Every One E-Book

Jo Clifford

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 109

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Mary, a mother of two, is doing the ironing one Saturday morning when she feels something on her shoulder. It's the beginning of a series of events that will change things for ever. For every one. A re-imagining of Everyman, one of the oldest stories in English drama, Jo Clifford's bold and haunting play tells a deeply emotional and warmly funny story of a voyage into the heart of living – and of what it means to lose the people we love. Every One was first performed at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2010, and was revived in a new production by Chris Goode & Company at Battersea Arts Centre, London, in 2016.

Leseprobe

Jo Clifford

EVERY ONE

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

‘Every One’ by Maddy Costa

Dedication

Epigraph

‘Before You Start to Read’ by Jo Clifford

Author’s Note

Characters

Every One

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Every One was first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, on 19 March 2010, with the following cast:

MARY

Kathryn Howden

JOE

Jonathan Hackett

MAZZ

Jenny Hulse

KEVIN

Kyle McPhail

MOTHER

Tina Gray

MAN

Liam Brennan

CHILD

Jenny Hulse

DANCERS

Courtney Bladen

Olivia Barnett Brown

Natalie Craigie

Monette O’Hara

Elaine Anderson

Elaine Farris

Mary Matthews

Kathryn Wilkinson

Hannah Titlestad

Margaret Anderson

Kathleen A. Krievs

Katrina Stimson

Director

Mark Thomson

Designer

Francis O’Connor

Lighting Designer

Davy Cunningham

Composer

Philip Pinsky

Choreographer

Rhiana Laws

The play was revived in a new production by Chris Goode & Company at the Battersea Arts Centre, London, on 2 March 2016, with the following cast:

MARY

Angela Clerkin

JOE

Michael Fenton Stevens

MAZZ

Nicola Weston

KEVIN

Nick Finegan

MOTHER

Eileen Nicholas

MAN

Nigel Barrett

Director

Chris Goode

Designer

Naomi Dawson

Associate Designer

Cécile Trémolières

Lighting Designer

Katharine Williams

Production Manager

Helen Mugridge

Stage Manager

Griffyn Gilligan

Producer

Ric Watts

Critical Writer

Maddy Costa

Every One

Jo Clifford’s Every One is the first play staged by Chris Goode & Company in its five years of existence that wasn’t either written by Chris or created collectively in response to other motley texts. Why this one? Although written by a transgender woman, it presents a heteronormative family that is not only white and middle-class but repeatedly claims, without question, the privileged space of being considered ‘ordinary’: they’re ‘just normal people’, they emphasise, ‘like everyone’. When Jo disrupts that picture, she does so through the death of the mother, which, to echo my children’s favourite catchphrase, isn’t very fair. That the mother works as a tax inspector suggests another apparent universal – that taxes and death are the only two certainties – half of which doesn’t apply to many low-waged people, or indeed mothers. Within the politics of the company, its desire to hear the voices of the marginalised and nonconformist, Every One seems to pose a series of problems.

It would be easy to read Every One as a sentimental play, a weepie, the more so for its basis in autobiography: the death of Jo’s wife, Susie, in 2005. ‘Time doesn’t heal anything,’ say Joe the character in Every One and Jo the playwright in unison: what changes is the ability to look at the wound. In writing of her wife’s pain, and her own, Jo breaks the taboo surrounding death, the culture of silence, avoidance and discomfort, inviting a contemplation at once of bereavement and the inevitability of one’s own demise. The loss of the mother is an ongoing theme in Chris’ work (devastatingly so in God/Head), and I read a reckoning with his own mother’s death in his decision to direct this play. At a surface level, Every One has the same directness as Blind Willie Johnson’s blues song, ‘Motherless Children’: ‘motherless children have a hard time when mother is dead’. That was autobiographical, too.

But the play has a complexity that renders its surface precarious and transparent as a thin sheet of ice. It begins with the family addressing the audience, as though inhabiting with them the same present moment: but that family move across time, into past and future, with a fluidity that is unnerving. We talked in the rehearsal room about ‘queer time’: whereas standardised storytelling, with its beginnings, middles and ends, is linear, queer writing is cyclical and multi-dimensional. I’ve encountered a similar theory of ‘feminine writing’ in the work of French post-structuralists (I had fun at university, I can tell you), and Every One is undoubtedly a feminist play. For two millennia, the iconography of Mary has been used to beat women into submission: Jo rejects that iconography and creates instead a Mary who is mundane and mortal, argumentative in the face of death and ultimately self-determining.

As much as Every One is focused on dying, it is also a play about living. Not just living on – the play doesn’t simply end with death but also begins with it and journeys beyond – but living differently. It calls for a different spirituality: not the organised Christianity of a church that has ‘dissipated all authority and power’ through its insistence on heteronormativity and binary absolutes (good/evil, male/female), but a faith expressed in tender appreciation of the spectrum of humanity. The same spirituality surges again and again in Jo’s work, most obviously in The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, a luminous sermon that retells stories from the Bible from a queer perspective.

Where that queered spirituality leads is to a robust resistance of capitalism. Every One is disgusted and incensed at the damage inflicted by capitalism. This is a play in which death claims responsibility for all the ills of the world: war, genocide and – his ‘masterstroke’ – an economic system that kills those it benefits as much as those it crushes. But he does so in the body of a man.

