Clytemnestra

I know, I know... Two blog posts in as many days, how unlike me. I found this poem though, which I wrote when playing Clytemnestra for The Rose Company, and not having looked at it in months I'm still quite proud of it, so...

The Murderess

He was always killing, my second husband. It was the only language he understood.

Words he bent and twisted to mask his intent; gold is a soft metal.

Swords he could speak in, held erect in his fist.

Edges he understood, and partings. Blood he listened to.

He killed my first husband, they remember that. He killed my son.

I'm told that is what lions do.

I never spoke my child’s dear name again. I will not say it now.

I keep the memory, hot and heavy in my womb.

I have swallowed coals.

One coal I carried long - an agony cherished, and then one more; a girl.

I mourn the children lost to sickness, too, and the struggles of the birthing bed,

I carry their weight still, of course they haunt me.

Only my murdered children blaze and burn.

Only the ones he killed consume me.

My boy’s name is forgotten now and mine alone, but hers...

She always wanted fame, my daughter.

He took me away with him, of course. They say he made me wife.

My baby's blood still speckled in his beard when he first raped me.

My brothers swore revenge. So rumour said.

And I, the spoils, rejoiced to hear it.

But kings are practical men, or they die young, and my father made arrangements.

The city his to keep, and in all honour, provided he called me wife and queen, sat me beside him.

I would have rather died - but no such choice was offered.

Revenge is men's work.

I know they say that I was angry to be set aside.

I will not leave that lie behind me.

His concubine, the prophetess, I killed in love.

She laughed and thanked me when she saw the blade, with her own hands she drew it to her throat.

She died a captive like myself, rejoicing in the blood that freed her.

He did not know me at the end. I could not risk it.

He was a strong man still, tempered by battle.

I dosed his wine, and so he died asleep, drowning in blood and water.

I too had learned to read the blade, it spoke as I had honed it; and as for blood,

it’s women’s native speech. He was fool to think that he could out-debate me.

I wish he had not slept so sound, that I had seen his eyes meet mine before I dimmed them.

That would have pleased me, that one look.

Revenge is men’s work. I killed him in the name of my son,

and for Iphigenia.

Learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.

  

Before I start, I want to say that learning 70-odd minutes of monologue is no big deal. There are plenty of other people who learn solo shows, many of which are at least an hour long, and don’t write blog posts about it. There are also many people who perform truly awe-inspiring feats of memorisation. Chao Lu  holds the world record for reciting π  to more than 67 thousand places. It took him some 24 hours. I’ve personally witnessed Oliver Senton playing Phil in The Warp  for a similar span– that was a thing to see, and that’s dialogue, which is much harder than monologue to learn.  And if those aren't sufficiently grandiloquent comparisons, then there are the oral traditions. You probably know that the epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek epic poems, the entirety of Brehon law, the Norse sagas, and many another once-memorised text surpass any modern memorisation by orders of magnitude. . . 

So, no big deal.

All the same, because I’m interested in how memorisation works, both technically and psychologically, and because people keep asking me about it, 

here goes:

LEARNING M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A

In early February 2013, I know M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I’ve read it through several times and it flows. The words come easily to me; they’re my words. LenaKitsopoulou wrote Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Υ.Λ.Α, but the translation is mine. I wrote every word.

I learned the first 2 pages (10 minutes) back in Aprli 2012, not long after I finished the translation, to perform at a scratch night. That was a scratch of the text itself, really. I didn’t do any work on it besides the learning. I just wanted to observe how the language worked with an English-speaking audience, if they understood it. They did, I even got a laugh or two, which was nice.

I spent about an hour a day on it for a week, and don’t remember any difficulty, though I do remember that it prompted minor rewrites. This flows better than that, you need a different turn of phrase here in order not to skip ahead to the next time you use that phrase; that sort of thing. The only bit I remember of that process is the 555 bus.

I’d agreed to meet my son and his aunt in Keswick and the 555 bus is the simplest and prettiest, if slowest way to get there. I look out the window. “This whole concept,” I mutter, “this birth-death, happy-sad, black-white business, is it going to go on much longer?” I am looking at the mossy roots of the trees outside, the little springs that sparkle among the stones, the giddily bouncing wild rabbits. They’re part of the text now.

•           *           *

In late February, 2013, I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I’m in Athens. I drop my son off at his cousin’s house, and take the bus to the hospital, running lines in my head.  The show is becoming my internal monologue.

My father has just had his spleen removed. It was enormous, full of lymphoma, and excised in an institution that is best known as a maternity hospital. The surgeon is a cousin and a friend – approaching us in the waiting room where the expectant families sit, he tells us Dad was delivered of a spleen weighing only a bit less than my kid did at birth. It wasn’t easy, but it went well. Later, my brother and I go into ICU to see him. He is freshly out from under anaesthesia and incoherent. For the first time I remember he looks old, and frail. Inside my head, Mairoula waxes narcissistic about her mother’s cancer diagnosis. I’m starting to hate her.

