Why I thought Midsummer Night's Dream could be a PEACE play.

My 2019 Midsummer Night's Dream was EU PEACE IV funded, which meant that our funder had an agenda that was not primarily artistic, although Ards and North Down Borough Council completely bought into the idea that a powerful artistic experience could bring about profound change, something for which I will be eternally grateful.  Terra Nova can satisfy enquiries into how our artistic practice brings about emotional and intellectual change, and anyone interested shouldn't hesitate to get in touch.  What I want to talk about here are catalyst moments within the script that made me think 'this will work.  It won't be forced.  This production can be about peace.'.  

As I came to think about the play, the war between Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the Fairies, gave me the first moment.  It was my first doorway into the production.  At the start, Oberon and Titania have been fighting for a while, and Titania pleads for them to resolve their differences, describing the ruin of the world that is caused by their discord, saying: 'this comes from our debate, from our dissension; we are their parents and originals'.  This felt like a great starting metaphor to look at the effect of orange-green dissension in Northern Ireland.  Especially for those of us who identify with neither tribe, the effect of the disension is wearying: endless.  Nothing seems to flourish as it could.

The second moment that convinced me that this was a play to use to explore racism in Northern Ireland is when Lysander pleads to the Court for the right to marry Hermia, a high born girl whom loves him.  Her father has promised her to someone else, but she loves Lysander.  I realised that by making Lysander a successful visible minority immigrant, someone who comes to court but didn't necesarily grow up there, his plea to the Queen concerning his own worth: 'I am your grace as well derived as he, as well possess'd; my love is more than his; my fortunes every way as fairly rank'd as Demetrius' would allow us to explore inequality.  Why shouldn't the immigrant be equal to the indigenous person? Why is it that success and skill never actually purchase belonging?  This Lysander speaks to my own feelings as an immigrant that our society masquerades as a meritocracy, but that beneith that disguise other rules are at play.  Lysander gave us the opportunity to unpack exclusion and racism across the province.

The final moment worth mentioning is Queen Thesea's decision at the end of the play to overrule what she has previously described as 'the ancient rule of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate'.  By the end she simply says 'I will overbear your will' to Hermia's father and permits the young lovers to marry freely.  We are reminded that rules are just human constructs, dictating who we must hate and who we are allowed to love.  The moment when Thesia decides to overrule the old order spoke powerfully to me about our ability to let the old rules go, in Northern Ireland, if we are willing.

Add my gender changes to this, my determination to cast three black actors, my decision to put a Queen rather than a King at the centre of the play, and the fun we had with WI ladies instead of male mechanicals and I had a play that could carry the PEACE 4 themes naturally.  Writing a Peace vs Love masque and adding to the celebration at the wedding rather than cutting that bit (as is more usual) gave me more context to showcase a range of local talent.  The key thing was that we all (craft, dancers, choir, musicians and drama performers) explored these themes together, as did the Front of House and tech team as they came on Board, meaning that the importance of these themes was carried forward by everyone involved in the production.

Shamed in the Guardian Newspaper

What do you do, as the survivor of depression and an eating disorder, when another survivor, one with a bigger profile, better connections, more followers and a Guardian column, body-shames and art-shames you in an article designed to sell his new book of memoirs? 

I did feel shamed. I feel shamed right now. I sit at the table in my house in Belfast on a sunny day, looking out into my smallish garden with his words ‘bulbous Canadian’ echoing around in my head.

But I would also like to apologise on behalf of our industry. It is rough.  On us all.

Tomorrow is my 54th birthday.

Yesterday I was marching in support of the School Strike for Climate.  

That’s when I found out.  What?  That something had been said about me in the Guardian by someone I didn’t know.  I wasn’t in the UK on the 20th of July when the article appeared.  I have an 84 year-old mother in Quebec.  I was with her, and being there was a full time job, so I wasn’t reading much.

A respected arts colleague spoke to me at yesterday’s Climate March in the glorious sunshine.  Someone I haven’t seen in a few months. 

