The Show Must Go on

(even though the last one's this afternoon)

I woke up about 4 this morning.

I tried to go back to sleep, as you do, and didn’t, as you don’t.

By about 5 I knew I wouldn’t sleep and gave myself over to my thoughts, mostly melancholy, about today being the last day of The Not So Ugly Duckling and how I’d probably miss her when she’s gone.

It was particularly gruesome in the old Traverse, I remembered.

It was a beautiful space: an old sail-makers loft on the first floor, and the scenery would be hoisted up through the dock door on a hand operated crane.

I wrote five shows for the Traverse in those early days:

LOSING VENICE (1985)

LUCY’S PLAY (1986)

PLAYING WITH FIRE (1987)

INES DE CASTRO (1989)

LIGHT IN THE VILLAGE (1991)

All of them were written fast, in a kind of white hot intensity, because they were all announced before they’d actually been written, and so the deadlines were ferocious.

They all made the hugest demands on the actors, too, and so rehearsals tended to be intense affairs.

I would live through everything the characters went through, and then go through it all over again in rehearsal and performance.

Again and again and again…

And because I hadn’t learned to defend myself or shield myself against these feelings in any way, by the end of the run it was as if every line of the play was etched deep into my soul.

So on the last night to experience each line being spoken for the last time was indescribably painful to me…

As if a fierce and beautiful fire was being extinguished, flame by flame, until there was nothing left but cold dead ash.

To make it all worse, at the end of the night it was the custom for the stage crew to dismantle the set and chuck it out the dock doors for it to smash on the yard below.

Such beautiful sets too. Incredibly gifted designers worked on those plays - Dermot Hayes, Bunny Christie, Paul Brown (twice), Tim Hatley - and the destruction of the beauty they had created hurt even more.

Our set is also beautiful.Ali Maclaurin has created such a gorgeous playing space for us, and a sustainable one, too.

So it won’t be destroyed. The floorcloth will be carefully folded, and the 4 IKEA stools carefully stacked, and put to bed in our producer’s garage, until it’s time for them to come out and join us on the road.

And I hope that time comes, because I love this play and am proud of it.

Writing it with Maria MacDonell was such a pleasure. And then rehearsing it with Ian Cameron and Roddy Simpson and performing it in the Scottish Storytelling Centre, too…

And somehow I’ve learnt how to reproduce the body’s memories of the feelings without actually having to feel them…

So here I am in bed, realising and remembering all these things, and it’s about 6 o’clock and it’s not time to wake up yet and I remember BBC Sounds and go to this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b0bcr727

These are plays I wrote in 2018 for a 15 minute radio drama slot that as far as I know no longer exists…

There was something about the incredibly tight restrictions of the form that convinced me it would work to maybe dramatise the most intense and painful and difficult week of my entire life:

The week of the Edinburgh Festival of 2004. The week that began with us trying to walk up the High St. to the Traverse together; and ended with my lover Susie being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given only weeks, maybe days, to live.

And then, at the beginning of the following week, the opening of my translation and adaptation of the ‘Celestina’ as part of the International Festival in the Kings.

The published text arrived in the middle of it all, with its dedication “To Susie Innes, and her toast to life”

… and I really can’t remember if that found its way into the plays, but I know we made that toast, all of us, in the face of death.

But I know I felt proud in the early hours of this morning, listening to the first episode. Proud of my text, proud of the actors (Liam Brennan and Kath Howden) and proud of Kirsty Williams and the production too.

I hope it continues to bring comfort…

Because more and more that’s what I think our “Not So Ugly Duckling” is for.

Someone came up to me after the show on Thursday, someone I’d never met before, but who turned out to be the younger sister of a woman I once loved.

After her death, I wrote a poem in her honour, and a play too, and her sister told me how much comfort my poem had given her and her mum in their grief.

She thanked me for the play, too: and for performing from the heart.

That so gladdens me.

So many people will be so anxious and afraid just now, with electricity bills tripling, and wondering how they’re going to manage. I don’t know myself.

And I’m astonished that the two people so grotesquely competing to be the next prime minister have nothing to offer. Nothing but division and hatred.

That makes our job all the more important: theatre’s task to give comfort and strength.

https://scottishstorytellingcentre.online.red61.co.uk/event/913:4336/913:17827/

https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/celestina