Staging tricks of the memory

Theatre critic

Tuesday 9 October 2012

The tin of biscuits for a break in rehearsals for The Authorised Kate Bane, the new play by Ella Hickson which forms the basis for the latest production by site-specific theatre specialists, Grid Iron, is Family Circle.

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Neil Cooper meets playwright Ella Hickson

Given the events in the play, was that conceptual irony?

Actress Jenny Hulse plays a young woman, Kate Bane, flitting between her divorced mother and father. This is not happy families. What exactly Kate Bane, Hulse, and indeed Hickson and Grid Iron director Ben Harrison are playing at isn't immediately clear. Bane is a playwright, writing a play about a family who may or may not resemble her own, or how she remembers them.

The characters Bane invents, however, are damaged, and her invented version of herself the messed-up product of a broken home, blaming her parents for everything. For a moment, it seems that things may lurch into the world of repressed memory syndrome, at one time a very voguish theme for young dramatists to pursue. While it skirts away from that subject, the scene being rehearsed nevertheless resembles a dry run for a me-generation psycho-drama. The fact that it is Hickson, a real-life playwright, imagining all this, adds yet another layer to a Russian doll style drama exploring the very nature of our personal histories."I'd started working with a neuro-scientist," Hickson explains of the roots of her new play, "and I discovered that we construct our memories far more than we actually remember things. That made me want to write something about that, and I knew that the family was the route into all this, but I also knew that the subject wasn't very dramatic by itself. "So I wrote this character who was at a tipping point in her life. The fact that she's a playwright meant that there were lots of holding of heads during research and development of the show, trying to figure out what was going on – but maybe theatre is how we construct ourselves."Hickson first came to prominence with Eight, an octet of monologues which presented a series of portraits of people living in 21st century Britain. Eight was produced at the Bedlam Theatre, the home of Edinburgh University Theatre Company, of which Hickson was a member until 2008. More than a decade earlier, both Harrison and Grid Iron co-artistic director Judith Doherty also cut their theatrical teeth at the Bedlam.Hickson followed Eight with her first full-length piece, Precious Little Talent, about a young woman who flees to New York to be with her estranged father, but finds love instead. Hickson's 2010 follow-up, Hot Mess, looked at a pair of twenty-something twins, the female half of whom is constantly disappointed by love. .Hickson, who is still in her twenties, has done her artistic growing up in public, following the success of Eight."I struggled for about six months about feelings of inauthenticity, both in my own work and in other work I was going to see. In pursuit of honesty and humanity I found that formal experimentation seemed to be some kind of solution. I wrote the play-within-a-play first, and the nature of the framework around the writing of the play-within-a-play came very much out of conversations with Ben."Hickson remains conscious of the fact that, for all her experiments with form, the big ideas behind Kate Bane's story need to be rooted in the everyday.SHE says: "I hope we've managed to neutralise the science, because what we're doing is tearing a few holes in some fundamental ideas of history. This idea that everything in your childhood is fake is pretty scary, but if you can get that over with a few jokes and some lighting, then why not?"Hickson talks of "the lie of empiricism" in seemingly objective tones. "It's not a straight line that ends when you're no longer a child. As a human impulse I can understand the appeal of saying how, because you failed your maths exam when you were seven, and because a man flashed at you when you were nine, that's what makes you who you are. But I also think it's very dangerous to think that."When she talks in this way, Hickson sounds not unlike her lead character in The Authorised Kate Bane. This begs the unavoidable question: who is the authorised Ella Hickson, and how close is Kate Bane to Hickson's own experiences of family life?"Not very," she insists. "Bits and pieces. To access the play's themes, you have to have some emotional through-line, but as far as the content goes, I've no ambition to do a biography of my own family. The distance between families is kind of the point of the play in a way, in that we write our entire past, and we do have the capacity to completely alter ourselves. I wish I did believe in an empirical straight line, but I don't have enough trauma in my life. That's something to think about as well. If you don't have enough trauma in your life, are you entitled to tell stories"That's something to think about when you pass round the box of Family Circle.The Authorised Kate Bane previews at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Friday and runs to October 26; it is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, October 30 to November 3. www.gridiron.org.uk

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Staging tricks of the memory

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