Hannah Nicklin

Two New Plays.

Hurrah for a less didactic blog post!

Yup, this is a (shock-horror) creative update.

It seems like while since I’ve spoken about my creative writing, and this is mainly because I’ve been working on one particular thing, and wasn’t certain I had the go-ahead to talk about it. But I definitely have that now, so here goes.

I handed in the first draft for my first ever proper commission this Monday. It’s going to be part of a showcase of new writing, of 4-6, 15 minute newly commissioned pieces called Word:Play, and produced by the excellent (well yes I would say that, but I genuinely do think they are excellent) Box of Tricks Theatre Company. The pieces are all written in response to a single word, and the word for this Word:Play is obsession.

Here’s what I’ve been writing:

AWAKE

Awake is a monologue for two voices- the play happens somewhere between real and not, focussing on the relationship between avatar and identity. J0n thinks he is real, but he is Flo’s avatar. Flo has been playing an MMORPG until passing out from dehydration. She awakes, and meets J0n, finding herself in what appears to be a kind of digital limbo. The meeting is initially an affable (if confused) one, but as it emerges that only one of them can leave the space it becomes a fight for survival. Flo is dying, and to survive, J0n has to convince her life is worth living.

There have been several deaths and child-neglect cases related to MMORGS over the past 3 or 4 years. This short piece explores the identity politics, obsessive personalities, perfectionism, and the revisionism/escapism involved in the hardcore gaming community. It asks why people want so much to disappear from ‘our’ world, questioning how much we invest in our online/virtual presences, and how real our online personas are. The place in which the two characters are trapped could be some kind of digital limbo, but it could also be Florence’s mind. In this space J0n is realer than he has ever been, and Florence is dying. It becomes clear that Florence has a choice to make – between her obsession, and her life. What does she really have to go back to?

The first draft went… well it went the way of most first drafts do for me, it felt like my brain was bleeding. But I got it done, and in time. There’s a lot to work on – in character, and my ideas about the universe of the play etc. But the first step is there, and (considering how time is flying at the moment) it won’t be long until I have my first fully kitted out production (this Winter, probably in the new year, in London).

In other writing news Scary Little Girls Productions have offered me full a weekend in November to workshop Eismas (PDF), the first draft of which they seem really interested in, possibly for presentation in London just before or after Christmas. This is bloody excellent news, as I really do need a proper actor/director reading of that piece to love and hate it enough again to redraft. Plus to get it in front of an audience, to get them asking questions and poking holes would be very useful. Spec-fic theatre is still quite a rare thing, so in a lot of ways I’m writing into the unknown – I seriously appreciate feedback and debate about my writing, for me, theatre should be a testing ground as much as it should present polished ideas. So yes, here’s to general excitement.

And finally, in shamless-plug fashion, do check out the latest shows from both Box of Tricks and Scary Little Girls.

I’m not kidding, do it.

Science Fiction Theatre, New Politics?

Yep, apologies again, I do have a very good excuse that was the worst migraine I’ve ever had, with proper visual disturbances and everything, and then (just recovered in time) I went to Manchester, and had a really brilliant weekend of just what I needed: friends, rock music, drink, video games and laughter. I feel almost happy! Plus only 12 MORE DAYS in Wolverhampton! YAY! So yes, that’s the reason for the gap in posts. But fear not loyal reader, this one will hopefully make up for it, for it is a rambling MONSTER.

OK, so while also doing shorter updates about what I’m up to and where I’m going with things, I did mention maybe doing more editorial-style blog entry every now and then. A bit of a chunkier look into my ideas on… things. Not sure what things exactly, but I suppose that it will probably be either theatre/arts or politics/feminism, these being the main forces that drive me. So yes, here’s a tentative first stab at one of these!