A few days later, I have a stupid argument with my brother. The tension is getting to us, the hospital, the worry. I storm off, walk up Kifissias towards the Olympic installations, past the suburban apartment blocks, forgotten village houses  tucked among them with chickens still in the yard, the empty lots full of weeds and wildflowers. “Can’t complain,” I tell the nettles and hubcaps, the already-crumbling concrete of the Calatrava walkway “can’t complain isn’t really gratitude”. Later still, my father asks me about the show. Conscious of not telling him about the character’s Daddy issues, nor her mother’s cancer, I read him the bit about being on a ferry boat, the long and increasingly absurd list of amenities she piles up, then rejects. He laughs.  In May, when we’re cutting down the text for performance, Stella suggests cutting that bit. I refuse; in the hospital, it made my father laugh.

  
                                                      *           *          *

It’s March 2013 and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. Thanks to Stella, I have a version of the script that looks a lot less daunting than the huge block of text I produced. She’s divided it into scenes and I can begin to see the outlines of the structure buried beneath the verbiage like the trunk of a shrub, just discernible under the leaves.

I know the first five pretty well, so I start with scene six. I put the script on the kitchen counter, just under the window. I read the first sentence aloud, repeat it while walking away. If I forget a word or hesitate or screw up, I walk back to the script, read aloud from there, walk again. When I’ve done that a couple of times without a mistake, I add a second sentence. Five sentences takes me through the door of the annexed kitchen, through the dining room, down the hall and to my front door; ten brings me back. When I’ve done ten sentences perfectly a few times, I start a new section. In the morning, walking back from dropping my kid off at school, I run as much as I know. When it starts to take longer than the 25 minutes of a leisurely stroll back, I take detours. I try not to speak out loud where people can hear me, but sometimes a sidelong glance tells me they can.

                                                      *           *          *

It’s April 2013 and I don’t know M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, though I know about half of it reasonably well, well enough to be getting on with. . . I don’t. Not really. In rehearsal I’ve got maybe a quarter, maybe a third then it’s rant and flail about for the next bit. I get to the end of a scene and face a mental desolation in which not a whisper of a word appears. I improvise actions. More often, I don’t. Stella gives me things to do. Moving, my body stops my brain remembering. I am the worst actor in the world.

I am entirely in awe of Stella (the Stella Duffy) and still not quite able to believe we’re here, in London, working on my show. I am trying to please. I am diffident. I am also constipated.  My digestion is as sluggish as my brain. I can’t get how three people (Leo Burtin, producing, Stella and I) can rehearse in open space, but because of D & D I love open space, so there I am. We have three days together. On the last day, my bowels awaken. The need to empty them is overpowering, and it hits me right in the middle of the morning’s rehearsal. Working in open space means that it’s cool for me to interrupt the work, explain that there’s something I have to do right then, do it, and come back. Of course I don’t do anything as sensible as that. Instead, I drag my bloated body thorough various ideas that Stella brings in, contributing no thing to the process but my endurance.

We’re working the “rock bottom” bit of the show, where Mairoula longs for the despair of her adolescence, revels in the memory of. It feels like rock bottom to me, too, but I’m not revelling. Stella gets frustrated with me. I don’t blame her, but find myself unable to tell her what’s going on.  I am certain she’s going to decide she can’t work with me after all. Who could work with the near-mute and shambling creature who’s been stumbling through the last two and a half days. I can barely endure sharing a body with her. With Aliki, I mean, though the more I think about Mairoula, the less I like her, too. She’s selfish, vain, pretentious, angry, self-involved, the kind of woman who fawns over men and ignores other women. I’ve forgotten why I ever wanted to play her.

Afterwards, lighter of body but more anxious than ever, I come back and we talk. I own up to the hero worship, and the anxiety, but not to the leaden bowels. It’s not an easy conversation, though Stella handles it with a generosity and perceptiveness I will come to know as typical. She shows no signs of wanting to abandon the project. I am giddy with relief. We’ve got one week off, then another three days in Lancaster.

In that week, rather than resume my one sentence at a time regimen, I try to learn the scenes I half-know by reciting them with the script in front of me and my eyes closed, opening them to check a particular word, or see what happens next. By the time Stella comes up to Lancaster, I know half the show. I’m desperately nervous that the next rehearsal period won’t go well. The night before we start, I invite Stella and Leo to dinner. I fret about the food, because it gives me something to fret about, but in the end it’s as pleasant a meal as I’ve ever shared.

