A Life in Stages 

Cally Phillips 

Published by HoAmPress Publishing 2013

© 2013 C.Phillips

This ebook is substantially the text of  the 'drama residency' retrospective first published online during the 2nd Edinburgh eBook Festival.  It is a part of a larger work.  It is free to share but please respect author copyright. 

Performing rights for all plays are available by negotiation with HoAmPresst Publishing. Contact the author in the first instance. If you wish to contact the author please do so via email: callyphillips@btinternet.com

Prologue

My first theatrical experience was perhaps the most important one and according to recent internet research, occurred in February 1970, which means I had just turned seven, though I could have sworn it was a year or two before that.  Anyway, through a range of ‘interesting’ circumstances I attended a dress rehearsal of The Admirable Crichton (by J.M.Barrie) at the Dundee Rep. There was a lot of shouting by the director. I think he was shouting at my mum who was doing costumes, for the inappropriateness of bringing small children into the rehearsal.  Allegedly, I was upset and in order to pacify me I was taken backstage to meet ‘Crichton’ (Google tells me he was played by Michael Stroud) after the rehearsal – to prove to me it was only ‘acting.’ It was not so much the smell of the grease paint that got me as the whole ‘backstage’ environment.  My mum worked in costume at the Rep for a while and I have other backstage memories of playing around the costume store. Reflecting now, some forty years on, I realise that the role the theatre has played in my life has always been one at least equally about the ‘behind the scenes’ activity and magic as it has been about the onstage performance.

Twenty years after that first theatrical encounter, I wrote my first play. It was another stage in the journey I'm writing about here, which is essentially a retrospective of my dramatic journey.  I have now come to the end of that journey. That’s not so much a ‘shock’ announcement as a realisation I’ve come to over the past couple of years and I’m simply using this retrospective to formalise for myself (and the world) that reality. In consequence the world will not shake on its axis. No substantial change will be felt by anyone. I’ve just said it out loud for the first time.  It’s a curtain call.

The journey that follows won’t be strictly chronological because one thing I’ve found out in life (as in the theatre) is that while there is a beginning, middle and end structure, they do not always fit into an easy, progressive narrative. As in my plays, my ‘dramatic journey’ has beginnings and ends all over the place.  My belief that ‘the destination is in the journey’ is perhaps nowhere expressed more clearly than in my stage work

Beginning

Apprenticeship (1980’s)  From usherette to leading lady

When I arrived in London in 1984 armed with a degree in Moral Philosophy and a belief that the streets were paved with the route to fame and fortune, I was quickly disabused.  During a hellish time working in sales, the theatre became my sanctuary. In fact I more or less lived in the National Theatre from the mid 80’s to the mid 90’s.  When I wasn’t selling, I was in a theatre in one capacity or another and I now look back on this as quite some apprenticeship. I can’t begin to count the number of productions I saw but I was there in the heyday of Ian McKellern at the National, Anthony Hopkins at the Old Vic and Richard Harris playing Pirandello’s Henry IV which remains the stand out best piece of theatre I’ve ever seen amidst a stellar line-up of plays. I bought playscripts and watched plays and lived and breathed high quality theatre on a weekly if not a daily basis.

And you couldn’t keep me out of the theatre. My ‘backstage’ experience moved front of house.  I became an usherette at the Secombe Centre Theatre in Sutton where I wielded a torch, a tray of ice creams, and tried to flog programmes. The lure of the greasepaint was still strong however and I joined Sutton Theatre Company, an amateur dramatics musical group with whom I performed for several shows.  Musical theatre isn’t really about acting though. And (for me) am dram really never ‘cut it’.  Too much about other things than the craft of acting.  Too social and not serious enough. I won’t deny it can be fun though.

In 1987 I performed in a ‘semi-professional’ production of Educating Rita the Epsom Playhouse, taking the title role.  After that it was front of house again as I earned the money to pay for drama school by working at the Noel Coward Wine Bar in the Phoenix Theatre and subsequently at the Strand Theatre (now the Novello Theatre) where I ran the upper circle bar.

I found I loved working front of house in the theatre.  Had I not had my sights set on the stage myself I might well have gone into theatre or cinema administration.  (Had the opportunity arisen I think I could have enjoyed that life – even in London.) I liked front of house work but working the bar just didn’t pay enough to live on – not when you did it five nights a week and all day on Saturdays.  Not even if you worked full time, really. It was £3 an hour but I loved it.

The Noel Coward wine bar was FUN. And I learned a lot about wine (and about people who drink it in intervals.) I also learned how to add up very quickly and accurately in my head not only for giving change (tills didn’t do that for you in those days) but for totting up at the end of the night.  I couldn’t go home (or more often go to a free late screening of a film – projectionists were great at getting you freebies!) until I’d got the figures to add up. That was some incentive.  The Phoenix was a great time. I liked the company, I liked the uniform (though I refused to wear a bow tie) and I liked the access to the theatre both front of house and backstage.  I rubbed shoulders with many famous actors but it was in a working environment and I grew out of being star struck very early on.  Even famous people can be moody and I have a (private) list of ‘big names’ and how pleasant they are as ‘real’ people outside their celebrity status. Too long to go into here sadly! 

I left the Phoenix when I went to drama school in 1988 but I started at the Strand soon after because they had Sunday shows.  I really needed the money by this stage (drama school is expensive!) and at my interview I both lied (saying I had experience of pulling pints which I didn’t) and fainted.  I was sitting on a bar stool and just keeled over backwards. I did things like that in those days – lack of food and high stress. I hit the ground, bounced back up and acted like nothing had happened (the drama school was teaching me something then!) and got the job. This time I had to wear a bow tie, but I got a winged collar shirt so I had to live with it.

Drama school had been a goal of mine for years. Be careful what you wish for! I got a place on the Post Graduate course at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, a place where they focussed on Stanislavskian technique (which was what I was interested in) as well as being strong in TV and Radio acting. I learned a lot there. Including that I really wasn’t cut out to be an actress.  Firstly, I could never work out what to do with my hands. Secondly, I could see that as a ‘type’ I wasn’t that special and I would always be competing with others of my ‘type’ who had more going for them and/or better connections. But more importantly I couldn’t hack the idea of a life spent waiting to be allowed to work.

I left drama school before the final agent’s shows, choosing, instead of being nameless girl in yet another drama school production of The Children’s Hour to take the lead in a YMCA youth theatre production of Gregory’s Girl where I played Dorothy. And then I retired from acting.  Although I didn’t know it then, the stage was now set to become a playwright. In the short term, I went back to sales repping – I still had to earn a living. I didn’t want to be a ‘resting’ actor.  I wanted to work.  I remember standing in line for benefits some months after I’d left drama school, turned on my heel and walked out, deciding that I would never take benefits again – whatever I had to do I would earn my own living without having to rely on the state. It was an important decision. I don’t regret it at all though it’s meant some very tough times along the way. I determined to make a living out of my creativity. And I’m happy to say I’ve mostly achieved that over the last twenty years.

