“You know when a song gets stuck in your head? I’ve got that now. Only it’s not a piece of music… it’s not a tune… it’s a phrase: home is where the heart is. Home is where the heart is.”
The idea for Tom Morton-Smith’s new In Doggerland came from an interest the playwright had in medical tourism. “But when I began researching people travelling to China for transplants, I realized I couldn’t actually go to China, and my interest shifted to the psychological fall-out of transplants, of not being able to cope with them. You’re not just fine after a transplant. There is a speech in the play which refers to one of the first hand transplants, where the patient felt he couldn’t deal with this new hand looking and functioning so differently, and he had it amputated again. But most of all, I was interested in the thought processes of someone who has been ill their entire life getting better. Not well, but better.”
Clive Moore and Jennifer Tan in In Doggerland. Photo: Devin Ainslie
The way to frame this subject in a contemporary British context was to look at coastal erosion – houses, or whole villages, dropping off the cliffs into the sea: “I wanted to explore the parallel between families investing in places that suddenly cease to exist, and the way the protagonist experiences life before an after her transplant. The play asks questions about who we are as human beings: what makes you you isn’t just your body. Are you your family? Your relationships? Are you where you grew up? Your family home?”
Director Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder hopes this gives the play resonance with a wider audience: “A play about transplants might not seem universal, but you can relate to it because of the family relationships at its heart: between a brother and a sister, between a father and a daughter, and between you and your family home.”
Tyrrell-Pinder and Morton-Smith take a second to think about the right term to describe the play:
– “Small? No. Detailed?”
– “Intricate?”
– “Not light, because it is not frivolous.”
They settle on “delicate.” Tyrrell-Pinder: “The play tackles big issues, but fundamentally it is about four ordinary people trying to live their lives the best they can.” Morton-Smith laments that an emphasis on family relationships is no longer at the foreground in new plays, and tries to counter this by writing a play where the characters are all inherently good people, struggling. There is “no atonement, no bad guy.” This sense of hope and positivity sets it apart from other new writing, which he says can be bleak and hard work. This is a consequence, he believes, of writers’ diets, still reacting to the in-yer-face writing of the nineties and the formal experimentation of the noughties, which has produced plays where drama is pushed to the extreme end, ignoring the smaller, personal tragedies. Tyrrell-Pinder adds: “There is a belief that there is more theatricality in misery.”
It is not surprising then that Morton-Smith’s influences as a writer aren’t necessarily other playwrights. He calls his cultural inspiration eclectic: “It’s not just theatre. It’s music, art, science authors, novelists. Theatre doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is important to cross-pollinate, to read Sarah Kane and then look at a Francis Bacon painting to find similarities. There was an experiment in America where a computer was programmed to create music in the style of famous composers. It was given unfinished symphonies and would complete them in the style of the composer. Eventually it was fed more and more composers, and finally its own compositions. As a playwright, I am like that: feed me culture and I will produce.”
It is an attitude which is paying off: a former writer-in-residence with Paines Plough, Morton-Smith is currently under commission with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But first, In Doggerland will tour England and Wales until the end of November.
The play is the product of an ongoing relationship between Morton-Smith and Box of Tricks Theatre, who discovered it in a showcase festival at London’s Theatre 503 in 2011 and subsequently committed to develop and tour it, even if Tyrrell-Pinder admits that touring has led to some compromises: “It would have been great to bed it in somewhere. It is set in fourteen different locations. There is some water. Touring necessitated a more pared-down, imaginative space, which makes the audience work harder.” But she is quick to add that touring presents its own rewards: the reinvigorating experience of connecting to new audiences and new spaces.
Box of Tricks, the brainchild of Mountview graduates Tyrrell-Pinder and Adam Quayle, started as one of the many young companies in London that focus on new writing. But in 2012, the company moved to Manchester, a choice which Tyrrell-Pinder claims was “both personal and professional. We were fed up of London. And we weren’t a London-centric company. We enjoyed touring. Manchester was an obvious choice – there is loads going on, with a big creative community, not just in theatre, and with several other big northern cities just an hour away. We were pleasantly surprised with the wealth of the writing talent here. There are some fantastic drama schools, a vibrant fringe scene, and with the BBC holding talent up here people no longer go straight to London.” She admits that one day, Box of Tricks would like to create their own venue in Manchester, to provide a home for writers and other practitioners, if anything because she realizes the responsibility to give back to the theatre community: Box of Tricks received support from venues and companies when it started out, and she would like to play a role in providing similar opportunities to other theatremakers. The first initiative to this end has been setting up Direct North, a network for theatre directors based in the North of England.
But the core of Box of Tricks’ activities will remain producing new writing. Tyrrell-Pinder enjoys the clean slate that brand new plays offer: “It is exciting to work on a world that has never been seen. It is both liberating and terrifying. You know you can rely on established plays; the dark nights of the soul you have as a director are always darker when you work on a new play. There is a greater responsibility to the playwright, to interpret the story as cleanly as possible. It is easy not to listen.” Morton-Smith is quick to add that a production and a playtext are still very different things, however: “A play is a blueprint. A directorial stamp is necessary, but a collaborative approach is fundamental. It is both terrifying and brilliant for a writer to see their characters separated from them, breaking the links to the writer and going out there, fully formed.
Being a playwright is nerve-wrecking and I have no idea why I put myself through it were it not for the chance to see the play exist in the audience’s long-term mind – no longer just in the theatre, but to see it engender a long-term change in their perception. That is why.”
In Doggerland is at the New Diorama, London, on the 10th-11th November and then touring until the 30th November 2013.
