Oliver
Emanuel is finding it difficult to see the wood for the trees at the moment. While
his new play, The Monstrous Heart, was running at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in
Scarborough prior to opening at the Traverse in Edinburgh next week, his
partner gave birth to the couple’s second child. In the five days before we
talk, Emanuel hasn’t had much sleep. The event does, however, give some kind of
insight into his play, in which estranged mother and daughter Mag and Beth are
reunited in a volatile fashion that lays bare all manner of demons waiting to
pounce.
“I
suppose this is quite a dangerous play,” says Emanuel, “and it’s designed to be
like that. I wrote it with all switches turned to eleven. One of its starting
points came about ten years ago when I was writing plays with young offenders
in prison, and I became really interested in how these children were treated by
the rest of society, and how in other people’s eyes they were just killers or
thugs, which raised a lot of interesting questions.
“Then,
about four or five years ago, I was about to become a dad for the first time.
Me and my partner were really excited about it, and we were having a fish
supper in Anstruther, and we started wondering what if it wasn’t the best bits
of each of us that our child ended up with, but the worst bits. We made a list
of all of our worst bits, and ended up thoroughly depressed.”
While
Emanuel is keen to point out that despite his and his partner’s fears, their
daughter has turned out “delightful”, he is also aware of future dangers
pointed up in the play’s third influence.
“Frankenstein,”
he says. “There’s a brilliant moment in Mary Shelley’s book where the creature
wakes up, and Dr Frankenstein sees the horror he’s brought into the world, and
makes a run for it. That makes you think about what the monster really is, and
I think a lot of that came from Mary Shelley’s own life, which had a lot of
abandonment in it, from when she was sent away when she was thirteen to
everything that happened afterwards.”
Emanuel
has channelled all this into The Monstrous Heart in a way that allows his
characters to vent in a suitably unhinged fashion as only a mother and daughter
can do.
“They
are a horror show,” he says. “They’re not characters you’d want to spend any
time with in real life. There’s a lot of unfinished business there, and when
Beth turns up at this cottage in the Canadian woods that Mag is living in, they
haven’t seen each other for a very long time, and it’s like the moment in
Frankenstein when the monster catches up with the Dr.
“Beth
is this funny, difficult woman, who’s been in and out of prison, and has this
big physical presence onstage. Mag is very different, and is this very quiet,
troubled woman, who’s really intelligent, but holds so much under the skin, and
has moved out of society on purpose so she can be away from that environment.”
There is also the added element of a dead
grizzly bear on Mag’s living room floor. How and why it ended up there remains
to be seen, but the result is “a play about nature versus nurture, and how the
past catches up with you,” according to Emanuel.
Whatever
happened to the grizzly bear in The Monstrous Heart, animals of one sort or
another have made frequent appearances in Emanuel’s plays, be it the eponymous
fire-breathing creature in Dragon, the fish in The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two
Goldfish, and the penguins in Spirit of Adventure, going right back to his
early play, Magpie Park. Currently in development is a new play called I Am
Tiger.
A raw
animal mentality is certainly there in Mag and Beth, played in Gareth Nicholls’
production by Christine Entwisle and Charlene Boyd. Both actresses are forces
of nature in their own right, with Entwisle having taken the lead role in the
National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Anthony Neilson’s play, The
Wonderful World of Dissocia, while Boyd has appeared in several productions by
Grid Iron Theatre company, and played Lady Macbeth in the Citizens Theatre’s
stripped-down take on Shakespeare in The Macbeths.
“They’re
both such instinctive actors,” says Emanuel, “and they’re onstage throughout,
so the play is like a wrestling match or a boxing match, and they have to build
their performances, and see how they can score points off each other. It’s
interesting as well that Christine and Charlene have physical resemblances, as
even with that, children can be so different from their parents. My daughter is
only three, and she looks like me, but she’s very different from me. That makes
me ask questions about how she was made, and what shapes her as a person.”
In
terms of The Monstrous Heart, Emanuel takes it to extremes.
“I
guess what I’ve been thinking about when writing the play is about how we label
people as monsters,” he says, “and whether there’s something inherent in us
that might make us monsters, or whether it’s something that society does. I’ve
always been interested in exploring what makes someone good, and what makes
someone bad. Is it decisions we make, or is there something in our core being
that makes that?”
The
Monstrous Heart, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, October 23-November 2.
The Herald, October 19th 2019
ends
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