We Wove a Web in Childhood  - from research to writing (1989)

After another painful six months or so in sales, earning some big money, in 1990 I made a brave decision. I ‘stopped the world’ and got off. I went to live in Sheffield where I spent a lot of time in the library (my other great love apart from the theatre) researching what became my first play We Wove A Web in Childhood.   It was a great time in many ways – I was working on my first computer – an Amstrad.  Of course I backed everything up onto big floppy discs. But that wasn’t a lot of use when the computer and discs were stolen in a break in and I had to go back to scratch.  Unfortunately, all the copious research notes I’d made were lost in this theft. Fortunately, I’d got to the stage where I was ready to write the play and so I just had to ‘go for it’ using memory and what written notes I had. I imagine, being me, I still had plenty of them. I still do for anything I write. Even though I use the computer like an extension of my arm, I plan and structure on paper and I have a ‘playbook’ for each play. I started this when I became ‘serious’ about playwriting in the late 1990’s.  It was a habit I stole from my screenwriting career.

But in the spring and summer of 1990 I was hard at it writing  my first play. Now I look back and think how interesting it is that I didn’t have the confidence to actually write my own dialogue – the play is substantially an editing job since it uses exclusively the actual juvenilia and poems of the Brontes.  What I brought to the party was dramatic structure and the underlying ‘dramatic story.’  Through painstaking research I had worked out a chronological path through the mountains of tiny handwritten juvenilia (spending time at the Bronte Parsonage Museum Library whenever I could afford to get there and poring through the Shakespeare Head versions of the ‘letters’ and ‘unpublished’ work when I couldn’t.) These days there’s a lot more published Bronte juvenilia and several really good biographical works to aid such research, but for me it was hard on the eyes and hard on the brain trying to work out ‘patterns’.  It paid off though, as I still believe I came up with something uniquely interesting in drawing parallels between the writing and the ‘real’ lives.  You’ll have to read (or watch) the play to make up your own mind on that one.

Once the play was written, I got a job in London teaching English and Drama.  During the following three years I was busy enough teaching not to take it too hard when the play got turned down everywhere I sent it.  Nice comments most of the time, but the general opinion was that it was ‘unproducable.’  I look back at it now and I see that the scenes read fast and I guess it takes quite some leap of the imagination to believe  that you can recreate the Battle of Waterloo on stage with four actors, but the end result of the comment ‘it’s unproducable’ was simply for me to put my money and my time where my mouth was and decide to do it myself.  This has become a pattern in my theatrical life. They tell you you can’t do it. You do it anyway. It works.

We Wove a Web in Childhood - the production 1993

This was what was known as ‘profit share’ (though everyone understands that profit is a theoretical concept in this context!) I was directing as well as producing (I took on all these roles to keep costs down not out of a power trip. It was the only way I knew I could get the play on. Necessity was the mother of invention. I ran auditions and held a four week rehearsal period.  During which time I went through about 3 Charlotte’s as they kept getting paid work. Finally I managed to get a great Charlotte,  but she had to take a couple of days off during the run to complete a BBC drama – so I promised to understudy her part for those performances.  That was me out of retirement, reluctantly I may say. But you know – the show must go on and all that.

Rehearsals are fun. That’s part of the problem for actors and directors. It’s really easy to lose sight of the fact that you are eventually going to perform for an audience and just enjoy yourself.  That’s why, subsequently, I’ve never run a long rehearsal period.  I like actors to come prepared and then to work hard and fast, and I find that in two to three days you can get a rehearsed reading up and ‘playing’ and in a week or a fortnight at the most you can mount a really convincing production.  You can do this if your writing is tight (by which I mean the dialogue is good enough for an actor to remember easily). I pride myself on writing dialogue that is both convincing to an audience and ‘easy’ for an actor. That’s because I’m a trained actor and I know a) how to learn lines fast and b) how you use words structurally in a play – it’s complex and I can’t go into it here, but it’s a skill and it makes all the difference. Dialogue works on a number of levels. It has to sound realistic, sure, but it has to be constructed too. An interesting side point is reading dialogue off the page is quite a different experience to ‘seeing’ dialogue on stage.  Many aspiring playwrights (and many theatre ‘readers’) don’t fully appreciate this. But it’s key. Poor dialogue really shows up on stage.  Good dialogue can make the audience forget that the actor is in a black box, the wrong age, the wrong sex and even if they’re holding a script, if the actor and the writing are good enough, you can get audiences to suspend disbelief.  There are ‘tricks’ to hide poor dialogue, sure. One of these is ‘high’ production values, which means lavish set and costumes and all sorts of ‘distractions’ which makes the audience buy into the event but to my mind, good dramatic writing is when you strip all that out and can still make an audience ‘believe.’  That’s always been my goal and I generally feel proud that I’ve achieved it as I intended in my produced stage work.

Benito Boccanegra, Come Back Molly Maguire (1990’s)

Of course the stage is no more paved with gold than the streets and simply having a critical success and financially ruinous disaster with We Wove A Web (as with most theatre!) did not guarantee me any further success. I spent another two years in London and theatrically nothing happened. Instead, I turned most of my effort to screenwriting as a way to earn money from writing and I managed to do that for a good 10 years.  I knew there was no money in the theatre. Not for me, anyway.  But it didn’t stop me writing plays when the thought occurred to me.

Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break came to me when (for reasons too long to go into)I found myself trapped at the Royal Opera House in a performance of Simone Boccanegra.  I don’t like opera. It’s a personal thing.  I have reservations based on the fact that vibrato actually hurts my ears and that the amount of money spent on them pains me. And generally they make the acting in am dram musical theatre look acceptable! I love the plushness of the ROH of course and the backstage intrigues me as it does in any of these opulent traditional theatres, but the content – not for me.  So, to keep myself amused while enduring the performance I started writing an absurdist play (in the vein of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) in my head.  This became the short play (as yet unperformed) Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break.  

In the years I’ve spent teaching playwriting, time and again I come across people who write scenes that are far too short. With too many characters. Benito Boccanegra runs for 40 minutes maximum and it has some twenty scenes and a huge cast list (it’s run through four time frames so the characters do double up). It is pretty much everything I rail against in teaching good play writing. BUT.  That’s for people who are trying to write traditional, mainstream plays that will stage in a proscenium arch and seek the approbation of the largely middle class aspirational theatre goer. (Usually these are the kind of people I’ve taught playwriting to actually!) And BBBB was not trying to do that.  It was at least as much inspired by Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui as anything else. (I saw that at the National and it changed my life. Prior to that performance I would have hung Brecht out to dry, being a committed fourth wall realist Stanislavskian trained actor.  However, the National performance which I took an A Level drama group of students to see in 1991 had Antony Sher as Arturo Ui (and a cast of some 27!) had an immediate impact but it also had a slow-drip feed effect into my own writing which I wasn’t to come to acknowledge till probably some ten years later.

The ‘character’ Benito Boccanegra is a created fiction. Literally.  In the play Joe Green and his student colleague are writing things up on the board trying to work out an equation for fame based on the letters in a name and as various names get wiped off, the name Benito Boccanegra emerges – and so the character ‘comes into being.’  (Obviously Mussolini and Simone are the rubbed out bits of name!)  Benito Boccanegra then takes the play by the horns, completely unaware that he is just a ‘character’ in a play.  With devastating effects.  The underlying ‘politics’ of the play compares fourteenth century Italy, with nineteenth century Europe and the rise of Fascism in the twentieth century.  And the ‘philosophy’ of the play deals with how fiction and fact are created. This is a theme I’ve come back to time and again in my plays –getting ever more ‘out there’ it seems. 