SCIENCE FICTION THEATRE

Yep, I’m on about that again. The reason I want to talk about my ideas for Science Fiction, or ‘Speculative’ Fiction on stage (aside from the fact it has formed the main body of my playwriting so far) is the very intriguing and quizzical reactions I have had to my writing so far. I should preface this with saying that by no means am I a fully-fledged playwright – I am still ‘emerging’ (‘young’ playwright is no longer PC –ageist, you see) and will hopefully always be learning – as thus I’m sure some of the reactions to my writing may be to just that – the actual writing, and not the choice of genre, but some of it definitely isn’t, some of it is a direct recoil from ‘genre’(in the pejorative sense).

I will discuss these reactions a little later, but first I want to try and explain the use do I think porting these genres to the stage will have, why I think they are exciting, important and useful.

In my mind this kind of theatre has the potential to form a new kind of political theatre. I’ll begin with a quote from the (sadly, recently late) great Augusto Boal

Theatre is a weapon. A very efficient weapon […] for this reason the ruling classes try to take hold of theatre and utilise it as a tool for domination […] but the theatre can also be a weapon of the liberation. For that, it is necessary to change appropriate theatrical forms. Change is imperative.

p. ix, Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed (New Edition). London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Politics and the majority of theatre, in my opinion, have at their hearts the same driving force. A belief in the individual and collective voice. A belief that experience informs belief which in application can produce change for the better. Change is the aim of political theatre (what theatre doesn’t pertain to either a personal or public politic is another question entirely). To initiate change in ideas and ideals, as Boal suggests, theatrical forms must always be in flux, they cannot stagnate because it is at that point you begin to accept, rather than question. I do not mean change from week to week, but I’m talking in terms of movements. Has theatre really had a movement since In-Yer-Face 90s theatre? I think theatre must continually be re-appropriated for new worlds and generations because theatre has the power to open our eyes, for us to see our many selves- it has a power beyond all other art forms; because of story.

When we are young we tell stories through play, it’s how we learn, how we explore our world, our roles within it, but somehow people seem to think that eventually, they become too grown up for stories. That is why we miss the new coercive narratives, the stories and roles that rest within the covers of magazines, flicker on our screens and are emblazoned on the side of buildings. These stories bombard us every day, and tell us who and how we should be. We need new stories, stories to challenge and rival these. We need to key into something that has more truth, more life; this is why I believe in stories played out in the theatre.

When you watch theatre, when you believe in it, you invest in it a part of your life; you credit it with a small but important part of yourself. A play is built of a hundred little volunteered hours, it is a rift in the space time continuum, a coming together of a hundred hours into one. This is why theatre can make you gasp; make the breath catch in your lungs for the life that you see onstage, because it is, in a small and immense way, a part of you. For some, theatre is a first taste of a collective experience.

Has theatre really had a movement since In-Yer-Face 90s theatre? My experience of theatre is unfortunately one severely limited by funds, and founded on a university course which rarely looked at post 2000 work, so call me on it if you have a better answer, but I think the time is ripe for a new theatre, a theatre that draws in a new generation bereft by context. There are adults now who have not known a world without the internet, for whom political extremes have been replaced by apparently middle ground hogging-expense abusing-privately educated white men that known as much about us as we about them. This is not my opinion, but it is the opinion of many of my contemporaries, most of whom have never voted. Apathy, to me, seems to be the aim of a lazy, right wing media who would find things a lot easier if they could just produce lifestyle magazines. I understand why in all of the difficult suffering and wars, injustices which don’t fit into an easy ‘good or bad’ conflict people just want to shut themselves off to it. I understand this because I know how much each horrible piece of pain that the media and the internet delivers me, hurts. It hurts because I am only one person. It hurts because one person can change everything; it hurts because I don’t have the space to help everyone. So you disconnect. History is everywhere for this generation, constantly in the making. But the wars happen elsewhere, we see things on our screens, and for all of it, the horror is never really a part of our lives. I believe that we need a way of helping people see again, and to do that we must make people feel uneasy, unsafe, wobbly. It is not history, but the future that we need now, in order that this generation might see themselves here, and nowhere else, here with the ability to participate. I believe in the future. I believe that new theatrical forms are sorely needed for the continuing relevancy and power of theatre.

