Lives of the Great Poisoners E-Book

Caryl Churchill

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

Seitenzahl: 70

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A multidisciplinary theatre piece about the most infamous poisoners in history, written by Caryl Churchill in collaboration with composer Orlando Gough and choreographer Ian Spink.  Lives of the Great Poisoners combines elements of text, dance and song to tell the stories of famous killers from Medea to Dr Crippen. It was first performed at the Arnolfini, Bristol, in February 1991 in a production by Second Stride, the performance collective co-founded by Ian Spink, Siobhan Davies and Richard Alston.

Leseprobe

Caryl Churchill

LIVESOF THE GREATPOISONERS

Co-authored by

Orlando Gough and Ian Spink

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction by Caryl Churchill

Introduction by Ian Spink

Original Production

Characters

Lives of the Great Poisoners

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introductionby Caryl Churchill, 1993

In 1979 I saw The Seven Deadly Sins at the Coliseum, with Julie Covington singing one Anna and Siobhan Davis dancing the other, and thought of working with three performers, one of whom would speak, one dance and one sing. But it was ten years before I worked on that kind of piece.

Meanwhile, I saw Trisha Brown talking while she danced, the Pina Bausch shows at Sadlers Wells in 1982 and work by Second Stride, and gradually got nearer to working with dancers. Les Waters and I asked Ian Spink and Siobhan Davis to work with us on the project that became Fen, but neither of them was free. There was a string quartet and a choreographed riot in Howard Davies’ production of Softcops at the RSC. Midday Sun (1984) was a collaboration arranged by John Ashford with performance devisers Geraldine Pilgrim and Pete Brooks; Sally Owen, a Second Stride performer, was the choreographer. In 1986 Les Waters and I approached Spink again and he worked with us and writer David Lan on A Mouthful of Birds for Joint Stock. The piece was made during twelve weeks, the writing mainly done in the middle four. Some of the performers were mainly dancers and some mainly actors, but everyone took part in the large movement pieces and everyone had spoken parts, though there were places where dancers danced and the actors had more to say. Fugue (Channel 4, 1988) was a film with a final dance piece, using movements that had happened in the story.

The big difference with Lives of the Great Poisoners was singing. Orlando Gough, Spink and I started meeting every few weeks and decided quite soon to have singers who sang, dancers who danced and actors who spoke, rather than everyone doing everything. This would mean scenes between, say, a character who spoke and one who sang or one who sang and one who danced. Orlando decided he wanted the singing to be a capella, which had two big effects. One was that he needed four singers; we felt there should be the same number of dancers (it was after all a Second Stride show) and since cost meant we could only have nine performers this left only one place for an actor, so we decided to bend our rule and make one of the performers both sing and speak. The other effect was that the words had on the whole to be written first. This, combined with our decision that – because the rehearsal period would be short – the words and music should be written before it started, meant they were more or less fixed before the movement was made. This doesn’t mean that the text constantly dominates what happens. ‘Death of Creusa and Creon – dance. They are sung to death by Medea and Poisons,’ left everything to Orlando and Spink. Sometimes the text is conversational, although Midgley moves in and out of song and Crippen and Cora speak and sing to each other. Sometimes it’s more like verse (‘If I put my hand in fire.’) Sometimes it’s bits of documentary (‘Brinvillier’s confession.’) Sometimes it’s just a few words which are used for a far longer piece of music (‘Don’t kill yourself.’)

I think it was Orlando who started us on poison and we played around for some time with the idea of a toxic waste ship of fools unable to put in to any port. That faded but poison stories stayed. Midgley, an American inventor discovered by Spink, turned out to be a way of turning three stories into one. So did spotting love triangles – Cora murdered by Crippen could come back for her revenge as Medea, and the story fell into place. There would be Crippen/Jason/Sainte-Croix (actor), Cora/Medea/Brinvilliers (singer) and Ethel/Creusa/Mme Sainte-Croix (dancer), and their friend Midgley. After that the details of the story were fairly quick to work out. There was soon a scenario we all agreed on and I went off to write the words, sending scenes to Orlando as I went on. At the beginning of rehearsal some characters had large parts down on paper while others still had their parts to be made. Similarly this book gives more weight to the sung and spoken characters because description can only give a glimpse of what was going on physically throughout the piece.

Some background information: Crippen’s name as a poisoner is well known, though the details of his story may not be. Lequeux was a prolific writer of mystery novels; Crippen apparently wrote to him with ideas for plots involving perfect murders. His reading is made up of quotations from ‘An Eye for an Eye’. Everything Crippen says to Ethel is taken from his letters to her. Medea’s story is too well known to need telling here. Less well known is that she also used her knowledge of potions to restore youth, as she did for Jason’s father Aeson. Brinvilliers was a notorious poisoner in seventeenth-century France. She learned about poison from her lover Sainte-Croix, who learned from Exili, an international political poisoner. Many of Mme de Sevigny’s lines are taken from her letters. ‘Brinvilliers’ Confession’ is based on her written confession. Thomas Midgley was an American industrial chemist in the early part of this century. He put the lead in petrol and CFCs in fridges, two inventions that seemed a good idea at the time but were inadver tently poisonous. An idea he never put into practice was that surplus corn production in America could be restricted by increasing the ozone in the earth’s atmosphere. Our Midgley has no resemblance to the real Midgley, apart from these inventions. In the Brinvilliers section he is based on her children’s tutor, Briancourt.

Introductionby Ian Spink, 1993

Since its formation in 1982 Second Stride has developed a habit of attempting a marriage of mixed theatre forms (text, music, performance and dance) with the result that its productions are often difficult to define. A critic once wrote ‘Is it dance, opera or theatre? Who cares, it’s great.’ The work to which he was referring was Heaven Ablaze in his Breast (1989), a collaboration which involved composer Judith Weir, designer Antony McDonald and myself. Based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the piece was performed jointly by Vocem Electric Voice Theatre and a group of Second Stride dancers. All the performers shared singing, dancing and spoken text and Heaven Ablaze probably fitted more into the category of music theatre.

Lives of the Great Poisoners was already in the planning stages well before Heaven Ablaze hit the stage. It marked the return of composer Orlando Gough to the company after three years’ absence and included a writer, Caryl Churchill, for the first time. Caryl and I had worked together before under different circumstances: A Mouthful of Birds (Joint Stock, 1986) and Fugue (Channel 4 Dancelines, 1988). Both of these productions required dancers and actors to share disciplines. However for Poisoners we decided that the performers would rarely if ever stray from their individual disciplines. Thus the singers would sing their parts in the manner of opera, the actors would act their parts and the dancers would dance their parts, neither speaking nor singing.

Orlando took the brave step of planning an a cappella score, that is, sung and spoken text without instrumental accompaniment. Music uttered from the stage would energise the narrative along with a series of ‘choreographed’ scenes and characterisations. The music and the text were initially the backbone of this work and a constant reference point during rehearsals.

The choreography for the four dancers began after the score and text had been developed. Improvisations with the performers led to movements which were later developed separately into dances which were then fitted into the written scenes.

The large mixed-form scenes (‘Whist’, ‘Music Hall Song’, ‘Death of Creusa’ and ‘Hoca’) began as separate layers of text, music and choreography and were woven together so as to allow each element its own integrity. As one who has moved away from pure dance, my main concern was that there should never be a flagging in the