The world of the theatre is a fictionally created world.  There is a relationship between characters, actors and audience which I find fascinating.  Creating reality works on so many levels in life and in drama.  The relationship between what you see and what’s happening underneath and what ‘reality’ can possibly mean in drama is core to my work and my interest in all aspects of the drama.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I developed a strange quantum version of ‘realism’ and ‘absurdism’ in my work. Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it’s my own, unique contribution to the history of theatre.  If that’s not too pretentious and presumptious.  It’s certainly kept my mind active over twenty years and maybe that’s enough.  Audiences have their own rules. Communicating with an audience is a transient and flexible thing and it’s very difficult to assess how well or badly one achieves this symbiotic relationship (latterly I came to believe it’s more or less impossible through traditional theatre – but that’s for another day.)

To sum up at this stage though:  for me, as well as being a personal place of sanctuary, the theatre was also a place for politics and philosophy.  I had still to work out the complex relationship between theatre and drama.

Middle

Anniversaries – Bond is Back

I’ve learned to be a ‘live in the moment’ sort of person. Theatre has been important in teaching me that.  It used to upset me that theatre was so transitory – a ‘lived’ experience which lasted the length of the play and (unless you went back time after time to the same production – which believe me, I have done) you cannot get ‘the moment’ back again. And even if you do revisit the play time after time, the beauty and perhaps the power of live theatre is that every performance is unique.  I learned this most substantially during the two week run of We Wove A Web in Childhood.  Not only do the actors perform slightly differently each time, but the impact of the audience changes things.  I never got bored through the whole two week run where (apart from the two days I understudied and so was on stage) I watched the performance and the audience alike, from the back of the theatre. I learned something new every day.  I could have (and still think I could) watch the play day after day live and learn something each time.  You can watch a film (or filmed version) time after time and see and learn new things, but there’s a fundamental difference. Watching a filmed performance it is YOU who changes with each viewing.  With live theatre it is the WHOLE thing that changes with each performance.

So, once you realise that with theatre (as with life) what you get is one crack at the experience (even if you are subject to eternal return if you don’t learn from that experience) you can settle into it as a creative form and not worry about the fact that every little nuance you’ve worked so hard on will be lost the moment it passes.  The acres of hard work that are not seen, the depth that is ‘missed’ or the substance that is either ignored or avoided by an audience (or individual audience members because I’m not a great believer in ‘the audience’ as an actual entity) are part of it.  You put in more than you get out. That’s creativity. Except it’s not strictly true. As the creator you get out things which never fully get communicated, that’s more true. But that’s the nature of communication, creative or otherwise. It’s a two way street and there are limitations on full understanding between people. In that life totally reflects art.

In the mid 1990’s I had more or less turned my back on the theatre. Too expensive. Too ephemeral. Too… well, I was a working screenwriter and I spent all my spare time in movie theatres or the BFI library.  In those days it wasn’t so easy to get hold of a screenplay. And believe me, if you want to write for the screen you not only need to watch films (or TV) you need to read the scripts as well. It’s a technical discipline and as with all creative work, an apprenticeship needs to be served.

But in a strange, crossover sort of experience, I wrote Bond is Back in the mid 90’s. It was an Abigail’s Party meets James Bond type of theatrical experience. The idea might have come to me when I sat behind Mike Leigh at a performance of something (I can’t remember what) at the National! I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes a nice story. Did I imagine the play would ever get made? Probably not.  Although come the 40th anniversary celebrations in 2002 there was quite a flurry of interest with my agent. It ‘nearly’ got produced. It didn’t.  It sat around again till I ebook published it in time for the 50th anniversary of the Bond Franchise. I’m resigned to it never being produced. Never be seen by me except in my own head. Which is not the best place to ‘see’ a play – but it’s a lot cheaper and less tiring than trying to get a play put on, believe me.

Bond is Back is funny. It’s social drama. It’s set at the fortieth birthday party of Kevin (think Timothy Spall) and his childhood friends all get together in a toe cringeingly ‘theme’ party which rather inevitably goes horribly wrong.  How I moved from the Brecht/Stoppard to the Ayckbourn style, because it’s more Ayckbourn than Leigh, I just don’t know. I guess I was still ‘finding’ my voice.   You can make your own judgement on the play by reading it. That’s the best I can offer.  

The other late 1990’s play that never got produced is called Come Back Molly Maguire. It was written specifically for an actor friend who had a contact in an Irish theatre in America.  It was designed for a traditional theatre environment. It had a cast of four young actors. It had ‘correct’ length scenes – although Dennis Potter was already lurking around in my subconscious as I’d included a couple of musical interludes – setting some traditional Irish ‘rebel’ songs to music for the play.  I guess it was a play about migration and racism. It was blending the past with the present. A sort of historical drama if you like. But certainly no Ibsen.  I don’t think it was a bad play. It probably wasn’t brilliantly written as I was trying to ‘fit’ traditional form. I’ve not looked at it in years. I’ve not even bothered to produce it as an ebook.  You can’t highlight everything in a career, so we move on.  Believe me, for every play I write about in this retrospective there are a heap of unpublished, unproduced works propping up a shelving unit and clogging up a hard drive on a computer somewhere in my house. I can’t  help it. I work hard at being creative. It’s so much better than sales. And so much better than being an actor and having to wait to be allowed to work.

Getting political and getting out and about    

Thus far we’ve arrived at the mid 1990’s and I’ve had one play produced, retired from an acting career, established a tentative foot in the world of screenwriting, and toyed around with writing plays, not fully understanding that the safety I felt in the plush seats of the proscenium arch mainstream theatre was both an illusion and nothing that would help me in my own writing.  My writing was political. Subversive. Anarchic. Absurdist. I wanted to put philosophy into the theatre if only I knew it.  My ‘political’ writing was actually an attempt at ‘social’ drama and it was not the sort of theme that would sit well with the average mainstream theatre going audience. My mind had become confused between kitchen sink dramas and drawing room farces and political comedies and absurdist drama.  Maybe I had over-experienced. Maybe it was time to develop my own way.  Maybe it was just time to actually ‘do’ drama again rather than wait for others to see potential. I was (if only I’d known it) developing a theory which challenge the traditional notion of ‘conflict’ being central to drama and the necessity for an ordered linear progression in the dramatic arc. But I still thought I wanted to ‘play’ in the mainstream theatres.  I hadn’t realised that you can’t bite the hand that feeds and get away with it.

