Lusty Juventus: M(Other) - The Writer's Perspective

www.lustyjuventus.co.uk

The M(other) Project

'The Writer's Perspective' by Christine Roberts I once inadvertently went to the wrong house to meet someone. Not realising there was another larger house further down the country lane, I'd stopped at the only one I could see and knocked on the door. A charming old gentleman opened the door and when I asked for Ellie he invited me in. He told me Ellie had 'popped out' but not to worry, 'she would return directly'. He politely offered me tea and cakes; we made idle conversation about the weather. And then we looked out of his cottage window to admire the beautiful garden. 'Your roses are absolutely stunning,' I enthused. He turned and smiled at me, 'Yes aren't they, are you the gardener?' After an hour, Ellie had still not arrived, and realising my mistake I made my excuses to leave the house. The old man took my hand and gave it a vigorous shake, 'Thank you so much for coming. Please feel free to visit again. We always like to have guests. Goodbye'. The play I wrote five years later concerning the effects of Alzheimer's disease began at that precise moment.
I have written many plays for performance all of which have been inspired by strong initial visual images. The playwright Richard Nelson explains that, 'images are powerful because of their meaning, not because of the attractiveness of the image itself'. The image of John, the old man, never left me. Theatrically I could see someone whose mind was slowly fragmenting, but the strictness of his upbringing was such that, despite the chaos he was experiencing, his social conditioning remained intact. Such a juxtaposition of formality and disintegration intrigued and disturbed me. What if this man had been my father, would he still have thought I was the gardener? And if he no longer recognised me as his daughter, what was the essence of our relationship? The seed for the play had been sown and over the next five years would slowly germinate.
When Lusty Juventus were invited to perform in Athens we felt that this theme held possibilities for us. We decided that I would write an initial script which would form the basis for our workshops. As a playwright who had also acted and directed I view the writing of a text not primarily as a literary act but as a process which leads to performance. In our model of collaboration, as highlighted by Elaine Aston, my initial role was that of the writer in the group. Yet although my role was still a collaborative one, at this stage I would be the central coordinator of ideas. I needed my own time to write and develop a script but I realised that in our style of creating, which actively worked against the hierarchisation of writer, performer or director, the text would later be open to negotiation and development. Using a semiotic ground, Roland Barthes qualifies the old assumptions about literary text, professing that, 'meaning of a work cannot be created by the work alone: the author never produces anything but presumptions of meaning, forms, and it is the world which fills them.' Texts, he believed, resembled 'the links of a chain of meaning', but that this chain is unattached so that someone else - in his terms, the reader - must fasten it, and give it a definitive meaning. In our terms this was not the reader, but the other people involved in the creative process of moving the script into performance. Deconstructionalists, such as Alvin Kernan, joke that Barthes' revolution had guillotined the author, whilst Foucault suggested that the author should appear to be absent, and to delegate his (or her) authority to others.

I knew that when I presented my script it would be mediated, but I also had the reassuring knowledge that I would become neither headless nor invisible. I would not be dispossessed of what I wanted to say. When I began to write, I knew that my exploration of Alzheimer's would not be through a naturalistic genre. This in part was influenced by the company's style of work, but also by my desire to explore this theme through strong visual imagery of: distance, decay, loss, memory, fragmentation and disintegration; the metaphors for which would be the train and the garden. I wanted the form to reciprocate the content. I knew that through these ideas we would find emergent meanings which would be explored using voice, body, film, as well as the written text. There is often confusion or imprecision when issues surrounding the artistic process are broached. When does the artistic process begin? What exactly is the artistic process? Who is involved? Or more contentiously who are the prime movers within that process. What happens exactly? Or to quote Beckett, 'Exactly!'
My initial script involved a mother and daughter. I wrote with poetic rhythms which would suit the physicality of the piece. After a positive response to my first draft, I was asked to look at a poem by Swinburne which Roberta was keen to incorporate. As the poem suited the style I had already used, I integrated snippets from the poem into my text and found that it added to the overall aesthetics of the piece. I had taken the script through the first two stages, for the third stage the writing became a collective activity with the inclusion of extracts from the poem into the final script and the addition of the Essential Mother character. Ironically due to ill-health, I couldn't attend this rehearsal so integrating the poem fell to the other group members. This is a very clear example of the writing becoming a collective activity. But it is also a rather simplistic perspective. The collective text truly manifested itself through our dramaturgical exploration. Our experimentation with our bodies, voice, and visual imagery, through which to find the emergent meanings within the written word, extend this narrow notion of text. Within this collective creation we were keen not to fall back into our established areas of expertise, whilst also recognising the diversity of our respective skills. There were inevitably many debates, frustrations, and also healthy disagreements. This is important to recognise, because as Ann Bogart notes, 'We often presume that collaboration means agreement. Too much agreement creates productions with no vitality, no dialectic, no truth. Unreflected agreement deadens the energy'. And energy we had in abundance. But have I learned anything, as a writer? Oh of course..for one, that my own words are definitely the most difficult to learn and deliver than all the others I have encountered. I have renewed respect for the valiant performers struggling to, 'get it right!' As an actor so bluntly told me, 'Now you know what I've been bloody battling with all these years!' Oh, and what of old John? He died, still believing that I was the gardener.