Would you mind giving us insight into your art/event/performance?
Josie: Two neighbours in the middle of nowhere argue over land. Territorial conflict pervades through the battleground from a war long gone but lingering still through the Towton air. Margaret, a woman in her early twenties, eager to escape the dreary, ruthless city of London, dreams of finding peace and quiet in the rural idyllic countryside, only to find her elderly neighbour stirs up the very battles she’d been trying to escape. In this quaint little unassuming village, we meet Steve, her gamekeeper, the village vicar, and many more eccentric characters, all harnessing their own strong opinions of this ever escalating conflict. But for Margaret, it’s too little, too late. It’s a rollercoaster ride for Margaret and indeed for her audience, as for 60 minutes, we step inside her mind, with all of its stories, and all of its chaos.
Tell us about the creative team and the process involved in producing your performance.
Josie: Where do I start? I am so lucky to have such a ridiculously talented team behind this show. I’ll start with my brilliant director, Esther, who I knew from LAMDA (she had studied directing there whilst I was training) who I bumped into again when I was working in a cafe in London and didn’t know where to put my energy because I had about a thousand projects I wanted to devote myself to. She said just start with something. So, I had the recording of my original thesis performance, which I sent to her, along with the script. She watched the piece, read the script, said she wanted to direct it, and the rest is history. We wanted to take it to the Camden Fringe, but as I was slightly late applying, I couldn’t find a venue, so I said to Esther, let’s just do it in the autumn. A couple days later, some dates opened up at one of my favourite venues, and we had a show! I love the specificity Esther brings to the script, to the characters, really ensuring each is as distinct as they can be, and placing great value upon the detail. Tara, our associate director and sound designer jumped on board and took over when Esther was bringing another human into the world, and brought the same brilliance and commitment. The whole team has been so dedicated and detailed and delightful, and I am so grateful to have them involved in this crazy piece.
Esther: We have an exciting ensemble of creatives working “behind the curtain” and it is so exciting to have such a big team of women and non-binary people supporting a one-woman show, maybe a bigger team than your average one-woman fringe show. Back in March it all started rather small, it was simply Josie (the writer and performer) and myself (the director) met and talked about the piece as it grew from 20 to 60 minutes. That deal seemed to work for us, until we got a date to stage the piece… I was pregnant at the time and the performance date was only a few weeks after my due date, which pushed us to get a strong team that could support the rehearsals, design and production. Without them, this play wouldn’t have come to fruition as it did, particularly Tara, don’t know what we would have done without them! All in all, having such a big team turned out to be a blessing beyond what we needed to cover as they are all huge supporters of the piece and ride or die Margaret fans!
Was there an inspiration for you to turn a petty neighbour feud on an old battlefield into a fast-paced dark comedy?
Josie: If you want the short answer, Henry VI Part 3. You’re probably going to need the long answer now. It all began once upon a time during drama school where as part of our final thesis, we had to write or devise a 20 minute performance. It could be literally anything, so long as it was loosely connected to classical theatre. I had remembered performing as Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI Part 3, and there was a scene in the play between an ordinary father and a son who fight in battle and kill their respective. Shakespeare basically decided to zoom in to the completely unnamed individual in amongst all this talk of kings and queens within the infamous war of the roses, and I found that really interesting. Why did he choose to do that? The emphasis on the individual, and on the micro inside the macro. Conflict is something that is woven within mankind’s history and we seem desperately unable to escape it. The thing is, in theatre, and writing, I find that people always relate to people. Ordinary people. People that are closer to themselves than kings and queens and famous figures, and often things can feel more close to home that way, relatable. So then I thought about ordinary issues we have in everyday life. Over the new building site through the window blocking the view. Over who had the wine and who just had the lemonade when the restaurant bill comes. We argue and make conflicts over literally anything and everything. And it can be very funny, how people get so wound up over the smallest of things, but is also, I think, extremely revealing of our natures. Humans seem to have this very ugly, petty, and powerful side that can come out at both the most irrelevant things, that affect absolutely no-one, but also the most important things that affect everyone. This play had to be a comedy, because of the absurdity of it all. If you don’t laugh, you’ll only cry
Writing a one-woman show with ten characters in 60 minutes is intense. How did you make each character feel distinct?
Josie: Making each character distinct was one of my biggest goals with this show. I’m a bit of a character actor, and have a background in comedy improv, so I worked a lot just by myself improvising characters that really served the story, that would wind Margaret up, or that might really support her, which makes it all the more devastating and indeed irritating when she doesn’t listen. As an actor-writer, I also admittedly just wanted to write characters that I really wanted to play, that were fun, and funny, but of course always served a purpose within the story. Margaret, as an unreliable narrator also crafts our perception of these people too, so it was interesting to see how far we can take some of the characters towards caricatures and which people Margaret chose to paint nicely and naturalistically, like her Dad and…well really it’s just her Dad. She wants the audience on her side, so her characterizations through her recollections all had to serve that purpose. Then Esther and Tara really helped me with the physicality. Again, it’s all in the detail. Eye-lines for example, Steve is seven foot tall so he would look down when talking to Margaret and vice versa. The cadences of the voice, the small mannerisms that Margaret chooses to exaggerate within the characters to make them seem more this way or the other. We’ve all tried to be extremely detailed with everything, and I really hope that comes through in the performance.