I left London behind in 1995, moving home to Scotland. I grew up in the East of Scotland but I moved to the rural South West. Like most people I’d never been to Dumfries and Galloway, only driving past the turn off at Gretna on my way north.  But for the next twelve years, and my most productive years ‘dramatically’ I lived and worked and created in that region.  Despite having the oldest working theatre in Scotland (Dumfries Theatre Royal – where Barrie had his first experience of drama) it’s not a theatrically inspired place – Rabbie Burns lived there and I swear you still trip over poets in the fields and towns – and when I wanted ‘theatre’ I had to travel to Edinburgh or Glasgow.  In reality this meant Traverse or Festival Fringe and RSAMD.  I have to say that some of the best productions I’ve seen are student productions.  Actors in training are like Olympic athletes. They are at the peak of their game, before they get fat and bloated sitting around ‘waiting to work’ and the RSAMD training was (to my mind) an excellent one.  I’ve often used RSAMD students and graduates in my ‘fast rehearsal’ technique productions and seldom been disappointed in their professionalism or performance.

I had a couple of years of quite serious ill health at this time, and I was earning my living screenwriting, both of which meant I had ‘spare time’ which gave me the opportunity in my spare time to experiment with my emerging creative ‘theory.’ In practical terms it means I could forget about theatre and focus again on drama. I  had to cut according to my cloth and active involvement in theatre had to be in short bursts. But I wanted to use my learned skills in a practical way and so when asked to write a play for young people to put on at a one act play competition, I agreed.  I’d not worked with ‘young people’ for a couple of years but it seemed like a fun thing to do. So I did it.

The result was The Truth About Hats. And guess what. It was Brechtian. It was devised theatre. It was all the things I’d spurned and scorned and denied all those years ago when my idea of ‘theatre’ was the best seat in the house at the National.  The script is available in the collection Triptych 2.  What I mostly remember from the time was the great bunch of kids. We had identical twins and a pair of brothers who were only distinguishable by size – that’s a gift for a playwright!  I worked with the kids to devise a play about ‘identity’ and we were all very proud of the result.  They didn’t win the competition (let’s not go into that one – am dram land again) but one of my proudest moments in the theatre was when the ‘judge’ (isn’t it a horrible idea competitive drama?) asked the cast what they thought they were doing in a somewhat shocked tone, because it didn’t seem like ‘drama’ to him.  The play had loud music, was pretty in your face and was very much a teenage version of the Resistible Rise… where ‘adults’ are ‘hat wearers’ who make up ridiculous rules, spreading hypocrisy wherever they go. The youngest member of the cast pulled himself up to his full height (which wasn’t more than four feet) and launched into one of the best explanations of the Brechtian alienation effect I’ve ever heard.  My pride was shortlived because half an hour later that wonderful little boy (doubtless a burly man now) was in floods of tears because they didn’t win. And he knew they should have done. They should have. It was the best piece of drama on display by a mile that day.  I felt guilty that I’d only taught them the lesson I’d learned myself – that if you don’t play by the ‘rules’ you can’t expect to win the ‘prizes.’  For myself that wasn’t a problem, but they were in a ‘competition’ after all. I hope they forgave me. I hope they learned the real lesson which was about the ‘truth’ of creativity and the strange ‘reality’ of drama. And that for creativity, the destination is in the journey.  

That experience bloodied me a bit as regards youth theatre. It’s a responsibility working with young people creatively.  I ran several workshops all of which were great experiences for the participants and all of which yielded ‘performances’ which may well have been significant in the lives of the young people themselves. I hope so.  Personally, I was learning to move away from the traditional.  Moving  away from theatre and towards drama.  Towards the participation rather than the consumption angle of creativity which marked my latter years where I think I transformed from being a playwright into a dramatist.

Along the way I undertook loads of interesting ‘short’ projects. I wrote a site specific play ‘Kirkcudbright’s Light’ about the artist Jessie M.King.  This was effectively a dramatised ‘walking’ tour round Kirkcudbright and ran (to packed houses?) for some three or four summers. 

I taught HNC drama for a year at the local College. The students were great. The facilities were poor and the lighting downright dangerous.  I wrote short pieces and directed and generally got down and dirty doing drama. It was great. It’s another job I could have continued doing indefinitely had the whole academic/administrative set up been anything beyond woeful. But I wasn’t prepared to sell students short and so I gave it away. I lectured at the University and during my residency (more of that to come) I wrote and delivered seminars and live and online courses in stage and screenwriting.  I was happy passing on the skills I’d learned.  It’s a sort of ‘backstage’ activity, teaching.  And because I love theatre, drama, creativity and writing it never palled to share this with others. I was screenwriting (with increasing unease) for money, but the creative work I undertook in theatrical drama was my life.

Inevitably I got political. I wrote a short play called Not Rocket Science which got workshopped at 7:84 theatre Company. They so missed the whole political point of it that I don’t even want to talk about that any more. IThis script is also in the Triptych 2 collection. You can download it and draw your own conclusions.  Suffice to say that workshop was the moment when I decided I had to ‘do’ my own theatre/drama my own way. My experiences with 7:84 and indeed with The Traverse (Scotland’s new writing theatre) were such that I realised there was something of a major mismatch in our understanding and goals. So much so that I never even bothered to get engaged with Scotland’s ‘National’ Theatre when it became established.  The clue is in the word. Establishment.  However ‘cool’ these folk try to be, I’m afraid I still believe that they are working towards a market paradigm which is just not on the same creative planet I’m on.  I don’t want to play by their rules. So I don’t.  I choose not to engage with them. There’s neither sour grapes nor secret wish to be ‘discovered’ by them. They don’t do what I do. I don’t do what they do. End of. I just finally realised that I would never gain ‘acceptance’ from this establishment because the very core of what I was doing creatively was against their raison d’etre. It’s a shame, it’s a sort of deep, picky, philosophical point which I won’t go into here (though I can, at length, if requested) but it’s just the way it is.

In 2004/5 I had a residency with West Lothian Youth Theatre for nearly a year which again involved workshops and the commission to write a play. At the time of writing the play I had no idea that it would end up being the first play ever performed at the Scottish Parliament, in 2005.  Had I known that I would not have titled it Life’s a Pizza.  Imagine. All my life, thinking I was a cutting edge socio-political writer and my claim to fame is Life’s a Pizza.  You have to laugh.  You can read it  in Triptych 2.  It was an interesting project about healthy eating and I think drama lends itself very well to such ‘issue’ based learning.  The play was performed by young actors from WLYT and they ran a workshop after the event.  The central ‘conceit’ of the play, if such there be, was that a pizza actually contains all the healthy ingredients to make a balanced diet.  It’s the added FAT which presents the problems. And with more than a passing nod to Brecht again the ‘fat’ family who populate the drama tell the story in their own inimitable way.  I was beginning to see that there are more slices in the pizza of ‘political’ theatre than simply the mainstream flavour. Time for Boal to enter the fray. But I’m running ahead of myself. I still have to tell you about the plays that form the backbone of my ‘mature’ output. 

Responding to rural crisis  – Men in White Suits 2002

In 2001 I wrote a play because I couldn’t not write it. Which is as good a reason for writing a play as I’ll ever have.  It was a personal response to both the environment around me and the stagnation in my own personal life. It’s bleak and deep and the culmination of many years thinking and writing about the lived experience of modern rural life for ‘ordinary’ people. (Not the ones who keep holiday homes or ‘own’ large tracts of land.) Foot and Mouth left many people broken and many people just numb.  The smell, sounds and fears of that time were palpable and, living on a farm property as I did at that time, I couldn’t escape the emotions.  It broke communities but in a strange way it also forged communities.  For months I couldn’t write, but then I felt compelled. It was the first time I really wrote ‘to bear witness.’

