Imagendering II

CW: You have mentioned Caryl Churchill as your dramatic heroine. Do you share her feminist commitment? Would you consider yourself a feminist writer or as a writer interested in feminism? Do you think that gender plays a role for your plays?

LW: I don't think I write from any necessarily feminist impulse. I think being a woman I have an interest in writing good female characters and we are still working against a long, long theatre history that has been very male-dominated. There are not enough really good female roles in classical work. So in terms of providing quality roles for female actors, yes, I suppose I have that at the back of my mind. When I first started out, I determined that I would never write a play that had more men in it than women. But then I wrote Breathing Corpses and that has got four men and three women, so I messed up. But other than telling stories about women, to some extent, I am not sure I necessarily call myself a feminist writer.

CW: You have also referred to Sarah Kane as a writer whose work you admire. Although critics responded much more positively to your debut than to hers, I was reminded of the reviews of her debut when I read the reviews of your plays, because reviewers again wondered how a young woman can write about such sinister or shocking topics. Several articles played with the idea that you are obsessed with death and expressed concern for your mental health. Did you have the feeling that your gender played a role in the way that your public persona was created?

LW: I don't know really. I hadn't thought of my gender playing a role. But yes, I think that girls are not supposed to write about nasty things. People tended to be quite surprised when they met me. They expected me to be some kind of little goth chick and some of the reviews even seemed to be a little worried about my mental health. To me it is absurd to assume that I am obsessed with writing about death, or that writing about death is a necessarily unhealthy thing to do because I think death is something that we should be allowed to consider. And think about it and discuss it at any time. Not only when we are directly confronted with it.

CW: When you begin writing a new play, do you know what you actually start with? Is it a specific topic, or are you attracted by a particular character or a constellation of characters? Or is it maybe a formal interest, as the time structure in Breathing Corpses?

LW: I suppose it depends on the play. Colder Than Here started because I had an interest in natural burials after I've read a newspaper article about it. And also, as a writer you are always looking for stories that haven't been told before. Colder Than Here particularly came out of the idea of natural burial and of someone planning their own funeral - I had never seen that dealt with in a piece of drama. Usually ideas bubble away to the back of my head for a year or two until they are grown enough to become a play. With Breathing Corpses it was quite different, because I started with the character of the chambermaid finding corpses in the hotel. First it was going to be just a play about her, but then, through exploring her character, I got interested in what it is like to find a body and the different situations that can happen in. That snowballed into the idea of three corpses which will somehow be connected. I came to the idea of this circle and the idea of writing an impossible story, and so found a structure that was exciting because the audience would have some work to do in terms of putting the stories together. I think if it had been sequential, I would have gotten less out of the individual relationships. I wanted to have a linear structure of themes rather than of narrative. The themes were in a linear progression. I imagined the structure in the shape of a bowtie: It starts out wider in the beginning and closes in - and in the middle of that is the fight scene, which is the core - and than it spreads out again.

CW: I think you generally mix comic and serious elements in a very successful way, which makes it difficult to categorise your plays in terms of comedy or tragedy. Is that something that you aim to do, with having a special function of comic elements in mind?

LW: I suppose it comes out of an attitude really. My own sense of humour is slightly dark. And I think there is room for humour, even when the subject is really serious. Humour makes the tragedy feel bigger somehow. And particularly with Colder Than Here, I wanted it to be humorous, because I didn't want it to become melodramatic. I don't know if it's a specifically British thing, but I wanted to write about people's ability to make jokes in that kind of situation and to show how people get on with their lives, and that there can be humorous elements to that. I used to think of it as a graph, whose top line was the lightness and the humour, with the seriousness as another line underneath. And that the top line could fall down underneath occasionally, but you need it to get back up because the audience are capable of seeing both lines and connecting them by themselves.

From Page to Stage

CW: What are your experiences with joining rehearsals? Do you feel that there are repercussions in your work - do the rehearsals lead to immediate changes in the script, and does watching rehearsals maybe also have a long-term impact on your writing?

LW: I love being in rehearsals. Not just that you get to see some people but just to see how people react to the text and what they find difficult. Sometimes it comes out in a completely different way than how you imagined it. Actors are fascinating. I feel admiration for them, the way that they start off on the first day, you do a read-through, and then they spend weeks going deeper and deeper and deeper into it, their performances are developing and developing. So I find I learn a lot. There are some writers that don't really want to be in a rehearsal at all. I stay until I get kicked out. I just love watching it come together. It's mind-blowing at times.