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How Authentically Can I use Life Experiences to Create an Engaging Piece of Work?

When in early 2018, Anoushka Warden’s autobiographical play “My Mum’s A Twat” opened at the Royal Court, she was hailed ‘fearless’ by Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone. She went on to say of her first reading of the play that she was “Blown away by it – by the energy of the storytelling. I became breathless, struck by the writing’s musicality and by its title. I was amazed by the resilience of this young girl who was effectively abandoned.” However, Warden at that time was not and never had intended to be a writer: her one woman show came from a stream of conscious writing based and grounded completely in the reality of her own situation. As Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction”, and Warden certainly proves that this is true. On a similar note, there are plenty of writers such as, Tennessee Williams, who express parts of their own life experiences in their work such as when Williams gives a nod to his own childhood in “A Glass Menagerie” or certain writers that seemingly ground their work in fiction as seen through the lens of “Fleabag” in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one woman show. As such I wanted to investigate how I can use the life experiences of those around me to create an authentic piece of work examining where the boundary between complete honesty and dramatic license exists.

My first aim was to create a piece of work that was accessible to the community it was based upon whilst also being accessible to people on a universal level. I decided I wanted to create a piece of work based on my Nana, Heather, and the stories she’s told of being from a fishing town in the 60’s as these had gripped me throughout my upbringing. This would also give me a clear target audience. The Grimsby fishing industry was massive and involved a network of families that would have a relationship with the piece because they had their own understanding of the time. On presenting the idea, one piece of feedback I got was from my tutor Jayne Courtney. She was born close by to Grimsby, in Hull and commented that as Hull also had docks and a fishing community she too could relate ‘directly to the story and nostalgia of her own experience’s’.  However here I was only fulfilling one part of my aim, I needed to make sure that the play would be received by people who had no concept of that time so as to create something with widespread appeal. Writer David Edgar once said, ‘The play text is both a blueprint and record, but also has an independent life’. This gave me the confidence to free the story up. Whilst I was documenting my Nana’s life, I could allow myself to use elements of dramatic license to help shape a story of its own. I started to think about the elements of the story that anyone could resonate with; her turbulent relationship with her rebellious husband, Keith– which taken out of context is really just a story about love and family, something that everyone has some understanding of and can connect to. I therefore wanted to draw on a particular story about the time my Mum found an article about Keith in the Bygones, a section of the modern-day newspaper that looks back on stories from the past. He was wanted for being involved in a shooting at a local pub. The reality was his friend had a starting gun that he pulled out- completely harmless. However, what if, for my story, the gun was real, and it had been used to harm someone and Heather was in some way recounting this. As tutor Karen Henthorn had taught me in my acting training to ‘always play the highest stakes’ I wanted to transfer this to my writing and play the ultimate scenario. This would make the story much more about a woman witnessing a betrayal from her husband and could arise many feelings of anger or confusion, of pain and protection: all of which every person must have experienced on some level in their life. Falling in love in the 60’s really is no different to falling in love today, illustrated extremely well in Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, for example. So, in doing this, I hope I opened the piece up to a universal audience who could recognise Heather’s emotional journey and connect in some way to it.

The next step, now that I had a clear idea of what I wanted the piece to be and who I wanted it to be aimed at was to start the writing process and achieve a first draft. Taking inspiration from the likes of Warden, I began stream of conscious writing.  However, the work quickly descended into a ramble and mesh of different stories my Nana had told me about her and my Grandad thus lacking clear direction. My second aim was to create a clear story arc, where a change occurred in the state and situation of the character from beginning to end. So, coming back to that, I decided to use a technique I had learnt from reading up on Waller- Bridge’s creative process in “Fleabag”. She talked of always having three things going on for the character in the scene at any one time, as seen in the first section of ‘Fleabag’ in which she is late for a job interview, sweaty and hot but really needing to impress. She went on to say when you achieve this “You instantly have reality”. By this I think she means as humans we are hardly ever focusing on one want, we always have multiple metaphorical plates to balance and are brains are aware of so many different things coming at us. Applying this to my work, if Heather was only having a conversation with the audience, there is nothing else going on and we are far removed from reality. I therefore decided to put someone else in the space, a Police Officer to rely the story too, someone who was looking for her husband Keith. He was kept imaginary to allow the focus to still be on Heather and her story but giving the character someone to speak directly to gave her a reason for speaking that developed into an objective. If the Officer was around enquiring after Keith, why wasn’t he there? Maybe Heather was protecting him? I quickly started to have my 3 things going on; Heather outwardly trying to placate and find out what the officer wanted whilst inwardly worrying about the disappearance of her partner. It gave a really interesting conflict between the show she was trying to put on against her own fear’s. I just needed a third. I came up with the concept that she was due to pick her daughter up from her mother’s, it provided a reason for her to want to see the Officer out and another thing weighing her down. This also meant I could start the piece with a really clear story and journey for it to go on. This was because all of these things Heather was battling put her right in the middle of the action with an active want. It wasn’t just a woman recounting some stories. Whilst this slightly altered the reality again, it would give me a clear set up to fill the imagined world with entirely real scenarios.