Men in White Suits tells the story of a farm in crisis. And a marriage in crisis. Phyllis and Duncan stand to lose it all when Foot and Mouth strikes. The play was given its first rehearsed reading at Lockerbie Town Hall, a year after the Foot and Mouth crisis started.  Emotions were still raw and for a rural population it had a realism that would never be matched at the rehearsed reading it was given at the Traverse later that year.

For the Traverse reading I was convinced to ‘rewrite’ it to take out my ‘rude mechanical’ urban characters.  I was aware then, and am still now, that these characters ‘grate’ for some people – especially urban people.  While it’s okay for Shakespeare to write in his ‘rude’ mechanicals as country bumpkins in Midsummer Night’s dream, it appears a crime to subvert that and suggest that urban characters coming to ‘rubberneck’ in foot and mouth regions (as they did) might just get the completely wrong end of the stick.  And they did. 

However ‘offensive’ the notion of the ‘rude mechanical urbanite’ was to a mainstream theatre audience, without this element the play didn’t ‘work’ for anyone.  And it certainly suffered in rehearsal from a lack of understanding.  While the amateur actors reading at Lockerbie totally ‘got’ the relationships between the central characters – the sense of hopelessness, isolation and the horrific decisions that people had to make (including shooting a dog) the professional actors (and I suspect the majority of the urban audience) just couldn’t understand why Phyllis didn’t ‘leave’ if her life was so bad and her marriage in tatters. I suppose people who work nine to five in offices can’t be expected to understand how farming life is tied to the land and what that actually means in reality. it's sad that this 'urbanisation' tends to spread out to the acting fraternity as well though.  Getting an 'authentic' rural Scots accent is hard, but getting understanding of rural Scots life was no easier. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest it's an example of the pervasiveness of urbanisation in cultural life within the theatre.  People forget that you can’t eat a beautiful sunset. Latterly, I’ve re-read the play and I stand by the ‘rude’ mechanicals all the way. Sure, they offer something uncomfortable and controversial, but seriously, do you expect a play about foot and mouth to be a happy, clappy experience?

What’s interesting to me was that what I was aiming to do in Men in White Suits was to present a modern, rural version of a Scottish classic play Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep.   I’ve spent a long time banging the drum for ‘gritty rural realism’ on screen, stage and print but every time I find myself up against a reality mismatch where the word ‘kailyard’ is bandied around without any real (in my mind) attempt to understand or acknowledge that Scotland has a very real, rural tradition which is not all green wellies and Landowners but where people live in poverty and work in outdoor factories.  Where the home goes with the job and where you marry into a life (don’t insult it by calling it a ‘lifestyle’) which, as Phyllis and Duncan’s marriage shows, can be a prison from which you cannot escape.

One day I hope that someone might take Men in White Suits off the shelf and dust it down and do some comparative analysis with Men Should Weep – perhaps from a sociological perspective. But they’d need to be someone who understands rural life as well as urban life and it’s not been my experience to find such a person in the world of ‘professional’ theatre yet.  Until then, like the Foot and Mouth crisis itself, the play will remain forgotten and ignored – that doesn’t surprise me at all, even though it saddens me.

Strangely though, the ‘experience’ of the two readings (rural and urban) did teach me something. However hard I try to compromise, I shouldn't  take things out of plays because directors tell me to.  While the ‘urban mechanicals’ might not be to everyone’s taste, without them the plays just doesn’t work because it loses an element of reality which it cannot afford to lose.  It finally taught me that the ‘audience’ I write for is not the paying audience of the established theatre.  And that other people do exist.  Who can and should be given the opportunity to experience live theatre which speaks to their lived reality. Not everyone goes to the theatre to ‘escape.’

It also offers a point for me to consider two styles of acting, and why I mutated from one to another at times. (I should state that Men in White Suits is strictly Stanislavskian reality by the way.) But why have I ever chosen Brecht over Stanislavski for dramatic purposes? That's simple. Good acting is actually very hard to do. To convince someone that what you are doing is ‘real’ requires great skill and professionalism.  Brechtian drama doesn’t require the same skills set. No one is being asked to suspend disbelief, even if they are being asked to ‘believe’ something – and more often than not actually they are being asked to ‘think’ about something or to ‘challenge’ it. Which means that performing Brechtian (or Boalian)  drama well is much easier than performing 'realistic' Stanislavskian drama.  And as such, opens the door for many more people to be actively creative.  My personal dramatic journey saw me move from a belief in Stanislavski, through Brecht to a final acknowledgement of Boal – and that journey took me out of the plush seats and into some very ‘real’ places.  And I don’t regret a minute of it.

While on this ‘journey’ the pendulum has swung between wanting people to really believe what’s happening to the characters in my plays (because it’s based on ‘real’ life experience and, I believe, represents how real people think and act) and wanting people to leave that place of safety (myself included) which is the position of ‘audience in the plush velvet seat’ and actually engage with the issues. 

At best I think I’ve manage to somehow meld the two together. Give people convincing ‘real’ characters who challenge their perceptions of the world whether they are sitting comfortably or not. That’s what I’ve sought to do in the ‘theatre.’ But theatre isn’t drama and I have learned to distinguish between the two.  There is much more to drama than theatre.  More to my dramatic journey than theatre. Much more to my creativity than simply the playscripts. But we’re not there yet.

Paying back to Barrie – Down the Line (2002-03)

Before I moved on to the ‘mature’ or ‘transition’ years I had a debt to repay.  To J.M.Barrie.  In 2002 I started as ‘Dramatist in residence’ at Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association, the first Scottish Arts Council Dramatist in residence (funded by the literature department) and the first write in resident for a while in Dumfries and Galloway who was not a poet.  All these points are small but significant in the next stage of the journey.

In the years immediately preceeding my residency I could be found often at meetings (I was on the Scottish Writers Guild committee) arguing that playwrights should be paid for writing plays and should not have to ‘moonlight’ as theatrical producers in order to get their work performed.  I believed that strongly. I’m not sure I still do. Actually, it’s of no relevance to me any more. I just mention it as one of life’s little ironies.  Because when I took up my residency at DGAA all was fine and dandy until we came to the point of how we would fund productions. A deathly silence. I don’t think the ‘literature’ department had considered that. They didn’t have to ‘fund’ poetry performances after all. But I pointed out that if I was to enable playwriting within the region it was a reasonable expectation for the emerging playwrights that their work would be produced and performed. And that costs money.

