IATE talk 12th November
Personal pain and process – transforming life through theatre works
It’s exciting to be talking to you at this event today. I have found great value in various forms of therapeutic practice at different points over the years. And in equal and possibly even greater measure, I have found my theatre practice to be a powerful and rewarding way to both embrace and transform issues.
A bit of context about me: I am a performer and theatre maker.
I also work as a director and I teach: drama, physical theatre skills, clowning and comedy both in Drama Schools and on open courses.
Although I began acting in the 1970’s in my country of birth, Australia. England however, is my home and I have been making theatre works here since 1980, firstly as a founding member of a small-scale fringe touring company and since 1983 as a solo artist. I have also collaborated with other artists and companies but most people who know me probably know me for either my teaching or my solo work.
Physical theatre was my field originally – some the early pieces were wordless or almost wordless. But I’d say, more often, I write and use text and meld it with movement and song into a whole.
I have always mined my own life to some degree for my theatre creations. Either directly or indirectly.
I have been asked to focus today on work that relates to childhood issues, but firstly I’d like to give a bit of context on my larger and more current approach to making work by referring to my most recent series of solo shows, which were autobiographical, based on real life issues. 3 shows created between 1999 and 2010. Right now I am working on a fourth, a piece largely composed of performed poetry.
The style they all roughly share is a kind of confessional story-telling mixed with swiftly sketched scenes plus some philosophical musings in direct address to the audience and including some music and some song. As a flavour, most people describe the work as a mixture of moving, thought provoking and funny.
These recent works have had for me a definite transformatory power. Getting my problem, my issue, getting the painful history into a format that contains emotion, finds new meaning and is also is redeemed by comedy has proved very effective for me.
Humour provides and requires a shift in perspective – and used well, that has a tremendously healing function.
My 1999 show TOPLESS, (got to have a good title… Topless was a ‘baring of the breast’, a ‘getting things off my chest’), it spoke about a series of painful events that happened over a 2 year period – divorce, heartbreak, a bout with breast cancer, illness and death of a parent and more. With all that as content, I felt the show had to be funny, so any ‘poor-me-ness’ had to be self-deprecating, any drama-queenishness owned up to. The grief was not sentimentalised but allowed to sit with its own human quality in the midst of it all, while the absurd details of the medical procedures and a painful romance were cartoonified.
So much so, that when I look back at those events now, it is the vivid, colourful version complete with a soundtrack of lounge songs that I recall. And I call that a result.
The most gratifying thing about not just TOPLESS, but MIDRIFF and INVOCATION is that my audiences, male and female alike always surprise me by seeing themselves in them. I’ll come out to the bar after the show to find people talking to one another and then to me about issues in their own lives….
Despite which, each time I make an autobiographical work, I wake in the middle of the night worrying
a/ do I really want to tell people these things about myself?
and
b/ will this be of interest to anyone?
Time and again I re-establish my belief that the specific leads into the universal…
And that telling one’s own story does have a value for others,
And that saying the truth as you see it, never turns out to being quite as scary as you think.
In these 3 autobiographical shows, naturally, some other people’s lives and stories intersect with my own. I’ve made a point of contacting people to make sure that they feel comfortable with what I put in my scripts about them.
In MIDRIFF I was not able to consult a friend because she had died. Tragically and disturbingly. Here is an excerpt from my 2002 show MIDRIFF:
I am indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck that I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?’
It’s always a relief to say bad things about yourself before someone else does.
As I was preparing for this talk today I realised that I will be talking about my family. In my earlier pieces I didn’t automatically ask their permission as I assumed my parents, still living in Australia, wouldn’t be seeing the work. As it turns out they eventually did see a couple of the pieces. My father came and saw Topless and he said : ‘You didn’t mention me.’
Just going back to that little extract from Midriff – you’ll see that I leaned on the story of Hamlet.
Which brings me to a brief talk about Process…in case that’s of interest to you…
The starting point for my pieces are usually something that I can’t understand or something that disturbs me.
Anything can provoke or trigger a piece: a recurrent dream, a newspaper article, a world event (CND protests Hiroshima Mon Amour 1984, Chernobyl – Frightened of Nothing 1986), some glitch in my current life, like a bout with breast cancer…
The starting impulse feels like a push, like a compulsion it’s like I have no choice about it
Then there’s gathering of material
Mining internally, keeping an eye out for synchronicities, what Arnold Mindell calls ‘flirts’ in the environment, researching…
Often I write a poem as a first capturing of the impulse, the lump ‘subject’ or seeming subject matter
Often there’s a song that I become fixated with listening to …
which usually never makes it into the realised production
Then there’s just continuing to write, read, research and improvising in the rehearsal room
Occasionally there may be drawing involved
There is collaboration with designers, if I can afford them and directors, who bring their own richness and judgement to the mix
Then there’s finding the myth
In other words
A piece has got to have a good ending, the audience has to go out happy or satisfied….or at least with in an interesting question.
