7 minute read
First things first...
Artistic Directors' Message
It’s been exactly a year since we were able to be in the same room with you, totally live and in the flesh, and we sincerely hope that all is as well as can be with you and yours.
Secondly, the fact that you have made the effort to turn up for our first live production in 12 months, fills us with enormous gratitude. So, from the bottom of our collective Pang family hearts – THANK YOU.
And thirdly, what a bizarre 12 months it’s been! It was the year that acronyms like “WFH”, “SHN” and “LOA” became part of our everyday lingo, each one usually accompanied by “WTF”. It was the year we became refugees in a virtual no-man’s land called “Zoom”. It was also the year livelihoods were decimated, lives were cruelly cut short, and life as we know it became unknowable.
Pandemic frontliners and essential workers went beyond the call of duty, literally to save lives, and to make life for the rest of us more liveable. We owe them big time, more than ever.
Meanwhile, as “non-essential” pariahs of the community, theatre practitioners upchucked at the word “upskill”, pissed our pants at “pivot”, and raised a collective third digit at “digitalize”.
But after we got over our initial petulance, we made efforts to upskill (though exactly what skills we upped remains dubious), we did our best to pivot (more like pirouette, actually), and, like deranged scientists, we each experimented with the Frankenstein’s monster known as digital theatre, with varying degrees of monstrosity. For Pangdemonium, we saw all this as part of our 2020 Season’s theme of “Evolution”. In order to survive this “pangdemic”, we have had to adapt, improvise, strategize, endure, and soldier on. Just as every single individual making a living in the arts has had to. Just as every person in whatever occupation trying to feed themselves and their loved ones in these dire circumstances, has had to.
The saying “we’re all in the same boat” ceased to apply, because the fact is that each one of us has had to create our own makeshift lifebuoy to navigate this unprecedented shitstorm. It’s been survival of the fittest of the unkindest kind.
And here we are, somehow still surviving. One lifebuoy that kept us afloat was the fact that so many of you were telling us how much live theatre meant to your lives, and how much you missed it. We know that theatre does not save lives; but we believe that by telling stories that explore the myriad complexities of our shared human experience, theatre has the power to help us better understand ourselves and one another, and to make life a little easier to bear.
On behalf of the entire theatre family, we want to express our profound appreciation to the many of you who extended positivity, encouragement and kindness in so many different ways over this challenging period, including those adventurous souls who consensually engaged in our summer fling with digital theatre, and for still respecting us the morning after. So, after being buffeted through dark waters for a year, we’re grateful to come full circle, back into the light, back to dry land, and back on stage, to share Girls and Boys with you – this story of one woman’s extraordinary life.
Pangdemonium has always told stories that champion the human spirit and the will to survive. And if there is a quintessential story of survival, this one is it. We hope it speaks to you in a personal way, and that whatever darkness you might be living through – pandemic-related or otherwise – you find some light out of it.
Here’s to a much better year ahead for all of us.
Thank you for your faith, your love, and your patience.
Lots of love,
Adrian, Tracie, and the Pangdemonium Family
“This is a really, really tough play for the audience...”
Playwright Dennis Kelly | Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Dennis Kelly is very honest about his play Girls and Boys, “There are only two characters in this play: the actor and the audience,” says Kelly. “You risk running the audience out of the play when it gets hard.”
The going gets very hard indeed, and anyone reading this before actually seeing the play is strongly advised to not read any further. As Kelly says: “You can’t talk about the play without giving away what’s going on.” But he thinks we do need to talk about it – and it’s his job to do it.
Girls and Boys tells the story of an unnamed working-class woman who blags her way into the film industry, gets married and has two children. She and her husband build a life together, and then it all starts to crumble… “Writers are weird. We are always working, we plunder our own relationships so lots of people can come and take a peek. If you’ve got any hope of writing anything good, what you have to do is put a secret in what you are writing. Sometimes a few. The secrets don’t have to be profound, it’s not like you are telling people that you killed someone as a child. What you are doing is saying, ‘This is what I think’, and it is almost always something that you don’t tell your friends, family or partner. But you do put it in a play for a whole bunch of strangers to come and have a look at. Or in a TV series for a million people to see.”
Kelly began work on Girls and Boys in a Naples airport while waiting, like the character in his play, for a flight. The play wasn’t commissioned by a theatre, but was something that Kelly felt compelled to write after wondering about the origins and effects of male violence. He sent the first draft to director Lyndsey Turner, and they developed it together before taking it to the Royal Court.
There has always been a dark side to Kelly’s work, from his 2003 debut, Debris, which featured a DIY crucifixion, through to DNA (about teenagers killing a classmate) to Channel 4’s brutally explicit thriller UTOPIA. Even his family shows, Matilda and Pinnochio, have baleful undertones. In Girls and Boys, he considers something almost unthinkable. In Girls and Boys, the woman’s daughter, Leanne, spends her time painstakingly creating objects, such as the Eiffel Tower made out of mud, while her young son, Danny, runs around destroying his sister’s structures.
One of the quiet, unassuming pleasures of the evening is watching the mother trying to teach her children with all the unsung heroism that it requires. “I’m not a fan of the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’,” says Kelly. “Men need masculinity and women need femininity. But there are men out there for whom asserting their masculinity means being unable to fail or bend but only to break.” Kelly believes it comes from a fear he recognises in his younger self.
“Up until my 30s, when I sorted myself out, I was terrified of admitting fear, but I was a very fearful person. You have to get past that, and when you do it brings a power, but lots of men don’t and never see past all the bullshit of the John Wayne myth.”
He thinks that’s the case of the unseen and unnamed husband in Girls and Boys. “He would probably think of himself as pretty liberal man. Even a feminist. I wanted to make them sympathetic and understandable as a couple. I didn’t want us to be able to blame her.”
When Kelly first met actress Carey Mulligan to talk about the role in the play’s London debut, he was taken aback to realise she was heavily pregnant.
“I said to her that I was shocked she had been OK to read the play. But she was fine. I love Carey’s physicality. The way she picks up Danny and cradles him. Like the character, she’s a working mum with two kids and you see a working mum’s love, patience, irritation and guilt. I don’t think it terrifies her doing the play; she manages not to let it become her.”
In early drafts, Kelly thought of the play as a gender-inverted Medea but says that the character “deserves her own play, more than just a riff on a Greek play”. He adds that the play is not about the husband. “It’s about her. There is another play about him,” he says, joking that it could be a sequel called Boys and Girls. He is unapologetic for giving this woman centre stage.
Carey Mulligan in the 2018 Royal Court production of Girls and Boys | Photograph: Marc Brenner/Vogue.com
For more, please read the full programme below.
