(3 / 5)

The Watermill Ensemble’s Macbeth is a rock ‘n roll and sexy production that finds favour with its public. Under the direction of Paul Hart, Shakespeare’s plays are given a cinematic flair and engaging performances. 

Macbeth, played competently by Billy Postlethwaite, enters the scene in combat uniform and blood on his face. The military setting gives a sense of comradery, aggression, and manliness. This makes more convincing Hart’s casting according to character rather than gender.  

The production moves away from the military world to plunge Macbeth into the criminal underworld. Macbeth’s castle is a seedy hotel. The neon sign ‘hotel’ leaves out the letters O and T to spell H—EL. In the style of a mafia boss, Macbeth hands out money from a bag to professional killers to get Banquo murdered. Accordingly, Lady Macbeth is the femme fatale of a mafia boss. Reminiscent of Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface without her grace, Lady Macbeth dons a red jumpsuit dress. The witches are in overly stretched mini dresses that conjures a brothel rather than ghosts. 

The jazzy music juxtaposed to the murder of Banquo is effective and striking. Music is protagonist in Hart’s productions. It creates the scene and provides commentary on the action. Sadly, not all the cast have the powerful voices of Billy Postlethwaite and Emma Barclay, here playing Lady Macduff. The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black lacks the necessary grit. 

Postlethwaite is a rough and tough army man. He has an animalesque energy. He is intense and captivating, but the tone of the production lacks subtlety making the soliloquies of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth a parenthesis in a Hollywood thriller. They are lustful, not sensual. They are all speaking verse comfortably but the excessive agitation puts the focus on action rather than atmosphere and meaning. 

Like Hart’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth gets stripped of Shakespeare. There is no tension between Macbeth’s murderous ambition and his guilt. Macbeth is blood-soaked from beginning to end. There is no discernible change or conflict, only a crescendo of paranoia. Emma McDonald is convincing as Lady Macbeth, but the supposedly sexy lingerie turns the tragedy into farce. Alas, for all its sound and fury, Hart’s Macbeth signifies nothing. 

I catch Billy Postlethwaite before he goes to rehearsals for a quick chat over the phone. He is playing Macbeth in Paul Hart’s production at the New Theatre, Cardiff. I ask him whether compassion plays a role in approaching a character like Macbeth. 

‘Everybody should have compassion and kindness, no matter who you are. In life, I try to do my best. In relation to Macbeth, he is someone who loses sight of those attributes while trying to gain something that he thinks he wants.’ 

It is hard if not impossible to identify with Macbeth, so how does an actor interpret the role? 

‘I look for the humanity in everybody I suppose. No one is inherently villain, so you try to work out what their motive is for doing what they are doing. People do villainous acts but they are not inherently evil. For Macbeth, it comes from a place of love, love for Lady Macbeth, for her, for what they have done together, for what they have lost. He is also a very ambitious human being. 

Postlethwaite tells me that he can recognise the love for another person and wanting to make that person happy as a driving force. He tries to ‘amplify’ emotions in his portrayal of Macbeth while making him a rounded human being. What distinguishes Macbeth is how love and ambition get twisted. 

‘Macbeth’s love for his wife and thirst for power are a powerful concoction of energy that he puts in murdering people. … That energy gets twisted.’ 

Postlethwaite’s interpretation of Macbeth is certainly energetic and intense. He tells me Macbeth is very draining. It is very physical. That physicality, in his voice as well as his bodily agility, gives Postlethwaite remarkable presence on stage. 

Billy Postlethwaite can currently be seen in Macbeth at the New Theatre, Cardiff,

https://www.newtheatrecardiff.co.uk/what’s-on/ws-macbeth/

(3.5 / 5)

The Watermill Ensemble’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an injection of fun, warmth, and colour. It triumphed at New Theatre with some in the audience giving a standing ovation. Loud and fabulous, it is the perfect production for all ages.  

All the cast give solid performances. Emma Barclay is wonderful as Bottom. Her voice stands out not only in power but in agility. The play’s eroticism is here blunt and humorous. This production aims to please and it does. It sparkles when it uses songs, such as I Put A Spell On You and Blue Moon, cabaret lights to frame the scene, and a contemporary ironic touch. The cast succeed in being funny without being caricatural.  

For all the fun, however, this take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream leaves Shakespeare out of the picture. The depth of the play is left untouched. I would have liked at least a nod to the plays’ darkness and symbolism. 

