The Authorised Kate Bane E-Book

Ella Hickson

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A painfully comic excavation of a family history that asks if there is an authorised version of the past - or just the one we can live with. Kate Bane returns home to her parents for a winter weekend to introduce her new boyfriend. As the snow falls, Kate finds herself searching with increasing desperation for the truth about her family's past. Are her memories fact, or are they continually shifting acts of imagination? Unable to pin down the truth, can she write a version of the family mythology that will ensure her own happiness? Ella Hickson's play The Authorised Kate Bane first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in October 2012 in a production by Grid Iron Theatre Company. It then transferred to the Tron Theatre, Glasgow.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Original Production

Epigraph

Dedication

Characters

The Authorised Kate Bane

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Author’s Note

The genesis of The Authorised Kate Bane came from an increasing preoccupation I have had with authenticity in theatre as concerns form and performance. I’m sure this is very common in playwrights. The delight and relief of simply finishing plays and/or getting them produced, quickly gives way to a critical engagement with the work – ‘What’s it for?’ ‘When is it good?’ and most importantly ‘What is true?’ When the occasions arose to discuss these questions with other practitioners, a part of my job that I most love and feel privileged to engage in, it became very clear that what I had deemed to be personal concerns were in fact political questions.

At the same time I was talking to a neuroscientist called Demis Hassabis who was doing fascinating work into how unreliable memory was. The idea that we ‘wrote’ our pasts more than remembered them brought the concept of character right into the centre of the question of theatrical authenticity. If characters aren’t formed from their pasts, then what are they? And by extension, stories cease to be just fictions but in fact the only means we have to create any sense of ‘self’. This rather disorganised collection of ideas was enough for Grid Iron to express interest. I was delighted by the idea of returning to Scotland and working on this material with a company that had formal experimentation at their heart and whom I trusted enough to take risks with.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ben, Jude and Deb for the opportunity to work with a company I respect and admire and in an environment that facilitates experiment and excellence; I am deeply grateful. I would like to thank Demis Hassabis for being so generous with his time and knowledge. My thanks to the cast and crew for their time, talent and ideas; my thanks too to David Greig for his continued advice – I am a braver writer because of it. My continued thanks go to Jess Cooper. Last – but by no means least – my thanks to my family and my boyfriend for their unflinching support and understanding.

E.H.

London, 2012

The Authorised Kate Bane was produced by Grid Iron Theatre Company, and first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, on 12 October 2012, with the following cast:

ALBIN GOTOLD

Nicky Elliott

KATE BANE

Jenny Hulse

NESSA BANE

Anne Kidd

IKE BANE

Sean Scanlan

Director

Ben Harrison

Producer

Judith Doherty

Composer

Michael John McCarthy

Set and Costume Designer

Becky Minto

Lighting Designer

‘The unfolding drama of life is revealed more by the telling than by the actual events told. Stories are not merely “chronicles” like a secretary’s minutes of a meeting, written to report exactly what transpires and at what time. Stories are less about facts and more about meanings. In the subjective and embellished telling of the past, the past is constructed, history is made.’

D.P. McAdams

‘Most of us are not easily willing to part with the assumption that there is a shared external reality that is at least partly knowable through memory…That assumption is fundamental to many of society’s institutions, such as our legal and education systems, and it also underlies our trust in autobiographical memory as a basis for self-understanding.’

For M, D and T

Characters

KATE BANE, thirty

IKE BANE, sixty-two

ALBIN GOTOLD, thirty-four

NESSA BANE, sixty-one

Note on the Text

KELSO

Dialogue/action of the ‘play’. This material is the product of Kate’s imagination, she writes this material during the performance. This dialogue/action is set in the imagined Bane house in Kelso, Scotland.

LONDON

Dialogue/action set in the London flat in which Kate writes the ‘play’.

MEMORY

Dialogue/action that is Kate’s memory, these are recalled whilst she is in her London flat, as she writes.

EDIT

Action/dialogue that represents rewriting or editing of the ‘play’ as it is being written in London.

A forward slash ( / ) in the text indicates interrupted speech.

One

LONDON

KATE enters her bedroom. She is dressed from an evening out. She walks into the bedroom, closes the door behind her and leans against it.

ALBIN (from downstairs barely audible). How was it?

KATE ignores the question. KATE gets changed into her pyjamas. She walks a circle around her room; shes deep in thought, frustrated. KATE