I’ve recently spent time on three different projects, all of which – in different ways – tell a story about stories. One is a project I spent a day on; one has finished; the other is still on-going. All have revolved to some extent around a deep analysis of story and of the hope found within them.
In three blogs, I’ll look in each case at what story is for, how the makers’ politics are informing it, and where that’s taking me in my own writing as I try and get a bit closer to what playwright Simon Stephens refers to as ‘your own writer’s myth’.
THE POMPS OF THE SUBSOIL by Leonora Carrington [1947] DACS; (c) DACS; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
The second project under the dramaturgical microscope is one of those occasional in-out consultations I often do with companies who are mid-process. Admittedly this is a company I worked with first in August 2013, but the process then was similarly brief; half a day’s prep time to look at scripted material, research material, sources and images from the project archive, alongside responses to questionnaires for each of the company members, and then half a day or so with the company to offer some objective dramaturgical support.
The company in question – Dirty Market – is ‘a performance group using bricolage to create events unlike anything else you’ll see: “I don’t like theatre but I like this!” – and they’re one of those creative outfits that push me beyond the conventional, demanding that I stretch my conception of what dramaturgy (and what story is, or could be) into more challenging realms.
When you add to that the source of their current adventure – an adaptation of the twentieth-century visionary surrealist masterpiece The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington – and you have the recipe for a dramaturgy that swirls around mercurially, tantalisingly within reach but defying a constant literal fixed set of rules. Which is just how they (and certainly I imagine Carrington) would like it.
I said that last bit like I knew Carrington’s work back-to-front. I don’t. I only heard of her and read this book last Monday.
But it’s a work that will stay with me forever, and it’s the dream book for this particular company: almost like they’ve found their Holy Grail (with, ironically, a book that includes an overturning of the patriarchy-inclined myth of the Holy Grail). That’s a pressure they’ve found themselves having to bear, made more complex by the act of adaptation which is in itself a tricky enough task, rife with a fluid terminology – appropriation? intervention? inspired by? based upon…?
The Hearing Trumpet begins with an old lady being despised and emotionally abused by her family until she is given a magical hearing trumpet by a friend. After placing her for a stint in a sinister old people’s home – one with more than a whiff of both communist and fascist regimes horribly whisked together – the book then tears itself apart from reality and ends with the protagonist boiling herself in a stew only to be immediately reborn; the Earth’s equator sat where the North and South poles are; a retrieval of the Grail itself during the tempestuous aftermath of a new Ice Age, and a radical, magical, irreverent and uplifting feminist revolution concerning the arrangement of the entire cosmos.
It is ontologically, physically, environmentally and biologically transformed: for example a benevolent wolf-headed King and Queen birth a litter of progenies that look forward to a brighter future outside human male authorities. I don’t know about you, but I think the world bloody well needs a piece of theatre that can show that story.
We spoke for about three and a half hours on Thursday evening, discussing the book, the script so far, a work-in-progress showing from the autumn, and what it meant to effectively transpose the journey or ‘ride’ of a reader through Carrington’s book to an audience member in a theatre: tricky when that experience even between the three of us was already split between it being hopeful (but about life), hopeful (but about death), uplifting (but because of suspension of disbelief) and uplifting (but because of the nature of metaphor and fantasy).
Reader, audience – we’re subjective beings. To claim a unifying ‘reading’ of all stories would be a fallacy, but at the same time seems to write us dramaturgs out of a job. Aren’t we meant to know the answers?
Well, no. Fortunately it’s not about predicting fixed story outcomes and meanings: it’s about attempting to anticipate the pathways for meaning-making through live performance, and understanding how we might apply those to the makers’ decisions regarding structure, content and form.
In addition, a multiplicity of meaning, form-breaking and Dirty Market are far from strangers. They’re used to thinking in terms of the experiential: their pieces are robustly imaginative, have audiences on their feet and wandering through different worlds and logics, and ask them to participate and problem-solve when recognisable elements of story have been intentionally twisted and mangled to reveal the darker sides of humanity.
Several times in this conversation however I had to stop myself from over-imposing my own personal ‘reading’ of the book – the company was gracious as ever, welcoming it into the room as a useful and refreshing departure from their own understanding of it – and I was certainly conscious of doing more creating than I was suggesting.
It’s difficult with dramaturgy to talk constantly in the abstract however, particularly with this source text: you want to pin down definites to illustrate your ideas, so fall back on a lot of ‘imagine if with this bit, you tried…’ They took it in their stride, noting and commenting and using it to develop the conversation. They’re a wonderful company and I hope to continue the relationship in the future.
However this section is called What Lane Learned, rather than What Everyone Else Learned, so mentioning it here is more about my own reading of Carrington’s story and my own reading (my own politics) regarding the purpose of story itself.
Carrington rewrites – smashes out of the water, to be honest – some of the biggest myths of our time with such joyful and outrageous imaginative departures. It’s a truly astonishing process, not least because the reference points for her rewriting are so recognisable: she borrows existing tropes from major religious stories, fables and legends, and re-arranges them with wild abandon.
She rearranges our world view with a reliance on its existing components and, in doing so, starkly reminds us that so much of what organises us – the organising principles of our lived world: religion, patriarchy, control over death, the evangelising of youth – is simply based in metaphorical stories. At some point these became accepted as unquestionable realities.
For me, what Carrington does is use story to remind us of a paradox: that there is nothing simultaneously so revolutionary and so obvious as the application of humans’ creative imaginations to help change the world.
As writers we’re constantly applying our creative imaginations to the world, but I doubt we all aspire to or imagine we’re capable of the heights that Carrington reaches. But she has great belief and optimism alongside her imagination: she is idealistic, utopian, uncynical – she’s certainly not second-guessing her audiences. She believes in a different world.
What we believe in now, what we aspire to, and what we’re prepared to admit we can believe about the future as people – and as playwrights – is surely part of what needs to make up our own writer’s myth.
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