There’s no getting round beginning middle and end
In that way dramaturgy assists the cathartic process: unless the piece feels complete, there will no be closure.
I have always been a ‘structure emerging out of content’ person….
So at a certain point in the process, looking for a model existing story or myth can be useful
With TOPLESS I thought, I know I want to say this stuff, but how is it going to end? What can I lean on here – is this the Book of Job, can I comically refer to Dante’s 7 layers of Hell? I just kept writing, allowing it to unfold. I eventually found out in the end that it was a struggle with identity.
What I thought was a recurring joke was in fact the nub of the piece.
My conscious or logical mind would never have found that.
So, childhood issues takes me to my early work.
My first solo piece was a physical theatre piece was called Red Heart, after the hot desert centre of Australia. An attempt to come to terms with growing up in suburban Australia – the claustrophobic, apathetic, sanitised mundaneity of it all in stark contrast to the wild interior.
In Australia, the huge proportion of the population cluster along its paved over, bill boarded, well-watered rim. Whereas the original population, the aborigines, had sung and danced and worshipped and cared for and communed with every single inch of the land including the desert with its, to many eyes invisible, rich plant and animal life.
I played the landscape and the wildlife. I also portrayed my child and adolescent self and my parents. I think at the time I was just intending to paint a portrait, to point up this absurd contrast, to show these quirky things…
but in the context of this talk, in a way the piece kind of hints at a family life that was a bit of a desert – sunny enough but arid and desolate and isolated, with this no-go land at the centre of it.
One of the issues at the ‘heart’ of our family dynamic was my father’s nervous illness which my mother only ever mentioned to me in private and which was never given a name other than ‘nerves’ or ‘nervous anxiety’, and which was never to be mentioned in front of my Father. So, though I felt it wasn’t a secret because it had been told to me, there was a constraint, a message there to stick to the safe territory, the allowable, the acceptable, the reduced options zone.
And of course I spent many years obeying this and then rebelling against it.
It strikes me now that the safe inhabited extremity and the mysterious interior is also a rather good metaphor for both the therapeutic and the artistic.
For me, emotional well-being consists of acceptance and understanding of all the shadow selves – all the aspects of the self. As an artist one has to be prepared to engage with and honour whatever arises. If you are playing a dark character you cannot judge them. It you are looking at a subject you have to uncover the unexpected aspects, not just show the obvious.
While my childhood was less than blissful (and I know that is the same for many), my father’s childhood, as much as I know about it, was pretty tough. In his adult life he remained hampered by unresolved feelings, as far as my untrained eye can see…..Dad was like many people of his generation – fearful of his inner workings. He preferred, as much as he liked anything, the material world. And he preferred, as we all can do at times, to point feelings outward to blame, intimidation and anger - rather than face the uncharted territory on the inside.
In performance, Red Heart provided for me a mix of feelings, a touch of transgressive guilt but also some satisfaction – as if I were able to ask the audience: ‘Look, what do you make if this, is it normal?’ I had always been gratified when things were admitted to in novels or diaries, the true hidden, the un-conventional story revealed. So perhaps what I said might be of use to someone else? Also I felt a subtle power in showing my own version of events, becoming the describer not the described.
I started to look back over my body of work with this talk in mind, I realised I had pretty much forgotten a piece called ‘Dogs I Have Been’ from about 1990.
This short piece – 16 short poems performed with a slide show with pictures of the family pets - was performed in the Lyric Studio in London as well as touring the UK. ‘Dogs I Have Been’ directly uses my childhood memories.
I think I was in therapy at this time, and examining my early life.
The first family dog I knew was my father’s fox terrier, already one of two dogs with the same name. He was grief stricken when this second dog died. My mother used to joke that my father loved in a strict hierarchy his ‘guns (no time to tell you about the guns here, another time)…guns, car, dog, kids and wife, in that order’. Perhaps you can see why I write about my folks, they were quite entertaining. Now I would have put myself at the bottom of that list. ….brother , sister.
Perhaps that was Dad’s special knack, making everyone feel equally undervalued.
