us between worlds, moving us between dimensions in the play: that was amazing, you found a way to move between these sequences just by being performers in the space.

Stephanie Greer (actor): For me it was a bit different because I wasn’t in Beaford or at CPT so it feels like I’ve been involved in this for a while but actually that’s not true…it’s for two weeks…but I was really glad that we had someone come in…I think if you have a writer who is also director….I think Hannah is the best person to direct this piece, but equally Hannah knows everything about this more than anyone else and actually it was really good for someone to come in and be really clear about what is going on, so he’d be like, OK, the audience don’t need to know what that is but there is clarity, whatever that may be, for us…I don’t know whether my lack of knowledge of what happened at Beaford was useful for the process, but it was great to have someone else who hadn’t been in every single day of the process to share that with.

DL: Julian Meyrick said you can only experience a play or script fresh once, everything after that is decay: and it’s the hardest job as writer, director, actor, to revisit and keep fresh that first impression of what you are watching, and that’s the role that I had to take into the room, I needed to imagine I’m watching this as an audience member for the first time….again…so coming in and out of the process with a month and then 3 weeks then 4 days between watching it helped me to do that, helped me to come back to it and watch the broad sweep of the piece and pick out those moments where I didn’t understand something or catch something, or something could be accentuated…trying to think like an audience member….

So we’ve got twenty-five minutes for questions or comments….

Question from floor: I just wondered what process you went through to select performers, because that must be very important…what was their understanding about what they were about to do?

HS: I was crazy lucky, I still can’t believe my luck with this team. I did this massive audition about a year ago, and I just put out a call myself, I didn’t go through agents, or casting directors or anything, just a call on the Arts Council Jobs website and Ideas Tap, and I got hundreds of applications, and I didn’t know how to choose, who to invite to audition, it was really hard, I’m sure there was something a bit random about it.  The audition was really about getting the actors to play with the text, I didn’t really tell them anything about the text, I didn’t know how to talk about it at that stage yet either, but I do think it was useful to run workshop auditions where people were working together and experimenting with the text and I think …well Lizzie just came in and she was Kim, one of the characters, which was amazing, but also I knew that Lizzie ‘got’ the play.

Of course actors will always say ‘I really love the play’ if they want the part, but I saw that Lizzie honestly did really love it, or get it, and because so few people had ‘got’ it, on the page, that was very important, and I just loved what she did. And I had another actor (Kathryn O’Reilly) already on board…turned out she played Sadie during our development process, but Stephanie was in the same audition with Lizzie, so when I was looking back over audition tapes, when Kathryn wasn’t able to go forwards with the production…there was just something about how Stephanie tasted the words, something about how she approached the language, that made me think – yeah I think we’ll work really well, I think this will be great, and it was such a good decision. Stephanie has only been here for two weeks, and she came to the first day of last week having learned all her lines…the entire play, it was astonishing.

LC: And it was the hardest text I’ve ever had to learn.

HS: She just knew it! Alan was in that same audition, and it is kind of interesting that I’ve ended up with three actors who were all in the same audition and worked together… I’ve got a team who are all really nice people to work with which is partly who you choose, you bring people in you get on with but also about making sure the process from the beginning is open…and it had to be…and in a way I was quite vulnerable, being the director, because I also didn’t know what it was…I was there saying ‘I don’t know’, I don’t quite know how to work on this, I would get up in the morning and be running the day but not really with any idea of how it was going to go, and I’ve never experienced that before, I found it exciting not to know what I was doing and because I’m lucky to have such generous people in the room, we’ve discovered how to do it over the process…so now I feel very confident with it, but I do think if you know exactly what you’re doing…if you know what you’re going to write before you write it, if you know how you’re going to write it, if you know what it is when you’ve written it and you know exactly how to direct it then what’s the point? Then you haven’t done anything new.

SG: I think it’s worth saying as well that if you direct your own work then you do have the choice of who you work with.  I found it really strange actually how little directors and theatres care about who the writer wants in the play, so you can have worked with a writer in development of the script, and they will be saying to the director ‘please see this person for this role’ and the director will say OK yeah fine, and not do that and not go with them…the writer can then feel they’ve got no control over their work.

Question from floor: I want to ask about the process of the performing, so you got this piece of paper and you wanted to know what actual action is happening to this person in the real world…and then there was the imaginative world, and you had these parallel lines running…and I wanted to ask whether you as a writer, were surprised about anything your actors found….and was it a journey you yourself had made prior to trying out….?

