Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Manchester Metropolitan University
Spring Tide at Maplethorpe
Spring Tide at Mablethorpe is a forty minute original dramatic monologue written and performed by Julie Wilkinson. The piece explores the social and political consequences of predicted sea level rise consequent on global warming through a dystopian vision of a fictional future in which we suppose that national leaders have denied the anthropogenic nature of climate change. Through this admonitory experiment, the play asks whether nationalist narratives are either a necessary or a sufficient response to scarcity of resource. The author draws on interviews she conducted in Lincolnshire following the floods of 2007, synthesising this material with recent accounts of the denigration of researchers writing on climate change. The text is informed by Fenland narratives collected by 19th century folklorist, Marie Balfour, and Tennyson's dialect poems from which the writer concocts a comic vocabulary which demonstrates a deep connection between landscape and language.
The play combines techniques developed in the author’s monologues Don’t Call Me Brave (Yorkshire Women Theatre, 1990) and Mirka’s Story (New Perspectives, 2007), with the choral quality of her play The Fare; here one performer speaks in many voices. Influenced by Dario Fo’s comic/political monologues (Mistero Buffo, 1969; Francis, The Holy Jester, 1999), the piece challenges the argument of Richard Bean's The Heretic. The performance builds on Julie's work in Noel Greig's play Best of Friends, (New Perspectives, 1985) and other devised cabarets.
The play is performed as part of stories for our not so distant future, a cross-genre programme including Gregory Norminton's short stories imagining alternative futures. Accompanied by a specially devised audience workshop, the show tests boundaries between literary, dramatic and political event. The originality of this hybrid artistic experiment is attested to by the range of bookers: Green Belt and Shambala Festivals; Edinburgh Storytelling Centre; the Capitol Theatre at MMU; the Mercury Theatre, Colchester.
