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.
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