‘There’s an article about you in the Guardian’ she said.  ‘An actor at a low point uses you as an example.  A terrible audition.  Vagina puppets.’ Vagina puppets? Yes, that was probably me.  

Back in 2012, I had spent over two years carefully interviewing people living in Northern Ireland about their sexuality. I had built installations where people could provide anonymous feedback about sexuality using the Kama Sutra as a prompt.  I had explored the Kama Sutra as one of three sacred books in Hindu Culture.  We used a French translation as I remember. It was better.  Unabridged. We worked in Belfast with Abhishek Thapar, a theatre colleague from Puna, India.  He provided context, counter-checked what we were doing and joined the Canadian, Cornish, Northern Irish, Spanish mix of people working on the show.

Sexuality was a hotly contested topic in Northern Ireland in those days, with rampant homophobia, draconian anti-abortion laws and high suicide rates.  It still is. But it was worse then. The team working on then Ulster Kama Sutra with me were all clear that Northern Irish attitudes to sexuality were hurting everyone who lived here.  Our research and time with Abhishek also highlighted echos in India, but we knew: this was going to be a piece of work for Northern Ireland. We would use puppets to keep things safe, and we would use humour, and satire to make our point.

We laughed about how many euphemisms we were learning for sexuality, sexual function and the sexual parts of the body.  It seemed both glorious and sad.  And the misconceptions about other cultures…  In 2011, Northern Ireland was a society in which only 220,000 people were foreign born; apparently about 60% of the population still went to church every Sunday. 

We tested our ideas out in Belfast’s 2012 Cathedral Quarter Festival.  Great feedback, some outrage: we were the sellout runaway success of the Festival, but we felt that maybe the piece now called the Ulster Kama Sutra had become too Irish. It was loosing its interculturality.

Abhisheck could not come back to join us - he was setting up a theatre programme in Puna. I felt we had to have an East Asian colleague working on the show, it wouldn’t be quite right to go forward without that input.  Rewrites were needed. More devising.  We auditioned like mad but no professional actors of East Asian descent were to be found in Northern Ireland.

We had managed to squeeze some project money out of the Arts Council: for development, rehearsal, production, a tour. Some regional venues, especially those funded by local government were refusing to take the tour.  Too risky they said. But a tour was coming together.  It seemed worth pressing onwards.

Christine, a friend who was working at the BBC, offered to help book London auditions.  Maybe we could find an actor there? Money was tight, but I felt it was important.  A friendly casting director at Soho Theatre helped put the word out.  I built pages on the website to explain the development of the show, circulated papers with a description of what was involved, brought photos of the puppets.  We were using three types: full sized puppets modelled on the actors, sock puppets and little crocheted genitalia.  People loved those.  Their woolly nature made everyone smile. so you could talk about even the most painful topics using them.  

For actors auditioning, puppet experience wasn’t strictly necessary, but people needed to understand the basic concept of animating a creature that was not themselves: masque work, even commedia dell’arte would help.

Then the venue we wanted to use for the auditions fell through.  Somebody suggested the Camden People’s Theatre.  It was a bit grim, but it had a long an honourable tradition of left wing engagement so I thought it might be ok.

Having worked as an actor myself for many years, I’ve always tried to run auditions as fairly and respectfully as possible.  Lay out materials for actors to read before hand, explain what it is that you want, tell them up front about the money and tour and topic, and why you’re working on what you’re working on.  I remember we made a tiny little area with two chairs and some info, photos of the puppets, material about the company, just outside the door to that rather dark low-ceilinged ground floor room in North London that we had to audition in.  We’d just finished three years of work in Macau, a year in Hong Kong, time in Tehran in January 2009 and I was proud of that work, and wanted auditionees to know about it.

Christine is an Auzzie, very high up in HR but a bit shy.  Having her help was lovely.