With A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we enter a world of doubles and illusion. The play within a play and the intermingling world of fairies and humans function as a house of mirrors that at once distorts reality and gives a truer picture of it. 

Sleep, the brother of death in Greek mythology, is used to access another reality, or, in post-Freudian terms, to travel deeper into our consciousness. The play is set in Athens, symbol of rationality, and in the woods, wild and dark. The rational day of humans is disrupted by the irrational night of the fairies.  

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often disturbing in the imposition of patriarchal order, in the loss of autonomy of humans but also of Titania, Queen of the fairies, who is made into having sex with an ass. It is tragic and comic. It conjures a dream world that grants humans the ability to see beyond, to transcend themselves. The hero is Bottom, the holy fool who goes through a quasi-mystical experience.  

‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go 
about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there 
is no man can tell what. Methought I was,—and 
methought I had,—but man is but a patched fool, if 
he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye 
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not 
seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue 
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream 
was.’ (Act IV, 1)

The Watermill Theatre’s tour stops in Cardiff this week with a double bill of polar-opposite Shakespeare plays on alternate nights: Macbeth, which will be playing on Wednesday, Thursday (matinee) and Saturday, and its tonal opposite, A Midsummer Night’s Dream which will be playing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday (matinee). I was delighted to see the performance of the latter, and to experience how Watermill – whose past triumphs include The Wipers Times, Crazy for You andMurder for Two – reconceptualised one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The creative team is brilliant across the board, and even though the pacing can be a bit uneven at times, the infectious energy of the cast, Paul Hart’s direction and the excellent second act more than makes up for it, with the ten actor-musicians gamely switching roles, instruments and costumes. Relocating the drama to Edwardian times maintains the original’s frenetic sense of fun, even if the period doesn’t add a huge amount to the original Athenian setting. (I wonder if it would have worked even better if set in the modern day, as with their staging of Macbeth).

Katie Lias’ production design beautifully shifts from dilapidated Edwardian theatre to the neon-lit faerie realm, aided by Tom White’s ethereal lighting. The music is worth the price of admission alone, with the cast performing gorgeous renditions of classic songs like ‘Cupid, Draw Back Your Bow’, ‘Blue Moon’, and ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. (Yes, the song choice can be a bit on the nose, but it works – trust me). The harmonies are delicious, especially in the haunting performance of Laura Mvula’s ‘Sing to the Moon’, the culmination of this ensemble’s considerable skill – and the show’s major moment of pure magic.

Our central lovestruck quartet – Lysander (Billy Postlethwaite), Hermia (Lucy Keirl), Helena (Robyn Sinclair) and Demetrius (Mike Slader) – are fairly thinly-drawn on the page, so your investment in their plight relies almost entirely on the actors’ charisma. Luckily, the four are more than up to the task, especially when Puck’s meddling turns their romantic squabbling up to eleven – coming to a crescendo with Hermia/Helena’s quippy sparring and the hysterical ‘macho-off’ between Lysander and Demetrius (the way they treat a bit of playground-style shoving as the most violently masculine mode of attack is maybe my favourite moment in the whole play – think ‘Agony’ from Into the Woods).

Postlethwaite gives easily the best performance in a brilliant ensemble. Effortlessly charming and captivating from the moment he saunters onstage, his Lysander is dynamic and compelling; his physicality pitched (at least from where I was sitting) somewhere between Kylo Ren and Kevin Kline in his prime. He makes the archaic dialogue sound natural and contemporary, and there’s a spark to his delivery that isn’t present elsewhere in the show. On the basis of his work here, his turn as Macbeth is sure to be mesmerising.

The lively chemistry between the main quartet carries them through wave after wave of romantic contrivances. Robyn Sinclair is a standout in every musical number, but her excellent artistry is undercut slightly by poor costume choices and overwrought affection for the rather insipid Demetrius. While Hermia and Helena are perpetually thankless roles, Sinclair and Keirl approach their perennially-perplexed paramours with panache. (Hermia for example insults Helena’s ‘beanpole’ frame despite the fact that the actresses are the same height. It’s a small but conspicuous issue which demonstrates that performing the play as writ doesn’t always work).