The rehearsal period is a joy, and the exercises Stella brings in show me how to fall in love with Mairoula again. We find some physicality, some hidden structure I can rest on, we find her kindness and her acute, acerbic eye on her own follies, her flights of poetic extravagance. We find, somewhere inside me, an open-hearted warmth to give her, a tenderness for the audience that I see in Stella, and that makes everything alright. We show the first half to some friends in Lancaster, and they’re engaged and friendly. One of them saw that first extract performed the previous year “I can see how much you’ve worked on it since,’ she says, it’s changed completely.”

                                                               *           *           *

It’s May 2013 and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. Stella has suggested a number of cuts, as we’re trying to bring the length down to under an hour. I’ve accepted most of them, rejected a couple – one because the Greeks will get it, even if no-one else does, and one because I don’t want to lose the bit my father laughed at. I’m surprised by how quickly I get used to skipping bits of text I’ve already learned; I expected that to drive me nuts. We have a final few days of rehearsal scheduled in London, then a little over a month to rehearse on my own before we open.

In London at the end of the month, I still have my script in hand for the last 10 minutes. It makes things tricky, because this is the most physically complex part of the show. We block it as well as we can. It’s almost there. I feel good.

                                                               *            *             *

It’s June 2013, and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. My housemate is helping me. He’s a graphic designer and a cartoonist, so his schedule is flexible and we can run lines when I’m free. He’s also Greek, and very perceptive about language. He teaches me some of the references I didn’t get in the text, elaborates, comments. He is the perfect person to do this with; patient, knowledgeable, relentless, precise. We run lines every day. I’ve got it all, except that last little bit, which I know vaguely, but not well.

In the last three weeks of June, I have a rehearsal space booked, three times a week. I can lay out the whole playing area, run the actions with the lines. I start to learn things by what I’m doing, not saying. I start to think about how I need to be saying that there so I have time to do that and then I can say that bit right after I’ve finished doing that bit. This is the part of rehearsing I love best. There is more creative ferment earlier in the process, but it’s always shadowed by the fear that it will never come together. At this stage, you have confidence, a shape, a sense of how it will play, but there’s still room for tinkering. I have all the beautiful stuff. The dress, and the rug and the wonderful sofa. Nerissa comes to watch a run. It's the first time anyone's seen it without me holding a script at some point or another. She's concerned about the sweat stains showing. She's right, as usual.

On the days I don’t have the space booked, I take long walks. It’s a beautiful time of year. I gather elder blossoms from the trees by the canal, I wander down into the marshy ground between the canal and the allotments, declaiming a very Greek text to the vivid English leaves. My boots are muddy. I am a study in exhilaration.

                                                          *            *             *

The show went well. One night in Lancaster and a film to show for it, a film which will form the centrepiece of our attempt to book a tour. I spend the summer running the show every day in my head. Back home in Greece, I run it swimming in the sea, the show’s length perfect for my morning workout – breast stroke out, freestyle back. Soon, I start to stumble, and by the end of the holiday I’ve given up. I’ll learn it again when we have dates. 

Tour booking, it turns out, is more complex than we knew. Months pass, and then more, and then hope appears. Her name is Claire and she’s booking the tour right now. Send her an email.

It’s February 2014, and I’m performing M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A again in less than two months. I'm scared, so I wrote to Stella and got the loveliest response. This morning, I went down to the cellar, opened one of the two suitcases where I keep the show, and took out the script; it’s the first time I’ve seen it since July,

It’s February 2014, and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.

Some months later...

Last winter, I ended a blog post with a breezy promise to confide in you the techniques I used to learn 60 plus minutes of monologue for my solo show; an English version of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A by Lena Kitsopoulou. Perhaps you read that promise. Perhaps you believed it, or even anticipated the big reveal; unlikely, but possible. Perhaps you even checked occasionally, as digital dust drifted out of the void to settle on these neglected pages, as the pause grew longer and longer and was revealed as silence.

I’m sorry.

I’ve been known to complain that theatre-makers rarely show process in their blogs; the wrong turns, the frustration, the bickering, the doubts. How much better it would be, I railed, if all the vulnerability and stupidity and mess were out in the open, so people understood that no-one’s work is effortless, unflawed, pristine – everything has life’s grubby fingerprints all over it. That’s how the light gets in.

And then I started working on my show, the show it had taken me a year and a half  and weeks and weeks of translating (and two directors whose schedules didn’t quite fit before I found a marvellous one who gloriously had just enough time) to get to start work on. And I was frustrated and scared and angry with myself and stupid and vulnerable and full of doubt. And I couldn’t bear to tell you what a fraud I was.

So time passed, and we were rehearsing and more time passed, during which the backlog of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A work that I’d have to tell you about before I got to the bit we were working on just then got longer and longer. And posterous closed down, so maintaining my blog suddenly meant uploading all that stuff all over again and consequently became even more daunting, and in the middle of it all the all-female theatre company we were talking about starting became a show and a performance date and there was so much to blog about I didn’t know where to start and here we are.