My father would declaim loudly and often ‘The more I see of humans, the more I like dogs.’ He would also say: ‘The name’s Ted – short for bars-ted.’
My father was in fact illegitimate, back in the day when that really wasn’t much fun.
It was only towards the very end of his life that dad told me once that his birth father - I don’t really think of him as my grandfather as I never met him - had had a fox terrier and so Dad got himself one. No wonder he loved that dog so much.
Now I know there is no normal. But at some point in life I began to notice a dissonance between how popular culture presented family life, and how my actual family life was….
Also – due to a number of events in childhood that I won’t bore you with here – I had a bundle of issues that I heartily wished to be rid of. I sensed a dissonance between how I wanted to be and how I was.
I was disturbed at the time at the way I often presented myself as over-compensatory, over-eager. I had a ‘good girl’ demeanour, a ‘like-me’ ‘like-me’ puppyish way of operating, that also cut out in moments of stress to raw feelings that I felt guilty for having.
Read DOGS
I, II, IV, VIII, XI
When I found them and read them through, I was surprised how uncomfortable it was to revisit those feelings. These little poems I still find quite sharp and raw – more of a pouring-out rather than the alchemised healing that I have come to appreciate from my more recent work.
And I remember now that I always felt uncomfortable reading them.
I made a piece called Wendy Darling for which I won a Fringe First in 1988 – a conscious childhood issue was not the seed impulse for the show. But later I could see how informed it was by my childhood and family themes.
Wendy Darling was born from recurrent dreams of flying. My early collaborator, director Rex Doyle said, you should use Peter Pan.
I had recently returned from Australia and had brought with me this old vinyl record which was a recording from an old stage show. I have a memory of I think, the one time the whole family grouped round the record player listening together – quite poignant in itself.
My brother had told me at an early age: ‘Girls can’t do anything.’ And of course I simultaneously believed and reacted against it.
In young adult life I was always banging against the glass ceiling of my imagination trying to invent inspiring female characters. Which was hard because I was had been brought up timid, to obey and keep myself safe. And of course that had not always worked out.
I originally wanted to update the story. Empower the character of Wendy. I imagined a piece where Wendy grew up and become an intrepid woman traveller in the 1930’s. I wanted her to hike to Tibet and learn the art of levitation. I imagined her having a daughter who was living now and a fan of yoga and meditation and there could be these flashbacks… but as you can hear this was going nowhere – sloppy split narrative and no plot. Drama requires conflict and adversity.
And anyway once I began re-reading J M Barrie’s story and reading about his life, and listening to the record, I realised how much I loved the darkness of the Never Land, the savagery of the Lost Boys who shoot Wendy on sight, the grudge-ridden Captain Hook and Wendy’s unrequited love for Peter. I couldn’t better J M Barrie.
(‘Mr Darling’ had a dark fascination in childhood, before I could consciously see that he had the same kind of melodramatic panics that my father had. And also I suddenly see the loveable Nana the dog nurse, having an office that put her in charge, one level above the children. )
Wendy Darling starts with a grown up Wendy come back to revisit the abandoned childhood nursery…we imagined, as for the real-life boys that Michael and John were based on, that they were killed in the Great War.
So Wendy arrives alone. As she prepares to spend the night there she unpacks a pine chest and the whole Never Land comes spilling out. She plays Peter and re-enacts her unsatisfactory relationship with him. At one moment, he says ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’.
My big brother died in 1984. The grief process was difficult because although I adored my older brother, throughout my childhood he pretty much seemed to hold me in contempt and there wasn’t much happy togetherness. He was much wilder than me, we had very little in common.
It took me years to realise I was grieving both for a brother and for a relationship that had never been.
And that I had been left like Wendy at the end of my piece looking out the window, vainly wishing for an impossible past and for one more glimpse of the boy for whom she had been too boring.
Here’s another excerpt from MIDRIFF with its Hamlet theme:
‘I’ve always felt for Ophelia at the beginning of the play –
Hamlet Act one, Scene three, her brother Laertes:
My necessaries are embarked. Fullstop. Farewell.
Oh! so Ophelia’s brother was buggering off all the time as well!
Age of 15 I wrote a poem about the back of my brother’s head
End of the hippy era, he and his long hair were always headed off
To Indonesia, Darwin, somewhere
Maybe my love of Hamlet is an act of revenge against a brother who never paid me enough attention
My brother was the bad boy and I was the good girl
He escaped sooner but I escaped further.’