The closest the play comes to exploring the contentious gender politics at its core is to genderswap a few characters – notably Puck (Molly Chesworth) and Bottom (Emma Barclay), both of which had potential but were undercut either by performance/direction or connotation. As to the first, Molly Chesworth isn’t quite as mercurial or mischievous as the Puck character needs to be (although her ‘stroppy toddler’ scene is a high point). And although Emma Barclay shines as an entertainingly imperious Bottom (the puns are inevitable when discussing this character), her casting means that we are invited to laugh at the prospect of a romance between the only same-sex couple in the show – and when the spells are broken, the heteronormative status quo is reset across the board. I do think the show’s heart is in the right place, but I think it would have been more subversive to gender-swap one of the main quartet of lovers instead.

In other casting quirks, the actors playing Theseus and Hippolyta traditionally double up as Oberon and Titania – but while Emma McDonald impressively plays both Queens, the roles of Theseus and Oberon are played by different actors here, which doesn’t entirely work. Offue Okegbe’s Theseus is a wonderfully commanding presence, although they added a subtle bit of pre-marital strife between him and Hippolyta that goes nowhere (and reverses their loved-up vibe from the original play); but Jamie Satterthwaite’s Oberon is less convincing. Satterthwaite doesn’t quite bring the same regal elegance as Emma McDonald’s enchanting Titania, and his subpar outfit looks like a Halloween costume next to her elfin haute couture.

Although a tad drawn-out, the show ends on a perfect note thanks to the ramshackle players’ (un)intentionally inept version of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the hilariously but earnestly incompetent luvvies wouldn’t seem out of place in Waiting for Guffman or Barry. The machinations of the fey court might be frequently more interesting than the bickering beaus (you can’t really beat top hat and tails-wearing faerie courtiers singing Nina Simone) – but if what we have witnessed here is, as Puck warns, just a dream, then it’s a very good one indeed.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️

Danny Walkman, a radio DJ at St Bevans Hospital, loves music so much he can’t conceive of someone not having a favourite track, then after one of his shows he meets Peggy, an elderly patient with no time for music or Danny either. Can he solve her cryptic clues and find out which one is Peggy’s song?

Written by Katherine Chandler as part of National Theatre Wales NHS at 70 festival in 2018, this play is insightful, funny, sad and downright charming. It explores with compassion the relationship between a caring but careless Danny, still in mourning for his father, and the tough, hard-bitten Peggy, who only cares for custard creams. Other characters are given more than just a simple sketching, so that they surround the piece, creating more depth.

Phil Clark’s direction broadens the production out from Danny’s mixing desk and chair, helping the audience visualise hospital wards, houses, even a memorial garden.

But at the heart of this monologue is Christian Patterson, who ties it all together and brings it to life, giving each character their own voice. His Danny is saved from being a stereotypical DJ, all form and no substance, by the suggestion of layers behind the cheery persona. This is a man on the edge of a breakdown, trying to come to terms with his father’s death, the possible senility of his father’s friend who works in the hospital, Peggy’s illness and his own precarious future.

At just over an hour, this play doesn’t outstay its welcome, but it packs more into its short running time than a lot of full-length ones. Peggy’s Song is more than worth an hour of your time, and as well as the warm humour, you may well come away with a few things to think about. I know I did, and I’ll treasure for a long time the sight of Christian Patterson dancing with a Bugs Bunny doll.

The production is currently on tour and can be seen at the venues below.

Blackwood Miners Institute – 8 October, 7.30pm BOOK NOW

Torch Theatre, Milford Haven – 9 October, 7.30pm BOOK NOW

Ffwrnes, Llanelli – 10 October, 7.30pm BOOK NOW

Lyric, Carmarthen – 11 October, 7.30pm BOOK NOW

800 years ago, Francis of Assisi travelled to Egypt to meet the Sultan Malek al-Kamil while Christian and Muslim armies fought in the Fifth Crusade, which had been called by Pope Innocent III in 2017. Francis had experienced war and had subsequently renounced his wealth and status. He was now a humble friar preaching peace in the midst of the violence. The Egyptian city of Damietta was under siege. Francis crossed the enemy lines and asked to meet the Sultan. He did not want to broker peace; rather he sought to convert the Sultan or, more likely, be made a martyr in that attempt.  

