small hours (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Lucy Kirkwood

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A collaborative theatre piece created by playwrights Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime with theatre director Katie Mitchell, small hours is an intimate dissection of the claustrophobic world of a new mother struggling to cope on her own. It was first performed at Hampstead Theatre in 2011. 'theatre of the highest form of immersion and realism that I have experienced... It is breathtaking' - A Younger Theatre

Leseprobe

Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime

small hours

NICK HERN BOOKSLondonwww.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Original Production

Characters

small hours

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

This is the introduction to Luck Kirkwood Plays: One; the collection in which this play first appears.

I grew up on the border of Essex and London, and my maternal ancestors came from the Isle of Thanet, and I started thinking aboutTinderboxat the end of four years of university in Edinburgh, as I prepared to go home. In 2006 it seemed to me like everything that had felt new and young and revolutionary for a while had revealed itself to be as old and reactionary as what came before it. So it was about change seeming impossible. A series of white men running the show. But it was also about how difficult change is for those at the sharp end of it. A country is a delicate organism and some parts are more exposed than others to the arrival of foreign bodies. I wanted to be honest but generous about this. Saul is a racist, but he is also a man who has been culturally and economically displaced by forces beyond his control. Modernity. Multiculturism. Weather. He’s a crook and a murderer and – worse – very sentimental. But he is grieving, and while his grief is sometimes presented comically, I don’t find it entirely funny.

I was lucky when Mike Bradwell commissioned me to write the play and when, after he left the Bush, Josie Rourke programmed and directed it. I remember her being very kind and calling me ‘baggage’ a lot. Lucy Osborne designed a stifling butcher’s shop behind a red velvet curtain and ignited my passion for model boxes. We opened in May at the old Bush Theatre, then a tiny space above a pub, during a heatwave when the air conditioning was broken. Dystopian farce is a genre with a niche fan club anyway: it’s fair to say it divided people. I think the play is better on the dystopia than the farce, but writing this introduction in the months after the Brexit vote it feels like its prevailing concerns are alive and kicking violently.

it felt empty…was developed closely with Lucy Morrison as a commission for Clean Break during my residency with the company. We had seen the Helen Bamber Foundation’s installation about human trafficking in Trafalgar Square, and both of us were struggling with the idea of victims of crime being incarcerated as criminals. We worked with the Poppy Project (whose funding was diverted in 2015 in the name of Austerity to, oddly, the Salvation Army). The women we talked with had been victims of the most inhumane crimes, not only by their traffickers but by the British Government. They were angry, articulate and bitterly aware that their suffering had begun with an ambition to improve their lives. Many of them had a coal-black sense of humour. All of this went into Dijana.

I had the idea for the first two acts, and writing them made it clear what the third one should be. I was roughly Dijana’s age at the time, and it felt important to show more how she was like me than how she wasn’t. It was supposed to go on in a disused shop unit in the old Shepherd’s Bush shopping centre. When this fell through the Arcola gave us a vast warehouse space at fairly short notice. Lucy gave me a beautiful and unflinching production, and Chloe Lamford created a dazzling, grubby, Lynchian rabbit warren for the audience to follow Dijana through. In the final act, the audience sat on white goods still in their packaging.

small hourswas entirely inspired by a request from Katie Mitchell to write a one-woman show for downstairs at the Hampstead Theatre, with Franz Xaver Kroetz’sRequest Programmeas a reference. Ed Hime and I wrote it in Brussels, taking it in turns to type. In the stage directions we had specified that she would stop and rewind the song at least five times, and in performance it was never less than nine, which was unbearable and why Katie is a great director. The audience sat in Maggie’s living room, which had very thick cream carpet. I remember how discomfited the small act of having to take your shoes off made them. I am glad to see it in print because so many people at the time seemed bewildered by the idea of playwrights writing stage directions, not just dialogue. Here is the proof.

NSFWwas the first play where the structure presented itself quite quickly. The spark was seeing my sister’s CV, which was five or six pages long and entirely filled with unpaid internships. It was never intended to be specifically about the magazine industry or even the media in general, but about how the industrialised workplace and Capitalism itself compromises us, by substituting over time its economic morality for our emotional one. No one in the play is inherently corrupt, and most of the corruption we do see is self-harming. Sam loses the woman he loves (and his love of women). Mr Bradshaw and Aidan lose their souls. And as a woman of fifty, Miranda’s been wired to find herself disgusting by a culture she herself has helped to enshrine. There’s a line in Martin Crimp’s brilliant playThe Treatmentabout corruption having three stations:

‘The first is the loss of innocence. The second is the desire to inflict that loss on others. The third is the need to instil in others that same desire.’

