Introduction to "Face"

This is a play that was written for a specific actress at two specific times and that is still in transition. (Plays, like films, as Antonioni said, are never actually finished – they are only ever ABANDONED)

The actress in question is Janette Foggo, who I first worked with in 1986 at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in a play of mine called “Muir” directed by Michael Boyd in which , the only actress in a cast of eight actors, she gamely portrayed just over half of the human race.

I've been trying to make this up to her ever since. FACE, in which I asked her to play twin sisters Isobel and Morag (Morag first for a mini-tour under the aegis of Perth Theatre directed by Kenny Miller) and later, in that order for a week each at Glasgow Lunchtime Theatre at Oran Mor under the direction of Stasi Schaeffer..is my latest attempt.

The plays were very well received critically and by the audiences...and Janette was rightly praised to the skies in the Glasgow Herald, Scotsman and Scottish Review of Books, so I hope we're making progress.

The two sisters in this play, which can be performed as a single play with an interval or in two performances, are conceived to be delivering their versions of the events surrounding their mother's deaths at the same moment but under very different circumstances. They share, for the moment, a face...but very little else, or so it seems. The two women viewed together, I hope, encompass in their different ways of telling their stories – the same story, in essence – a reasonable catalogue of ways of feeling about things. Of course, the presence of a third real person, the actress in who is both embodying and observing these women while the audience identifies with, and distances itself, from them...brings in a whole lot of pother possibilities beyond the scope of any writer to predict. Which is what makes theatre...and reading..what they are...interactions that are both controlled by craft and entirely unpredictable.

Which is what the present tense – the only one that really maters – is all about.

Introduction to "Shall Roger Casement Hang?"

At the time of going to press, this play has been written and work shopped but not yet performed. It is due to open on May 20^th 2016 with Benny Young as Casement and Stevie Clyde as Hall - and everybody else - at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow directed by Andy Arnold.

Sometimes, it's all about the present tense. This is particularly true when working on a story that is almost exactly 100 years old and a play that is being published before the first performance. I mean that in that to begin with, the play is about the Irish Independence struggle at a time when Ireland is very largely re-imagining itself, especially with regard to homosexuality. On the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising (when Casement was dis-interred from Pentonville Gaol and re-buried – against his wishes – in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin) it was still conventional wisdom in Irish Republican circles that the British had forged the notorious “Black Diaries” that recounted the sex life of this most complex and contradictory of the complex and contradictory revolutionaries of 1916. In Ireland itself the centenary is being marked with nuances and negotiations that owe as much to what happened in the years after the celebrations of 1966...and the way they fed into the Civil Rights struggle in the North ..as they do to the ways in which Irish Society is re-imagining itself on both sides of the border of 1921.

Second, the “present-tenseness” of a play about events around the Easter Rising in the context of Scotland at a time when, had the referendum gone the other way, we would be in the early weeks on Independence ourselves is another source of currency for a play about the beginning of what Tom Nairn called “The Break Up of Britain.”

Third, and most importantly for the way the play is written, there is a general problem with historical drama, and that is in deciding what the present tense of the play IS! This is particularly true in a context where a good many of the first audience (this being Glasgow) will know a good deal of that history, but rather more of the audience (it not being Ireland) will know little or nothing. Indeed, the advance publicity for the play (which had to be written before the play script was finished) doesn';t quite describe the exact manner of setting that I decided on quite late in the process.

I had thought initially that the present would be Casement in between his sentence of death (on June 28^th 1916) and his execution (on August 3^rd that year) and that we and he would look back on his long and varied career as a British Diplomat, Irish Revolutionary and Human Rights Pioneer while his reputation was being surreptitiously destroyed by the circulation of the “Black Diaries” by the prototypical Special Branch. But then I looked at the partial transcripts of Casement's two days of interrogation at Scotland Yard immediately after his capture that took place on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday...and quickly saw that in the contrasting circumstances on those two days – both Casement and the British thought on the Sunday that the Rising had been called off, and both were shocked when it actually happened at noon on Easter Monday – and that here was a “present tense” when “what-everyone-knows-happened-hasn't-happened-yet.”

It then became my job to shoehorn all the complexity and ambiguity I've felt about Casement since I first learned the outlines of his story into those two days...and the memories and prophecies, the past and future tenses... evoked in that present. The help of Andy and the actors in doing that (with the support of the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland) was invaluable.

Now, I hope that on the page or the stage, or both, and both for the historically informed (and committed, this being about Ireland, God help me as a Scotsman!) what follows will be of interest and provocation. Because it's too late to change it now.

That's the problem with the present tense. It's over before you know it.