Just a quick note about my current project, quick because most of what I’d say is already on-line here:
http://www.reelingwrithing.com/formel.html
I’m doing a good deal of work for it in Islay this summer. And, no, I can’t deny that’ll be as good as a holiday.
P.S. If you’re a promoter you can download a PDF with more details of the show here.
‘I’m Just A Mouse‘ is a downloadable book to go with our production of ‘If I Was A Mouse I Would Hide In Your Hood‘. The words are by me and the pictures are by Helen Nunn.
Enjoy.
And if get a sec let us know what you think.
On 11 July 2009 I spent an hour on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square as part of Anthony Gormley’s ‘One and Other’. During my hour I wrote a ten minute play inspired by the ‘Tank Man’ of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. ‘Tank Man’ will be performed by Gillian Lees at the Edinburgh Fringe 09 alongside our new full length play ‘Funny’.
You can find more information about ‘Funny’ here.
You can find more information about ‘Tank Man’ here.
In the late ‘80s I was campaigning against human rights abuse. Around 1989 I was shown a document by a researcher that was very sensitive at the time. It documented the abuses meted out by the UK security services in and had been leaked by an official with inside knowledge and first hand experience. Most of the document detailed physical and psychological abuse that nobody could deny should be described as torture. Suspects were brutally beaten but left without bruising, frozen near to the point of death, isolated and threatened horrifically.
The content of document was horrific but what really caught my attention was a section that described techniques that went beyond the physical and psychological techniques of cruelty.
One section described how the as the years had progressed the interrogatees had become increasingly sophisticated in their resistance to interrogation, allegedly due to training they had received in the Middle East. Techniques had been learnt from meditation that cushioned them from everything happening around them and to them. That cushion was found very difficult if not impossible to pierce. Interrogators were finding physical force, threats, isolation and other proven methods to be progressively less effective. The secret services began to consult even wider about how to crack this meditation cushion around their suspects.
One of the weapons they found was humour – jokes. They learnt that they might be able to crack through all the defences if they just find the joke that their victim just could not resist. They learnt that even in the ultimate hostile environment of the interrogation cell they might find the joke to break down the defences. Once the laughter came they were able to lever open the crack and break the suspect’s resolve.
I was fascinated at the time by this brief anecdote in a document that was generally intended as a record of physical and psychological torture. One of my points of interest at the time was how this demonstrated a far greater and confident display of power than the physical force or psychological cruelty used by other, perhaps less sophisticated, interrogators. The infliction of torture is usually a demonstration of power and status as well as an exercise in obtaining information. By using the instinct for laughter the interrogators were manipulating rather than simply extracting and foregoing the temptation to ‘teach a lesson’.
Under the circumstances of saving lives from the acts of a terrorist this seemed more efficient and pragmatic. But it also made me consider the impact on the interrogatee of this manipulation and how in the long term he or she may have preferred to heal the wounds of torture rather than have the confusion of having broken under the pressure of laughter.
These sophisticated interrogators were searching for methods that took them inside emotions and instinctive reactions and to play with the complexity of the mind. The fact that it was also unlikely to make them fall foul of international standards was incidental.
Of equal interest to me, and particularly as a maker of theatre, was the potential this story had for an investigation of humour. Why do we sometimes laugh at a joke that had a subject matter that would otherwise repel us? Why do we laugh at all, at anything? Why do most comedians see the need to find the edge of what is regarded as ‘decent’ and then push their comedy just that little bit further. Even the normally conservative late Ronnie Barker felt the need to tell a controversial 9/11 joke during his swansong TV programme.
This document revealed the calculated use of comedy as a weapon by the state, but the potential power relation between the comedian and audience is apparent in any performance. This potential is demonstrated by the urge for audience heckling that can disturb the relationship and shift the power to the attention seeking audience member.
Just under a month to the start of rehearsal of ‘Hannah and Harvey’. Eek. The draft of the script for the start of rehearsal is nearly ready, artwork is coming in for the projections, welding and hammering is about to start on the set, music has been written and more auditory magic is on its way. I love this moment on any show. I’ve always maintained to students that in the course of creativity decisions are as important, if not more important, than ideas. Ideas are two-a-penny to the artist – it’s what you do with them that matters. And now is the time for many, many, decisions.
The really great thing at this very moment is that I’ve just seen who Hannah is. It’s that realisation of seeing a character taking life and coming off the page. My hope is that there is enough space for Katherine, the director, and Romana, that actor, to create a ‘Hannah’ of their own and I don’t think the words are too prescriptive. But she also has a strength and identity of her own.
Back to work. Things to do.
P.S. Have a look at the video trailer. It’s brilliant! -
… The title of this modest 80 minute piece might be said to be misleading given the substantial role for a stuffed sheep called Fenella – clearly not a man. But really it is about a father and son and how they dealt with the premature loss of their wife/mother.
