A Play A Day #2: stoning mary by debbie tucker green

Oh dear, I seem to have fallen behind rather quickly in this task I have set myself. I shall endeavour to catch up with another play I know well...

stoning mary (both title and playwright are deliberately lowercase) takes three issues mainly associated with the developing world, and transposes them to a European context - the script specifies that all the characters are white - echoing Tony Blair's comment at the World Economic Forum in 2005 that, 'If what was happening in Africa today was happening in any other part of the world, there would be such a scandal and clamour that governments would be falling over themselves to act in response.' I acted in a production of this at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2008, and the subject matter made this a difficult one to sell. It was a rainy summer that year, and as I stood on the Royal Mile with a pile of soggy fliers trying to tempt people to see a play about AIDS, child soldiers, and death by stoning occasionally I wished I was in a comedy about funny animals. Though the issues are weighty, however, tucker green explores them with a lightness of touch. The husband and wife fighting over the one anti-retroviral prescription they can afford, the mother and father with their conflicting memories of their kidnapped son, the sisters bickering in prison: all of these are credible human relationships rather than dreary didactic stereotypes.

Ultimately, though, what stands out for me about this play is the same thing that drew me to it when I first encountered it in auditions - the sharp, distinctive brilliance of the language. tucker green wrote poetry before she wrote plays, and it seems to me that many excerpts from stoning mary could stand alone as poems. The Older Sister's description of her hypothetical last request ('... Somethin fizzy. Somethin fizzy n' strong. Somethin that'd (gasps) me. Bottles of it. Crates a it. No glass necessary suck it straight from source, bottle up head back - lash it down. Lovely.') is as effervescent and intoxicating as the drink she is imagining. Mary's speech demanding to know 'what happened to the womanist bitches? The feminist bitches?' who didn't support her cause is lyrical rather than preachy. The idiosyncrasies of the characters' speech did make some of the lines rather tricky to learn ('Cos - "you me" - mighta got sick and tired a takin reverse charged allocated anything from "me you" - that "you me " didn't want.'), but add to a sense of percussive urgency. If anything, the tidy structure of the play - the way three seemingly disparate stories intersect - seems at odds with the messy, exciting language. I found the introduction of the Boyfriend character towards the end, presumably to mirror the Husband and Wife at the beginning and suggest a perpetual cycle of desperation and dependency, superfluous and a little confusing. 

It is also intriguing reading back over all the notes I scribbled on my copy of the script, for example:

Wow. That's an acting master-class, right there.

I believed in this play enough to shave my head for the character; the past eighteen months have represented a journey from bald to bob:

It was definitely worth it: I still feel very lucky to have been in this play. 

Good female monologues? Yes: Both the Older and the Younger Sister have several, including Older Sister's hilarious obsessive questions about Mary's glasses, and Mary's 'bitches' speech.

A Play A Day #1: Pale Horse by Joe Penhall

The first play for my challenge is one which is rather familiar to me at the moment, as I shall be performing in it this week (do come along if you're local!). It is the darkly funny Pale Horse by Joe Penhall, currently perhaps more famous for his screenplay adaptations of The Road and Enduring Love than his writing for theatre.

The action centres around the character of Charles Strong, who runs a grotty pub in South London. Within the first scene he is confronted by the news that his wife - who he describes as 'the very oxygen I breathe' - has been run over by a bus. We follow him as he struggles with the disruption of grief, searching for and failing to find solace in booze, in 'modern medicine', in religion (he comes from a family of agnostics, which he defines as 'C of E for atheist'), and in new barmaid Lucy. Charles is a wonderful shambling bear of a character, at turns warmly charming and terrifyingly violent; I would have loved to have seen Ray Winstone in the role in the original production in 1995. His reminiscences about his late wife - 'Clumping about the garden with her little boots on, her hair all over the gaff, growing things. She was magic with courgettes.' - are made no less touching by the alternative perspective on their relationship offered by one of the drinkers in his pub.

I have greatly enjoyed getting to know Pale Horse. Its dialogue is whip-smart without being smugly clever, and the humour that infuses it adds savour to the sadness at its core. The final scene especialy, where Charles addresses his wife's grave ('Remember the time I tried to leave? We had a ruck in the middle of the night and I got up and got dressed but you'd hidden my shoes... to stop me leaving. But I went anyway... in my socks.') brings me close to tears each time I hear it. If anyone is curious about the particular production that I am involved in, feel free to check out this little trailer our director made with some rehearsal footage (you might have to be logged in to Facebook to see it).

A Play A Day for 28 Days

Over the past year or so, I have built up quite a little library of plays. I thought it might be an interesting project to read one of these for every day in this shortest of months, and blog about it. It remains to be seen what form this will take, or whether I will have anything valuable to say about them... I am especially interested in hunting down juicy female monologues, with a view to applying to drama school next year, so if you know of any, please leave a comment! In fact, if you have any favourite plays, even if they feature an all-male cast stuck on a submarine talking about chest hair, I'd still love to hear about them.

There should also be plenty of crafty posts coming up, as I have been doing a lot of knitting and even a small, tentative bit of sewing, so do keep reading even if you have no interest in the theatre at all. Towards the end of this month I will have my one year blog-iversary, so I shall get thinking about what I could do to celebrate that - again, all suggestions welcome!