This post originally featured in Lane’s List in November 2014.
Image from FREE: www.halfmoon.org.uk
I was in a panel discussion last year which took as its starting point the experience of a character from one of my plays: a young girl from Kabul who runs from a forced marriage in order to save herself, but in doing so precipitates the death and mutilation of her family who owe a huge debt.
This isn’t what the play is about.
It’s about freedom, desire, the urban landscape, the corrupting and claustrophobic power of cities on our sense of individuality, the need to run from those things we most need to confront, the aspirations and dreams of teenagers that occupy the realms of the imagination before they become reality, and what might happen if the city became a force running within us rather than a force we constantly push against.
So I was slightly sceptical of a discussion being built around what was – for me – the backstory of one of the characters rather than the present-tense action itself.
As playwrights, I think we all want to be magnanimous and let our work go in front of an audience (and in fact we have no choice but to do so), yet there’s always a part of us that wants to say ‘well, actually, it’s not really about that…’.
Such is the contract with putting stories in the public realm: an audience takes what is most useful, or that which touches it most, and leaves behind the rest.
What emerged however was one of the most useful and inspiring discussions I’ve had in a long time about the responsibility of public storytellers, revolving around one central question:
How do we counter the dominant narratives of minority female and male experience – not just forced migration, but anything that perpetuates an ideology that only limits our understanding of diverse human experience?
In other words it was a hugely political discussion.
There was a representative from a local council authority who expressed her excitement when she saw young women confronting the (largely media-based) myths of their culture or situation through theatre, and going through a catharsis to realise they could take control of their own story.
We talked about the predominance of women being portrayed in stories simply as the totality of their experiences as ‘victims’ of a certain duality: women who are manipulative and lie, or who are suffering – and our responsibility to gift those two stereotypes much bigger, richer, more layered stories and in doing so perhaps give agency to the audiences to construct a new reality too.
We talked about the need particularly among work for young audiences – the broader frame around this discussion – for there to be sensitive males and strong women seen on stage.
We talked about the different manifestations of ‘strength’ – strength in humour, optimism, friendship, love – and about reversing paradigms of character and entertaining new alternatives.
Case in point: one of the theatre makers was telling a story about five girls and how their identities came under scrutiny through the action of the play. Sounds fairly routine except:
1. the five girls are all the same character
2. when one of them gets home one day, their entire house has disappeared
3. the story is told through a combination of live action and graphic-novel-style projection
We also talked about the theatre we were making, and the common passion among us to occupy realms of the imagination with freedom – and that it was only there, in those realms, that the new stories could be told and presented.
We wanted to build worlds that de-cluttered themselves of barriers or crashed through the boundaries of form and reality to get to the bigger questions – not simply how to ‘cope’, but how to reinvent and take control of the world.
This was high-octane dramaturgical discussion, in my view.
These are the ideas that permit you to spin new mythologies, create new universes, embrace other worlds that elevate and transcend reality to give a true sense of freedom to the story, and its form, to its audience, and to you as a storyteller.
Forced migration is not what my play is about – but in honing in and undoing this particular strand, teasing it apart to look at why it mattered, the unexpected was allowed in – and it actually became everything that my play was about.
It was about looking at an aspect of the world and re-telling it with the freedom theatrical imagination can give you.
Let in the unexpected – in process, writing, discussion, imagination – and it might reveal what you needed to know about your story all along.
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