I only had one day in London and there were three key things I needed to find out in the 20 minutes we had for each audition.  Could they act, when allowed to choose their own piece? Could they understand that puppetting is about channeling acting and reactions into a puppet on your own hand? Did they enjoy comedy?

I remember one actor who got the part working with a sock from his own laundry, making it come alive as the most delightful witty and challenging character.

I also remember wanting to communicate my love of all aspects of physical theatre, mask, clowning.  I certainly felt that after more than 20 years working in the UK had a right to be in London.  Auditioning. Even if the room was a dingy. If I was kind, straight forward and respectful, I would be met with kindness, straight forwardness and respect.

I decided I would meet actors for 20 minutes.  Usually it was 10 in the business.  Twenty minutes felt like a bit of luxury. I would be a specific as possible before hand, so that people would know exactly what I needed to see.  I would ensure they wouldn’t waste their time or mine if this job wasn’t for them.

By the time I found myself in that audition room, I had set up and run two companies, line-produced in the West End, run an English rep theatre, run an Irish regional theatre, set up a producing consortium, taken seven shows to Edinburgh, written, directed, produced up and down the country.  At one point in the 90s a show sponsor had gone bankrupt and I had spent three years personally working off a £14,000 company overdraft. I was a respected freelance director and playwright. I had been commissioned for TV, for radio, and fought my way through depression and the death of my beloved father.  I had met and married an Irish musician.  With his help I had beaten an vicious eating disorder. I had worked all over the world, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Iran, China, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, all across England, Scotland and Wales, all across London. I had established myself in Belfast.

I didn’t think of myself as the article describes me: not bulbous, or breathless. I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘coo-ee’ to anyone in my life. I didn’t think my Canadian accent was inferior because I’ve never judged anyone for their accent in English.   I knew that it was acceptable to be casually racist about ‘fat Americans’ in London, because in my 12 years there I’d heard plenty of those kind of remarks, but I didn’t think they applied to me.

I speak two languages fluently, with smatterings of several more.  I was born in Delhi, grew up in Bangkok, Jakarta, Geneva; I’m a citizen of the world.  Not “a bulbous woman with a sprig of spiked hair” casually featured in a Guardian article as an ‘absurd’ example of reaching “rock bottom”.

I also don’t think that asking London actors to work in Belfast is part of ‘rock bottom absurdity’.  

The Ulster Kama Sutra tour worked out of Belfast in 2012, playing in Northern Irish regional theatres.  In his Guardian article Rhik has transformed this into ‘six venues in the West of Scotland, driving back to Cumbernauld each night’.  The West of Scotland is huge.  What sane person would organise that?  

And why Cumbernauld anyway?  Has Cumbernauld been chosen because it is "the back of beyond"?  Is the West of Scotland somehow more absurd than Belfast?  Or are they both so interchangably awful to someone from London that it doesn’t matter? London hits rock bottom, and the outer reaches of the British Isles exist only to showcase the awfulness.

For Rhik, the puppets we developed are part of the awfulness too.  Not our puppets of course, strange made-up puppets from his memory that serve to underline more awfulness.  In our show there was no playboy bunny, there was no radishes, there was no Hitler, although there was a puppet version of our actor colleague John, as there was of each actor, who happens to have short dark hair and glasses.  There was no one called Esmerelda.  There never was.  There were three crocheted vaginas, developed with the help of the ladies of Belfast’s Indian community centre, and the Belfast Lesbian support network and various other groups, each about the size of a teacup and saucer.

Wouldn’t you be charmed by those?  Doesn’t the idea of little crocheted vaginas (one even had reading glasses) conjure up adorable images of the WI, and jam, and needing considerably bigger buns?  They were created to be fun and feminist, and they came in different skin tones.

In the audition I spoke quickly about the challenges of working interculturally around sexuality in Northern Ireland. I struggled to help the actors challenge the texts they had chosen. I taught actor after actor the rudiments of puppetry in just a few moments. I tried to have fun. I shared the development work I had done, the hilarity of euphemisms I had run into, the gentleness we had to find to handle shame wherever we met it.

