Kirsty Cox as Svetlana Aliluyeva in my own attempt at a single performer play: STALIN’S DAUGHTER
I saw two one-person plays this week – both powerful pieces of writing full of layers and complexity, dynamic journeys for their characters and the ability to introduce a world alien to our own and yet strikingly familiar.
GROUNDED by American writer George Brant (touring nationally from The Gate) and TITUS by Belgian writer Jan Sobrie (English version by Oliver Emmanuel) made language and their audiences work hard despite being compellingly simple in the design of their dramatic action. One was for adults, and one was for children. Both gripped and moved me in different ways.
One performer is in a huge gauze box: a female fighter pilot recently fallen pregnant, seemingly hermetically sealed from the audience and in charge of her tiny kingdom whilst also being trapped within it.
The other performer is an adult playing the ten year-old son of a vegetarian butcher whose wife has died, leaping from within the audience, clambering up onto the stage and ascending a desk which he tells us is the school roof – where he remains, toes perched on the precipice of death – for the duration of the play.
In both cases, the playing space sets a territory that in some way reflects the experiences of the characters, either literally (being on the edge of a school roof) or metaphorically (trapped in roles that demand on defining us their way when we desire the total opposite for ourselves).
Both plays are firmly expressed from the point of view of their protagonists: the language of the fighter pilot is aggressive, staccato and rapid-fire but continually betraying an unspoken doubt beneath; the language of the schoolboy is cheeky, irreverent and imaginative, yet veering between truth and fantasy as he navigates an unfamiliar landscape of loss and grief.
The physicality communicates story too, as the fighter-pilot prowls and spins and darts inside her cage, every false move or pause or interruption enhancing our understanding of her increasingly faltering path; and as the schoolboy teeters on the brink of his destiny, his enthusiasm in painting pictures of his imagined world with sweeping gestures insist on throwing him into dramatic wobbles.
In both cases, only in being confronted with the deeper personal truth of their situation can they break the frame and make a choice: to move forward, or to stay stuck on repeat forever. Dramatic character paradigm signed, sealed and delivered.
So what makes them feel so enthrallingly different and new?
I could wax lyrical for pages and pages on the themes and worlds of both pieces; how, respectively, they captured the terrorism and injustice of American military tactics and the way a parent’s grief deeply impacts on the world and choices of the now-motherless child; how one communicates the complex experience of being a woman and mother in a patriarchal military, and the other the experience of being ten and watching everything in the adult world that you rely on for security crumbling around you one-by-one.
At the heart of it though, they simply told very strong human stories.
A fighter-pilot’s passion for her position is challenged by personal, political and military circumstances: the ensuing contradictions in her various new roles (mother / drone pilot / wife) are irreconcilably conflicted.
A boy loses his mother and when his father can’t cope anymore, he finds solace in writing stories on his bedroom wall and pursuing the love of his life, a keen swimmer called Tina whose overtly religious mother bans them from seeing one another.
Or even more distilled:
How do we reconcile the conflicts between multiple roles we feel destined to perform?
Where do we go when the adult world of loss impacts on the child’s world of security?
These questions are dissected for us through dramatised first-person storytellings: in the present tense, the past tense, playing themselves and others, creating the spaces in our imaginations where other characters’ words or bodies might sit, creating the textures and rhythms of huge visual narrative landscapes – all through language, performance and minimal stage design. Theatre of economy, theatre of craft. Sublime in some cases.
I hear too many people saying that monologues are easy to write. This might be because when people think monologue, they immediately think you’re going to be telling the audience everything, therefore that nothing is actually happening in front of you on stage and that you’re basically rehashing Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (which I most definitely did in my first ever play aged 19. They’re brilliant in their own way, but far from the only way to do it).
These two plays show such mastery of craft with spoken language, and it’s from that foundation that the theatrical languages that support their telling are inspired. What these writers leave out of the text is what makes them bold, brave, ambitious and – frankly – eminently actable pieces of work.
Above all though – and for me this is the golden rule of one person plays – the characters are taking a risk in telling us their story. There is something at stake for them in exposing these personal tales and they themselves are changed by the act of telling. The act of telling is the journey, just as much as they story they are telling is a journey.
What Lane Learned is that the powerhouse of great theatre so often resides in the basic things not just done well, but done so well that you forget they’re being done to you. An actor, a space, some words – and suddenly, you’re submitting to the spell of the story’s world, whether you’re ten or thirty-four.
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