The blog is still a mess, and most of the links are broken. I don’t know when I’ll get around to fixing  it up. I don’t know if I’m going to write about learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I don’t know if I’m going to write about the whole warty process of re-learning a show you’ve only performed once, some 10 months after that one performance. I don’t know what I’m going to write about, and I’m not making any any promises. Except…. I promise to write. To keep on writing.

Keep me honest, willya?

How did you learn all those lines?

                        At least one member of any theatre audience anywhere.

It's a question actors roll their eyes at. Line learning, after all, is basic. Wondering at an actor's ability to learn lines is like being impressed by a football player's ability to kick a moving ball. Sure, for a klutz like me, it would be quite an achievement, but to a professional it's entry level stuff. It's basic, like a chef chopping onions or turning on the gas; stuff that any fool can do if they put their mind to it. This particular fool finds it quite easy; much easier than learning blocking or choreography of any kind. I sweat blood to learn movement scores, getting my left and right and my forward and back thoroughly muddled, and no amount of description can help me find my way through, only repetition. In contrast, words in order don't need much to stick in my memory. In an ordinary rehearsal process I need only to read the scene through a few times in advance, and after a handful of rehearsals I know not only my own lines, but everyone else’s too.

Yes, it’s obnoxious, and yes, it makes me cocky. Recently I was performing a horror story at a literary festival, and changed my mind about which story two days before the gig. I adapted the new story into a 10 minute monologue, which took most of the first day, and spent the second day, performance day, learning. It took me about 5 hours of solid work. I got away with it, because my cockiness is not without foundation - and because the director trusted me, she didn’t panic, at least not visibly. It went well, and people said nice things about the show as a whole, and about my part in it. Still, in those last minutes of silent panic, frantically going over the lines in my head as I waited to start, I thought: This has to change. I used to be well-prepared as a matter of course. I didn’t used to put such strain on the equanimity of directors. When did I get like this? Too many last minute gigs, too many shows still devising the day before tech, too many semi –professional shows with their usual mix of dedication and coasting, too many cabarets, too much seat-of-your-pants-theatre.

I don’t think I can get away with that with M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. It’s sixteen pages long, single-spaced, or about an hour and a half of uninterrupted speech. The  director has asked me to be off book before we start rehearsals in April. She’s right, I know she’s right. But it’s not just cockiness that makes me play chicken with my own memory, it’s also a sort of procrastination that only the sheer terror of an unmovable deadline can pierce. If I were to proceed in the way that’s become my habit, I’d look at my calendar sometime in late March, panic, and spend a week or so cramming the text into my brain all day every day. It would more or less work, it would be okay. But okay is not good enough for M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, for the show I’ve been working to get made for over a year. I picked a very ambitious text, I’ve translated it as well as I can, I have the good fortune to be working with the best possible people to be doing it with – I’m going to learn it. Properly.

That was what I decided, about a month ago. I set myself the goal of learning two pages a week, a nice, relaxed schedule. Too relaxed; there was no fear to keep me working. And there was life. Life happened, as it does, and brought disappointments and exciting developments and a health crisis among my dearest and nearest, and in short, I do not have eight pages under my belt. I have three. This is not a disaster. There’s still all of March to go. If I learn 3 pages a week, I’ll be in good shape for April.

Good shape! That reminds me, I’d also linked a get-performing-fit resolution to the line-learning schedule. I would time my workouts, my much-needed the-last-time-I-was in-good-shape-for-physical-theatre-was-before-my-son-was-born-and-he’s-eight-years-old-now workouts to fit the lines I knew, so that as I learned more text I would spend longer on my fitness. No, I didn’t do that either. It was a good idea though, right? Right. So I’m doing it, now. And to keep me honest, because something has to, I choose you, oh perusers of this blog

I now know the first 3 pages of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. By Monday the 4th of March, I’m going to know the first 6 pages. And I’ll be able to engage in some cardiovascular activity (probably that knee-to-opposite-elbow thing that’s used a s a hip warm-up) for as long as it takes me to recite them. I’m going to post here to say so, and in honour of that at-least-one audience member, I’m going to tell you how I did it too.

Half-baked ideas about one-on-one

The first one-on-one performance I ever made was carefully constructed to protect me from the audience. That's not how I saw it at the time, but it's something that occurred to me after recently performing a new one-on-one. That first piece, called I'm Listening, featured me sitting in an alcove with a screen in front of my face playing a video of me listening to someone telling a story. The audience was asked to tell me something while watching my recorded face react to someone else's words. It was meant to disconcert people, and it did. It was also an unexpectedly, powerfully rewarding experience for me. People told me all sorts of things; biographical details, funny stories, romantic pain,  boasting, trauma, touching concern for me, hope and distress - in one or two cases I had real fears for their emotional wellbeing, fears the form I'd chosen prevented me from doing anything about. I heard every word, but I didn't know their names or faces,  never had to look them in the eye. I never had to do or say anything. Because of these things,  never really thought of it as a one-on- one performance, more an istallation with a live component. Writing about it has made me realize I need to rebuild I'm Listening, but that's a topic for a different post.