With the old sales mantra ‘there are no problems only solutions’ in my mind, I took the unilateral step of committing my stipend (the part of my money I would get for ‘own work’ to setting up a theatre company which would produce work during the residency period.  Are you laughing at the irony yet? I’d fought for years not to have to do this and now, here I was, doing it.  But it was probably one of the better ‘moves’ I’ve made in my life. It opened so many avenues to me (even though I stayed firm to other principles and made sure that I never set up as a ‘proper’ company which would be eligible for ‘proper’ funding. That led to all kinds of confusion from ‘the establishment.’ How could I be a ‘professional’ company and not a ‘limited’ company. How could I be producing work without getting subsidised funding? Ah, ‘you can’t do that’ rears it’s ugly head again. But guess what. You can. I did.  During the six years of Bamboo Grove Theatre Company we put on over two hundred short plays (or sketches). We ran workshops and monthly performances and all manner of outreach, all far away from the mainstream and all of them enhancing the life and experience of local people. It was theatre and drama and much, much more.  I engaged with mental health issues, with physical and learning disabilities, with young people with actors with aspiring playwrights and somehow I managed to keep the whole thing afloat.  I learned from Grotowski and from Boal and I discovered that small audiences in out of the way places were not a sign of failure. It was the impact you had on the audience that counted. So that’s what I aimed for.  Loads of people’s lives were touched by Bamboo Grove Theatre Company. And I hope in a positive way for most of them.

But back to my debt. To J.M.Barrie. It was he who got me ‘into’ the theatre in the beginning remember. Well, in 2002 it was the 100th anniversary of The Admirable Crichton and, seeing as I was in Dumfries, in residence, I thought I should do something to mark this.  So I wrote an updated version of the play called Down the Line and it was performed by HNC students (ably directed by Mona Keeling an RSAMD graduate) at the Minerva Hall, Dumfries Academy (J.M.B’s old school) complete with bucket loads of sand for the ‘island’ scenes which I don’t expect they’ve ever fully cleared from the cracks in the floor to this day.  The play formed the centrepiece of a ‘symposium’ day at which we also had the eminent Barrie scholar R.D.S.Jack speak.  Barrie was given a good outing that day. The play was reprised the following year by a younger group of school children in an outreach project from Oxford University Drama Society.  I think my ‘version’ holds true to the original but yet isn’t too ‘stuffy’ for a modern young audience.  

Barrie is of course best known for Peter Pan, but there is much more to him that that and I ‘banged his drum’ in Dumfries as hard as I could.  With little effect at the time. But now Joanna Lumley has got behind the Moat Brae Trust and I hope that soon, in some way, J.M.B will get more of what he deserves from an audience and readership, not just in Dumfries but across Scotland.  I’m still doing what I can. Still ‘digging up the kailyard’ and showing that ‘gritty rural realism’ exists and is not to be ignored by the urban majority who think they have the exclusive rights of being ‘true’ Scots.

End

Love is an Urban Myth

We are approaching the Third Act or the ‘End’ section of this retrospective. And it’s only fitting that at this point I mention the play which above all others I think represents my ‘belief system’ both emotionally and structurally. 

Love is an Urban Myth was written in 1998 and performed as a rehearsed reading at the Traverse in February 1999 and some months later in the Tron.  It was in a way a ‘breakthrough’ play, though of course it was more like a guerrilla incursion than the stepping stone to any lasting involvement in mainstream (even ‘experimental’ or ‘cutting edge’ mainstream theatre) I managed to get the late Tom McGrath to read it and he passed it on to director Nic Bone. I think there was a lot of head scratching but they decided to give it a go, possibly still not sure what to make of it.

When I lived in London for several years a flat opposite had a poster in the window calling out for people to remember the Lebanese hostage John McCarthy and noting how many days he’d been held captive. That stuck in my mind.  Later I read Brian Keenan’s ‘An Evil Cradling’ as well as McCarthy’s ‘Some Other Rainbow.’ I can recommend both – for different reasons.  But both were key to my creation of Love is an Urban Myth.   The play is set in a West African prison cell. The ‘hostages’ are Dave and Sarah.  I wanted to explore what would happen if you were stuck in a prison with a person of the opposite sex – someone you’d never met but had been captured together simply because you sat next to each other on a plane.  It’s a play of relationships. Of the ‘games’ people play. And it’s a play which has a beginning, a middle and an end. Just not in that order.  The first scene is in an art gallery, fifteen years after the ‘event’ when Dave and Sarah meet up for the first time since the ordeal.  This scene pushes the boundaries (and the tolerance) of an audience – it seems ‘meaningless’ and the conversations are ‘random’ and ‘disordered.’  For the audience there’s the uncomfortable sense that you are evesdropping on a personal conversation – and you cannot make sense of it because the conversation is intensely personal between the two characters.  The scene goes on almost too long to bear.  The audience cries out to ‘make meaning’ and this is deliberate as the intention is to get them to reassess what sitting watching a play actually means.  The ‘conflict’ isn’t usual. The audience engagement isn’t standard. It’s all a bit too… real… too intimate… too absurd.  And the audience are in a black box – a sort of prison cell just like Dave and Sarah.  And that’s where, when the scene ends, we go. Back fifteen years to the prison cell.  And now we are all, actor and audience, part of that drama.  And everything that happens for the rest of the play allows the audience to go ‘oh, I realise what that bit of conversation meant’, ‘now I get what was going on in the art gallery,’ etc. The structure of the play is built in the first scene and developed in ‘real time’ through the rest of the play.   We are all stuck in the oppression of the prison ‘box’ trying to work out what love really means. And by the time you get to the final end of the play – back to the art gallery (but even then that’s not the end) you have been on the journey too.  Beyond the end we enter a hotel room – a variation on the intimacy and anonymity of a prison cell – and are really called to consider whether Fitzgerald was right that we are ‘boats beating against the past’ and whether love is just another ‘urban myth’ or a game we invent to keep away the isolation of being alive and alone in the world.

My biggest problem, or fear with this play was that Keenan or McCarthy would feel I had trivialised their experience. I mean, I was writing something that was deep and important for me about emotion and human relationships, toying with the notion that ‘conflict’ in the theatre could be a more intimate and less obvious thing than is usual but I couldn’t escape the fact that I was writing drama (even though my own personal experience is riven through the play) and I’d used their ‘lives’ as part of that creation.  For a writer to use their own life as part of the dramatic narrative is quite acceptable – to use other peoples – I wasn’t so sure.  I actually met Brian Keenan (at a poetry event) once some years after the play had been first performed, and I spoke to him about it.  He was really nice about it and put me at my ease that this was an okay thing to do.  I don’t do ‘heroes’ but I have to say Brian Keenan is one of the ‘coolest’, most ‘real’ people I’ve ever met. Certainly beats a lot of the ‘famous’ moody types I encountered in London’s theatre land years before.

Love is an Urban Myth never really leaves me. During my residency I had the audacious idea to put on three plays in a weekend – calling them a triptych- and it was one of these plays.  It stays in my heart for so many reasons. Not least because, to misquote Emily Bronte, to some degree it’s true that ‘Nelly, I am Sarah.’

When Time Stands Still

The second play in ‘Triptych’ which was written around 2002 is When Time Stands Still.  I really don’t know what to say about this play. I have mixed feelings. I don’t think it’s a bad play, I just think that it suffered from being the last play where I tried to ride two horses facing in different directions.  It’s an homage to the play I loved during my A level English course Look Back in Anger by John Osborne.  I decided to try and set a kitchen sink drama on Mars.  The research was amazing. I love to do in depth research because I have this personal belief (probably a throw back to acting days) that in order to understand and ‘write’ my characters I need to know everything they would know.  And since my characters were going to be spacemen on Mars, I needed to know in quite great detail just exactly how you’d terraform that planet.  Back in the day, I could probably have been dropped there and known how to build the Hab in which my characters live. It’s another ‘prison’ environment in a way.