Theatre must constantly be in flux, we must find new forms, new ways of playing with stories because we can undo the pain of the modern world, we can begin to learn again. Theatre is not a reflection of life, but rather a reflection of what it could be- it is the art of possibility.

Theatre must reflect new worlds.

And this is where I believe science/speculative fiction theatre can come in.

There are a few examples of this happening in theatre, they are growing, I saw Zero by Theatre Absolute half a year ago – set in an anonymous future where series of internment camps criss-cross the world, Far Away by Caryl Churchill, if you ask me, is a spectacular, breathtaking piece of dystopian fiction, and Steve Water’s Contingency Plan double bill about a climate change is set in the near future, and currently getting rave reviews at The Bush. I really believe that where we are now, in the late ‘noughties’, on a wave that is beginning to swell, moving towards a tipping point – I feel this in the new wave of feminism, I feel it in the new questions being raised about the sustainability of the particular form of capitalism we have heretofore subscribed, I feel that it must happen in politics, and I feel that it is happening to stories now too. People in a world of web 2.0 and constant connectivity, laugh, love and communicate in entirely new ways. Is theatre currently fitted out to portray these new ways of being? To work with new ideas of identity and gender, or to harness the wonderfully widespread and democratising power of technology? I believe that all these big new question marks are making the world shift, and that theatre is also beginning to find its current skin too restrictive.

In my work I portray possible futures, in Being Someone Else I try to look at love, loss, and identity in the gaming world, in the radio play Bird Woman I loosely borrow from a 70s feminist fable to touch upon the feeling of being a young girl, and in Eismas I imagine a world where a single child policy has been enforced throughout Europe. I use these elements of SF, Spec-fic and fantasy with political intent- particularly in my most recent piece Eismas, I have used SF as a kind of distancing device – a cerebral as opposed to emotional distance – in order that an audience can relax, think ‘oh but this isn’t about me, it’s just a story’ but then I also hope that they would care about the central characters that they follow the journey of the piece and see how we could get there- and because they felt the pain of the world, see that they want for us not to be there, see this world in the light of what it might become. See that we have a chance, now, to change it.

This is not a new idea. From Victorian ghost stories (A Christmas Carol!) to feminist and socialist science fiction, to fairy stories, all of these have aimed to mould people’s feelings in the same way. Is it coercive? I suppose it is. But no more, I think, than any piece of storytelling.

So, back to why I am talking about why I write within the bounds of SF. I have had some very interesting experiences over the past year so, of a very odd resistance to SF on stage. Both of the external moderators on the masters I did at Birmingham commented that they did not like SF on my reader reports. One said that should and would not colour his report on my piece, the other accused the play of ‘wanting to be a Hollywood film’ and called me ‘a writer with very little experience of, or perhaps interest in, the material realities of making theatre’. Likewise at the recent workshopped reading of Eismas the question was asked: ‘wouldn’t this be better as a film?’ This produced a reasonably heated discussion, in which my director expressed the following (heavily paraphrased) sentiment: ‘this is not about the genre, this is about the content. Theatre, to me, is about people and politics: having something to say. This is not a play set in a big special effect driven world, this is a play about two people, and their relationship.’ Eismas shows the public sphere through the pain it exerts on the private. If you ask me, that is the stuff for theatre. This discussion was made doubly strange by the fact that two of the other plays were historical ones, one of which made allusions to vampirism, and the other was about psychics in Edwardian times! But I suppose that was exactly the reaction that I need isn’t it? The other half of the room really connected with the political content of the piece, and it’s that unease, that unease which is key to my political intent.

My mum (as ever) puts it succinctly when she says ‘it’s just snobbery, people forget, don’t they, that all stories are fiction’ all of the universes are invented, why not play with that? Why not use that edge to try and provoke the feeling that the future is invented. We decide what we want it to be.

Change is imperative. Theatrical forms must always be in flux. Theatre has the power to open our eyes, for us to see our many selves, to see ourselves anew. Let’s write about the future. Let’s talk about now. Let’s learn about being human again. Let’s participate.

Thanks for reading.