But in Rhik’s Guardian piece I am just part of the awfulness, I ‘burble’, ‘yelp’ and then ultimately I ‘coo’ the genital euphemism that always entertained and saddened me when I ran into it in workshops: ‘the lady garden’.  I am served up as the fun object of contempt to showcase how far Rhik Samadder has fallen: to my bulbous, cooing, Canadian, lady-gardening level.

That was tough to read.  And it was tough to know that it is out there to be read by colleagues in London, Belfast and beyond.  I’m pretty identifiable.  I’ve been told that if you google ‘vulva puppets’ you  get me.  So this is me pointing it out before anyone else stumbles on it.  I'm taking the bull by the horns.

And the sun is still shining outside the window.  Yesterday’s climate march seemed like a success.  And you know what? So was that tour of the Ulster Kama Sutra that Rhik didn’t get cast in.  

The crocheted vagina puppets have gone on to star in a world-wide ad campaign for sanitary products, aiming to make women more comfortable with their bodies and menstruation.

In the years since Rhik’s audition I’ve worked with numerous professional visible minority actors, mentored those seeking to enter the profession, engaged with thousands of community participants, run programmes to create new Irish non-white stories featuring languages other than English, represented Northern Ireland in everything from Shakespeare 400 to case studies in diversity across Europe.  Books and articles have been written about my practice from Galway to Berlin to Melbourne.   

But, as I read the Guardian article that sort of featured a sort of version of me, I wept and felt small.  I was humiliated.  I had to pick myself up from that humiliation and think about what it meant.  

What I want to say is: ‘Rhik, if I somehow contributed to making you feel humiliated in that room in North London all those years ago, I am sorry.  It was never my intention.’  I have been knocked down and picked myself up too.  I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. I have found joy, and companionship, and overcome abuse, and shared tough times and great moments with wonderful talented colleagues.

I hope I don’t feature in your book. Even though you say you’ve turned your heart inside out to write it.

I’ve turned my heart inside out too.

You can read Rhik's article about reaching rock bottom here https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jul/20/rhik-samadder-confessions-of-a-failed-actor

The Story of Midsummer Night's Dream

I'm getting ready to direct my next large-scale Shakespeare production, for Terra Nova Productions: A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I'll be leading thirty professionals, working with 150 people from across Ards and North Down to create the show, which opens on the 2nd of May 2019.  There will be dance, hopefully martial arts, maybe skateboarders, a choir, live music and more.  It will, of course, be exploring intercultural relationships in Northern Ireland, but more on that anon.

One of the first things I get asked by people less familiar with Shakespeare is, what is the play about?  They may remember Puck, and some lovers, and Bottom getting turned into a donkey, but it is usually a bit of a blur. With that in mind, here is the basic story as our production sees it.

So, here goes...

The Story of Midsummer Night's Dream

This Shakespeare story is set in Athens (Ards & North Down) where young Queen Thesea has just agreed to marry the Warrior Hippolytus to confirm peace between their two countries.

A group of WI ladies have decided to rehearse a Greek tragedy in honour of their Queen’s marriage celebrations.  They decide to include the new talent in town, a rowdy weaver from Donegal called Bottom. He thinks he’s brilliant and wants to play all the parts.

Two sets of young lovers are also trying to sort their lives out.  Hermia loves Lysander, an immigrant who has done very well for himself, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius.  Demetrius likes the idea even though he’s been secretly wooing Helena. However, he ditches her when Hermia’s father makes him a good offer.  The Athenian rules say that Hermia must do what her father says.

In the wild woods outside the city the fairy king and queen are having a marital spat.  They and their rival gangs of supernatural beings meet in the wood for a brawl. King Oberon is conspiring with his servant Puck to punish his Queen, Titania, and he decides to magic her eyelids while she's sleeping so that she’ll fall in love with the first thing she sees when she wakes up.  And let’s make is something ridiculous, Oberon and Puck decide.