What the Triptych plays had in common was mainly that sense of being enclosed in a prison like environment.  Looking back with the benefit of a psychology degree to match my earlier moral philosophy one, I can draw some interesting conclusions about the inevitability of my moving out of ‘mainstream’ theatre into the more flexible and anarchic world of ‘drama’ because hey, I’ve written these three plays where the characters (and the audience) are all stuck in a box.  The plays are all about the intensity and oppressiveness of the situation and relationships within that situation.  And guess what. Perhaps that says something about the writers relationship to her creative form as well!  Because after the ‘Triptych’ plays I burst out of that box bigstyle.

The ‘conceit’ in When Time Stands Still is that time is ‘relative’ in an interesting way on Mars. Basically there’s a forty minute mis-match between the Martian and the Earth day. And for our ‘characters’ the way this is resolved to keep them in contact with Earth is that time is ‘stopped’ (by means of a sedative’) for forty minutes each day. But humans being what they are they fight against this. Matti not only stops taking his ‘sed’ but convinces Elaine to stop too – and they embark on an affair which is bound not to be able to be constrained by this ‘unreal’ time frame.  You need to know that Elaine is married to the other crew member (and Captain) Armstrong.  It’s a love triangle come kitchen sink drama – set on Mars. 

While this play felt fresh and new to me (especially after the claustrophobia of Men in White Suits) when writing it, it actually had its origins in the first play I never wrote.  I tried to write a play when I was seventeen. It’s a little known fact. It formed my ‘juvenilia’ which believe me was nothing like as impressive as the Brontes.  The aim of the play was to look at the Arthurian triangle – from the perspective of Lancelot the night before the final battle. It was called No Hero I and I stalled early on when I realised I didn’t know enough about love from any perspective to do the theme justice.   But here it came out in When Time Stands Still.  Matti is a combination of Jimmy Porter and Lancelot. He goes on a bit. Boy does he go on a bit. But that’s because that’s what (in my experience) these ‘charismatic’ type seducers do.  The world (and in his case Mars) revolve around them. Their life is spend trying to convince others of the vital importance of their own personal reality.  Maybe that’s why I’m not fully comfortable with the play.  Matti worries me.  On so many levels.  But again, I think it’s good for a play to unsettle you. Although I hate those audience ‘experiences’ where the fourth wall is broken and you are somehow dragged onto the stage and into the action – like they do with you in circuses and pantomimes -  I do think that a feeling of emotional discomfort can be a good thing for an audience. But then that’s because I don’t expect my audiences to be sitting in their plush seats, enjoying their chocolates and somehow distanced from the ‘entertainment.’  I want my audiences to feel (to some small degree) the level of naked fear I felt watching Richard Harris ‘be’ Henry IV or Anthony Hopkins in The Lonely Road by Arthur Schnitzer. These plays have long passed into the ether but the emotional memory of them will stay with me forever. That's the power of great theatre and truly great acting. And that’s what I aim for in my plays – getting into the head and heart of the individual audience member – making the ‘play’ real for them in some way. Making them feel something ‘real.’  I don’t think When Time Stands Still really does this.  Or at least I think the other two parts of ‘Triptych’ do it much better.

The Other Side of the Mountain

The final play in the Triptych weekend of 2003 was freshly finished with a couple of weeks to spare before the production. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it was something I cobbled together quickly to make up a threesome. Far from it. The play originated back in the early 1990’s when I tried (and failed) many many times to find a way to write a play about the last days of Scott of the Antarctic. Those final days in the tent when they lost their hope and lost their minds.  Writing madness isn’t easy. Writing about ‘real’ people isn’t easy. And realising that they have relatives who might do anything from be disappointed to lynch you is a big disincentive however honestly you want to write a play. 

It took a good ten years of tussling with the concept to change it into something that might work.  I changed the setting to rural China. I made the characters ‘fictional’ and the ‘quest’ was fictional too.  But it was yet another play about the intensity of the prison. In this case we have Xavier and James who are following a lead across remote Chinese mountains in order to ‘verify’ the existence of the Daoist philosopher Lao Tzu.  Xavier is the scholar and James the mountaineer.  They start with fairly fixed positions and views on the nature of life and religion. These change as they are forced to confront ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in terms of their discovery and their lives.  Like Scott’s party, they get stuck in a tent due to bad weather – with the certain knowledge that they will die.  And that death takes a long time coming. 

Even when I embarked upon writing the play ‘the new way’ removing the ‘real’ people and ‘fictionalising’ the characters,  I struggled with this. Post Love is an Urban Myth I was trying to play with structure and for some months I wrestled trying to in some way use the patterns of the iching as my structural device. In the end it was too complex but what I did was employ a sort of Eastern ‘structure’ with the play effectively set into a square rather than the traditional three act linear progressive structure of Western drama. I don’t think the audience actually needs to notice this at all, it was just useful for me in plotting out the ‘dramatic journey’ and ‘character arc’s of my work.  The ‘journey’ was fairly obvious. From life to death. But I don’t believe real life works on a progressive path and I wanted my characters to experience ‘real’ highs and lows even within the obvious downward spiral. The ‘conflict’ in the play is really the personal one of coming to terms with the meaning of an individual life.  The ‘journey’ is the change which occurs to each character in his world view and in his perception of himself. And perhaps the results are surprising as both characters change when forced to ‘step up to the plate’ and face the inevitable.

This play expresses some of my deepest emotional and spiritual beliefs and I’ve directed it (and so seen it performed) with two different casts in 2003 and 2004.  Death is never an easy subject to deal with, but The Other Side of the Mountain is the best response I’ve managed to give to that great leveller to date. 

Ridiculously (but perhaps inevitably) the space in which these ‘box’ plays were performed was a beautiful little pros arch/plush seat theatre in Dumfries called The Brigend.  I spent a lot of time in this theatre during my residency and while it wasn’t the ideal space for the Triptych plays it did offer something interesting in my theory that if the play is good enough the audience will not be distracted by the surroundings.  I do wonder though, whether playing them in a black box environment might help an audience really experience the intensity of the claustrophobia.  But by the time I found the ultimate ‘black box’ theatre, the Triptych was over, the money and time had been spent and I had to put aside Fitzgerald’s eternally backward beating and move on to the next stage – breaking out of the box.

Chasing Waves and Benito Boccanegra revisited

Breaking out of the theatrical ‘box’ was a long time coming.  And yet perhaps always inevitable.  From We Wove a Web which played in a black box and yet dealt with the melodrama which is so much a part of the history of plush seat theatre, to Chasing Waves in which I embarked upon an exploration of ‘all the world is in the box’, everything I have done in the theatre seems (to me now) to have been part of a whole. And that whole is now complete. Over.  Like Xavier and James I’m able to sit back (but in more comfort) and consider what my life in stages has all amounted to. And like James, I’m happy with it.