Al-Kamil was a Sufi and a man who had been seeking peace for years. Francis greeted the Sultan saying ‘Peace Be Upon You’, much like the Muslim ‘Assalaam o Aleikum’, which may have prompted the Sultan to give hospitality to Francis and brother Illuminato instead of killing them. The encounter changed Francis profoundly. It is a beautiful story of welcoming the Other, the one that is supposed to be the enemy or at least a stranger, and becomes a friend through hospitality. At its core is a deep spirituality both men had, something that is wholly absent in David J. Britton’s play Kamil and Francis. 

In Kamil and Francis, the two men interpreted respectively by Simon Armstrong and Russell Gomer exchange light banter in heaven over a game of table football, too often behaving like 21^st century football fans. The gimmick affords a few laughs but fails to capture the personality of both Francis and al-Kamil. The story is told mainly by Sister Placida (Katherine Weare) and Kamil’s interpreter Alhikma (Ri Richards), who speak directly to the audience inundating us with information.  

Kamil comes across as petty complaining about being forgotten by the history books due to his ceding of Jerusalem for peace with Christian crusaders, perhaps a clumsy attempt referring to the contemporary situation in the Middle East. The numerous humourous allusions to psychoanalytical notions, wrongly attributed to the 21^st century, soon become irksome. The anachronistic take contributes to making the protagonists and the encounter more distant and obscure. Before us are not Francis and Kamil, but two uninspired and uninspiring men. The jokes sometimes weigh down the piece. At one point, Kamil’s interpreter jokes that brother Illuminato is discovering Middle Eastern cuisine, superior to the Italian cuisine of the time, which lacked tomatoes and spaghetti. In such a pedantic text, one would expect the author to know that in the 13^th century Italian nobles delighted in the cuisine of the East and that only with the Renaissance ‘eat local’ came into fashion. 

All the cast do their best to infuse some life into a pedantic play and to convey emotions battling an emotionless text. They are committed and manage to salvage the story. It is a story that should be told, but one that requires a good ear for the earthy spirituality of Francis and the transcendent faith of Kamil. 

Kamil and Francis, produced by Theatr Cadair, premiered at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, Wales on the 27th and 29th of September 2019.

The Creature, Company of Sirens’ bold reinvention of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is not only a magnificent modernisation of the classic tale but a potent and poignant examination of what it means for society to deem someone a monster. The play, vibrantly written by Lucy Gough and dynamically directed by Chris Durnall, functions as a spiritual sequel to their previous collaboration The Wolf Tattoo, which explored knife crime and gang violence. The Creature picks up these thematic threads and shifts the action from a futuristic dystopia to the dystopian prison system of our own world; to a single cell in which a young man confronts his erstwhile father for his part in the son’s terrible crime.

The production is thematically rich and harrowingly rendered. Are monsters born or created? What makes us monsters? And who is responsible? These questions form the spine of the story, and Gough has a knack for exploring the universal in the specific. The central mystery of Son’s ‘monstrous’ act is elegantly unwrapped, with breadcrumbs – bird, heart, tree – keeping the audience guessing until the final reveal, which (as in a criminal trial) still only forms a partial glimpse as to the act itself. Thematically and tonally, it called to mind Carol Ann Duffy’s Education for Leisure (empathetically exploring the psyche of a person who commits violent acts), the Taviani Brothers’ documentary Caesar Must Die (humanising/liberating prisoners through theatre), and Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell (in which the central image of hell – descending a rope into a bottomless pit – strikes a chord with the metaphors of this piece).

The original soundscape is effectively squelchy and unsettling, with Angharad Matthew’s design impressively recalling the psychological minimalism of the Sherman Theatre’s Tremor, and Dan Young’s spectral lighting eerily recalls Frankenstein’s early foray into the visual medium. The performances are powerful and evocative, even if they can be a little overwrought at times, but Durnall’s direction imbues a fantastic sense of motion and movement, and the melodrama complements the story’s high emotions and Gothic origins. Sometimes the characters’ declarations can feel a little on the nose, and a few elements don’t read as powerfully in execution as they might have on the page (the “autopsy”, Father’s revelatory monologue), but the creative team’s skill and good intentions keep the drama grounded and thrilling.

Intriguingly, the character of Son is portrayed by three actors – primarily by Matt Reed, who brings a brilliant Toby Kebbell-like intensity to proceedings, but also by Jared Ellis Thomas and Angharad Matthews, who embody the various facets of Son’s character, occupying the roles of his heart and mind respectively. The trio’s sinewy, surreal entrance starts the play: the three, a tangle of limbs under a sterile table, emerge as if from the primordial ooze in a visually thrilling sequence that you simply have to see to believe.