Lysander and Hermia decide to elope, and run away into the woods.  They are followed by Demetrius who is followed by poor Helena. Puck and Oberon decide to make things right for the lovers, but unfortunately Puck magics the wrong eyelids and suddenly Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with Helena.

The WI ladies and Bottom also head into the woods to find a good secret place to rehearse their play.  Unfortunately for them, Puck decides to turn Bottom into a donkey so that he can be the thing that Titania falls in love with.  Everyone else runs away screaming.

After a long night of confusion, shouting, running around and ‘amore’ between Titania and Bottom the Donkey, Oberon decides that enough is enough.  He orders the magic be taken off of Titania and Lysander’s eyes.

Titania forgives Oberon, and the two severed parts of the fairy world are reconciled in a wild dance.  

Lysander & Hermia and Demetrius & Helena are discovered by Queen Thesea and her fiancé.  Influenced by her own newfound happiness and the extraordinary stories of the night’s adventures, Thesea decides to do away with the old rules and everyone gets to marry the person they want.

There is a big celebration featuring talented people from across Ards and North Down, showcasing all kinds of different traditions of marriage from around the world.  It is an extravaganza of movement, dance, poetry, acting, singing and music, and they are joined on the stroke of midnight by the members of the fairy world in a final celebration.

To find out how to get involved with the production, on-stage, back-stage and more go to www.terranovaproductions.net/dream or seach social media for #ANDdream.

Four Women Over Forty Take Men's Roles in the Belfast Tempest

For international women’s day, I thought I would just spend a few minutes writing about why I have cast so many women in the Belfast Tempest, being staged at T13, in the Titanic Quarter, April 20^th to 23^rd this year.  2016 is the Shakespeare 400^th Anniversary, and scholars believe that Shakespeare was born and died on the 23^rd of April, the final night of our performance, so this feels like an important landmark moment.

For the Belfast Tempest, I have cast four key men’s parts with women.  What is more, I have cast them with women over 40.  As anyone working in theatre, film or TV will know, meaningful parts for women are rarer than the same for men, and parts for women dry up over 30 years of age.  The parts I have cast with women are: Antonio, Prospero’s scheming sibling, who steals his Dukedom; King Alonso, the ruler of a nearby kingdom who assists Antonio in the usurpation but comes to regret is decision and rejoices when his son Ferdinand proposes marriage to Prospero’s daughter Miranda; Stephano, Alonso’s drunken butler; and Gonzalo, the elderly aide who assists Prospero when his Dukedom is usurped and spend most of the play either trying to cheer everyone up, or worrying about their welfare.

The Belfast Tempest is a professional production (one of seven Creative and Cultural Belfast) that sees a professional cast, from Northern Ireland and beyond, joining 230 people from across the city to create an enormous magical site-specific production down in T13 warehouse. We are playing in the round, and audiences will be invited to take their places on seats decorated as rafts and shipwrecks to see the production.  The betrothal party of Miranda and Ferdinand has been turned into a 25-minute extravaganza presented in their honour by people from across the city.  So, it is obvious right from the start this is the Belfast Tempest, using Shakespeare’s text only, but trimmed, slimmed and adapted to say something about our city.

So, back to how and why I changed those male roles to female.

I wanted something for the talented professional actresses of Belfast to get their teeth into.  But I also wanted the gender flip to make sense in terms of the play.  I believe we women aren’t served with tokenism.  We’re served when an active watchful eye is being kept on equal opportunities for us, and on the service of good art at the same time.