It opens with the son arriving in a remote corner of Ardnamurchan where his father had been a crofter, clutching the urn which holds his father’s ashes. The father duly appears, at much the same age as the son is now, and they chew over the sorts of things that fathers and sons really ought to talk about more but rarely do until one or other of them is dead: how the son became a photographer because of his father’s hobby; why the son stayed in Glasgow when his father went to work the croft and why he wants to come back there now; how the father was content in the wind and rain and the hard labour of surviving off the land in the far west of the Highlands, before the telephone and even electricity had found its way down the long Ardnamurchan peninsula. …
It could have been grimly drab, or portentously lyrical. But Nunn shows once again what a skillful writer he is because his script is witty, tender, and full of interest. Involving the composer Eddie McGuire was also a key move. His series of pieces for solo flutes of various sizes (very well played by Katie Punter) punctuate, comment on, animate and even argue with the two men.
Callum Cuthbertson and James McAnerney, as son and father, respectively respond well to Katherine Morley’s unfussy direction. …
Robert Dawson Scott
April 2008. I’m in the Stables flat of the Cromarty Arts Trust writing the script for ‘Hannah and Harvey‘. I have to confess to having spent a few days trying to think through some story problems but now I’m getting there. While I’ve been in the North of Scotland my niece Helen has been in Bath, South-ish England, also working on ‘Hannah and Harvey’ and thinking through some illustration problems. So Helen sent me this cartoon:
Thankfully we’ve both got past the head scratching stage and ‘Hannah and Harvey‘ is going to be awesome (even if we do say so ourselves).
When asked about ‘Only the Men’ I have often said that the idea for the show was born when I visited the village of Sanna in Ardnamurchan on the west coast of Scotland. What is nearer the truth is that the show is the story I needed to tell about my own family, the small farm my father owned and my urge to get off the land as quickly as I could. And the feelings I now have about why that happened.
When I was a child my father often told me that I should ‘get a job in a bank’ and never once gave me even a hint that my future should be working on the land. This was from a man who loved birds, would scour through the pages of the expensive bird books he had saved to buy for interesting facts, would lie on his stomach in a damp woodland photographing a rare mushroom and would never be happier anywhere other than in the middle of a loch with his old fishing rod. But according to him working the land just wasn’t an option for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.
When I had put on a few years I learnt that my father was sad. The death of my sister had shaped my father’s emotions as well as my family. My closest brother and I had been born after her death when the local GP had advised my father that the best thing would be to give my mother another baby as soon as possible. My father never stopped mourning even though we arrived. The family home and the small farm that went with it were sold when Dad finally admitted that he couldn’t live there any more. My sister had died on the road outside the house, hit by a lorry full of rubble.
Adulthood also opened my eyes to the way Dad liked to be alone. And that he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met in my life and ever likely to meet (and I used to work for the Dalai Lama!). I don’t know whether Dad spent so much time alone before Sally’s death but it certainly fitted his general demeanour afterwards.
In my middle age I have felt an attraction back to the rural. I live in the city and enjoy that life but I can feel
my shoulders drop with relief when I get into the green open space and my head is once again turned by bird song. The trouble is that I no longer feel that I am ‘from the country’. It is a different language but one I recognise from my childhood.
When I went to Sanna I saw the places of my childhood in the surreal but beautiful geography. The wildlife and the wind were familiar. It was a shock. The evident history gave this reaction a greater resonance. The beautiful sands of Sanna Bay are surrounded by some new homes but even more ruins of old crofts. Some of the new homes have a shadow of an abandoned stone house. When the stone was usurped by concrete the old houses have been left standing, right next to the door of the new home. History ever present. Sanna is a beautiful natural place but it has a sadness that the humans brought with them and left hanging around after when they left.
When I became resolved to write a play set in Sanna I went back for a longer period, several in fact. I set out to meet residents of Sanna and to hear as much of the first-hand history as I could. The story that then unfolded wasn’t a surprise but it came at me with some force. That Sanna was never a place that people should have lived and that it was inevitable that they have left. That the village grew from the clearances and the injustice of that period was finally brought to its conclusion when the last crofter finally gave up and left in 1970s. My father’s voice telling me to get off the land bounced around my head a great deal when I did this research.
There is a modern truth for Sanna that is not necessarily defined by its history. The village now has electricity, telephone, internet, roads and potential of some tourist income. I understand that there is some contention about the modern development of Sanna but my own personal belief is that if people want to live there they should be allowed to change the crofts to accommodate their needs, work the land as efficiently as possible and develop into a real community. But that was not the truth in the 1970s when life was very hard, almost as hard as it had been 100 years earlier, and the outside world had changed.
In all of this I saw the story of a family that had mixed motives for staying on the land, was rejecting it but at the same time could not leave its isolation. A father and son who both felt the inherited attraction of Sanna but who had both rejected it when they were no more than children and had gone to Glasgow. They were Glaswegians on the surface but Sanna was still in their fabric.
That was my starting point for ‘Only the Men’. If you saw our production I hope you enjoyed it.