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Fishskin Trousers

This play was written as a conscious experiment in exploring the form of the monologue drama, a form particularly associated with Irish playwrights. In works such as Brian Friel’s 'Faith Healer', Conor Macpherson’s 'This Lime Tree Bower', and Mark O’Rowe’s 'Terminus', three first-person narratives intertwine to create a complete story, in a form that is both close to story-telling but has the immediacy and presence of theatre. Instead of an impartial ‘narrator’, characters speak as themselves and engage directly with the audience. Without ‘acting out’, miming or physicalizing their stories, the characters simply tell us what happened to them.

Inevitably this form throws an emphasis onto language itself – the voice, and the words a character uses to tell, or to hide, what he or she needs to express. The author’s piece, ‘The World of Words’, written for the online arts journal 'Exeunt' elaborates on her aims: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/the-world-of-words-com.

The play creates a drama of three contrasting voices with a strong connection to time and place (an invented twelfth- century Suffolk idiom, based on the real Suffolk accent; 1970s Australian; and a contemporary voice). The texture of language and speech take the place of visual distractions. Archives of the work of Peggy Cole and Charlie Haycock were invaluable in researching the old Suffolk accent as were films such as Peter Brook’s 'Akenfield' (from Ronald Blythe’s book of the same name) in which Peggy Cole herself appears. The treatment of the Wild Man myth becomes a fictional exploration of the theories of Uta Frith, who in her book 'Autism' argues that most feral children are in fact autistic children abandoned by their parents. Thus thematically the play developed into a meditation on otherness and difference.