When playwright Oliver
Emanuel was approached by artistic directors of Vox Motus theatre
company Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison with a proposal for a new
play, Emanuel jumped at the idea. The Glasgow-based writer of works
that have included The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish and
Titus and the pair behind The Infamous Brothers Davenport, The Not-So
Fatal Death of Grandpa Fredo and Slick had wanted to work with each
other for some time, and this new idea seemed a golden opportunity
for them all. For Emanuel, Edmunds and Harrison's brief sounded
particularly enticing.
“They said, we want
to do something about a twelve-year old boy who's grieving for his
mother,” Emanuel says of that initial conversation. “Oh, they
said, and we want there to be a dragon. Oh, and we want it to be done
without words.”
Three years on, the end
result of that conversation is Dragon, a collaboration between Vox
Motus, the National Theatre of Scotland and Chinese company, the
Tianjin People's Art Theatre, which opens at the Citizens Theatre in
Glasgow this week before touring the country. Dragon tells the story
of Tommy, whose mother died a year earlier. Tommy's dad is racked
with grief, his big sister won't talk to him, and he has become the
target of the school bully. When Tommy opens his curtains one day he
discovers a dragon with whom he finds an angry affinity. Tommy and
the dragon do everything together, but when fires start happening
around Glasgow, things change in a story which has a very personal
root for its author.
“I came to Scotland a
year after my own mother passed away,” Emanuel explains. “I've
written about grief in a lot of different ways, and been quite open
about my own grieving, and this seemed to fit in with that. Having
said that, I think it's only auto-biographical in the sense that
everything you write is auto-biographical. I did lose my mum, and I
do have a father and a sister, but I'm not the play's main character.
None of what happens in the play happened to me, and a dragon didn't
come to my house. But when you're grieving you don't always have the
words for how you're feeling. Tommy can't speak, and he doesn't know
how to express himself, and out of that I wanted to find a new form,
because there aren't that many plays with no words.”
If Tommy's relationship
with the dragon sounds akin to that between the little boy and his
stuffed toy tiger in comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, albeit with
inclinations for fire-raising, think again. Nor is the dragon an
invisible friend for Tommy.
“Tommy can see the
dragon, and nobody else can,” Emanuel explains, “but it's
certainly not an imaginary dragon. When the Chinese company got
involved, that really changed the dynamic and opened the story out,
because when we think of dragons, you have something like St George,
who slayed a dragon, but the Chinese believe that there's a dragon in
everyone, and that's about balance and equilibrium. So there's this
idea that we all have our own dragon, and we all have our own things
to deal with just as Tommy does.”
Vox Motus' pedigree
utilising puppets, magic and other visual effects in their work was
certainly a gift for Emanuel, who describes his script for Dragon as
“a cross between a short story and a film script, with myself as a
kind of story wizard. Historically, you can look back at Bertolt
Brecht, who said his work should always be understandable, and
there's a lot of visual stuff going on with the Berliner Ensemble. I
saw them in Berlin, and I don't speak German, but I could understand
what was going on. Then you've got something like [feature film] The
Artist, so with Dragon it's a case of me wanting to try things out.
Titus was just one man on stage telling a story for forty-five
minutes, but I'm not interested in repeating myself, and never want
to do the same thing twice, so this is the complete opposite of
that.”
While not specifically
aimed at children, Dragon's exploration of childhood is something
Emanuel knows well.
“I've done quite a
lot of work for young people,” he says, “and although Vox Motus
have done a lot of work for adults, they noticed their audiences were
getting younger, so began to be interested in pursuing the younger
end of that spectrum. I think Scotland has proved again and again
that theatre for young people can be made with real depth, even
though writing for children is much harder than for adults, because
they won't put up with just any old rubbish.”
In describing who
Dragon is for, Emanuel contrasts his dhow with another NTS piece, the
stage adaptation of John
Ajvide Lindqvist's romantic horror novel later adapted for film, Let The Right One In.
“Let
The Right One In was an adult show about childhood,” Emanuel says.
“Dragon is a show about childhood as well, but it's for both
children of about twelve-upwards and adults, and I think people will
have very different experiences of the show. I'm really interested in
everyone having their own different dragon experiences, and what the
dragon means to them.
“I have a personal
wish to explore the idea that children experience things different to
adults, and what it's like to feel a particular emotion for the first
time, whether it's grief or first love. There have been recent
suggestions that children don't feel grief, and that they can just
get on with things, but that's not my experience at all. Of course
children feel things, and that's what Dragon is about. I've always
been interested in telling big emotional stories, and there's
something really eloquent in doing it without words. It can speak
more powerfully done that way. There's a real poetry in silence.”
Dragon, Citizens
Theatre, Glasgow, October 11th-19th, then tours.
ends
Oliver Emanuel – A
Life in Words
Oliver Emanuel was born
in Kent in 1980, and studied English and Theatre at the University of
Leeds before going on to take an MA in Creative Writing at the
University of East Anglia. In 2002 he set up Silver Tongue Theatre
with writer and performer Daniel Bye, and produced four plays by
Emanuel; Iz, Bella and the Beautiful Knight, Shiver and Man Across
The Way.
In 2006, Emanuel was
appointed Writer-on-Attachment at West Yorkshire Playhouse, who
produced Emanuel's play, Magpie Park, in 2007. Since moving to
Glasgow in 2007, Emanuel has written for the National Theatre of
Scotland, Dundee Rep, Oran Mor, Visible Fictions, the Tron Theatre
and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Emanuel has written plays
and short stories for BBC Radio 4, 3 and 7, while his short film,
This Way Up, has been shown at film festivals around the world.
The Herald, October 8th 2013
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