HS I had done it but not in such a clear way, I had an idea going into the meeting with David that this is a linear thing over forty eight hours but it wasn’t completely filled in and I enjoyed doing that with the actors…I think what surprises me and what I don’t do is back story…what had happened before this play starts, and definitely when I talked to Stephanie, she was talking about how Sadie grew up, and what her mother was like, and what she’d experienced in childhood and how she’d adapted to that, all of these things we hadn’t really talked about but it all rings true. That’s something that I don’t tend to think about so much.

LC: It’s a two way thing, because as an actor you want to know who this person is, and that’s prejudice too, about character being primary…so actually there’s a lot we have to chuck out to meet you in this work, and work out a different way…a way that is more akin to music…and sometimes this play is just a musical  score…it feels like that..

HS: It goes though various stages, I think we got to a stage where actors were asking a lot of questions like ‘why am I doing this?’ ‘Where am I?’…And I couldn’t really answer because…well, you’re in the imagination or, it’s kind of a dream and it doesn’t make sense and there isn’t logic in this place… and I felt we were getting trapped, and I think it was Kathryn who said ‘you’re the director, what do you want?’ And I went away and came back and said ‘I want us to treat this like a piece of music’ and that was very helpful, for a while. We went through a logical process of what’s going on stage, then a musical stage, then we looked at the body, physicality…to see what that does to meaning and that in a way moved us towards and away from the play.

Where we are now I think has taken elements of all of that but I wouldn’t say now that we are treating the play as a piece of music because I think what I’ve discovered is that if you do that, without a sense of character and emotional journey, that’s when it becomes what people were telling me it was. I think the musical parts should be communicating something about the inner world of the characters or emotion in this particular play, so it’s been a weird layering up of processes, and now those layers have brought us here.

DL: The director Katie Mitchell has a process she talks about in her book, On Directing, where she sits down with a play and goes through it scene by scene or unit by unit and asks, what are the things that are facts that I can pull out and what questions, or impressions have I got, and I think that’s something I did…What are the things I feel are facts, what are impressions…the reason I do that…the audience goes into the theatre with very little, the title, maybe a strapline, the blurb, everything after that is accumulation, you are accumulating knowledge so dramaturgically that role of going in and watching over and over is abut wiping the slate clean and starting from nothing…again…and what’s building up, section by section…this is what I mean by mapping in the brain…you’re accumulating and all that time trying to make sense of accumulation…which things are sitting up, where are the anchors, the moments when I go ‘I get that’…where are those moments through the play, if we hit those, the bits in between can cope with being multiple in their meaning, and undefined.

The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is on at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter until 20th April. It will tour in the Autumn.

David Lane is a playwright and freelance dramaturg based in Bristol. He is regularly working with the Egg in Bath, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Goldsmiths College in London and as a workshop leader with Bristol Old Vic. He has been commissioned to write and adapt for young companies at Theatre Royal Plymouth and Salisbury Playhouse and for rural touring with Forest Forge. He has written articles on dramaturgy in the journal Studies in Theatre and Performance; his book Contemporary British Drama was published by Edinburgh university Press in 2010 and a feature on playwright Jim Cartwright is included in Modern British Playwriting: The Eighties by Methuen Drama. He is convenor of Final Projects on the MA Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College and has taught modules in dramaturgy, playwriting and text and performance at Exeter University, City University, Brunel and Sussex. He is also part-time coordinator of Theatre Writing South West, which has been supporting and developing new writing in the region since 2004.

‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’ photo (and lighting) by Gary Bowman

I was introduced to the idea of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg while making performance in Amsterdam ten years ago. I’ve started thinking about the dramaturg as a kind of guardian of meaning. A dramaturg ‘reads’ a performance and makes associations, connections, constructs narrative, identifies what drives the work and how the world it conjures up functions. There are various definitions of ‘dramaturg’ – different in different countries and disciplines, but basically the etymology of the word sums it up: drama = action, aergon= rules/workings. Dramaturgy = how the action works.

David Lane’s role as dramaturg on this project had three parts, the first, to help get a handle on the script before rehearsals, the second, to plan ways of mapping out and getting a handle on the script, the world, the characters at the beginning of our development process with actors and the creative team, and the third, to watch run throughs/rehearsals and to help keep what was happening on stage on track with what we wanted to communicate. David helped us to uncover the meanings that were under the surface of the play, and then once we’d discovered them, he helped us to keep them visible.