Chasing Waves was the final play of my residency. It was all about breaking moulds.  It kind of encapsulates everything I ever wanted or needed to say about theatre and drama in one not so easy package.  We have two characters who may or may not be Wittgenstein and Schrodinger, who are not sure whether they are even characters. We are forced to challenge the relationship of actor, character, writer and audience and indeed question what ‘the box’ itself is.  The theatre is a box. The world is a box. Reality is a box.  We are all in boxes. And like Schrodingers cat, how can we ever know what state we are in until and unless we are ‘observed’ by the outside world. It all sounds very complex  - and of course I believe that the way to understand it is to watch it.  Failing that to read it.  But of course that’s nothing to the live ‘experience’ shared by a small number of people who were the audience during the performances at the Swallow Theatre, Whithorn – the black box chosen for the production.   Chasing Waves was also innovative in that I opened the rehearsal process to ‘audience’ so that aspiring writers and interested others could experience the box from the inside as well.  The play was directed by Amanda Walker-   I had too much on my plate to run the open rehearsals as well as direct and I wanted to view it from a different perspective.  She did a great job, as did the actors, but there’s a part of me that wishes I’d done it like We Wove a Web and been playwright and director.  Only because I now know it’s the last such play I would put on and it would have been a nice circular sort of closure. But then, life isn’t like that is it? Endings aren’t nice and clean cut like that.

And so even though Chasing Waves was an ending, and marked the final definitive statement on my journey in stages in the theatre and my dramatic journey as a playwright and a person, there is still more to come. One more 'epsiode' or 'scene' which represents some seven or eight years.  Time, as you will see, is relative.

Epilogue

So what happens after the end? That’s the really interesting question isn’t it?  I remember being a small child at night wondering and wondering ‘what is outside infinity’ and determined that if I thought hard enough I’d be able to figure it out.  I have grown up to accept that some things are just beyond comprehension, however hard you think, and my creative endeavours have been a large part in this acceptance as much as a large part in my attempt to make meaning of the world I find myself in, and communicate my emotions to other people in the hope that I might find some symbiosis.  It happens sometimes. When it does, it’s magic. But these are moments and like theatre, they are fleeting.

There’s an end. There’s a lack of acceptance of that end. There’s a realisation and then there’s closure. That’s the final stage of my journey. Oh, and there’s a long diversion into a completely different way of living.  And I’m still not sure whether that journey is ended or just shifting to another perspective. That’s life.

After Chasing Waves I tried to write another play. I even tried to get funding for it (what was I thinking?) But I couldn’t do it (I couldn’t do either of those things actually)  It was another black box extravaganza (I hadn’t learned the significant lesson of Chasing Waves it seems  - once you’ve opened the box you can’t go back in there) It was called Just a Man and was an attempt to look at the last night of Che Guevara. I wanted to know what he really, really felt and thought as he lay injured in the schoolhouse in La Paz. But I couldn’t do it. Because I knew I could never get into his head and do his thoughts justice. I knew I’d just be writing an ‘interpretation.’  It wasn’t a case of editing his writing, as with We Wove a Web, though I tried to do that. It was that the ‘moments’ I wanted to explore were deeply personal, inside one man’s head and all I would ever be able to do was interpret them. And as Marx reminded me frequently ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.’  When I became  a playwright I think I wanted to ‘change the world’ through my writing. I learned it wasn’t possible. I changed myself instead.  Now, through drama I think I’ve changed the lives of some people in the world for better and that is something I’m proud of, but I no longer believe that I (or anyone?) can really change the world through plush seat theatre.  Boal taught me that and I thank him for it.

Well, I gave up on the Che Guevara play. To be more specific I shifted perspective. I wrote a more personal story as an online blog and then as a novella which is (of course being me) not just a straight fiction but an exploration of the very nature of narrative psychology. It’s called Another World is Possible and is available as ebook and paperback. 

Then I wrote another play. Powerplay. I finished it this time. It draws parallels between the ‘rules’ of human relationships  - especially marriage, and the ‘rules’ of ice hockey. In that respect it harks back to Love is an Urban Myth. But when I wrote it I realised I really had to stop writing for the theatre because after Chasing Waves I had not just broken out of the box, I had broken the box itself.  Powerplay would be best performed on an ice rink. And when in the world is that ever going to happen?  It’s a play that requires all the fizz and buzz of a sporting event and yet retains that claustrophobic intensity of personal emotion which I’m beginning to see as a hallmark of my writing.  I’ve given up trying to work out what anyone else sees in my writing.

So. Powerplay was my realisation of the end.  But by that time I was deep, deep into the world of Boalian drama so I barely noticed that I’d finished one kind of writing for ever.  I was so caught up in the new,  flexible scripts I worked on for some seven years with ABC Drama Group – a group I directed and facilitated for and with whom I have had the most profound and delightful experiences of my life.  ABC are not a coda to my life’s work, they represent a completely different aspect and believe me, I could write about that experience indefinitely, never worrying about what comes after infinity. But this was my dramatic journey in stages and ABC are the part when I left stages behind (even though we’ve put plays on stages with them too.) If you’re really interested in the ABC years then I suggest you read A Week with No Labels which is my fictional representation of those times.

Health and personal circumstance now mean that I don’t engage in any form of theatre or drama and I can’t say I miss it, because as I hope you might have seen through this ‘retrospective’ I’ve been there, worn the t shirt and faced the final curtain – and I did it my way. And it was good.  But it was a stage (or several stages) in my life and all good things must come to an end.  I think it’s important to recognise endings as much as Benito Boccanegra points out that it’s important to recognise opportunities. And it’s always important to live in the moment. And my moments in the plush seats and black boxes are now not moments but memories. 

More about the author 

Stage credits for commissioned/performed plays with date of first performance

(Published plays are linked)

Choices  (2011)

Meat Your Greens (2010)

Aiken Drum’s Recycled Musical (2008)

FairPlay Dramas (2007)  

The End of the Age of Oil (2006)

Life’s a Pizza (2005) published in Triptych 2

Chasing Waves  (2004)

Piglet (2004)

One to One with William Buckland (2003)

The Other Side of the Mountain (2003) published in Triptych

When Time Stands Still (2003) published in Triptych  

Men in White Suits (2002)

Down the Line (2002)   

Love is an Urban Myth (1999) published in Triptych  

Kirkcudbright’s Light: A walk with Jessie M King (1999)

We Wove A Web in Childhood (1993)

Other published plays:

Powerplay (2007) 

Bond is Back (1998)

The Truth About Hats (1997) Not Rocket Science (2004) and Life’s a Pizza (2005) published as Triptych 2

Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break (1994) (published with Chasing Waves)

Other works referred to

A Week with No Labels

Another World is Possible

The links above are all for Amazon. Don’t do Kindle? Don’t worry. Coming soon: Plays also available in epub and pdf editions.  Click HERE for availability

Some plays are currently distributed for epub  through Kobo

Cally Phillips Amazon Author page UK

Cally Phillips Amazon Author page US

Or visit the HoAmPresst website SHOP