Esther: After we decided that all the characters from the town of Towton were going to be caricaturized, we used a technique for character building that I learned from Jay Miller (Artistic Director of The Yard Theatre) where you use 3 references that relate to the character to build up their physicality, voice, rhythm, mannerisms, etc. With those references in both our minds we could always dial up or down certain aspects and since all of them are different, so are the characters. Actually the bigger challenge were the three characters that are related to one another: Margaret and her parents. For those three characters we wanted to keep certain shared elements without losing the illusion that there are multiple people on stage, particularly hard to do in the rapid fire dialogues that Josie wrote between Mum and Margaret, but I think we were successful.
Margaret makes some pretty “questionable decisions.” What makes her someone audiences can’t look away from?
Josie: She’s so honest, and yet somehow she’s always lying. We never know truly when or even whether she is telling the truth. Without giving too much away, everything kind of gets worse and worse for her throughout the story, that you end up feeling for her even though she’s not quite the goody. But in this show, that’s sort of the point. No one is fully good or fully bad, because people are far more complicated than that. And Margaret is very complicated indeed. You might find yourself gritting your teeth thinking ‘for goodness sake Margaret, why!?’ Especially toward the end. I’ll leave it at that.
Esther: She’s quite charming, bold, straightforward and bad. But we don’t tend to like a bad woman, as we would a man, unless she’s sexualised or a victim. It is a challenge liking Margaret for who she is, but we want her to be likeable without exploiting her. It also helps the fact that everyone knows how far she has taken the conflict with her neighbour for something so small, makes you want to watch… It’s like a car crash in slowmotion, terrifying, but fascinating!
How did collaboration and the individual experiences shape the return of the show?
Josie: Collaboration is in my opinion, one of the best parts of making theatre. Each person on the team brings their own insight, perspectives and ideas to the show that you never would have thought of. It’s been so fun, seeing this play evolve, through the musical composition our sound designer and associate director Tara compiled, the brilliant lighting from EJ, transporting the audience in and out of fields, through kitchen windows, and inside church halls. Martha has some exciting ideas for costume for our next show, Glerren and Priya have been brilliant producing behind the scenes, and it’s just been wonderful to see everyone’s ideas bring the story to another level for the show to have yet another life.
Esther: We all have kept closely in touch, making sure all creatives voices are heard. The fact that we all worked together in the same piece before made it easier to see what needed or could be changed and the play has evolved with a bolder design and a few changes to the ending – we have a few audiences coming to watch it again, let’s see how they find the changes!!
What are some of the challenges which came with bringing it to the stage?
Josie: For me as a performer, my biggest challenge is ensuring the audience are on the edge of their seat throughout the entire thing. I think it was Phoebe Waller Bridge that said to ‘bore your audience is unforgivable’. It’s one thing to write a show, to write the script, but bringing it to the stage is in and of itself a great challenge, especially a solo play. So my biggest goal as both a writer and an actor, is to ensure every scene, and every line, every character and every movement is completely purposeful, specific, and carries forward the absolute pandemonium of the story, so the audience never checks their watch.
Esther: Not getting carried away with props and set! It is such an evocative piece that it could be easy to want to have a thousand bits of costume to represent each character… It has been tempting, but less is more. We all have had to be very selective when it comes to choosing what to add so that it doesn’t take away from the actor’s craft, so every single element, light, sound, set has been carefully chosen to highlight the story and the storyteller.
What do you hope theatregoers take away afterwards?
Josie: More than anything, I just want the audience to enjoy the piece and laugh at these crazy people stuck in this random field in the middle of nowhere. If they do that, I’ll be happy. I think theatre and obviously comedy, is entertainment, storytelling at its heart, and I hope the audience feel sufficiently entertained. If they leave thinking a little bit too, cherry on the cake.
Esther: Such a tricky question. I hope they take away one less hour of their day and realise how close we all come to getting knee deep into a fight with the neighbours!
Interested in being featured on our Have a Gander page? With many previews and Q&As lined up, we’re always happy to chat about including your show in future articles. Please do get in touch through the contact page to feature in an upcoming ‘Have A Gander’
Interested in being featured on our Have a Gander page? With many previews and Q&As lined up, we’re always happy to chat about including your show in future articles. Please do get in touch through the contact page to feature in an upcoming ‘Have A Gander’