Cups of tea, page-turners and needing a rest

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been feeling very overwhelmed, a lot of big things have been happening in my life and I don’t feel as though I have had the time to even think about them. I hate feeling tired and run down because I’m just not that kind of person. I’m always up and doing something but recently I’ve been dreaming of a day, a day where it rains really hard so you can hear it through the whole house, a day for staying in your pyjamas and having a Harry Potter marathon, a day of just doing nothing. At our most recent Playwrights gathering we spoke about if we could choose an international day of something what would it be, based on how we were feeling. The day which I created was the international day of emotional support cups of tea. A day for sitting down with a cup of tea and having a right good chat, to let it all out. I think having a nice warm cup of tea and a couple of dark chocolate digestives is a sure-fire way of making me feel a little more relaxed.

I thought I’d share some of the plays I have read and watched recently. Firstly, Meet Me at Dawn by Zinnie Harris, OMG I loved it. I loved everything about it from the storyline, the language to the way it made me feel. It was the definition of a page-turner. After reading this play I kind of had to just sit for a bit and reflect, it left me feeling as though my mind had expanded. It is very rare for a play or a book to do this for me, so it just shows I really did love it. Secondly, I read Look Back in Anger by John Osborne. It is difficult not to compare the two because I read them so close together. I found it to be very old fashioned, not just the storyline but also the language used by the characters which I think is why it didn’t click for me. I couldn’t relate to this play as much as I did with Meet Me at Dawn. I didn’t find myself sitting there, reading a line and think YES, I totally get that. One thing that did strike me was a game that was mentioned several times. It was called squirrels and bears. This was a game played by Jimmy Porter and his wife Alison. My first thought was this must symbolise their relationship, him being the bear and her being the squirrel. I did some research, and it does symbolize their relationship, as I thought but, it also gives them a way to access a simple affection for each other that they can’t achieve in normal life. I felt quite sad after reading this, they are in a relationship and in order to get close to one another they had created a game, a coping mechanism.

A play that I watched was A Doll’s House, by Henrik Isbe, I did enjoy this play very much, I think that I would enjoy it even more if I were to watch it a second time. Nora is a character that I could relate to in some ways but not others, I relate to her in the sense that she too is a woman and has shared struggles because of that, she feels trapped and as though she is lesser than her husband which is why she feels as though she needs to prove a point, not to anyone around her but herself. There was something about the storyline which I couldn’t quite connect with, the fact that she had to take her husband to Italy in order for him to get better. Maybe it is because that is something of its time but that just didn’t seem realistic. The part which I loved the most and had stuck in my mind is the ending, it was fabulous, and I think being a woman made it feel all the more powerful. Afterwards, I did some research and found out that the play was seen to be so controversial at the time that Ibsen was forced to write a second ending which he thought to be a barbaric outrage and was to be used only when necessary. The controversy centred around Nora’s decision to abandon her children, and in the second ending she decides that the children need her more than she needs her freedom.

I also tried Nicola McCartney’s Angels, Demons, Myths and Rituals Exercise. Nicola gave us this exercise to do during a Playwright workshop. I found it rather difficult, just making up characters from scratch without a story first, but I suppose that is the whole point. It is definitely one that I would try again at a different time if I was struggling to get to know a character, but I think the way my mind works when it comes to writing didn’t quite work with it.

So, that’s a little summary of how I’ve been feeling and what I’ve been reading and watching. My play Wee Yin is being performed on the 30^th of June and the 1^st of July, I am so excited for people to see it. So much work has gone into it over the past year and I’m really proud of it. Once it has finished, I’m hoping for some time to have a good rest.

 

Naomi Watson

Naomi is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2020-2021