So, the characters in the Belfast Tempest reflect three time frames.  The time of the original Tudor push into the island of Ireland – represented by Ariel and Caliban, both servants of Prospero.  The time of Belfast maritime power and ship-building greatness, just prior to the sinking of the Titanic and the first world war.  This timeframe is represented by Prospero, his daughter Miranda and in my interpretation, his sister Antonia.  Prospero confesses that before his dukedom was taken over by his sister, he didn’t enjoy ruling saying and put his sibling in charge:

I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated to closeness and the bettering of my mind… in my false [sister] awaked an evil nature… [she] did believe she was indeed the duke;

…Me, poor man, my library was dukedom large enough; of temporal royalties [she] thinks me now incapable;

And I thought: ‘can you blame her’?  Seriously though, the rise of the suffragette movement in this period, the fight for changes to the laws to allow women the vote, as well as more autonomy and more legal rights, and the resistance these women faced, give me a very good reason to make Antonio into Antonia, and to cast the talented and redoubtable Jo Donnelly in the part.

Queen Alonsa, Stephana and Gonzala belong to the third time frame represented in the Belfast Tempest: modern times.  These characters are blown onto the island by the magical Tempest that Prospero creates, they are quite literally ‘the blow ins’ new arrivals from outside Northern Ireland, and they represent everything that Prospero hates, everything that he perceives have robbed him of his power.  They are not evil characters, they are fully rounded human beings: generous, selfish, petulant, kind, loyal, disloyal, regal or ludicrous, hopeful or despairing at different times during their journey.

I wanted this cast of characters to look and sound different: by their voices, race, dress and characters to represent all of us who, while born elsewhere, have settled in Belfast.

Nicola Gardner is an experienced and highly professional black actress from Manchester. I have grown up around black women of power and distinction and I immediately envisaged Queen Alonsa as one.  Nicola seemed like perfect casting.  Her drunken butler Stephano became, her drunken PA Stephana, and wonderful comedy character with more than a dash of AbFab about her.  Who better to pull that off then my long-time friend and artistic collaborator Nuala McKeever?  The fact that Nuala’s ear for accents allows her to nail the part of a white character who is not from Northern Ireland was a must.

I can’t reveal who is playing Gonzala because she has not accepted the role yet, but with several powerful women performers over 40 in Terra Nova’s community programme, I am spoilt for choice.

The decision ‘mess with Shakespeare’ as some might say, wasn’t taken lightly, or disrespectfully, but as part of carefully thought out reinterpretation of the play for Northern Ireland in 2016.  As Simon Russell Beale said to the Guardian (15.02.15):

Shakespeare is “big enough” to withstand having scenes cut and lines transposed or obsolete words changed for the sake of clarity. “You can do what you like with it as long as you make coherent, emotional sense.  I see absolutely no problem in throwing Shakespeare around.  The texts will, hopefully, always be there.”

Personally, I like to think that man who created Rosalind, and Cleopatra, and Gertrude and Juliet won’t mind strong women enjoying themselves getting their teeth into his language and his characters in the Belfast Tempest.

The Belfast Tempest is performed April 20^th to 23^rd at T13.  Tickets are currently on sale at www.crescentarts.org and www.visitbelfast.com – to find out more go to www.terranovaproductions.net/belfast-tempest.

Andrea Montgomery

8^th March, 2016

"Flegs" In East Belfast

On Tuesday flags, or should I say 'flegs', went up in East Belfast.  Not on my street, but within sight of my house.  The flegs commemorate the founding of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) in 1913 - many of whom went on to die in the Somme.  About sixty years later the UVF name and its symbols were taken over by a group responsible for the death of many hundreds of people during the 'Troubles'. As were several other groups, too.

Some, but not all, of the men putting up the flegs wore masks.  The flegs are unofficial but hundreds of them have gone up. An official parade is taking place next Sunday to commemorate the founding of the origional 1913 UVF and the flegs line the parade route.

On Tuesday, as we drove past, the expressions on the faces of the men putting up the flegs made me pretty uncomfortable, and I thought: 'what is the outcome you most heartily desire? And if you got that, what would you do next? And then what would you do after that?'

My husband feels it is futile and dangerous to talk to anyone about the flegs. I'm not sure.

Oh, my feelings are complicated.