The next part was to then sustain this strong opening and continue the narrative arc and journey. The Officer had given me the means to do this. By the characters wanting something from each other it could allow them to move, affect and thus change one another. I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to do this but I took inspiration from Steve Waters who commented; “The idea of sitting down and working it all out and then fitting the dialogue in is a lot of nonsense because dialogue is about action, it is about the energy in the play… writer who has to get through it minute-by-minute, second-by-second, word-by-word to get to the next word.” Therefore, I thought the best way to do this was to just let the two characters live in the space. To find out what was going to happen and how they would push each other around. In order to do that I decided I had to write the dialogue of the Officer, so that his arc was as clear as Heather’s; even if I took him out again it was not enough to imagine him anymore, he had to be real. In doing this I could start to examine the status of the Officer, especially at that time and how that affected the normally outspoken Heather. At what points was she bold in her responses to him and at what points could he silence her to submission. I also found the writing reached a natural point in which, under the strain of the pretense, she dropped her guard to the Officer and revealed that she didn’t know where her partner was. This changed the dynamic and relationship between them, it felt natural that the Officer would have some sympathy for her, dropping his status to identify with her on an equal and human level. When I then looked at removing the Officer’s parts again I found the scene now had a clearer journey for Heather that was heavily influenced by her now clear relationship with the Officer.

Now I had written a very rough draft of my story I wanted to take my work to an audience and see what reaction it could ascertain. Duncan Macmillan says his biggest surprise about having his work performed by actors is that ‘however much I’ve worked on a play before rehearsal, I’ll still need to cut and rewrite almost everything’ and I think this is so, because different people will have their own artistic responses and thoughts on your piece of work that will naturally force the writing to change in order to accommodate and actually, I know from my own training, when collaboration occurs the results can be even more fruitful than what one person could achieve on their own.

I therefore wanted to read the work so far to my peers and see what response I would achieve. But in light of quarantine this proved tricky. Instead, I picked certain sections of my work to record and send to them and receive feedback on. A section of the work I performed for them can be found in Appendixes C. I wanted to highlight this particular section to talk about in my rationale for it received especially important feedback. From Reader A it was said that the work seemed especially ‘chunky’ and ‘far less conversational’ because of the absence of the Officer’s lines. Further to this, Reader B, said what was happening to Heather would make her ‘a bit more all over the place’. It was also felt that a lot of Heather’s responses were ‘engineered’ as they were having to ‘spell out’ the officer’s lines that were deleted. This was going against my third aim to create a ‘nuanced piece of dialogue’.