The doubles’ aspect of the Son character is especially interesting because duality is a key theme in his beloved Frankenstein, in which the son (the creature) can be read as a dark double of the father (Victor). Father (Jams Thomas) enters as an imposing figure jangling a set of keys. At first, then, he seems like a Warden, until his aloof disdain makes him more akin to some remote deity who materialises to pass judgment. When he enters the cell, he identifies himself as Father – not just the Frankenstinian sire of this seemingly-monstrous Son, but also the manifestation of patriarchal enmity; a symbol of the society which has shaped, condemned and discarded people like Son.

It was a pleasure to stay for the excellent post-show panel, in which the creative team explained that, in developing The Creature, they collaborated with young offenders from Parc Prison in Bridgend – the vivid authenticity of their collective and individual voices lends the drama a tangible, believable quality even as the weirdness escalates. Much of what we witness is ambiguous, largely psychological, and steered by an unreliable narrator who leaves us in doubt as to whether what we have seen actually takes place in reality.

The play is not realistic in a literal sense, then, but in an emotional one. The feelings are raw and jagged; tension simmers and rises to boiling point, but there is no relief or release – because this is a snapshot into the mind of someone like Son, whose traumas are absorbed so deeply into his psyche that he relives them on an endless loop. Son’s nightmare – ‘I’m in a labyrinth being chased by a monster, but the monster is me’ – demonstrates a remorse that he never clearly vocalises, and it’s interesting that his quest for a clean slate and father figure doesn’t turn him towards religion (despite wearing a rosary, something which is never overtly mentioned by the characters). The play also has some fascinating meditations on gender/gendered violence which similarly harken back to its Shelleyan source.

The dialogue is frequently interspersed with songs by cult music icon Daniel Johnston, a loner and underground revolutionary of whom Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was a vocal admirer. The most striking of these is ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’, which hauntingly sketches Son’s predicament through the recurring lyric, ‘he was smiling through his own personal hell’. The penal system is its own specific type of hell on earth, imprisoning people in a monotonous cycle that is supposed to squeeze the criminal impulses out of them and depositing them back into society a changed person – or, otherwise, hole them up for the rest of their natural-born lives for committing a crime that society deems unforgivable. But it is almost impossible to imagine how the four walls of a barren cell can facilitate a moral and spiritual metamorphosis, especially because a criminal record can operate as an indelible mark on one’s character which jeopardises the prospect of ever finding a stable job, home, and life.

‘Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?’ Though never spoken in this version, the original creature’s plaintive repine appears to encapsulate Son’s rationale. Myriad social factors and personal traumas formed the disparate limbs of his identity that the root of his criminal actions is fragmented in neglect, abandonment, isolation, and (implicitly) issues of poverty, class and mental health. Monstrosity is a social phenomenon; it’s a word we use to label people whose actions are so repugnant that we as a society cannot condone. But monsters are the children of society – and, as Son urges Father, the responsibility for these monstrous acts are shared by us all. If society does not provide an opportunity for people to change, the vicious cycle repeats. The fact that re-offending is on the rise and people of colour (and especially black men) are disproportionately incarcerated accords with the notion that prison is a microcosm for the world: its injustices are the world’s injustices. The system punishes the offender rather than the social structures which contributed to that person’s crime, and as such can arguably never truly offer justice or closure.

The least we can do, as Son implores, is listen. The play wonderfully demonstrates how literature (and theatre) can help you make sense of the world – Frankenstein’s creature gives Son the words he wouldn’t otherwise have to describe the chaos in his soul. Likewise, this production gives us the chance to hear Son’s story and empathise with him just as we did with Shelley’s creature.

This is a four-star show with a five-star heart that resonates long after the striking final image.  It’s not only a taut exercise in maintaining mystery and suspense, but a viscerally timely and harrowingly relevant work of art that urges us to take responsibility for what we create and, crucially, for each other. The Creature is playing at Seligman Theatre, Chapter Arts Centre from 1-5, 8-10 October (BSL-interpreted performance on 4 October): https://www.chapter.org/whats-on/performance/the-creature-company-of-sirens/4595/.

Hi Tess great to meet you, can you give our readers some background information on yourself please?

