“I’ve
got my children glued to the TV,” says Hannah Lavery cheerily as she talks
about The Drift, her autobiographical solo play she performs in a short
cross-country tour next month. It’s September school holiday, and, while one child
is on a playdate, the other two are lost in a world of X-Box. They may be
quiet, but they’re comfortably within reach.
This
wasn’t always the case for Lavery when she was their age, at least not in terms
of her dad, who left her and her mother when she was three. This became the
starting point for The Drift, an angry and unflinchingly honest elegy to her
absent father, who died in 2017, leaving behind a considerable weight of
familial baggage.
“It’s
been a strange journey,” says Lavery. “I wrote the play as a series of poems,
and I was running this tiny fringe venue on the Royal Mile in the waiting room
of my step-father’s shop. There was an empty slot in the afternoon, and I thought
I’d do it once and put it away. I was brave and quite vulnerable, and I don’t think
if I’d been asked to write it by the National Theatre of Scotland, who I’m
doing it with now, I would have been.
“It’s
about grief, and it opened things up about my relationship with my father, and
his relationship with Scotland. There’s this whole idea as well of having an
absent father. How do you grieve for someone you’ve never had a hold of, and
who, because he was black in Scotland, had the problems that he did? But the
play is rooted in grief, and everything else came later. I didn’t set out to
write a play about Scotland and its relationship with people of colour.”
In
the audience for The Drift was Jenny Lindsay, poet, performer and co-founder of
spoken-word night, Flint and Pitch. Lindsay mentored Lavery, who performed a
version of The Drift at Flint and Pitch, developing the play further as part of
the Workers Theatre Megaphone Residency and later through the NTS’ Just Start
Here Festival and Engine Room programme. A work in progress was seen at the
Tron Theatre in Glasgow last year during Black History Month, with director Eve
Nicol returning to oversee this full production.
With
a Higher in acting and performance pre-dating her degree in English and
Education with Post-Colonial Literature and a diploma in Secondary English
Teaching, Lavery is no stranger to theatre. She penned two short works for the
Traverse Theatre’s Words, Words, Words night, and wrote another to mark the
twentieth anniversary of the Lyceum Youth Theatre. At this year’s Edinburgh
International Festival, there was a work in progress of Lament for Sheku Bayoh,
a response to the death in 2015 of a thirty-one-year-old man while in police
custody in Kirkcaldy.
“For
me,” says Lavery, “theatre was originally spoken-word, and only later did it
become something else. I suppose for a lot of people, spoken-word is about
authenticity, and being able to tell your own story so there’s a truth in it. I
think the production of The Drift still has that essence, and even though there’s
a director and a designer, there’s still a rawness to it, but the theatrical
quality that’s there now elevates it.
“I’ve
done extracts of The Drift at Neu! Reekie!, getting up after someone else, and
that’s been wonderful, but this is different. It’s a strange thing getting up
and telling a personal story, but it’s also a piece of art. It’s crafted. It’s
not me getting up and having a breakdown.”
Lavery
remembers writing her first poem aged twelve.
“It
took me a long time to know you could do that,” she says. “I never really
showed my work to anyone till I was in my thirties. I’d left school when I was
sixteen, then finished university in my twenties and went into spoken-word
because it felt the most accessible.”
Inbetween
writing, Lavery works full time at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh,
and her poems from The Drift were recently published as Finding Sea Glass, a
pamphlet published by Stewed Rhubarb Press. This too was in part a reclaiming
of her own history, as well as acknowledging how the racism her father faced in
Scotland hasn’t gone away.
“I
think there’s a denial about Scotland’s racism,” she says, “and there’s a kind
of gaslighting that comes when people tell you that your experience of Scotland
is wrong. I love this country, but you have to be critical of it and challenge
this denial of people of colour’s experience. Doing my research for the play I
saw the amount Scotland was involved in slavery and colonialism, and not
acknowledging that is wilfully ignorant and insulting.
“I’m
mixed race, so I’m a product of whiteness as much as blackness. I’m also
Scottish, and I’m a Yes voter, but I’ve become increasingly aware of how
dangerous Scottish exceptionalism is. What does it mean to say we’re better than
those over the border? Instead of that, we have to start listening to the
things people are saying.
“I didn’t
do the play to make a political point, It’s about my family history, and it’s
about how racism plays out, and how painful it is when you’re told you don’t
belong. It’s also a Scottish play about a daughter who’s lost her father, who
just happens to be of colour. It’s also a play about belonging. When you lose a
parent, your world shifts. The play is about sharing that.”
She
pauses.
“I
should probably put my children out in the sunshine,” she says.
The
Drift, Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, October 2; Mull Theatre, Druimfin, Tobermory,
October 4; Heart of Hawick, October 8; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, October 10;
Tron Theatre, Glasgow, October 11-12.
The Herald, September 21st 2019.
ends
Comments