Sink (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

John O'donovan

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 58

Beschreibung

Sink is a play of two voices for one actor, about memory, catastrophe and sacrifice. Bríd's coming home to convalesce after drying out in rehab. Ciara's headed west too, investigating a potential archaeological site on a parched area of bogland. But as the countryside swelters in a heatwave, the pair find peace elusive. How will Bríd cope in her old haunts? How will Ciara confront a past she thought forgotten? And will they unearth the hidden truth that binds them together? Sink premiered at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2019, directed by Thomas Martin. 'O'Donovan is a gifted writer, the lines curl about each other with elegance and depth' - Irish Independent

Leseprobe

John O’Donovan

SINK

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Thanks

Characters

Sink

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Sink was first performed at the Boys’ School, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on 10 September 2019, in a One Duck production, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival, with the following cast and creative team:

CIARA/BRÍD

Rachel Feeney

Director

Thomas Martin

Sound

Jon McLeod

Lighting

Cillian McNamara

Costume

Susan Yanofsky

Set

Dermot McMahon

Stage Manager

Georgia Piano

Producers

Alan Mahon

John O’Donovan

Author’s Note

The Boys’ School in Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, is an atmospheric space for a play. Two church windows sit high and asymmetrically on the back wall of the stage, a wall built out of small red bricks that are chipped and crumbling with age. Audiences filter in from behind this wall and down around a sloping ramp to take their seats in church pews, waiting in semi-darkness for the show to begin.

In the first production the director, Thomas Martin, had set the performer, Rachel Feeney, on stage before the audience entered. Poised atop a plinth, Rachel would lie against the back wall as though the wall were the ground and the audience were watching over her. She waited there, ghostly, in that kind of repose that looks like it could be sleep or death, until the lights shifted and the play began.

For an hour or so it was the only repose she got; Sink is a demanding prospect for an actor, with its mix of language and storytelling styles, and it was astonishing to watch Rachel emobdy Ciara and Bríd alternately, giving distinct, discrete postures, voices and personalities to them both.

The decision that the play should be delivered by a single performer alone is meant to highlight the doubling and cyclical action that defines the play, not only in overlapping themes and the interplay of coincidence, but in the storylines the protagonists follow: both women travel west from a tense and overbearing city to the apparent peace of the countryside only to be harassed and disconcerted by the recurrence of traumatic memories from their childhoods. Both seek to move past the anxiety these memories provoke – Ciara by trying to bring what’s unconscious to consciousness, Bríd by trying to repress and forget – and both women ultimately find a higher purpose in sacrificing their self-preservation for the salvation of another: Bríd shields a little girl from a traumatic experience of her own, Ciara fails to recall her own trauma but rescues an old man from alcoholic self-destruction.

Ciara and Bríd have opposing beliefs when it comes to memory, but they both come to an uneasy truce with their respective pasts, recognising that the ordinary business of living is a painful mystery – it was ever thus, and maybe no amount of self-excavation can change that.

I first started thinking about the ideas that would become Sink in the summer of 2018 when a heatwave struck Ireland and a host of archaeological finds were discovered as land dried out and outlines of henges, enclosures and other tombs were made visible in the scorched earth. It got me thinking about climate change and how it related to our past, and it struck me that many of the bog bodies that have been found in Ireland were probably, as Ciara says in the play, ‘Ritual sacrifice: tribal leaders probably, killed by their own people and buried. A punishment for bad weather, or an offering for better harvests.’

That seemed to me to be an exact doubling of what’s happening nowadays – people being so fearful of their future, so terrified of what their climate would do to them, that they would risk self-destruction and violence against their institutions of authority in the hope that peace might be delivered in the aftermath.

We’re living now with the mistakes that previous generations made; our traumas – of climate, of economy, of personality even – happen and recur because of how our immediate ancestors shaped the world to suit their short-term needs. And the world that the next generation gets to live in will be shaped entirely by our success or failure today to correct the errors of those generations that went before us.

If we are able to safeguard that future, it will be because the old modes of living have finally run dry. The choices we make now cannot just be the same old choices, and they cannot be choices just for us. We’re living cloaked in the remains of the past, but we need to start thinking in full awareness of the future – it is our capacity for imagining ourselves across time, perhaps disregarding the past, certainly protending the future, that will determine whether our descendants sink or swim.

That feeling, of living across time, of channelling trauma and playing host to other people’s pain, of sacrificing yourself and accepting the irresolvability of the mysterious way the past recurs is what drove the writing of Sink. Love and empathy are key – the idea that we might give up our own desires for the needs of others is the communality that can shape a friendship, a relationship, a family or a tribe. It is not the individual but the collective that gets prioritised. It is a calculated risk – it is not the burning of others to save ourselves, but the offering of oneself to save another – that might allow us all to survive.

Each night on stage Rachel had to pick apart these offerings, these knotty, interwoven thoughts delivered in two distinct modes of language – one discursive, one reflexive; one conversational, one pre-conscious – and tell a story that crossed multiple characters in a single setting across multiple timelines. For an hour. And audiences had to dig deep too, pull apart the story strands and find what was buried in the language.

It was never not a big ask, but hopefully what was waiting to be discovered was a sense of hope, an idea that we are often where we always were, but we also always have the opportunity to change, to give ourselves up and break the cycles that confine us. Whether those cycles are made up of the oppression of personal traumatic memory, or the damage done by the systems we live in – as is the case in both Sink and Flights – the answer is always in looking outside ourselves and offering up what we each might need from one another.

John O’Donovan

January 2020

Acknowledgements