It's not every day that
a major writer pens a play with a specific actress in mind. This is
exactly what happened, however, when Knives in Hens and Blackbird
author David Harrower approached former Taggart star Blythe Duff, who
performed Harrower's two-hander, Good With People, at last year's
Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring with it to New York.
The result of this
collaboration is Ciara, a solo piece in which Duff plays a woman who
runs a successful Glasgow art gallery, but who also happens to be the
daughter of a just-deceased big city crime lord.
“David told me he
wanted to write something about Glasgow,” says Duff of the roots of
the play that now forms the flagship production of the Traverse
Theatre's Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. “That was in 2010, then
in 2011 he came back, and we worked quite closely on the play. It was
so exciting being part of that process, and what we've got now is
this piece about a woman in her fifties who has effectively
legitimised her father's ill-gotten gains. It says something about
the relationship between the art world and the underworld, which has
always existed, but it's also about grief and loss, and is an
incredibly moving family story as well.”
Perhaps because she's
been on the other side of the law as Detective Constable Then later
Inspector) Jackie Reid in Taggart for more than two decades, Duff
seems to be able to find it easy to apply the necessarily forensic
eye for detail in finding out what makes her character tick.
“She's a tough
cookie,” Duff says of Ciara. “She's smart. I think she's got a
lot going for her, even though she's grieving for a lot of things.
She's certainly grieving for the loss of her childhood. She had an
extraordinary childhood, during which she was very cosseted. She was
a princess, and when princesses grow up they become some kind of
royalty.
“She also has this
incredible need to tell her story. She says from the start that she
doesn't care if the audience feel sorry for her or not, but she also
has this incredible need for love, even as she's coming to terms with
her grieving. She's married, but you find out that she's very much
alone in the world. Her mum's not around, her brother's not around
and her dad's not around, and you discover she's quite a lonely soul.
“There's people she
has lunch with, but she has no real friends she can talk to. That's
why she seeks people out to tell her story. The people who live in
that world she grew up in. there's not many people you can talk to
about it.”
Duff was last seen
onstage in the Borders-based Firebrand company's revival of Rona
Munro's women's prison set play, Iron. Duff's turn as a lifer won her
the Best Actress award at this year's Critics Awards for Theatre in
Scotland.
It couldn't have come
at a better time,” Duff admits. “After thirty years in the
business, I must be doing something right.”
Prior to Iron, Duff did
Good With People, and previously appeared in another solo work,
Karen McLachlan's play, Just Checking. The latter was produced by
Duff's own company, Datum Point, who also co-produced Good With
People, and are now joining forces with the Traverse again for Ciara.
While there have also been roles with the National Theatre of
Scotland, all of the plays named above found Duff sticking her neck
out in a series of meaty roles where, after twenty-one years of
Taggart, she could so easily have played safe.
“I keep thinking, oh,
my God, that was a big number,” Duff says. “Every time I've done
a big, chunky piece, the experience propels me onto the next thing.
So since 2009 I've constantly been in preparation for projects. I
really work hard, and I decided I was going to put myself on the line
in some way. I turned fifty, and you'd think there are no parts for
fifty year old women, but I've been seeking them out, and embracing
everything that comes my way.
“I never thought one
job would last twenty-one years, and now, I could probably get a job
that would earn me lots more money, but the Traverse gave me my first
ever professional job, and, it sounds grand, but I suppose I want to
give something back, and when someone like David Harrower comes along
and says they're thinking of writing something for you, it's very
flattering.
“I need to be
creative, and be inspired by texts, so it's all a bit of a buzz.
Performance is one thing, but it's the process to get that which in
some ways makes things more interesting. It's really connecting to
people that I enjoy.”
By Duff's own
admission, it hasn't all been plain sailing.
“When I did Iron,”
she remembers, “we had three and a half weeks to prepare, and I
almost did a runner. I thought, okay, I'm in Hawick, no-one'll find
me. That play's a hundred and two pages long, but with a new play
you've always got a big white script. With iron, we were working with
the published play-text, and because that's so small, you
under-estimate how many words there are.”
Despite her anxieties,
Duff gave a storming performance, hence the much-deserved award.
Beyond this too, Duff is in full possession of a canny pragmatic
streak that suggests she's more in control than she lets on. This
manifests itself most clearly via datum point, and indeed her whole
approach to co-production and collaboration in austere times.
“This is something I
want to do,” Duff says of Datum Point's ongoing set of
co-productions. “We all have to think about doing theatre in a
business-like fashion. Business is a dirty word, but we have to talk
ourselves up. We have to make theatre something that people want to
leave the house for.”
With Duff onstage, Orla
O'Loughlin's production might well be that sort of theatre.
“I don't think this
will be a show-off piece,” Duff says. “There's not a lot of
movement. I let the words do it for me. My thoughts about Ciara are
that it needs to have a long life. It needs to come to Glasgow. It's
like Glasgow rock. It's got Glasgow imprinted all the way through it.
The Edinburgh festival audiences will take it in one way, and that's
great, but this play shows Glasgow warts and all, and Glasgow
audiences are used to that. It's this incredible exploration of the
Glasgow art world. Some people are frightened of art if it doesn't
match their furniture, but the play looks at
how artists work, and
what art means to people in a world where the criminal element and
what we call the cheese and wine element sit cheek by jowl.”
Ciara, Traverse
Theatre, August 1st-25th
Blythe Duff – On
Stage and Screen
Blythe Duff was born in
East Kilbride in 1962.
After leaving school,
Duff joined The Company, a Glasgow-based theatre company run at the
Washington Arts Centre as part of the Youth Opportunities programme.
Duff also joined Scottish Youth Theatre.
Duff's first
professional job was at the Traverse as part of an SYT young
Playwrights Festival.
She went on to appear
at the Traverse in plays such as Anne Marie Di Mambro's Tally's
Blood, Sharp Shorts, and King of the Fields, by Stuart Paterson.
During her twenty-one
years on Taggart, her character Jackie Reid rose through the ranks,
from a community WPC, to Detective Constable, Detective Sergeant and,
in the final series in 2011, Detective Inspector.
Duff founded Datum
Point productions in 2010, and to date have produced or co-produced
Just Checking, Good With People and Ciara.
The Herald, July 30th 2013
ends
Comments