A lovesong to community

(photo: Ella Maximillion)

Coming back to Melbourne this year has felt like coming home.

Partly because I love it here and I do really feel at home in this city; but partly I’ve been back in rehearsal.

And that really does feel like coming home.

The deep crisis affecting theatre back home in Scotland - the lack of funding, the lack of confidence, the lack of valuing theatre as an art form -

all means that the last time I was totally involved in rehearsing a new work as a writer was way back in 2019, with THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

So long ago, that I’d forgotten I’ve been missing it.

But as soon as I stepped into the Fortyfive Downstairs rehearsal space then I knew.

I knew I’d come back home.

There’s something about these spaces, with their infinite possibilities, which makes them the best spaces in the world.

And the wonderful thing about rehearsals is that they’re the places where these possibilities take form:

They’re the places where the previously unimagined come into the world.

It was in a rehearsal room that for the very first time in my life it became possible for me to imagine myself as a girl.

I was fourteen years old, still traumatised by the death of my mother, and by the intense bullying what have happened the previous years when everyone in the boarding school had turned against me and refused to talk to me or acknowledge my existence.

I was shy and frightened and knew my safety in that place just hang by a thread…

But in rehearsal I could be confident and feel I had a place in the world.

It didn’t last. The utter unbearable agonies of adolescence in an institutionally abusive boy’s school soon brought it to an end.

But although it seemed I’d lost my vocation as a performer as soon as I’d discovered it, it was theatre that saved my life, and continues to give meaning and purpose and joy to my being.

So it’s right, somehow, that this show, “36”, opening on Tuesday, should be both a celebration of theatre and an intergenerational love letter to the trans/queer community…

And with that it’s a celebration of humanity and of life itself.

Because those who now so stridently see to deny us the right to exist are denying life inside themselves.

That’s not how it began. It began as an attempt to ease our fear of death.

I’d just turned 70 and was becoming inescapably aware of getting old.

And not just getting old, but with death coming round the corner.

I needed to write something that would help me come to grips with my fear of dying; and see I could help audiences with it, too, because Western society is really terrible at death.

So that’s why I wrote “Sister Death” (Play no. 110: February 2022)…and that’s also why I couldn’t a find a way to stage it…

Until Kitan Petkovski and the Bullet Heart Club of Melbourne, who staged “Jesus Queen” so beautifully in Melbourne in 2023 and 2024, said he’d like to do it.

Which meant I was expecting to come to Melbourne this year to perform “Sister Death”…

Only a foreign performer performing a foreign play about death did not seem to be a commercially very strong proposition…

And Kitan showed the play to a fabulous trans writer/performer called Bayley Turner, who loved it, and out of that grew the possibility of collaboratively creating a new play based on “Sister Death” with a new title that Bayley could perform…

So we called it “36” after the urban myth that trans women globally have a life expectancy of 35; and imagined to be the performer’s 35th birthday…

So she reflects on her life and its joys and its sorrows believing this could be her last year in this world.

So I said to her: “Have a go with Sister death. Change the bits that don’t work for you. or just leave them out, and write new bits of your own that tell your story…”

And then I wondered what would come back.

And what came back was beautiful, because Bayley has such a gift for dialogue, such a gift for storytelling, and such a gift for form…

Then I rewrote the script and sent it back, and she rewrote the rewrite and sent it back…

And back and forth until we have a script that is so much richer and so much stronger…

Collaborating online was one joy; collaborating in person in the rehearsal room another, much deeper one…

And in the process we’ve started to love one another.

Bayley’s the same age as my younger daughter; and it’s so gorgeous finding myself loving Bayley as a daughter, and finding these amazingly profound connections between us, nurtured through rich experience in different generations on different continents.

It feels like a real miracle, a gorgeous and unexpected gift from art and the universe, that we should have found a way to distil these connections into a script, and then into a production, that includes everything I want to see in the theatre:

An event that is rich in meaning and emotion, that is sexy and profound and funny and angry and deeply deeply political too.

That says things that have never been said before; and which desperately need to be heard.

And which is accessible to everybody….

“36”, co-written by Jo Clifford and Bayley Turner, performed by Bayley Turner with the singer Alexandra Amerides, and voiceover by Jo Clifford opens at Fortyfive Downstairs, Flinders Street Lane, Melbourne, on Tuesday 21st Jan and runs till 2nd Feb.

Produced by Bullet Heart Club in association with fortyfive downstairs and Midsumma.

Tickets for 36