T H E O S T R A K A P L A Y S
A C O M P A N I O N
BY
FRANCIS HAGAN
Published by Francis Hagan at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Francis Hagan
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T H E O S T R A K A P L A Y S
A C O M P A N I O N
BY
FRANCIS HAGAN
An Author’s Introduction:
Ostraka: the process whereby a person was nominated by name using broken or ruined shards of pottery in order to expel them from the city-state; hence the word ostracism. That word somehow seems to fit the theme running through the plays I have been writing over the last three years. In all of them you will find characters who no longer fit in or who have been expelled or even indeed exiled from either the city-state, a house, a library, or even larger realms like history itself or a strange planet lost to its own time. These ostracised characters flounder as a consequence and what follows seems in many cases to be a forlorn struggle to either recapture their old place or re-define a new position almost out of pique or even indeed madness. Words and themes recur in all these plays - decadence, rebellion, stubbornness, acting, revenge, madness, the refugee, the damned, and so on. These characters are not easy people to side up alongside to as you watch them in these plays. They are wilful and monomaniacal in most cases. Many are driven by an ethics created by the extreme outside position they now find themselves in - from Hypatia alone and lost in the Ruins of the Library, to Inigo Jones failing to stage the last great Masque of Elizabethan England in a burnt-out House, to even Unwith himself now driven to remain in that single lonely body and denying himself even water to drink by. These characters exist as positions outside normality and by doing so engender a new perspective riddled with desire, politics and will. As such they are not sympathetic characters. The opposite in fact. You will not like most of them. You will not even identify with many of them at all. In fact, empathy, that old canard of narrative and story, will be missing for most of the time.
What you will find in the plays which follow is instead a poetic imaginative space outside of any easy realm: indeed a necessary space where all the usual habitual marks of identification will be at best provisional - if they are there at all. This is the dramatic world or diegesis of the Ostracised - those lost characters either wilfully expelled or selfishly cast out. These characters exist to irritate and provoke by their absence even as they carve out a new realm or aesthetics against our own. They are in the last resort the only really valid explorers left in that they move beyond and underneath that which we have all already accepted.
Thus the dramatic space in these plays is also somewhat wilful and selfish. There is no easy narrative in these plays. Some may flirt with narrative in the conventional sense - A Little Winter Love, for example, or The Andalusian Study - but most eject narrative as a consequence of these characters and their journey into a new space. Language fills these spaces as an excess; dialogue crumbles into monologue; action reverberates into violence on an almost aesthetic level. These bodies overlay each other with blood and cruelty as they flounder and create- all outside whatever convention has abandoned them.
It may be asked why a dramatic space? Why not write about these characters in a novel or indeed even in poetry? Because in the end these characters exist to fill space - a space outside convention and any easy empathy. That in fact as theatre is both the first and the last public space (from which politics and religion are bed brothers) these characters need to be seen/scene as bodies struggling beyond the limen of the known and the familiar. In doing so, they become profoundly political bodies arguing for the selfish, the willed and the unknown as acts to be seen and felt by a public body. In this sense, because dramatically these characters have been ostracised by a larger public body then it is only apt that another public body - the audience - witnesses that inevitable consequence which is their tragedy.
This in the final analysis is the world of that lonely and final tragic character: the Ostraka; a character alone who may show us a last horizon beyond morality and ethics or conventional politics, and who may if we can stomach that journey lead us to a new horizon within . . .
UNEARTH
This on the surface seems like a conventional science-fiction premise: that of the team of explorers lost on an alien world who stumble into a mystery which then allows them to discover a deeper humanity in themselves. And in some ways I suppose it is - but with a dark twist in the centre. Beneath that surface narrative lies a more complicated humanity where perhaps Blade Runner meets Solaris. For in this alien world the team is not a team at all and the man tasked with uncovering a hideous crime is himself not a man at all. Here in Unearth a single premise underwrites everything and that is what if a single mind can be projected not just into one clone but into multiple clones? And what if while distilled into a multiple cloned team, one of those clones is discovered murdered? Can you murder yourself and if so what would drive you to do such a thing? Out of that deeper science-fiction premise rose the story of Unearth - a planet doomed beyond time under a remorseless sun that never moves. Under that unblinking monolith, a violent act is committed and a solitary man - Unwith - enters to solve and judge those responsible.
This is the diegesis of Unearth - a place where the mind is scattered and fragmented and even in the end driven mad. A place where murder is not murder and time never moves. It is an alien realm shorn of empathy and consequence from which arises a monstrous act unthinkable to all who are involved in it. It is also a place so far distant from us here on Earth that it can of course only be our own space now twisted and distorted out of all easy perspective. For in the end, Unearth is our own planet now rendered alien and inhospitable. The cloned bodies our own now lost to all time. And the mind broken and scattered in these clones that of an alien mind from a world far distant from our own.