Performing solo has been a pragmatic choice rather than an aesthetic one, and as I've gotten to know more and more people in Lancaster I enjoy working with, I've done less and less of it. Collective awareness, the complicity among performers, among audience, and between the two groups is at the heart of what theatre is for me, and apart from a long-term one-woman show and some storytelling, I just didn't want to perform solo at all, never mind the intimacy and intensity of one-on-one.

And then I read this funny and touching post and thought "This would make a great little one-on-one performance!" With Daniel Abraham's permission I adapted it for ease of speaking and for more British references, and have now performed it at two festivals. I'll be honest; I didn't take it too seriously. I thought of it primarily as a geek joke that people might get, a throwaway, essentially frivolous piece of work that I was doing for fun, and to attend festivals I wanted to attend while my 'serious work' was nowhere near ready to show, and that I'd never perform elsewhere. I'd reckoned without the audience, which is pretty stupid for someone who's given to mouthing off about how it's always about the audience.

I felt that I was very vulnerable performing the show, both in the sense that pretending to be in love with the audience left me open to unwanted romantic attention, and that there was considerable scope for them to steer our interaction away from the course I wanted it to take. A couple of people did, in fact, intervene in the performance - one turned it into a dialogue, the other responded with an improvised monologue of her own. A third may have asked me out, I'm not sure - I've never been any good at that kind of thing. Several people though, told me later that they felt it gave them no room to reply, that my performance held a one-way mirror between us, isolating them from the possibility of communication.

I don't know which of these is true. Maybe they're all true at the same time. I've only performed this to about fifteen different people, and I don't feel I've learned even one fifteenth of what it can teach me. I haven't learned that much yet about one on one performance but I have learned that even when the audience isn't telling you stories, every single performance is radically different from the others. It wouldn't be alive without a real human connection beneath the fiction of the text; and no real human connection is ever throwaway.

Because it was filmed outdoors, with other conversations taking place, this video doesn't have the best sound quality, and of course it can't hope to capture the kinds of things I've been talking about. All the same, it's documentation, and there if anyone wants to see it. My thanks to hÅb Arts  for the video, and of course for the perennially exciting and supportive Emergency festival at which it was filmed. I'd also like to thank Vee Uye  of Larkin' About whose MixTape was based within earshot, and whose kind words were crucial to my rethinking the performance, and Tuheen Huda, the audience member in the video.

When do you give up?

Warning: This post contains self-pity and may also contain traces of hyperbole. This post was manufactured in a body that wasn't feeling very well at the time and may derive much of its substance from said indisposition.

When do you give up? When do you say, I'm 41 years old, I started trying to earn a living in theatre in my 30s divorced and with a small child, I have no agent, no producer, no ally, no commission,  no funding, no projects off the ground, no prospects, no hope. I'm lucky to be teaching youth theatre which is fun and rewarding, if emotionally exhausting. I'm lucky that my small town has two semi-professional companies who are talented and nice and a pleasure to work with so I can keep doing shows, and who knows, maybe someday they'll be in a position to pay me something against the costs of childcare. When do you say, I haven't been paid for acting since October (though I did get paid in May for presenting a pervasive game so that almost counts) and I'm tired of paying for casting websites, and I'm tired of  applying for festivals, and I'm tired of traveling to one-off gigs that don't even pay my expenses, and I'm tired of writing shows I don't know how to get produced, and I'm tired of talking to people I hope will help me, and I'm tired of busrsaries for the under-25s and free courses in London, and development support for emerging artists in other regions and other forms; and I'm going to give up. I'm going to hang on to the teaching and the semiprofessional gigs for which I only have to pay childcare and not travel as well, and I'm going to give up on anything more. When do you say that? More to the point, when do I say that? Not yet, but I think it may be soon.


Because I have no agent, because I'm 41 and foreign, my strategy for getting my needy ass on stage has involved writing or adapting shows for me to be in. Last year, I applied to six different festivals with three different short performances I'd written. I didn't get in to any. This year, I've written a full-length verbatim piece and translated a monologue. Both have received very encouraging feedback, the monologue even found itself a director. We had a Development Day. I didn't know what a Development Day was, but it clearly had capital letters. What it turned out to be was me reading the script out to people at a venue, who said, in a way that was difficult to dispute and impossible to resent, that it wasn't for them. Then we spent a few hours working on the text. Then I read it again, much better, to an invited audience of one friend and my mother, who both loved it. Then the director went back to the complex pending project that's taking up most of her time, and I took my script home and started tweeting questions that I hoped might lead me to another venue. They did, or at least to a meeting with another venue. I talked about the monologue to someone I really enjoyed talking to, I left her with a copy. She said she was too busy to read it now, but would get back to me in two weeks; that's tomorrow.