Thank you so much! I’m a playwright and novelist living in Cardiff. I was born in the Midlands but grew up in Oswestry along the Welsh border. I spent my teenage years at school in Denbigh, before going to London for university and work for some years. Some of my writing has been produced in London theatres, as well as at the Edinburgh Festival, and also in the States as part of human rights campaigns. I’m also a refugee rights activist, volunteering with two charities, Calais Action and a choir of refugees and friends, Citizens Of The World Choir.

My latest play, “Cargo,” about a group of refugees travelling in a cargo container was produced at the Arcola Theatre London in 2016 and later toured by the Turkish State Theatre last year, and I’ve also previously written a couple of young adult novels about climate change called the Genopolis series. My new show “The Story” was commissioned by The Other Room Cardiff, as part of their Violence series, and will be on from 8 – 25 October 2019.

So, what got you interested in the arts?

My dad was a painter and my aunt was an actress, my brothers are musicians so it’s definitely in the family blood. I read a lot from an early age so I always wanted to write, but also I think I probably moved into writing because it was a toss-up between that and music, but with two brothers as musicians there was more space to find my way in books and theatre for me. Family dynamics (I’m the baby of my siblings) are responsible for an awful lot!

Why do you write?

Therapy! I suffer a lot from depression and anxiety, and unfortunately I’m not one of those people who can do yoga or meditation for calming myself because my brain turns into a screaming bear pit. Instead I manage intrusive or cataclysmic thoughts by creating and writing, whether influenced by or as a direct block to worrisome stuff so I can immerse myself somewhere else for a few hours, or process things that are happening to me. I don’t find that depression and anxiety stop me writing, quite the opposite in fact; my last two pieces were written in the pit of depression earlier this year when I could barely get out of bed, and writing was pretty much the only thing that got me through. It’s a bit like playing beautiful music to block out the neighbours fighting, if you turn it up loud enough, then you can escape for a while.

There are a range of organisations supporting Welsh and Wales based writers, I wonder if you feel the current support network and career opportunities feel ‘healthy’ to you? Is it possible to sustain a career as a writer in Wales and if not what would help?

To be honest, it’s always going to be really hard to be a “full time writer”, wherever you are in the UK, because there’s only so much resources to go around, so both in London and in Wales I’ve had to juggle various things to keep going. I’ve noticed in Wales that the Sherman and Clwyd have been supporting many writers and well as the various writers rooms at the BBC. If I could identify anything it would be that it would be targeting the missing areas of representation in supporting writers, do we need to support more female writers, more writers of colour, etc. The Violet Burns Award by The Other Room Theatre is a very good example of supporting female artists, and I think that it would be good to see more of initiatives like this.  

If you were able to fund an area of the arts in Wales what would this be and why?

I’m very interested in mental health and neurodivergence so theatre and groups by and for people affected by various learning or communication conditions, such as Hijinx, or shows like Splish Splash by NTW last year are really valuable. I’m increasingly interested in types of communication that don’t depend on language, because theatre is all about communication, so to try to find ways of telling stories that don’t hinge on words themselves is something that I’m thinking about now.  

Can you tell us about your writing process? Where do your ideas come from?

Ideas get triggered by a range of things; my experience volunteering for instance, or a news story, or domestic events in my family perhaps. There’s always a period of downtime once a script is finished or a deadline met, where I’m the most uncreative person ever because it feels like I’m all used up; but having a few new hot ideas always in my back locker to plan or feel excited about helps my mind feel active.

Can you describe your writing day? Do you have a process or a minimum word count?

I think of writing as a daily practice, like yoga or meditation or tai-chi perhaps, because it has therapeutic value for me personally. The process does change according to whether or not the work is commissioned or whether it’s an idea that I’m working on as a spec script, or a deadline is approaching, but essentially I try to do a bit every day, whether it’s simply allowing myself time to let ideas germinate, or taking half an hour to try to get some raw material down, or editing over something that’s been written. I think most writers have different periods when they find it easier to either edit or create or ruminate, we’re not word machines. Luckily I’m quite a quick writer if I know a deadline is coming, so deadlines really help me to pace myself. I’m definitely not one of those writers who sits down and knocks out a thousand words every morning, but keeping it in the active part of my mind where I’m either writing something or thinking of writing something helps me.

You are a verbatim storyteller, how do you resolve the challenge of telling a gripping tale and sharing the truth of the diverse voices you work with?