Capitalist patriarchy is destroying us, and so we need to change: to care for each other, help each other, ask ‘how are you?’ and really listen to the answer. The congregating we do in theatre might just be central to this shift. In 2013, Chris and Jo shared the stage at the Bike Shed in Exeter for a conversation; I sat in the audience electrified by the passion that erupted from Jo as she spoke of theatre as a place of resistance, in which people deny the ‘capital-intensive economy that ... is obsessed with the notion of the individual, in competition with our fellow human beings’, by working together, trusting each other and exercising empathy. Jo went on: ‘If there’s one quality that we need more than any other in this terrible world it is empathy. We have to resist this horrible tendency to dehumanise our fellow humans and judge them and belittle them and exploit them; we have to learn to love each other, and that’s what theatre is about.’ It’s what Every One is about. It’s what Chris Goode & Company is about. Jo’s marginalised, nonconformist voice sings out in this play, and that’s why the company is so proud to present it.

Maddy CostaFebruary 2016

To Susie,

dear loved one

for the last time

‘Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.’John Milton, Paradise Lost

‘A condition of complete simplicityCosting not less than everything.’

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Before You Start to Read

Where the play comes from

At the end of the first performance of my Anna Karenina, one of my lovely daughters said to me: ‘Dad! That was about us! You put us up there!’

She was right, even though I hadn’t intended that, and obviously the characters she had just seen were originally nominally Tolstoy’s. It’s as if everything that happens to me forms part of a kind of storehouse from which, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, I draw my characters.

This play is unusual for me because it comes very directly from a recent memory. Which I will describe soon.

It’s only really in the last few weeks, as I have been reflecting on what I need to tell the actors before rehearsals (which, as I write this, begin tomorrow), that another memory has come back into consciousness. One I know has given this play its first impetus and final shape.

When I was twelve years old, my mother came to see me in the boarding school in which I had been put. Such visits were unusual, partly because she lived so very far away, and partly too because there was a sense that it was somehow ‘good for boys’ to be separated from our parents. Especially our mothers.

She took me out one Sunday that November, and then – joy of joys – I saw her again on the Wednesday. We were all to watch a rugby match; and she came along too. She brought along my little dog, Sally. Sally was a Jack Russell terrier and I loved carrying her inside my jumper so she could stick her neck out at the collar.

We were due to meet again the next day, the Thursday, when she was to be at my confirmation service in the school chapel. This was a rite of passage service where we reaffirmed our baptismal vows and were then allowed to take communion.

Part of the service consisted of each of us going up to the Bishop and kneeling before him. He was to lay his hands on our heads and say a blessing. My mum wrote me a letter, which I had received that morning, to say that I wasn’t to worry if I didn’t feel anything when this happened. When she was confirmed she had been eagerly anticipating some profound experience at this moment and was very disappointed when apparently nothing happened.

Whatever I felt at the moment, she wanted to reassure me, it would all be fine.

I was unexpectedly called away by the assistant headteacher, and off I went, with the letter still in my pocket, to be told by my grieving father that my mother had died very suddenly in the night.

It was a brain haemorrhage. It came out of nowhere. It devastated my young life.

Death is like that. I did not know it when I wrote this play, but I understand now that this experience was the seed that first generated it.

Consciously, however, this play came from the death of my wife, Susie, in February 2005.

The process began in May or June 2004, when she suffered from something that was diagnosed as a stroke. Out of nowhere, she said she felt some evil creature fixing itself to her shoulder and battening on to her. For a while she could not move; then she was taken to hospital.

I was away at the time, and could not help her.

She seemed to be on the road to recovery; but in August that year she started to lose her peripheral vision, become disorientated, and suffered from the most agonising headaches. Again she fell unconscious, again she was taken to hospital; but this time they found a brain tumour. They drilled a hole in the back of her head, located the tumour, analysed it; and discovered it was extremely malignant, and too close to the brain stem to be surgically removed.

They told me she might last for a week or so, but most likely she would die within days.

As it turned out, she lived another six months.

I cannot yet write about that time.

Afterwards, I became aware of how incompetent our culture is when it comes to the universal fact of death. It was almost impossible for me to talk about my experience; and there was a conspicuous lack of public events, either in the church, or the theatre, or anywhere, that helped me understand what had happened or which could help me continue to live with it.

A dear old friend of mine, the actor Suzanne Dance, had at about the same time suffered the death of her mother, and she was having a similar experience. We decided to try to pool our talents to see what could be done. The result is Leave to Remain, a ritualistic theatre event with words and music played live on the cello, which we have performed about two or three times a year ever since.

Leave to Remain is designed to be mostly performed in non-theatre spaces; Every One is an attempt to use the wonderful, amazing communication resources offered by a beautiful theatre like Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum.

Both pieces are an attempt to break the taboo surrounding death and offer a way forward in the face of it.

I became very ill in the year following Susie’s death. The mitral valve in my heart was no longer functioning properly and had to be repaired. My heart was literally broken and bleeding.

In the operation, my heart had to be stopped for the surgeon to repair it.

In that sense, I, too, have died.

Certainly I had to face the possibility of my own death; both before the operation and after it, when miscommunication resulted in my being seriously overdosed with warfarin and being close to bleeding to death.

Even now, each time I become aware of my own heart beating I also become aware that one day, and perhaps now, it will stop.

This sense is intensified by the fact that I have just reached the age of sixty. This feels to me like a good time to contemplate the inevitable fact of my coming death.