My distress may seem premature. Two weeks rarely means 'exactly 14 days', certainly it doesn't when I say it. And 14 days is tomorrow. And if they do say no, there are other venues, there must be other avenues. It's a great script, and I'd be very good in it. And the other one, the verbatim script, I know how to fix it now, and it's got legs... I just don't know how I'll ever get it to a racetrack. I'm just running out of hope, or faith, or energy, or stick-to-itivness or whatever. I'm tired of pushing boulders up foothills and having them roll down again, tired of hoping to someday try to push one up a mountain. Most of all, I'm tired of doing it alone. Every now and then, I find someone I think might be an ally for a project, who'll believe in it as I do, and we'll be a team. I'm tired of having these alliances fall apart, so tired that I'm not really leaning on either potential ally I have now. Because they have more urgent projects, because I can't promise either of us will get paid, because I don't have a producer's skills and I can't afford to hire someone who does. 



I think I'm assuming the venue will not want my monologue, the Mairoula I wax lyrical about in my previous post. And I still love it, believe in it, I'm still aching to perform it. Properly. With time, and direction, because it needs it, it's not the kind of script I can direct myself in. And I don't know where to take it to next, who to talk to how. I never even wanted to get my scripts produced. I'd have been perfectly happy performing other people's words forever. But if Mairoula doesn't find a home tomorrow, I'll keep trying, somehow, though I don't know how. I haven't given up, not yet. But I've started to wonder when I will.

The Translator And The Actor At Cross-Purposes

I don't know how to write about this. If I'd intended to blog about the process of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I should have started months ago, at the beginning. Now I need to think - and by think I mean write- about last night, but I can't start there, or nothing will make any sense. I'll have to start at the beginning after all, and see if I can follow my thoughts to where I stand.

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The beginning came courtesy of Phoebe, an old friend in Athens who is a journalist but used to be an actor. She reported for the BBC World Service on Greek theatre's response to the economic crisis, discussing several plays that sounded intriguing. Selfish motives foremost in my mind, I asked if any of them might be suitable for translation and performance in English. She replied that the best thing she'd seen in Athens last year was not notably political, but, come to think of it, it might suit me perfectly. It was Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Y.Λ.Α a one woman show written by Lena Kitsopoulou and performed, to great acclaim, by Maria Protopappa.  I asked another good friend, Maro, who also has a deep knowledge of theatre and excellent taste, though different aesthetic preferences from Phoebe. She too, said the show was very powerful, though she warned me it was full of wordplay and references to Greek culture, that it would be almost impossible to translate.

I had to read it. I contacted Lena, whom I didn't know, with some trepidation, but she was warm and friendly, cheerfully sending me a copy of the performance script. I loved it. It surged off the page with a reckless, flamboyant energy; fascinating, exasperating, as alive as any text I've ever seen. I wrote to her again, being perfectly frank about my near total lack of resources;  nevertheless we agreed easily on the terms by which I could use her work. It's not necessary to like a playwright whose work you're dying to perform, but I like Lena very much. Even if M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. never gets off the ground in English, I'll have had the pleasure of getting to know her a bit.

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I'm not going to say I didn't struggle with the translation, because I did to some extent, particularly with a section in the middle that's made up almost entirely of punning acronyms. For this section, I sought, and received help from a mixed group of Greek friends and family, who got me unstuck and on the right track more than once. I also had a wonderful time doing it, and found it much easier than I anticipated. I've worked as a translator on and off, it's a natural occupation for someone brought up bilingual, but I'd translated marketing bumf, academic texts, a coffee table book, never a work of art. I loved translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A., it was the most fun I've ever had at my desk. If you're reading this and you know anyone who might need a literary translator - Greek to English- please put us in touch. This isn't really a joke; I could use the work.

I won't talk about the content except in general terms. It's a rip-roaring rollercoaster of a stream of consciousness monologue, whose clever, self-aware protagonist tries to conceal her own truths under a slew of great universals and outrageous jokes, some deft, some clunky, and ends up revealing more than she thinks. It's a lovely play. It's also a play that requires a great performance; something with depth, comic timing, a huge emotional range, nuance, layers. Nothing less could carry it, could even begin to approach the power of the words on the page.
 
