It’s hard to be a parent these days. Just ask Frances
Poet, whose new play, Gut, opens at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this
weekend in a production directed by Poet’s fellow writer Zinnie Harris. Gut is
a sadly familiar sounding story about what happens when a couple take their
three-year-old son to a supermarket café, and what may or may not have happened
after an incident that shatters their faith in those closest to them.
“I wrote it when I was in the eye of the storm of
raising two young kids,” says Poet. “My youngest was two and my eldest was
four, and at that point I only had one day a week to write. Most of my week was
playdates and chatting to other parents.”
Poet watched a Facebook link to a breakfast TV
experiment, in which the children of parents who were confident their children
would never go off with a stranger watched film of an undercover social worker approach
them in a play-park. Nine out of ten of the children did the opposite.
“The woman presenting summed up by saying, we’re not
trying to scare you, it’s just better that you’re well informed,” says Poet. “And
I sat there thinking, so these parents have had the conversation with their
children, the only way they could’ve gone further is to terrify them about
human-kind.”
While other anecdotes fed into Poet’s thinking, Gut aims
to question things beyond them.
“If you step aside from the parenting, which I was
very much in the heart of at the time, I think Gut is a play about trust,” she
says. “I think I err towards the more trusting side of things. My dad was very
over-protective. I lived in the middle of the countryside, and I used to go for
these walks, and my dad, who was very protective, would say there are two types
of lunatics about. There are lunatics behind the wheel, and lunatics who follow
you in the car.”
If Gut sounds the stuff of 1970s public information
films designed to scare kids into staying safe, the revelations of everyday
child abuse hiding in plain sight over the last few years have also influenced
the play.
“The comparisons between how our parents raised us,
and how we now raise our kids, is really marked,” says Poet. “I think there was
a kind of benign neglect from my mother’s generation that actually meant that
they didn’t make themselves martyrs to parenthood in the way that my generation
have. We’re better informed, we know what that benign neglect caused, and we know
about the abuse that was covered up, but we’re more strung out and stressed out
helicopter parents.”
In this way, Gut attempts to filter the play’s
narrative through troubling echoes of the past.
“It was a different time, with a different style of
parenting,” says Poet, “and it was a time when we were all dreaming about writing
to Jimmy Saville.”
Gut is Poet’s first full length work to see the light
of day since she scripted Adam, the Cora Bissett directed dramatisation of transgender
Egyptian asylum seeker Adam Kashmiry’s flight to liberation. Presented by the
National Theatre of Scotland, who are also associate producers of Gut, Adam was
something of a bridge for Poet, who was a dramaturg and literary manager with the
NTS prior to developing her own writing career.
“I flipping loved being part of Adam,” she says, “and
it was an amazing process, but Cora came to me, so I was serving Cora’s vision
and Adam’s story, and I loved that. I see that project a bit as part of the
adaptation work that I’ve done, which is different from this. It’s a scarier leap
into the dark when you come up with something and say I think this is important,
and I think audiences should come to this, to when a director says, I want to
do this project, hey, come and collaborate with me. And also, Gut was written
before Adam, so this really does feel like the first one.”
Raised between York and Scarborough, Poet was
introduced to theatre as a child, and did some directing while studying at St
Andrew’s University. Thinking she wanted to be a TV director, Poet spoke to a
friend of her uncle’s, who was a script editor on Midsomer Murders, and who
suggested she do some script reading for various theatres. From this she became
literary assistant at the Bush Theatre in London, and then literary director
associate at Hampstead Theatre.
“I didn’t know script reading and literary management
was a job,” she says, “but
once I got there I bloody loved it.”
As a young woman with limited experience, there were
times that Poet was made to feel like she shouldn’t be there.
“When I was script-reading before the job at the Bush
turned up, all the other people on the script-reading panel were directors, actors
and writers, and I was still in my early twenties. I remember one time going
for a drink with everyone afterwards, which was excruciating, but I knew I had
to do it. It was such an awkward thing. And I remember turning up and some guy
saying, well, what are you, then, and me saying, well, I’m script-reading, and
feeling that somehow that wasn’t allowed. So it was an odd thing until I found
the root of it and became a literary assistant.”
While at the Bush, Poet took part in the Royal Court’s
young writers course, and at Hampstead submitted a piece for a new writing
festival run by Drywrite, the company that launched the success of writer and
actress Phoebe Waller Bridge. Once she joined the National Theatre of Scotland
as literary manager, however, she concentrated on dramaturgy.
“The NTS job was much broader and more thrilling than
the kind of jobs I’d had before,” says Poet, “because the remit was so much
broader. It wasn’t just like the new writing theatres, where the script lands
and I’m a gate-keeper as a literary manager. At NTS, it was a different
emphasis anyway, because you weren’t getting sent loads of scripts, but there
were loads more entry points. So this person is a maker, and this person’s a
novelist or a musician, and we’re going to be working in a different way.”
After leaving the NTS, Poet was approached by the late
David MacLennan, who drafted her into the A Play, A Pie and A Pint fold. Poet
worked as dramaturg on The Jean Jacques Rousseau show, and her short play,
Faith Fall was produced at Oran Mor. This was followed by stripped down
adaptations of Moliere’s The Misanthrope and Racine’s Andromaque, and eventually
to Gut, which she entered anonymously for the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting.
When it was short-listed, Poet finally felt validated as a writer. With
commissions for Out of Joint, Theatre Galore and Perth Theatre ongoing, Poet
says she’s “riding the crest of a wave at the minute, and I’m really busy,
which is very thrilling, and I know tumbleweed is round the corner, but until
it is I just have to keep going for it.”
While Gut aims to challenge ideas about parenting,
Poet isn’t interested in offering glib solutions.
“My mum used to say about my dad that she wasn’t
allowed to be the worrier, because he filled that gap for her. So, as worried
as she might be, she wasn’t allowed to be that, and I think if I’m anything I’m
probably more that parent. You’re not allowed to be neurotic, because the kids
have to live, but there is a dilemma at the heart of it which I can’t answer, and
that’s about how do we retain the freedom of our parents in the 70s whilst
making sure that our kids don’t fall through the net? Maybe it’s better that
all the kids are helicopter parented in order that one kid is not abused, I don’t
know. It’s that clash between normal life and horror, and that your brain has
to accommodate the horror to protect the child, that’s the weirdest part about
parenting.”
Gut, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 20-May 12; Tron
Theatre, Glasgow, May 16-19
The Herald, April 19th 2018
ends
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