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Sisters
finally to the fore
When it comes to female
trios in theatre, there are really only two sorts. There are your
witches - courtesy of Shakespeare obviously, and the moorland wanderings
of Macbeth; and then there are your sisters - Masha, Olga, and Irina
immediately spring to mind, as wrought by Chekhov in his unastonishingly
titled Three Sisters. (Flimsy adaptations of Bronte novels don't count
in these musings.)
The reason I am thinking threesomes is because the usual hurly-burly
that is the Traverse Theatre at Festival time is dominated this year
by three world premieres by Scottish-based women writers. For the
record, Kate Atkinson places herself firmly in the first camp. "I'd
go for the witch every time," while Zinnie Harris sides with the sisters.
Sue Glover, meanwhile, plumps for somewhere in the middle. "A sisterly
witch?" I suggest. "A witchy sister," is her reply.
All three do suggest that their placing in respective groupings should
probably be done by those they are working with: the Traverse company
in the case of Atkinson's Abandonment and Glover's Shetland Saga;
Glasgow's Tron and the Royal National Theatre for Harris's Further
than the Furthest Thing. But is the fact that all three premieres
happen to be written by women worth highlighting in the first place?
"It's kind of weird when you get grouped with other writers," says
Zinnie Harris. "Although it's quite nice in a way, I actually feel
that the work should be judged individually. There are probably as
many things that would cause us to be in different camps as there
would be to put us in the same. I think it is coincidence that there
happens to be three women this year; if you look at last year it might
have been all men." As it turns out, it wasn't, but rest assured if
it had been, nobody would have thought it worth mentioning. Maybe
vesting the Traverse programme with an aura of the remarkable, just
because of a simple gender imbalance, is flawed. Maybe.
"In 89 I was doing a survey for the Writers Guild on how many women
writers were in the Festival," Sue Glover tells me. "It was something
like 3.5%. I went right through the Fringe brochure and, when I phoned
the Traverse, the Lyceum, and all the other main theatres in Scotland
to ask about women writers - how many had they had in the past year
- there were almost none. I couldn't believe it was so small, and
some of that small percentage was Agatha Christie as well, probably
adapted by a man!"
Thankfully, murder mysteries are out this year. But what is in? The
natural response when writing about three new plays is to look for
the thing that links them: rummage around between the pages searching
for a kind of zeitgeist. The diversity of these writers turns such
a task into a contrivance really, though one thing does stick out
(literally perhaps as well as figuratively) and that is the notion
of islands. Shetland Saga is a saga set on Shetland (you'll probably
have picked that up): the story of the uneasy relationship between
the local community and a boatload of Bulgarian sailors with a dangerous
past, stranded on the island; Harris's Further than . . . is inspired
by the mid-Atlantic colony of Tristan da Cunha, evacuated to Southampton
following the eruption of a volcano in the 1960s; Atkinson's main
character in Abandonment is a woman isolated from the world around
her: moving to a new house but finding that family, friends, and a
long-dead former tenant conspire to ensure that she is not as cut
off as she would like to think. And if that does, indeed, sound like
a contrivance, a quote from each of them.
"I could have set the play in Ullapool and it would have been easier
because Ullapool people talk to you much more easily than Shetlanders
do," says Glover. "But there is something about being a part of Scotland
and yet not a part of Scotland that is very intriguing. There's something
about being cut off. I love islands and isolation and it makes sense."
"It's about the relationship with the outside world," Harris tells
me. "The second act is set in England after the volcano has gone off,
and they are forced to embrace the outside world."
She adds: "It's about how the experience of their upbringing, the
simplicity of their life up to that point, manages to find itself
expressed; how you hang on to your past sort of thing, and, ultimately,
how they find a route home. It's about change and I think the island
provides a setting to say something about the way any of us react
to change."
And Atkinson on her character? "She feels isolated in many ways and
she feels that she's not connected to life in the way that she might
be. A lot of it is to do with personal space in all kinds of different
ways: how much we let people in, how much we let ourselves out."
So maybe there is something in the air then. It will be interesting
to see whether there will be any sense of it given the three writers'
vastly different backgrounds and approaches.
Glover is the experienced pair of hands - though she would not claim
this herself - following up the Borders history play Bondagers by
going right to the other end of the country (though not consciously,
she says) and addressing very contemporary issues such as asylum-seekers.
Zinnie Harris is the young blood, winner of the Peggy Ramsay award
for playwrighting last year and about to produce a rash of new commissions.
Kate Atkinson is the famous novelist, bored of books but not bored
of writing, coming up with her first full-length play and a new way
of thinking.
"I don't get edited, but I get directed," she says. "I have complete
control over a novel, absolute, omnipotent, but with a play, right
from the beginning it was much more 'what do you think?', 'what are
your ideas?', 'what should I do?'. It was a conscious decision because
I do like being in control. I couldn't bear the idea of anyone contributing
or commenting or having any ideas about a novel, but with a play I
wanted to write in a different way."
It may just be a quirk of programming that sees women dominating Scottish
theatre's contribution to this year's Fringe (there is also Nicola
McCartney at the Brunton - and not a Greig, a Greenhorn, or a Harrower
in sight), but something has obviously changed since Sue Glover's
depressing survey. " When shall we three meet again?" ask Macbeth's
witches, "In thunder, lighting, or in rain? When the hurlyburly's
done, when the battle's lost and won." Maybe this battle has been.
- Robert Thomson (August 3, 2000)
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