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It's also a play that strikes very close to home for me. Like me, the protagonist is an actor in early middle age. Like me she is single, language-obsessed, unhappy - unlike me she is childless. There are so many mistakes to make in the performing of it; melodrama beckons, and glib reliance on the wit of the text, so does a cathartic self-indulgent wallow. Now, I didn't come back to acting, my first love, in my 30's because I was scared of a big, juicy, complex part. And I didn't spend two months translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. to balk at playing her. But neither was I unconscious of the scale of the difficulty, of how very much dedicated character work it was going to take to do it properly, nor stupid enough to try it on my own.

I was going to need a director. Not only a very good one, but one who cared about new writing enough to take on this odd and entirely unknown text from another culture,  and would be willing to entrust the acting to me, an odd and entirely unknown actor from another culture. Fortunately, I knew an excellent director, whom I trusted aesthetically and as a person, and she'd seen me do a short solo piece I was quite proud of. It would serve as an audition. She is Louie Ingham, Associate Artist at The Duke's Theatre in Lancaster, where I live, and recently director of one of the most moving things I'd seen there. I sent her the script. She loved it, we agreed to apply for funding, to try to make it happen. I was thrilled, thrilled and impatient to start. Also slightly incredulous, needing the reassurance of a starting date to believe it was real. But Louie's schedule was packed. The earliest we could start development was mid - May. Rehearsals were unlikely to begin before autumn.

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There I was, with a freshly translated play I was itching to start work on, and no director for weeks or months yet. And there came an invitation to a scratch night, issued by undergraduates at my old university. This, I thought to myself, was a great opportunity to try out  a short extract from the script. Undirected of course. I wouldn't attempt to play the character, just speak the words in a way that made sense to me, to see if my translation actually worked in English, spoken aloud. Even just learning it would help me understand how the words felt in my body, in my mouth. It would allow me to further polish the translation, to make sure it was a dramatic text, not just a literary one. I would have no ego riding on the performance because I would have put very little into it. Just learned the lines, played a bit with word stresses, come up with a bit of business. There was no point in trying to do character work, no point in going into any depth without Louie's guidance and support. It was just text, not acting.

The first indication that I might be deluded came as I re-read the script, looking for a good bit to do, an extract that had a shape to it, that gave some idea of what the play was like, without requiring any of the depths I couldn't yet supply. I chose a couple of bits, read them out a few times, started learning the one that sounded best. And stopped. I couldn't learn it. It was too far along. I'd have to start at the beginning, that's where actors start learning monologues, at the beginning. Fortunately the first two pages were pretty self-contained, almost an overture. I started learning them.  I did redraft as I learned, finding the places that didn't flow out loud, and that was good. I learned it more easily than I've ever learned any text, probably because I'd already broken it down into thoughts in order to translate it, or maybe just because I'd worked on the English words for so long that I already knew them a bit.

                     

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Which brings me to last night, to that scratch night, where I learned that it's one thing to say you don't care about your performance as such, just about speaking the words in English to an audience, and another thing to actually not care about your performance, as such. Don't get me wrong; I held the audience, they laughed in the right places, even got a little bit tense in the right places - a little bit.  The text certainly worked, some decisions about it that had troubled me had clearly succeeded, and my core skills in speaking text didn't fail me. But, it was empty when it should have been full, a husk instead of a ripe fruit. In Mairoula's terminology - the title is both a name and an acronym- a watermelon that was a bit unripe, not very juicy, a bit bleah.

And I hated it. I hated not giving my baby - Lena's baby - the care it deserved. It hurt. It hurt during the performance, and it still hurts. A few years ago, in the depths of an ugly depression, I spent a lot of time being emotionally distant from my young son. I'm better now, and I feel like shit about those times. It's not the same thing of course, but the flavour of that guilt is like the taste in my mind right now, the taste of having betrayed a precious, tender creature in my trust. I betrayed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.; not grossly, not irrevocably, but I betrayed it. And it haunts me. I've spent all day writing this just to get to these two paragraphs where I can say: How stupid of me to think I could  not care about the performance, even for the sake of the translation. I may be both translator and actor here, and who knows what else, but I can't be both at the same time. And I know it was a scratch, and presented as a work in progress, and it's not the end of the world. I know. But all the same, I'm ashamed of myself. In my enthusiasm, I volunteered to do that little extract at another couple of events. I'm cancelling those. I'll go through the rest of the text reading aloud, making changes like the ones I made in the first two pages, and that's that. The rest can wait, and I can stand waiting much better than I can stand letting the material down again.

Finishing The Seam

Image by beanphoto

Working on Lancaster Theatre Uncut has been an absolute joy, even as we lurched from one crisis to another. We didn’t have much with which to make it happen. Besides the play texts, all we had was ourselves, what little time and other resources we could steal from our lives, whatever space we could borrow. Maybe that’s the essence, what theatre’s always made of; people, space, time. In our case the last two were in very short supply, but people made up the difference. So very many people stepped in to make Saturday’s event. From Hannah Price and her team down in London, the writers who donated their work, the people here in Lancaster who gave their time, their effort, their skills. For each person listed in our programme as part of the production, there were anywhere from two to a dozen of their friends and family members without whom the event would have been lesser, or not have happened at all. And that’s without going into the thanks page.