Which I think is a good way of describing the ‘Fall’ of the play.

Simon Godwin cast it beautifully and Janie Dee was resplendent in an obscene leather dress. I remember lots of trouble being taken at the Royal Court to make sure the topless photograph of Carrie was ethically sourced. I think it’s more about class than gender and it’s a play that gets progressively less funny as it goes along.

Chimericastarted as a commission at the National Theatre Studio, an incredible gift, as it gave me licence to think on a larger scale than young playwrights are usually advised to do. The problem was that when it was released after a period of development, there weren’t that many other theatres with the capacity for an epic play with a cast of twelve. So it then went on a long journey before Michael Attenborough programmed it at the Almeida. The most important thing that happened in that time was that Headlong came along on a white horse and rescued it from the doldrums. Ben Power and I worked on it together for some time, pacing around Covent Garden,talking it out. The Occupy movement hadn’t emerged when I first started writing, and Barack Obama was also a couple of years away. Later there were many drafts of the play set during the ’08 US election, and eventually I realised I was writing a thriller.

I was over the moon when Lyndsey Turner agreed to direct it, and for more than a year she worked intensively on the play with me, visiting me in Norfolk and going as deeply into the research as I had. She is a peerless dramaturg and we value the same things, so her rigorous notes and questions were often hard but never painful, and always made the play better. Es Devlin agreed to design a year in advance, so the final drafts were entirely tailored to her sleek, protean design of a spinning cube. At the first reading it was four-and-a-half hours long and I felt despair. We changed a lot during previews, which was possible due to a talented and heroic cast and crew who understood with grace the complexity of the play’s mechanics – it is down to all of them, and Lyndsey’s holding of all our nerves, that it got to be performed in its best possible version.

At the time of writing, three years later, a ham-faced Donald Trump is whipping his supporters into a frenzy over China, and it occurs to me for the first time thatChimericahas more in common withTinderboxthan any of the other plays in this book, being in part about the yielding of empire and identity, and the anxiety and ugliness that come with that. And as I am halfway through a new play about a comet, knee-deep in elliptical orbits, it seems right, somehow, that this body of work, spanning seven years of writing, should end up right back where it started.

Lucy Kirkwood October 2016

I’d like to thank Mel Kenyon, Lucy Morrison and Ed Hime for their help in the writing of all of these plays.

small hours was first presented in the Michael Frayn Studio Theatre (downstairs) at the Hampstead Theatre, London, on 11 January 2011, with the following cast:

WOMAN

Sandy McDade

Director

Katie Mitchell

Designer

Alex Eales

Lighting Designer

Philip Gladwell

Sound Designer

Gareth Fry

Assistant Director

John Higgins

Casting

Wendy Spon

Characters

WOMAN

STEVEN (offstage) MUM (offstage)

AWOMANsits on the sofa wearing headphones that stretch to a stereo system.

There is a plastic bag at her feet, containing her purchases from her trip to the corner shop: a litre of Coca-Cola in a plastic bottle, some bars of chocolate, half of a plastic-wrapped Dundee cake.

She is listening to dance music and her eyes are closed.

The music is turned to a high volume.

Its tinny echoes leak from the headphones.

TheWOMANopens her eyes.

She reaches down and takes the bottle of Coke from the plastic bag, unscrews the lid and drinks some.

She screws the lid back on and puts it down again.

She takes her headphones off.

She takes her mobile phone from the pocket of the coat and looks at it to establish what time it is.

On seeing the time she gets up, goes to the radio and turns it on to the BBC World Service.

The end of the 3 a.m. news broadcast.

The news broadcast ends and the weather report plays. It includes a severe weather warning for Scotland.

When the weather report finishes, the radio station carries on into another programme.

TheWOMANcrosses to the landline to make a phone call.

The call is not answered.

The call goes through to answerphone.

WOMAN. Hi.

She realises the radio is still on.

She hangs up. She turns the radio off. She realises she is feeling hot.

She takes off her outdoor coat and hangs it over a chair. She takes her boots off and leaves them by the chair.

She picks up an air freshener and sprays it about the room.

She picks up clothes, moves them to a different part of the room.

Next to the sofa, she finds a pair of man’s shoes. Well-used trainers.

She takes one of the shoes off her hand and sniffs her hand.

She goes to her mobile.

She locates the number for her local cinema on the mobile and dials.

The call is connected.

VOICE(off).Welcome to Odeon Cineline. Please say the name of the Odeon cinema you would like to visit.

WOMAN. Camden Parkway.

VOICE(off).Did you say Muswell Hill?

WOMAN. No.

VOICE(off).Please say the name of the cinema you would like to visit.