Interestingly, I don’t see myself as a verbatim storyteller. The majority of my work is not verbatim (The Story for instance is fiction), so collecting verbal stories and contributions from people in order to shape it into an artistic work – is something that I’d only use if it was a real-life non-fiction story I was telling.

However, being a writer can be quite lonely so verbatim offers a nice collaborative environment of talking to people and getting out of your own head for a while and into someone else’s. You get to meet hundreds of different people from different backgrounds that you might not otherwise have known in life, and open yourself up to all sorts of interesting possibilities. Right now for instance, I’m working as a librettist with four different choirs to listen to the members’ stories and help transform them into an opera by collaborating with a composer as part of the “Singing Our Lives” project.

And yes, sometimes it’s hard to balance the objective truth of what you’re told with the endless writer’s itch to edit and augment reality, but I switch on different parts of my brain to shape what’s best about the material that I’m given into the themes and actions of the contributors themselves. I find that quite easy to do, as it takes the pressure off to “create” – and in most of my verbatim projects, the story is there waiting to be found anyway.

You were commissioned by the King’s Head Theatre to write the verbatim theatre piece Someone To Blame (2012), to highlight the real-life case of Sam Hallam, a 17-year old convicted of a murder he did not commit. Could you describe how you approached this commission and the subsequent developments in Sam’s story.

This was perhaps the most unusual commission I’ve received, which was part of the campaign to highlight the inconsistent evidence that convicted Sam of murder although he wasn’t even there. It was the first non-fiction play I had done, and given the legal issues I decided to work in a verbatim style, reading my way through huge stacks of court testimony, police interview reports and witness statements to use people’s own words about the events to create a piece of theatre. We also visited, interviewed and transcribed the words of people who were there at the time, including Sam in prison a couple of times.

I have a law degree which helped me get through and absorb the mass of evidence, and put together a script which started off with a gang fight in north London during which a young person was tragically stabbed to death. It then followed the various characters implicated in the murder, and critically examined the testimony which had convicted Sam.

The play was produced by the King’s Head a few weeks before Sam’s appeal. When Sam’s case was finally heard, the cast and crew of the play were all in the gallery at the Court of Appeal in London listening to the lawyers outlining the evidence. One of the actors leaned over and whispered to me, “It’s just like your play, isn’t it!”

What we hadn’t expected was that the judges, having heard only three hours of evidence, decided to free Sam there and then as his conviction had been so demonstrably not proven. Sam walked free from the doors of the courthouse that day and got sprayed with champagne by his friends, and there was a huge party in Hoxton for him afterwards. Sadly Sam was denied compensation for his unlawful conviction as the government had abolished automatic compensation for victims of miscarriages of justice.

What excites you about the arts in Wales?

I spent a long time in the London arts scene after I graduated from university, and what I really love about the Welsh arts scene is that it’s smaller yet has a vastly more supportive feel from the theatrical community, as well as from the audiences and community towards practitioners. Artistically there seems to be a lot more dedication to process in rehearsals and development support.

What was the last really great thing that you experienced that you would like to share with our readers?

I was shortlisted for the inaugural BBC Wales Writer in Residence award this year which really excited me and made me feel honoured to be included. It was especially meaningful because I had written the script whilst getting through a very difficult emotional time in my life, and was a deadline that I really struggled with. I’m very glad I managed however, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity.

And finally, your new play, The Story, commissioned by The Other Room Theatre as part of their Violence Series, explores the language of violence and the stories we tell ourselves to justify violence against others. In an extremely polarised society what can this new play offer to inform, educate and entertain?

Since I volunteered in Northern France from 2015 and also in Athens and Lesvos in 2016, the rising populist right-wing rhetoric has really exposed how language has been weaponised and how words matter, whether it be the murder of Jo Cox or the rise in racist attacks and nationalist sentiments in the UK post-Brexit. The Story is also an examination of how the idea of humanity and what it means to be human is being increasingly deconstructed. Volunteers have been criminalised for pulling people out of the sea or giving out food because the recipients aren’t seen as “legal”.

On an artistic note, it’s also probably the most “theatrical” play I’ve written, and really demands a lot of the actors and team! I’m very grateful to The Other Room for giving me the opportunity to create something around these themes, and watching The Story come alive in rehearsals has been epic. People watching it are definitely not going to know what will happen next!

“The Story” plays at The Other Room, Cardiff, as part of their Violence series from 8 – 25 October 2019.