Time was what we had the least of. We held auditions a month ago, with extracts from the seven plays then available. In any ordinary rehearsal process of course, a month is plenty of time. Only we weren’t rehearsing every day. We were lucky to spend two hours together a week on any given play. Of course people put in time on their own, got others to stand in for rehearsals, and by considerable effort, it held together. Still, there were losses. The worst was that our schedule didn’t allow us to incorporate the eighth play, David Greig’s Fragile, into our event. This is a pity for all sorts of reasons. One of our first and most crucial recruits to the cause, Daragh Carville, was eager to direct it, sight unseen. I’ve understood from various reviews, and from Kieran Hurley, who performed it in Glasgow, that it’s not only excellent, but occupies a formal territory I’m personally fascinated by. But we were short of time and short of actors. We couldn’t do it, that was clear. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it and find out what we’ve missed.

It’s been a case of mucking in all along, never more so than on the Saturday itself. We had access to the Storey’s auditorium from 1 PM. The plan had been to quickly tech through the transitions between plays and the few light and sound cues, then go for a full dress rehearsal. This plan didn’t survive contact with reality. It was 1:20 before we were all assembled, un-stacking the modular stage, setting it up at one end of the auditorium, and unfolding the chairs. We were blessed that Emma Geraghty, a Lancaster University undergraduate who was already acting in two of the plays turned out to know her way around a lighting desk. Even with LitFest director Andy Darby, and Emma, and fellow undergraduate actor Leo, and Adrian, partner to one of our directors, all helping out with tech; even with all the rest of us doing what we could, it was after 2 by the time we were ready to start. There was no way to cram in a tech and a dress, we’d be lucky to finish a full tech run in time. I don’t know what we would have done without all the other directors and some of the actors thinking of all the things I’d forgotten to think about. I don’t know what we’d have done without Angela, smoothing the way and doing everything else. As it was, we finished teching just 40 minutes before we opened the house doors.

Some of the plays had had less than 5 hours rehearsal with a full cast. The reasons varied: Housekeeping, Lucy Kirkwood’s absurdist 3-hander had lost its protagonist. Twice. The final replacement had taken on the part only a week before, and we’d been so certain that he couldn’t learn the lines in time that we’d put it in the programme. He proved us wrong. That whole company, the least theatrically experienced of all of us, did director Tim Austin and the rest of us proud. Everybody did. I’m going to write the kind of thing here that gets theatre people mocked for being “luvvies”. I don’t care. Love was what these shows were made of, that and a shoestring. Knowing you can rely on people, to do what’s needed and more…well, it inspires love. But if trust was a product of our working together, it was also a requirement. After all the desperate scrambling for performers and recruiting of amateurs, we had to can someone in the last week. It was so late in the process that she’s in our publicity photo. Crazy as it sounds, it was an entirely pragmatic decision; better no-one at all than someone you can’t rely on. Come to think of it, the fact that she managed to show up to the photo shoot but failed to attend rehearsals speaks for itself. Director Keely Hawkins came up with an ingenious solution involving stylization and a pair of dictaphones, and in the end we had a better show for it.

I’m not in a position to give you a review, I’m much too close. I can tell you that it went remarkably well, with none of the disasters I was dreading, and that the audience was enthusiastic. I can tell you that it worked, as a production and as a call for political action. The audience was palpably fired up. Back in February, we were all pretty clear about why were doing this; why we were protesting, and why in the form of theatre. By Saturday night, it had all become about the how. We had our hands so full with the how of putting these plays together that we almost forgot what they were, and why we were doing it. To put it another way, making Lancaster Theatre Uncut inspired so much love that we misplaced the anger which sparked it. And then the house lights dimmed, and we started. When we spoke to audience, in the plays themselves and afterwards, in the bar, we remembered, because they reminded us.

Adam Gregory, who was in that audience, wrote that it was “like a rallying call for a minor revolution” and of course he’s right, that was the whole point. But there’s something else in his post that will stay with me from that night. I looked out into the house, and saw strangers and nodding acquaintances, teachers and parents from my son’s school, shopkeepers, neighbours, friends, people I knew from work- some of these categories are overlapping. I felt, for the first time since I moved from the large, hot, dry and bustling southern European city in which I was born to this small, damp, quiet town in the north of England, that I was at home. As much as our anger, it was our love we were asserting, our sense of this place and the people we share it with. Against the fraud of the Big Mac Society we set the reality of this small community and many others like it. Theirs is made of greed and lies, ours of love and people; that’s why we’re going to win.

This piece was commissioned by exeunt magazine