Stephanie Greer, photo by Eileen & Chris Long

It was hard for me to maintain the kind of distance needed from the work. At some stages in the process I was just so delighted by what the actors were doing that I didn’t realise what we were losing. It took me a while (years) to uncover what I already knew about the work …I didn’t know it consciously.

I invited David Lane to be the dramaturg on this project because he read the script on its own terms. He saw it as something that he didn’t understand, but rather than being put off by that he wanted to know more about it and look closer. It’s the kind of play that needs to be read several times, which takes a good few hours. That doesn’t mean it needs to be seen many times, but it’s not written for the page, and although many people will say that of course all plays are written for performance…I disagree.

There are various development processes out there, ways of working, unwritten rules, structures and  hierarchies that somehow impede on what and how a writer writes. It’s quite unusual to be able to devise your own process. I needed to find our own way of developing this piece because it’s not a play that will work in a read through, a rehearsed reading, a three week rehearsal process, it’s not easy to discover how to work with this play, how to re-write it, how to direct and act it, or what it means. That’s why we’ve learned so much along the way.

I wrote a play that I didn’t understand. This is probably the biggest reason I needed David’s help. I didn’t understand the play, but I loved it. Every time I read it, it did something to me. But I had no distance from it at all. I was beginning to worry that the feedback I had received might be true. I thought it was an emotional play, I thought the characters had emotional journeys, it certainly affected me emotionally, and knew I’d written it right from the gut, but on the page people were just seeing it as poetic, literary, clever….(heavy criticism in this country).

photo: Eileen & Chris Long

I didn’t understand the play because I didn’t plan it at all. I didn’t think about theme or character or structure before writing it. I had read plenty of ‘how to write a play’ books, but found that going into writing with all of that in mind just stunted my ability to write. I would bore myself before I got to ten pages. If I’m planning out what I’m going to write in advance, then it’s going to be predictable and unoriginal. I don’t think well with that part of my brain. But when I let my unconscious take over I was able to write something more complex and emotionally ‘true’ than anything I could have planned.

I wrote ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’ as a stream of consciousness. I wrote it from an emotional, physical impulse. I wrote it in one go, and then spent the next three years trying to figure out what it was. It was a protest play. A protest against the plays I was seeing, against the voices in my head telling me how I should be writing, against a realisation that no one was going to produce my work anyway so I may as well write whatever the hell I wanted. It was drawn from my own unconscious and emotional experiences – I’m only realising to what extent now I’m seeing it in front of an audience.

Often a writer writes a play, and then the dramaturg or whoever, takes them through a process of ‘development’ which helps them to find out what it’s really about, and then armed with this knowledge the playwright returns to the work and makes it more coherent, makes it fit a structure  that everyone ‘gets’, makes it work on the page. We didn’t do that with this play.

That isn’t to say I didn’t do any re-writing, one of the first things I did was get rid of the large chorus of tall thin people…. But I didn’t start adjusting things with the aim of clarifying meaning until we’d spent a month rehearsing/exploring the work in performance. David describes the later changes as ‘anchors’ – little clues that will help the audience construct their own narratives and images in response to the work. We cut two pages yesterday during our tech when the fact that it wasn’t right to have a light change at a certain point made me realise that it wasn’t right to have that section at all.

Now I know what the play is about, I can talk about the characters, the back stories, the emotional journeys, what I want the audience experience to be etc etc. I couldn’t do any of that until now. It’s taken three years and over a month of work on the play with a team to get here. We’ve got here through trusting that what I wrote had all that in it, just in a way we weren’t accustomed to.

I have had the opportunity to choose who I work with, and to put together a team that was keen to go on a journey of figuring out with me, figuring out how to talk about the work, figuring out how to perform it, direct it, design it. This process was a layering that involved David Lane’s kind of mappings, my kind of musical approach, Amit Lahav’s kind of choreographic and emotional approach, and then a return to the script and a re-layering of our process in a way that served the play. To be able to go on a journey that includes many moments of not-knowing, and to be able to continually renew the way in which we worked was a privilege.  This process has made it possible to do something that I believe can be described as ‘new’.

Stephanie Greer. @Stephanie De Leng

I met Stephanie nearly a year ago at the audition for ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’ (then called ‘Hunger’). I thought she was great, but the role she was right for (Sadie) was already cast. The first phase of work was development followed by a showing at CPT, after which it turned out our lead was unable to do the production and tour, so I called Stephanie. I knew she was very keen on the project, her training seemed right, and there was something about how she found her way around Sadie’s lines that told me she got my writing.

