Shilpa
T-Hyland wants to tell stories differently. This is something that should be
apparent when the Glasgow-based director opens her new production of Miss Julie
in Perth Theatre’s Joan Knight Studio this weekend prior to a short tour.
Zinnie Harris’ version of Strindberg’s simmering piece of cross-class passion was
the play chosen by T-Hyland to bring to full production after becoming the first
recipient of The Cross Trust Young Director Award. The latter is a new scheme
initiated by The Cross Trust, set up by philanthropist Sir Alexander Cross in
1943 to provide opportunities to young men and women to ‘extend the boundaries
of their knowledge of human life’.
There
are certainly plenty of opportunities for the latter in Miss Julie, a play of
extremes which T-Hyland initially kept her distance from.
“I
was kind of frightened about it at first,” she says. “I had to choose from four
plays, and I’d read the original version, and even Strindberg said it leaves a
bad taste.”
Harris’
version, re-imagined in 1920s Scotland during the General Strike, captured
T-Hyland’s imagination.
“It
really spoke to me,” she says. “It’s set at a time between the wars when
socialist ideas were coming to Britain, and with women in particular, with what
went on with the suffragettes, it’s a period where it feels that things can
really change. Except for the characters in the play, who in their heads have
been stuck in the same situation for years.
“That
made me think about now, and about how difficult things are in the world just
now. A lot of that is to do with a lack of empathy, and in the play there are a
lot of difficult connections between the characters, but they can’t move
forward without empathy. There are things about each other they kind of envy,
but they fail to understand who they are.
“In
Miss Julie and her maid Christine, you’ve got two women who aren’t each other’s
allies. Then you’ve got John, who’s not an evil man, but he’s caught up in a negative
form of masculinity that he’s been taught.
“One
of the things I was keen to do when casting the play was to cast relatively
young, so the characters are roughly the same age. I think that maybe sharpens
the distance they have to travel to understand each other, which, for me, is
maybe about speaking to a younger audience who are living through all the things
that are going on today.”
Born
in London to an Indian mother and English father, T-Hyland moved to Glasgow with
her family when she was less than a year old, and considers herself very much “Glasgow
born and bred.”
With
an artist mother and violin maker dad, T-Hyland’s move into theatre perhaps should
come as no surprise. Given that her brother is studying astro-physics, however,
familial influences are maybe not as clear cut as they appear. Then again,
given that T-Hyland’s grandfather was acclaimed Indian playwright, director and
actor Lalit Mohan Thapalyal, whose plays for children written in both Garhwali
and Hindi won awards, and are still performed since his passing in 2004,
something has clearly rubbed off on her.
“I’ve
always had an interest in storytelling in some form or another,” she says,
having attended both Scottish Youth Theatre and what was then the Royal Scottish
Academy of Music and Drama as a child. “I think making stories collaboratively
appealed to me, and at the time becoming an actor seemed the most obvious way
to do that.”
A short
course in directing changed things.
“As
soon as I started directing it made sense,” she says.
T-Hyland
did a Master’s degree in Classical and Contemporary Text at the Royal
Conservatoire of Scotland. Over an intense year, the course put directors and
actors together to effectively form a company, developing new work by three
writers presented at venues including the Globe Theatre. T-Hyland ended up
directing Bubble, a short piece by Kieran Hurley
It
was while at the RCS as well that T-Hyland co-founded the Modest Predicament
company with producer Jenny Gilvear. So far, T-Hyland has directed two children’s
shows for the company, The Dragon and the Whales and Erin, Errol and the Earth
Creatures. The company also presented Atlas as part of the Hidden Door festival
in Leith. All three shows have put puppetry at their centre. Playing with form
in this way goes some way to illustrate the different ways T-Hyland wants to
tell stories.
“I’m
interested in adaptations,” she says, “re-telling them and re-contextualising
them. That’s partly what appealed to me about Miss Julie. In terms of
story-telling, I think I’m interested in alternative views of narrative, and
what that can bring to a story.”
This
attitude stems in part from T-Hyland’s Indian heritage.
“It’s
something I think about a lot,’ she says. “There’s lots of work I haven’t made
yet, but which I want to make, that will look at what it means to be half-Indian,
half-white, or even just a non-white woman living in Scotland at this time. It’s
really hard to find information about the history of that, and my big
frustration is that we don’t teach anything about Empire in schools.”
Beyond
Miss Julie, there are plans to take Modest Predicament’s production of The
Dragon and The Whale to the Puppet Animation Festival. T-Hyland also has
ambitions to develop a version of Roxana, Daniel Defoe’s story about a young
woman and her maid climbing the social ladder. An early version was seen in a
rehearsed reading at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. There is also the small
matter of potentially doing a PhD looking at how history is put onstage. In a
parallel vein, “There’s an alternative history play I’d like to make.”
In
the meantime, with her production of Miss Julie being her biggest work to date,
T-Hyland aims to cut through to the play’s personal heart as much as its
political one.
“On a
purely human kind of basis,” she says, “I think it’s about the difficulty of
communicating with another person. It’s also about the power of finding a
connection with another person, but how fragile that can be.”
Miss
Julie, Perth Theatre, February 14-23; Tron Theatre, Glasgow, February 27-March
2; The Studio, Edinburgh, March 6-9.
The Herald, February 12th 2019
ends
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