Adaptations have been rewarding for me. I made a piece called The Wooden Boy based on Pinocchio for a company called Gambolling Guizers, two male performers. Although at moments leaning on the Disney version, I concentrated on the darker Collodi original where Pinocchio is an unruly wood sprite, and had the performers appear onstage as wood sprites who then unfold the tale. In response to another of my father’s maxim’s ‘children should be seen and not heard’ – by which he meant they should be not just silent but preferably inactive, I had Pinocchio drowned at the end, with one sprite as the grief-stricken Gepetto cradling the boy turned back into a stiff lifeless puppet while the other woodsprite says slyly from the side: ‘Am I real boy now, daddy?’
These acts of revenge worry me slightly…..
It’s been hard writing this – I’ve come up against something that troubled me for so many years – really there’s not so much that I have suffered. A bit of me is afraid you’ll think poorly of me for making so much of nothing. Where I stand now - I thank my mother and father for the life and the privileges they gave me.
And I certainly thank my father for the wealth of material he has given me.
I thought at this point of writing a list of all my childhood issues,
but
I don’t want to overly expose myself
and I don’t wish to sound complaining either.
Suffice to say that at moments in my childhood I was disappointed in the amount of support and respect I received.
Inside the grown up me there were questions about abuse of power and then of course there were and are in the world very real issues of equality and double standards regarding women that were quite live for me.
The Porter’s Daughter – a play I wrote, was initiated by my wanting to deal with the problem of ambition. Why wasn’t I further long in my career? Why were women more likely to subsume themselves to men’s careers than vice versa. Why didn’t I have enough ambition?
Rex recommended I look at Lady Macbeth. Another adaptation, another re-writing of an old story.
For Lady Mac – I showed the moment that happens off stage in Shakespeare’s play. How and exactly when does she go mad?
‘I longed to be a soldier, but no one humoured me.
They threw the dress over my head like a sack and trussed me up inside it.
‘You are to meet your husband,’ they said, ‘He is a great man of action, a great soldier.’
That night I dreamt
I was the warrior standing beneath the banners on the battlefield.
I had his spirit, his strength, his body and his aim.
My voice rang out above the beating of the flags and I saw horses, men and cannon follow my intent.’
I re-read the play – the first Shakespeare play I had studied, and on re-reading was very taken with the imagery of the shifting wheel, everyone moving up a level….
Still looking for the antidote to weak or victimised female protagonists. I wanted to take someone who was abused but have her functioning and undamaged. I focused on the lowliest character in the castle and gave him someone lower than him. I invented a daughter for the Porter.
I also wanted to explore an uneventful life, and un-driven life - as I was quite a passive person. Also wanted to illuminate if I could, the theme of a woman’s worth.
In TPD, the woman gets to move away from the incestuous and violent relationship with her father (I hasten to add this was not directly modelled on me and my father) and moves up through the ranks to become the queen’s hand maiden and finally the lover of the king.
When the word is out that the English are arriving, the Porter come to the upper part of the castle to find her, ‘You belong with me,’ he says, ‘can you not understand, there’ll be a siege! You’ll never survive.’
And she replies: ‘How do you know? I have stood the whole of my life in siege.’
In my play the witches are a cross between Mother Courage and the Three Stooges. They have come north to take advantage of this moment in time and now they are headed south again, with quite a lot of booty from the castle.
I made the Porter both a bully and a weak man…and in this scene he tries unsuccessfully to pull upon the witches pity.
But he’s been violent and abusive to one of them previously and that is not forgotten. They force him to push their cart out of the bog.
He accidentally discovers that they are leaving with the gold.
They and they insult and mock him.
He is afraid – ‘what kind of grandmothers are you?’
They do a mock beheading and impaling and a mock knighting and just when he thinks he’s free, they kill him anyway.
The woman remains alone in the castle with the dead queen’s body and she gives a speech challenging the coming men to see value not in money or in glory but in the richness of feminine nature. The way her father had been blind to it.
So as I look back one could identify in my work a common theme or re-writing the past.
I copied Wendy Darling from VHS to DVD last night and noticed – I play almost single character in the Barrie’s book and play. Escaping my childhood role of useless girl and good girl to become the whole story: from the heartless Pan and the jealous Tinkerbell to Pirate Smee the unassuming, indispensible second-in-command, the loving yet elusive Mother and the disturbed and brooding Hook.
In translating my real life issues into theatre works I guess I have time and time and again been attempting to form a new story, if not the optimal one, then I have attempted a different one.
The work
is never done…..
