When Peter Arnott's
debut play, White Rose, first appeared at the Traverse Theatre in
1985, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government were two years into
their second time of office, and Britain appeared to be in the midst
of civil war. The miners strike was still ongoing, while outside the
Royal Airforce base in Greenham Common, all-women peace camps were
set up in protest of the American cruise missiles housed there. In
1982, some 30,000 women joined hands around the camp's perimeter.
When Arnott read Night Witches, a book by Bruce Miles, which told the
little-known story of the female pilots who flew Soviet aeroplanes
during the Second World War, something caught Arnott's imagination.
“It was my first
commission, and my brief was to do something big with three actors,”
Arnott says on the eve of the play's first major revival in almost
thirty years by the Borders-based Firebrand Theatre company. “It
was forty years since the end of the Second World War, and Night
Witches seemed to fit in with a lot of things that were going on. All
these women's support groups had formed around the miners strike, and
with Greenham Common happening as well, there was this feeling that
these women’s lives had been changed by fighting the good fight.
Whatever happened to the fight, they were still changed, and they
weren't going to be defeated.”
Two women who are
fighting the good fight in different ways to those in the play are
Janet Coulson and Ellie Zeegan, who are joint artistic directors of
Firebrand. The pair set up the Hawick-based company after
coincidentally moving to the Borders in 2010. The pair had met at The
Actors Temple, a London-based initiative founded by Zeegan, so, as
Coulson points out, “It was a no-brainer that we carry on working
together. It was too much of a coincidence to ignore. The area is
crying out for more theatre to be produced here, and we very much
wanted to do contemporary work.”
Zeegan agrees.
“We wanted to do
strong plays with powerful stories, but we also wanted to do
something that dealt with big things in intimate spaces,” she says.
With seasoned director
Richard Baron, a veteran of every main-house producing stage in
Scotland, drafted in as Director of Productions, to date, Firebrand
have produced revivals of David Mamet's play, Oleanna, and Rona
Munro's women's prison-set drama, Iron.
White Rose continues
the company's exploration of big ideas. For Arnott going back to the
play after such a long time was “distinctly strange. I re-read the
script when I was first asked if it could be done, and my thoughts
were, who is this up and coming young man with all this energy. It's
very much a play about young people, written by a young man.
While White Rose
reminded Arnott of his younger self, he wasn't tempted to apply
almost three decades of experience as a playwright to rewrite it.
“It was written by
somebody who was twenty-two years old,” he says, “so revisiting
it after all this time wouldn't have felt right.”
White Rose is one of a
multitude of seminal works from the 1970s and 1980s by Scottish
playwrights which have faded from view, and which are only now being
rediscovered.
“It's only really
since the advent of the National Theatre of Scotland that second
productions of plays have really started to happen,” Arnott
observes. “We used to have hits, but they would run the same length
of time as the disasters. White Rose transferred to the Almeida in
London for two weeks, and that was that.
“Also, it wasn't in
print in the way a lot of new plays are now, so there was no access
to it. It was nearly published in a collection of Scottish plays
called Scot Free, but in the end there wasn't enough room. There were
a couple of small-scale productions, one of which was done in New
York by someone who saw the original at the Traverse, and was so
off-off Broadway it was practically New Jersey, but after a while the
momentum stops, and this is the first fully resourced production
since it was first done.”
One of the most
memorable things about the original production of White Rose was the
casting of a young actress called Tilda Swinton. Swinton would go on
to appear in several other plays at the Traverse and films by Derek
Jarman before going on to become the international superstar she is
today.
“People keep asking
me about Tilda Swinton,” Arnott says, “but at the time Tilda
Swinton wasn't Tilda Swinton yet in terms of what she would become.
She was in my year at Cambridge, and was a fantastic young actress
then, so it's very strange looking at all the fantastic work she's
done over the last ten years.”
A quarter of a century
on, stepping into Swinton's shoes is Alison O'Donnell, an equally
talented actress who intends making the part her own.
“They're some pretty
big shoes to fill,” O'Donnell admits of her latest role. “But I
guess she was much less established then than she is now. It's quite
good having such a solid reference point, because Tilda Swinton has
such intensity as an actress, although I'm not trying to be her. I've
got to give it my own interpretation.”
Beyond White Rose,
O'Donnell's profile looks set to soar. She is about to appear in two
television pilots set to be aired in the spring, including a crime
drama based in Shetland. Firebrand too look set to continue to blaze
a trail of high quality productions of what now might be regarded as
contemporary classics. Arnott, meanwhile, is returning to the Second
World War for a new play for the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, where
another Traverse old boy, Hamish Glen, is artistic director.
“It's called
Propaganda Swing, and is about a Nazi jazz band called Charlie and
his Orchestra,” Arnott says. “They actually existed, and we want
to do it as a radio play for the stage, with foley artists and
everything like that.”
Let's hope it won't
take thirty years for this one to get a second production.
White Rose, Tron
Theatre, Glasgow, February 26th-March 2nd, then tours.
The Herald, February 26th 2013
ends
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