Refined (All the Passion): Manifesto

History is everywhere for this generation. It is potentially at our fingertips, on every 24 hour news channel, the internet, our mobile phones and pdas, but the wars happen elsewhere, we see things on our screens, and for all of it, the horror is never really a part of our lives. Do you remember what everyone said when the planes hit the Twin Towers? “It looked just like a film”. For many it was an individual experience, each person saw it in front of their own little screen.

Everything is mediated, comes through one channel or another, and people live in new worlds to avoid this one as it fights to get at you. Fights to tell you how to live, what to buy, what is ‘in’ and why it’s necessary for you to Please Your Man. So for this generation, drowned in the sound of a thousand cries, history is nothing- there’s too much to hear and the distortion is so high that it seems too far away to matter. Everything is like white noise, beyond noise, beyond silence. And no one hears a single cry.

I believe that we need a way of making people hear again, and to do that we must make people feel uneasy, unsafe. Away from the Hollywood endings and day by day narrative imperative there needs to be a form of expression, a way of telling stories that is particular only to the theatre.

When you watch theatre, when you believe in it, you invest in it a part of your life; you credit it with a small but important part of yourself. A play is built of a hundred little volunteered hours, it is a rift in the space time continuum, a coming together of a hundred hours into one. This is why theatre can make you gasp; make the breath catch in your lungs for the life that you see onstage, because it is, in a small and immense way, a part of you and all around you. For some, theatre their first taste of a collective experience.

I believe that it is not history, but the future that we now need, in order that this generation might see themselves here, and nowhere else, and crucially, here with the ability to change what might happen. The future is a land often spoken of; however it is one of the only places that a news camera cannot go, and a place that film cannot lend the same breath of life or genuine place that the theatre can show. So I believe in Theatre.

I believe that theatre in Britain needs a movement, a movement built of new and old writers of all ages, genders and races, but one that decides, to visit schools, sixth forms, offices and universities, homeless shelters, prisons, hospitals and shopping centres, we need to take theatre out, draw people in, with Pies or Pints or promises of other kinds, because theatre speaks, it lives and dies and is so fragile a creation that you strive to listen to its voice. We must – as has never really wholly been done – bring theatre to The Masses, acknowledging that The Masses now are not a whole, but are united in only one thing, a lingering discontent. The modern malaise of never quite being, doing or saying, everything you think you should.

History has gone. No one listens to it anymore. Nor do people listen to the present, because it is still recorded, history the second that it happens. Instead I believe in Science Fiction. In Science Fiction, theatre could find an unfamiliar world that renders familiar things real to a new generation of people bereft.

I want to write a kind of play set 100 years in the future, in the middle of electromagnetic warfare, or the fall of America, the trial of some British war criminal, a future that really criticises religion, new-liberalism or the media, a future torn apart by war over the last supply of natural gas, or where China is the universal super power. I want to issue a new political theatre of such scope that it makes people gasp, cry, and stare wide-eyed at something truly engaging. I will write about love, and music, singing, that kiss that hurts so much because it can never happen. I will write about the worlds where people live because this one brings them too much pain.

I will do this.

Left-Handed Politics

LEFT HANDED POLITICS
(Towards a Science Fiction Theatre)

I am currently reading a book formed of collected pieces of prose and speech by David Hare called ‘Writing Left-Handed’. It is so called in reference to his finding prose a ‘left-handed’ form of communication – his natural or ‘right-handed’ form is the stage play. I particularly picked up this book because the Chapter 2 (sub) heading caught my eye: On Political Theatre. (p.24)

I am always interested in reading peoples’ opinions on the nature of political theatre. However I am never quite satisfied when I read these pieces, they frustrate me. Not out of poor or dull or angry writing, but rather because inherent in politcal theartre is an urge, a desperation, a need to lift up the corners of that rug society likes to sweep the nasty bits under, and hear the voices, an urge which tears apart my heart also.