I had originally conceived of Unearth as being a Radio Play - as I imagined the dialogue and the environment suiting that medium better than the stage. However, the more I decided on the structure of the play the more I realised that in fact theatre was its true medium - for in the end this was a play rooted in bodies; those clones of the team all occupied by that singular mind and that these bodies needed to be seen onstage for the deeper themes to be really touched. On the radio, it would all be sounds alone and that would in some way betray what was actually happening here. This led to a debate on the staging of Unearth in my mind - I was deliberately avoiding dramatic action in the scenes given that the team were all one lost character - and I quickly decided that tone and a certain cold quiet staging would be appropriate here. This is not a naturalistic piece. The play is comprised of short scenes often no longer than a single page. Dialogue is clipped and terse - devoid of humanity except towards the end. Only Unwith talks easily with the other members. They themselves are minimalist in their words; somewhat less than themselves as it were. So in my mind the staging should likewise be unaturalistic: abstracted perhaps, or even stylised to the point of rendering them statuesque onstage - riveted in that awful space where the sun hangs above them all, never moving . . .
ITHAKA
This was a short piece written specifically for the National Theatre of Scotland’s Five Minute Theatre festival. It was staged in the Govan Theatre Arts Collective building at Water Row. This of all the plays is perhaps the most conventional - set in a lost crossroads deep in an old Europe in the 20th century. An old woman rummages around collecting firewood and kindling as a scarred veteran in a nondescript army greatcoat drifts past. This is of course the last echo of Ithaca, that island home of Odysseus and Penelope, and these two characters are all that is left of them now in our world and our imagination - lost souls only really grasping fitfully at what they once had. It is a small and quiet piece and is perhaps of all the plays the one with the most hope in it. For in the end, this scarred veteran finally finds his home and love even as Penelope accepts him back as a man now no longer driven by adventure and war. Finally they can begin to really understand each other.
THE ANDALUSIAN STUDY
This is a play where I wanted to pose a mystery to the audience and leave it unsolved except for two clues - one major and one minor in the piece. On the surface this is a conventional story - that of the outsider being seduced into a private world wherein two players compete for control. Bill Alexander arrives a few years after WWII at the manorial estate of ‘Averroes’ deep in the Sierra Morena hills in Spain. He has been hired by this Averroes to catalogue and then sell a vast collection of dusty books and manuscripts. While there, Mira, the wilful daughter of this Averroes, seduces Bill against her father with the promise of love and freedom. What follows is a battle of wills as Bill attempts to navigate the truth between father and daughter. Except of course Bill is not all he seems to be - and neither for that matter is Averroes and Mira. The play is very much a ‘Propsero and Miranda with Ferdinand - except Ferdinand turns out not to be Ferdinand at all but Caliban in disguise’. Deeper secrets lie at the heart of this play too. There is a cruel murder which changes everything and yet which seems not to change anything at all. The more Bill falls into the dark world of this Spain lost in the foothills between the lands of Don Quixote and Lorca, the more his own reality and truth unravel also. In the end, Bill is left blind and crippled by a deep uncertainty about who he actually is - and it is this sense of unravelling that I wanted to leave the audience with also. Hence a mystery crucial to the play which is left unexplained at the end. Conventional drama will always attempt to tie up the loose ends - but in a play which examines the very unravelling of character I felt it was important not to tie everything up and so in some small way allow the audience itself to experience a little of what Bill himself is going through.
A LITTLE WINTER LOVE
This is perhaps the most thematically complex of the plays written so far. In one short and violent night the survivors of battle and siege root around in the ruins of Basing House attempting to survive, escape or even stage one last rebellion against the new forces of Puritanism. It is a play in which the last shards of Elizabethan Theatre fall in disarray. Here Inigo Jones struggles to rehearse and stage the last Masque of Royalty even as his nemesis, Major Harrison moves to mock him. As the long night drags on, men become women and the mad over throw the sane even as the sane don madness as an escape. The House itself crumbles into a new landscape and within these forms new shadows emerge: even the dead now drift seeking revenge.