- The fact that she looked so perfect for the role wasn’t the deciding factor – it’s a bit disconcerting to meet someone who has existed in your imagination in real life. Thankfully the similarities are only external.

It was a great call. Stephanie is a fantastic actor – flexible, dedicated, open, emotionally connected, and after just a few days she has a great sense of the character and the play. I found it interesting to hear Stephanie talk about Sadie – she started with her back-story, and details that aren’t actually mentioned in the play. – perhaps reveals the actor’s approach to character.

[odd fact: Stephanie’s real surname is Jones]

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Where did you train?

At Bretton Hall, in the middle of nowhere in Yorkshire. It had a reputation for being a bit cult-like, which is accurate in a way, it was very much a bubble, the emphasis was on creating new and exciting work, it wasn’t as traditional as some drama schools. So even though it was an acting course- Stanislavski training, animal studies, Shakespeare, Greek plays, you got the opportunity to choose your own path through the degree.

In my third year I was lucky, our large cast performance was directed by someone with a theatre company and links with the National Theatre in Cyprus, so that was how I got my first job. We took a version of the same piece to a festival of ancient Greek drama in Cyprus, the director produced it and we had a new director – Michael Fentiman who was at the RSC.

I was the last year to graduate from Bretton hall. We didn’t know it was going to close until half way through our first year. Once we’d come to terms with it, for us it meant we had a lot of outside directors who came in for modules, so we worked with some very interesting professional people. …and there was loads of space….

It sounds similar to my experience of Dartington – in the middle of nowhere in Devon. The move to Falmouth was announced in my final year there. It seems that these kind of small, experimental arts colleges aren’t sustainable anymore. We also described Dartington as a bubble….actually that’s a great thing when it comes to training and making your own work. I always feel like I’m in a bubble during a rehearsal process…..  In what ways was your training at Bretton Hall useful for this project?

In a general sense, it’s the openness to something different and not having set ideas on what ‘theatre’ should be. I worked with a PhD student in my 3^rd year and he was interested in treating text as music, not everything, but some of the things in this piece are reminiscent of that. I think I take for granted how physical our training was, and even if you didn’t decide to go down physical theatre route, if you’re devising theatre it’s different to being sat around a table writing. When I think of creating a piece it comes out of the body first…

Tell us about your character:

Sadie lives with her boyfriend Danny, her sister Kim lives nearby. Her and her sister were predominantly brought up by their mum, their dad left when they were young. Their mum wasn’t very stable, she had depression, I think that’s had a massive impact on Sadie, I think she blames herself for her mother’s unhappiness and I think her mother’s relationship to food and meals was perhaps not greatly helpful for Sadie.

However I don’t think you can blame everything on the mother, because Sadie has got an eating disorder, and self-harms as well as seeing things and hearing voices that aren’t there. Kim deals with the grief of the mum’s death in a very different way. When their mother died, Kim took on her role, Sadie was too vulnerable. What we see in the play is that Kim has smothered Sadie and not allowed her to become an adult, and her own person. Sadie is living with her boyfriend, but I think her sister is around a lot and involved in that relationship. I think Danny is a very patient person, to put up with that, and loves Sadie very much. And perhaps he didn’t quite know what he was letting himself in for.

Sadie wants to be tall and thin, and has no real sense of her actual body. This image, even though it’s something she aspires to, manifests itself in a nightmarish way….She sees tall, thin people around her, when she’s walking down a street or at home…but also I think her mind guards itself. If something painful happens in real life she switches, forgets about it and goes into her imagination. Her imagination frightens her a lot of the time but it also protects her, which is maybe why she believes it. I think when she’s in a really bad place she loses bits of time, she won’t remember something that’s happened, I think that’s really quite scary.

I think she finds things that are real and builds nice places and fantasies from that…if she felt safe in her childhood bedroom, or something she’s seen…it’ll appear in her fantasy….and then it might take over and the fantasy becomes a nightmare.

Do you identify with her in any way?

Yes, it’s difficult because she’s really messed up, and I think I’ve been fortunate in my life in that I’ve nowhere near got the same issues that she’s got, but – some of her worries and fears and insecurities do ring true, I would imagine with a lot of people. Danny’s got his issues with tidying up, we see in the play that at one point this prevents him going to bed with Sadie, she takes that as a massive rejection. I think there’s something in me that if someone was to say ‘OK yeah but later’ I’d be like – do you not fancy me enough? I suppose I’ve learned about my own insecurity there…I think if all her issues were coming out of somewhere far from most people she’d be hard to identify with, but I think there is a point where you go ‘I do get that, I understand, I just don’t deal with it in that way’. The people around her aren’t helping. She’s coddled and protected, Danny puts up with her craziness and shouting and moods.