I have always wanted to write political theatre. The first piece I ever wrote was a 20minute Brechtian examination of the Iraq War (I was a very precocious 17 year old). A question you are often asked in playwriting workshops and by dramaturgs and directors is “what do you really want to say?”, “what kind of play do you really want to write?”. And I always, always feel in my heart a terrible tension, and I know, I know that I want to write political theatre. I want to write for life, on stages that are bigger than you can see all at one time, I want to write for barricades and riots, for whole 20 year histories and huge and complex, terrible and beautiful stories. This is not a good way to get yourself produced.

Hare, too, talks about writing histories, he talks about presenting “those strange uneasy factors that make a place here and nowhere else” (p.34) on stage, as part of his political theatre for a “generation who are cowed, who seem to have given up on the possibility of change” (p.35). I think at 23, I was the very last of that generation. If you sit in universities seminars now, and watch the pain of the lecturer as they try to extract some kind of discussion from their beleagured students, you realise that this genertaion, the ones who grew up with the internet, the ones with so much information at their fingertips that it just doesn’t seem important, have never really known the possiblity of change. Never understood the true meaning of the word.

History is everywhere for this generation. It is potentially at their fingertips, on every 24 hour new channel – but importantly – separate from them – through their mobile phone or their television set or their connection with the internet the wider world is never really a part of their lives. The areoplane hitting the second of the Twin Towers was real the first time you saw it, but after it had been reproduced, the 20th time you had seen it that day, every newspaper cover the next week, after a year when it was dissected by conspiracy theorists, after all the back and forth- it was just another piece of media, like a show that makes you laugh, you download, but then you’ve seen it a couple of times and it just doesn’t get you the way it did. Everything is transmuted. Changed, and if you will allow me to take liberties with the etymology to form a dual meaning for the word, changed as in rendered: Trans- ‘beyond‘ muted- (mutus “silent, dumb,”) silence.

And for this generation, drowned in the sound of a thousand cries every day, history is nothing new- there’s too much to hear and the distortion is so high that it seems too far away to matter. Everything is all the same thing, it blends together and change is impossible, everything just flows. The cries are beyond silence.

So what does interest this generation? What stories do they buy? I have rarely seen some people so engaged, as when playing Bioshock they inject themselves with a genetic-enhancement and electrocute another few genetically altered and crazed psuedo-zombies that were foolish enough to be wandering through an icy pool. Harry Potter got countless young people reading their first book. The latest cult hit TV series being frantically downloaded through University servers all over the country was Heroes, a far ranging show about ordinary people developing genetic irregularities that enable them to, for example, read minds, regenerate, fly. I believe that in Science Fiction, theatre could find an unfamiliar world that renders familiar things real.

“I write love stories. Most of my plays are that. Over and over again I have written about romanatic love, because it never goes away. And the view of the world it provides, the dislocation it offers, is the most intense experience that many people know on earth.
And I write comedy because … such ideas as the one I have just uttered make me laugh.”

(p.35 ‘Writing Left-Handed’)

I think that because Science fiction renders for the audience a vision of the future, it could be key in rejuvanating British Political Theatre. The best piece of political theatre I have recently read is Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) it is very short colection of 3 vignettes which slowly slip into fantasy, they begin recognisable, parody everyday styles of speech and discussion, but at the end of each scene the characters are rendered as part of a terrible reality and you see yourself reflected in their eyes.

I believe that we need a way of making people uneasy, a form of expression, a way of telling stories which just doesn’t seem to sit right, which niggles at your senses; a left handed politic. I believe in Science Fiction Theatre. I believe that it is not history, but the future that we now need, in order that this new generation might see themselves here, and nowhere else, and crucially, here with the ability to change what might happen. The future is a land often spoken of, more so as global warming takes hold, however it is one of the only places that a news camera cannot go, a place that can be lent the lives of actors, a place that the theatre can show.

I want to write a kind of play that is like David Edgar’s Playing With Fire but set 100 years in the future, in the middle of electromagnetic warfare, or the fall of America. I want to issue a new political theatre of such scope that it makes people gasp, cry, and stare wide-eyed at something truly engaging.

I will do this.