My first thought was to reinstate the lines and think about having the Officer live in the space however I then remembered Alice Birch’s ‘Blank’ that I had recently seen performed. There is a scene between a young girl and a police officer were his lines were deleted. The first thing I noticed about her work was that the policeman’s lines were very minimal, he let the girl reveal her information and only prompted her at times. For instance, the Officer says, ‘Your friend’ and rather than the girl simply answering ‘yes’ she goes on to say ‘He hadn’t decided to have a party. He had an empty house – his parents weren’t there’, so rather than the Officer driving the conversation and asking everything, the girl offers up the information herself. I therefore decided I needed to have longer periods of time were Heather was speaking and in control and not the Officer. This proved tricky at first in my story he is firmly in control and on the front foot asking Heather questions.  However, as was said in my feedback ‘she’s all over the place’ so therefore her thoughts can be too. For example, she can protest Keith’s innocence and quickly switch to discovering the Officer’s motives for being there and quickly switch to asking him to leave and he definitely wouldn’t need to tell her how serious it was. The officer could tell her the initial information and then the rest of it could unfold for her without his interference, as if she is playing out the situation in her mind.  It also helped to achieve the next part of my aim: ‘what is not said carries as much weight as what is’. Heather would be quick to get rid of the Officer because she knows full well of Keith’s involvement in the incident and so deflecting the blame onto the Officer’s need to ‘catch the proper criminals’ would make sense. By re drafting the piece with this feedback in mind I felt it really worked to keep the Officer as an imagined force and still created nuanced dialogue. In fact, my hope is in performance, this will only be heightened because you don’t know exactly what the Officer says so hopefully each individual audience member will take away different thoughts and feelings towards the relationship and what was going on.

In working on the story and dialogue of the piece I had started to come further away from the original truth of the story and whilst I wanted the piece to have elements of dramatic license it had to be mostly authentic. I decided I could channel this really effectively through the character of Heather herself. As the great Arthur Miller said, “everything we are at every moment is alive within us”. By this I believe he is saying that humans are complex, and we have many faces and moods and opinions that exist within us and can come out at any one time. It’s that detail that makes us real and Heather already had that level of detail before I even put pen to paper because she is real. She has years of life experience bundled into her words and at the age of 72 knows exactly who she is. I wanted to harness this and put it into the piece so her voice could shine through. Water’s also went on to say of dialogue “The dialogue is not just about, “I like the feel of that dialogue.” It is something to do with what is happening with the dialogue; the way that it shows you how people behave; the way it shows you about how life is.” This is exactly why I think Warden’s play had a ‘musicality’ and ‘energy’. She was using her own rhythms and speech patterns and opinions to be really frank about her life. I saw little reason as to why I couldn’t channel that in my piece. I therefore decided to go and speak to my Nana again and with her permission, record her talking to me about the stories I had chosen to include in my writing. Whilst the piece couldn’t be totally verbatim (which would leave little scope for dramatic license) I could pay special attention to the way she told these stories and how she used her words to create an accurate portrayal of her. A section of this recording can be found in the appendix. I wanted to make sure Heather’s tone came out in the text and so I started going through it listening to the recording and redrafting moments that opposed her manner.  One thing I noticed and suppose had always known was how direct and forthright my Nana is and was. Highlighted by the frank tone she had when recounting stories, for example, when she talks of my Grandad ‘being thrown out’ of the Winter Garden’s she states it was a ‘rare occasion’ that he had done nothing wrong. And when she subtly implied that if he hadn’t asked her to marry him ‘the night was young’ and she may have left with someone else. I decided to pull these phrases out and use them in the text. By doing the character really started to gain detail and become the real person behind it, that I know and love.

During our conversation she started to show me pictures of both her and Grandad. Which can be found in the appendix also. Looking at what they were wearing and how they presented themselves revealed even more to me about who they were at that time. As the Oscar’s Costume Design Instructional guide puts it simply ‘In real life, clothes define our taste and are an expression of our personality’. So, this was another layer I had to consider. In all of her picture’s Heather appears extremely ‘on trend’, perhaps the most striking is her aged 15 in a beautiful white coat. Thus, suggesting her outlook and ideas were slightly modern for the time. However, there was an element of the well put together housewife also present in her look. Already the details of what makes her, her were unfolding. I decided one of the best ways to give an immediate nod to the reader, which would potentially be the actor portraying her, on how they could achieve this character was to give a little character bio in the stage directions. This would touch upon all of the key traits that had come to light from my interview with Heather and I gave special attention to her clothing as another way to elude to her personality. In doing this I had started to blend totally authentic experiences with the drama of the piece to create something steeped in truth.

In conclusion, I believe you can use life experiences to create an authentic piece of work. I think I have demonstrated this in my piece as the character, story, dialogue and detail of the work is all firmly grounded in the truth. However, in order to bring my version of the story to a new audience the concept and overall arc of the story contained elements of dramatic license. But I think overall both fact and fiction blended together seamlessly, to create this story.