It's just before 10am in the Traverse Theatre, and artistic director
Orla O'Loughlin has an awards ceremony to get to. It may be the last
week of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but O'Loughlin has already been
at work for two hours, as she has been for pretty much every day of
August. The reason for such un-artistic early starts is Dream Plays
(Scenes From a Play I'll Never Write), the series of twelve performed
readings of newly commissioned works curated and directed by O'Loughlin
with playwright David Greig, and which ran each day over two weeks.
As the mini season's name suggests, each reading took place at 9am, a
time when most Fringe carousers are just settling into some rapid eye
movement after a night propping up their favoured watering hole. With a
final hour's rehearsal for each play beginning at 8am, for O'Loughlin
and Greig, at least, sleep has become something of a luxury in the
rapid turnover required for each play.
The first week of Dream Plays featured works by established writers
David Ireland, Sue Glover, Nicola McCartney, Alan Wilkins and Janice
Galloway, plus one from Traverse newbie, Sabrina Mahfouz, who was
commissioned after O'Loughlin saw her play, One Hour Only, at the
Underbelly.
The entire Dream Plays experience, according to O'Loughlin, has been “a
labour of love. It's been a pretty schizophrenic experience holding
twelve different plays in my head for the last couple of months, and
then two on a daily basis.”
Dream Plays came about following a conversation between O'Loughlin and
Greig, who were both aware of the precedents set in previous Traverse
breakfast seasons, Ravenhill For Breakfast and Impossible Plays For
Breakfast.
“It was very early on in my tenure, and I was keen to work with as many
writers as possible,” O'Loughlin says. “It was an open invitation, and
every play has turned out completely different.”
The second week of Dream Plays began with Room 7, Johnny McKnight's
scurrilous science fiction play about one woman's entry into what turns
out to be a glorified baby factory, watched over by a multitude of
cameras. It's quite a departure for McKnight, who nevertheless manages
to bring some of his trademark camp to an otherwise dark tale.
For National Health, playwright Lynda Radley sits at a table at the
back of the stage, blowing bubbles while the three young women in the
psychiatric unit where her play is set push their situation as far as
they can.
For Skeleton Wumman, Gerda Stevenson puts a guitarist and cellist
onstage to accompany actress Pauline Knowles delivering an already
lyrical monologue written in a rich Scots idiom. Also present onstage
is a signer, providing access for the deaf in a way which also goes
some way to illustrate and Stevenson's narrative.
In his introduction to A Respectable Widow Takes To Vulgarity, Douglas
Maxwell describes his play as “Pygmalion in reverse, which is pretty
much the case in a yarn in which a merry widow takes to one of her dead
husband's potty-mouthed employees. As she learns how to "vulgarise her
inner monologue,” this liberation of her own vocabulary becomes a last
gasp connection to her self-made husband.
It Ended. Or the body of an unknownman on Somerton Beach was the second
play by a writer picked up on the Fringe. Australian playwright Tobias
Manderson-Galvin's play The Economist, was spotted by Greig, and within
forty-eight hours, Manderson-Galvin's flight of fancy based in part on
a real life mystery of a man washed up on a beach in 1948, was onstage.
Using elements of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam fused with a
self-reflexive detective story, Manderson-Galvin's play proved to be a
fascinating exercise in form that revealed a tantalisingly playful
voice.
Out of the twelve plays, it is the newest voices that have proved the
most revelatory. When Mahfouz was first approached by O'Loughlin to
write what turned out to be a play about three female computer game
avatars written in streetwise rhyme, “I thought about it for about five
seconds, and then said yes. It was quite fateful, really, because I
hadn't been up to Edinburgh yet, so when I got here it made it all the
more exciting.”
For Manderson-Galvin too, being thrown in the deep end left little time
for thought.
“It was an idea I'd been playing with,” he says, “so this forced my
hand somewhat, and now I'll probably write hundreds of pages more and
see where it goes.”
All parties are keen to continue the relationship begun with Dream
Plays. If all goes well, new plays by Mahfouz and Manderson-Galvin
should hopefully be seen in Edinburgh before too long.
As Greig points out, though, “Dream Plays was never about putting on
complete works. That's been the best part about it, that sense of
roughness and unfinishedness to everything, and the fact that they
could go anywhere.”
If Dream Plays has been O'Loughlin's coming out ball, as she gets to
develop relationships with Scotland's writers and actors, it also
suggests a new sense of urgency in terms of putting work on in
increasingly cash-strapped times.
“Our job is to get work onto the stage,” she says, “and not to do
development for development's sake. It's also been a way for me to get
to know the writers quickly, and discovering the range of work that's
out there. It's also about saying that we have the will to get this
work on. If this year has been about ant anything, it’s about putting
the writer at the centre of the programme.”
All of which comes through in last week's announcement of the
Traverse's autumn season, in which O'Loughlin will direct both in-house
productions. The first of these will be the Artist Man and the Mother
Woman, a new piece from the fantastical mind of Morna Pearson, whose
debut play, Distracted, scooped the Meyer-Whitworth Award in 2006. This
will be followed by The Arthur Conan Doyle Story, a riotous Christmas
show in association with the physical-based Peepolykus company.
As well as a visit from Grid Iron and a new dance festival, the new
season will also begin Traverse 50, which, in the spirit of Dream
Plays, will see the Traverse work with fifty writers in the run up to
the theatre's half century anniversary in 2013.
In the meantime, it's 10am again, in the Traverse bar. It's Sunday
morning, and the final Dream Play, Found at Sea, by poet Andrew Greig
has just been performed. A dramatisation of a long poem about a sailing
trip undertaken by Greig, in some ways its the most complete of all the
Dream Plays.
With actors Tam Dean Burn and Lewis Howden gathered around a pub table
topped with half-finished drinks, the pair map out a very personal
voyage awash with little epiphanies en route. A set of sails sits
behind the actors, who chalk out tents and camp-fires on the floor
while Greig himself sits to one side, sound-tracking the whole thing
with his live banjo playing. Greig's writing exudes warmth in
abundance, and, in David Greig's mini-production, again points to a
more inventive future.
For now, though, the Dream Plays are over. In the bar, David Greig
chats with former Traverse artistic director Philip Howard. O'Loughlin
sits in the corner with her family, relaxing at last at the end of her
first Fringe in charge of the Traverse. It's an all too rare pause for
breath before the dreaming begins once more.
Details of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh's autumn season can be found
at www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, August 28th 2012
ends
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