Everything Not Saved E-Book

Carys D. Coburn

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

Seitenzahl: 65

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Ex-lovers argue about when they were happiest, police officers rewrite history, and Rasputin dances like no one's watching. Oh, and also the Queen is there. We're going to feed the present to the past. It's a kind of ritual. A kind of sacrifice. Memory always is. Everything Not Saved by Carys D. Coburn with MALAPROP Theatre was first staged at the 2017 Dublin Fringe Festival, where it won the Georganne Aldrich Heller Award for a standout Irish artist or company that demonstrates innovation and connects with audiences. It was subsequently staged at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Leseprobe

MALAPROP

plays

Everything Not Saved

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Original Production

Characters

Everything Not Saved

Company Biographies

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

It’s been a busy few years since we were awarded Spirit of Fringe at Dublin Fringe Festival for LOVE+. At the time we weren’t even a company, on the basis that a company name felt like a promise of a further show. We knew we could make LOVE+ – because we’d just done so – but we didn’t know if we could make something else.

And then, with the award, we suddenly had to! What a wonderful vote of confidence! What a terrifying vote of confidence!

It made sense, we felt, to take two years to make Everything Not Saved. So we could work out how we worked. To separate the idiosyncrasies of a single project – because they all have idiosyncrasies – from integral parts of the process. (That was a thing we did once, this is a thing we always do.) To work out our interests, goals, style.

Style, in particular, is a funny thing. Get too precious about it and you fall into self-parody. Get too self-conscious about getting too precious about it, and you risk alienating people who like your stuff by not doing things you want to do out of some vague sense you have a duty to ‘innovate’. (Whatever that means.)

Our solution was not something we sat down and worked out. It was something that emerged from two years of intense work on everything else: BlackCatfishMusketeer, JERICHO, a truly bizarre short play that we performed at a corporate fundraising dinner. (The brief: okay, so, we’re raising funds for children with haemophilia, so what if it was a retelling of the Children of Lír but instead of them turning into swans they had haemophilia and instead of their dad is a king who works for Construction Company We Can’t Legally Name In This Introduction?)

We made shows that, in retrospect, we think share a set of priorities if not a set language. They all aim to say something about the world we live in, but to say it obliquely. To have the larger thought sneak up on you. Not because mystery is inherently more artistic, but so as to encourage reappraisal of what you thought you knew. To make you realise two disparate things are the perfect metaphor for each other. To make you think the sprawling, associative thought that you would not otherwise think.

In funding-application speak, we often say that we ‘aim to challenge, delight and speak to the world we live in (even when imagining different ones)’. We’re lucky to have found a moderately palatable soundbite that matches up moderately well with what we really think.

We also like this quote from Kim Stanley Robinson: ‘If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.’

That feels true to us. That realism is more ‘radar ping’ than ‘Book of Revelation’, a missive from where we’ve just been, a contingent truth subject to correction, a great flavour to round out a meal but never the main event. Grumio’s totes hilarious joke from the Shrew: do you want the mustard without the beef?

‘Contingent’ is a good word. We like sci-fi because it’s not not fantasy, because it reminds us that the present is future history and erstwhile future. Our pal Eoghan Quinn did a PhD with super-brainy cool dude Julia Jarcho, who talks about negating the present; there’s a difference between it is so and it is necessarily so. That has a political charge, finding ways to get people to feel that the givens of the world are really mades. Not data, facta. It’s the feeling of waking up on February 9th 2020 and Sinn Féin have seventeen Teachtaí Dála and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have one apiece. Not that we are Sinn Féin supporters, but this has never happened before! We might have the chance to be disappointed by the ostensibly left-wing party in government, instead of just swapping Fine Gael (capitalist death-cult) for Fianna Fáil (capitalist death-cult) until the end of time! Everything is where it was, but there’s a new way through it all. It occurs to you that the same old dots can be joined in a different order. It occurs to you that taking a different path means new perspectives from new places we’ve never stood before.

Another quote we like, this from our fairy godmother Ali Smith: ‘More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.’ That’s the feeling, that there might be a clean path. You try not to feel it about electoral politics – most of us are the age that means our first election was the one that put Labour in power so Joan Burton could cut lone-parent benefits. We’ve been here before. And yet, and yet, the feeling of possibility. It’s briefer and more doomed than the feeling of May 23rd 2015 or May 25th 2018, those big referendum results – there was actual hope on those days. Maybe the WHOLE country doesn’t hate queers; maybe the WHOLE country doesn’t hate women. But hope is a slippery instant between the months of terrified lead-up to the vote and the years of complex aftermath that have followed. Possibility is a less shiny feeling than hope, but it might be more durable. In the face of everything it is less of a strain to believe it doesn’t have to be this way than it gets better.

Maybe that’s the key to why we like sudden changes of subject that aren’t. Maybe that’s why the characteristic MALAPROP gesture – if there is one – is the zoom, whether out or in, movement without departure or arrival, things appearing or disappearing from where they weren’t hiding but we couldn’t see, sharpening or blurring until there’s something there that wasn’t there before. Hence the Queen, bad cops, Rasputin, bad cops again, nineteenth-century gays, seventeenth-century science and/or alchemy, Loughinisland, even more bad cops, Operation Legacy, immortal time-travelling drag king Isaac Newton, climate breakdown, rabbits, Blanchardstown, cruise ships, Minnie Riperton, great tits.

Enjoy.

This introduction is taken from MALAPROP: plays; the collection in which this play first appears.

Everything Not Saved was first performed at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, on 11 September 2017, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival. The cast was as follows:

B

Breffni Holahan

M

Maeve O’Mahony

P

Peter Corboy

SPOOKY-JEWEL-FACED- WOMAN-WHO-SHOOTS-B

Sara Gannon

Set, Costume, Graphic Design

Molly O’Cathain

Lighting Design

John Gunning

Sound Design

Brian Fallon

Stage Manager

Sara Gannon

Producer

Carla Rogers

Production Manager

Dara Ó Cairbre

Assistant Stage Manager

Ursula McGinn

Costume Assistant

Anna Chiara Vispi

Assistant Lighting Designer

Briony Morgan

Characters

B

M

P

Note on the Dialogue

Text in bold is voice-over and projection until it is indicated that the voice-over drops out. In the original production, the voice-over was progressively older in each section.

Where text is in [square brackets] these words are intended but unspoken.

One

Hi.

Thanks for coming.

Especially you, James.

What with the new baby and all.

Would you raise your hand if you wouldn’t mind raising your hand in answer to some questions?

Please.

I’m asking nicely.

You don’t have to, but it’ll be more interesting if you do.

Thank you, everyone except the woman in the fifth row rolling her eyes.

Raise your hand if you think you’ll remember, in five minutes, the face of the person who took your ticket?