What are the challenges of the role?

Her journey is a rollercoaster. Where she goes emotionally is so extreme that it’s about finding the sense and meaning of it but then going further than that. Whatever I imagine I would do in that situation, if those things were happening to me – I then push that to the very extreme… I have to lose any barriers, any holding back. I think we do guard ourselves, we don’t cry in front of people we don’t know…in order for me to play Sadie in the most truthful way I need to let that go…

As an example – Sadie is in the market having an absurd conversation about buying apples and a disagreement on the price…she’s trying to explain her point of view but the market seller is having none of it and she completely breaks down. It reminded me of a time recently when I needed to be in London for a screening, and I had a ticket for a specific train but I’d forgotten it was Sunday and the buses were irregular, I was cutting it fine and I ran from the bus stop to Liverpool Lime Street, I got there just in time. I’m convinced the conductor saw me and he put up the signal for it to go just as I was getting there. I lost all sense of the people around…I was pleading with him, he was like stone, I completely burst into tears which is very unlike me. People were stood on the platform staring at the conductor like he was the worst person in the world.

He came to help me change my ticket, I couldn’t say thank you in a normal way, I was choking. So that’s what I channel for the breakdown…..you know  it’s embarrassing and you want to control your speech but you can’t, you’re in such a state of distress.

 What’s your favourite moment in the play? 

I really like the naturalistic bits with Danny at the moment, you can ask me this again when we’re further on, I think it’s because the naturalistic bits are easy for me to find, I can relate to them – living with a boyfriend, having tense moments. It should remind the audience that actually she’s a person…not a fantastical character, and I think that’s important, and hopefully she’ll be likeable so they will care…that’s my job…

You came into the process later than Lizzie and Alan. What’s this like?

I’ve never done that before, I’ve always started with everyone else, so it’s a bit daunting despite everyone being really nice, it’s a bit scary because I don’t want people to get frustrated if we have to stop because I’m not up to speed on lines or don’t understand bits they’ve already worked on… plus there’s the fact someone else has already had a go at this role, so I’m trying not to think about that as it’s not helpful. I am really competitive and a perfectionist, I’m not used to being the person who’s behind, it’s a good learning curve for me.

At times though it’s been really useful. A scene has just been left to run and the other two are doing things in character and in the space, and I have no idea what’s going on, so I get to experience it for the first time, I’m in the same position that Sadie is in.

I’m really impressed by the other two, in awe at times actually. Which makes me go ‘come on’ – sometimes you might be in a cast where the others don’t have the same work ethic. But here everyone’s working extremely hard and are really talented…so I have to tell myself ‘OK don’t let the side down’.

What’s it like being based in Liverpool?

I’ve never lived in London, although I spend a lot of time here, there is that assumption that if you’re taking acting seriously you should live in London. I continuously pull against that and I wonder if I’m making a bad decision, putting myself out of opportunities – which is why I go to auditions, I get up at stupid 0’ Clock in the morning…but Liverpool is so much cheaper so you can get a better quality of life for less money. I remind myself of that when I’m on a coach at five in the morning…it allows me more time to be creative and not have to do menial jobs for rent and things. So I do think I made the right choice for me, also because I’m Northern…. I’m not about to be on Eastenders….but Liverpool and Manchester are in the middle of the country, and media city is now in Salford.

I’ve only lived in Liverpool for two years….moving out of Manchester didn’t affect my work there, but I’d never worked in Liverpool until I lived there. I’ve had a lot of work there since…I have had to perfect my scouse accent….

What are your ambitions for the future?

I’d like to be able to live off just performing. At the moment I do lots of workshop leading and teaching. Having said that, I’m sure I would miss working with children and young people, they always surprise you and that can inform your work, but I suppose if it was a choice rather than a necessity that would be nice. I’ve done a lot of film recently and I’m liking that as it’s very different, I’d like to do more, and there are so many theatres and theatre companies I think are brilliant….I want to work with them all.

This job is closer to my training than anything I’ve done before. When we go to Leeds in the autumn I’ll get some of my tutors to come, it’s funny because even though I’ve had good jobs I’m proud of, this will be what they are most proud of me for. Because it’s new and exciting and daring.

Thanks! – Great place to end the interview and start the rehearsal!

Stephanie Greer, Lizzie Crarer (and Alan Humphrey’s arm) in rehearsals.