There is something tragic about one man’s obsession to stage a Masque within a ruin - especially when it is a Masque obsessed with dreams and phantasms; a Masque detailing another Ark separate from the one built by Noah; an Ark where imagination itself finds refuge. It is of course that last defiant act against the end of theatre and freedom and a certain licentiousness now doomed to the pages of history - much like the head of Charles the First. Here in this play other forces swirl around Inigo’s struggle to stage that Masque and as they do so, the House itself mocks them. At the heart of this play then rests the notion of revolution and what happens in that awful moment when the old world tumbles into chaos and before the new order can assert itself. That moment when all the gates are open and every demon and fool capers in freedom. Chaos abounds but in that chaos can lie the seeds of a deeper revolution - against order itself. Basing House becomes then a crucible in the night; a staging ground, as it were, where morality and imagination war against whatever new order may come to chain them all.
Here in this play, clothes are thrown off, character is abandoned, social order is reversed. Even theatre itself is liberated into the gibbering of the mad. And out of all that chaos, the love of one man for one woman encircles all.
CONSTANTINOPLE, ITS DREAMS
This is a play in eight short scenes. Each scene is a facet of that magnificent city of Constantinople, once the greatest city know to the world. Each facet is a dark exploration of those souls lost in that city now itself lost from history. Constantinople: a place where people drown in books, where they are overwhelmed by a past too huge to comprehend, where every action is merely an echo of countless others many times repeated, wherein decadence is elevated to the level of style. It is a play where the character of the City itself takes centre stage.
Here you will see marionette makers reveal their Art to devastating consequences; you will see madness attempting to cut itself free from books; you will see skin itself used to stage a rebellion against an Emperor; you will see a mapmaker allowing one tiny little hole in his map to stand as the only freedom he can write in the city; and so on. Here in this play, character after character struggles with the presence of a city so vast and ancient it drowns them all.
And even in the Fall of that City, that madness continues as the books are carted away and into the West to preserve a History so old even its statues have eroded into dust. This is the legacy of Constantinople: the weight of a past too heavy to unburden. It imprisons even as it releases - and all those characters caught up in that past are always ostracised from truth and freedom.
THE WRACKED
This is perhaps the most ambitious play of the series - in that I have attempted to create a piece of what is called ‘Monumental’ or total theatre: that is, a piece of dramatic writing where every element in the writing is attempting to delimit and detail the directorial signature. Here stage directions, action and dialogue are all wedded together so that to tamper with or cut out any one element will seriously derail the piece as a whole. This is also a play which plays with its narrative structure in a wilful and complex manner: characters move back and forwards through the dramatic time in reverse order; the stage environment is mapped and shaped to echo into the following scenes; characters and effigies blur so that what you see becomes a strange hybrid realm peopled by shadows and caricatures. At the heart of this play lies Tomas De Torquemada: the Great Inquisitor of Spain, whose desire for Credo twists the realm into a phantasmagorical space where armies invade wardrobes and shadows eat and up and drown out real people. This is History as a horror story experienced by one man whose madness overrules all. It is a Spain in which the People of the Three Holy Books are torn out and scattered by obsession and desire. Where giant puppet effigies sway over nervous courtiers and characters emerge from the future to slay their ancestors in a fit of pique.
This play is not an easy play - it slides across the page in a miasma of enveloping characters and actions. It takes you into a world of red sand and mirrors and hanging effigies whose empty eye sockets swivel about unblinkingly upon all. It is a play in the end about that single moment where the end emerges to drown you out while you are still unfinished as a character.
It is only in this play of them all written so far that I place myself as a character.
THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY
This is a short play, about an hour long, with thirty short scenes, many of which feature characters who never re-appear. It is set on a shore cluttered with ruins of a forgotten civilisation battered by an uncaring sea. Along this shore wanders an endless stream of refugees, all struggling to articulate old actions and truths. Drifting in and out of these refugees are the last gods - now bored and filled with ennui. This is the world that is left to those heroes and demi-gods we once worshipped or were told about. The world of Phaedra, Oedipus and Medea. The world of Tragedy now abandoned to an anaemic place of echo and mockery. Here along this shore a slight figure also walks - the New God whose touch is redemption and whose words bring salvation from all their tragic masks. This is the last echo of Tragedy and also its pathetic Fate in a world which has abandoned them forever into the dry texts of plays and stories.
It is a place where Tragedy has come to die, alone and bereft.
A TIGER’S LEAP
The Great Library of Alexandria after its fiery destruction by Monks and Zealots now remains as a Ruin in the city. As such, the new Roman elite attempt to re-consecrate it into a nunnery not realising that Hypatia herself still lurks in the ruins and will defy them all. Here in these ruins the survivors scrabble and bicker attempting to hang onto the Old Order even as it moves in to sweep them away - but underlying all is that great writer Edmund Gibbons whose pen will resurrect the Library and Hypatia herself into History. What follows is a battle over the fate of the Library and the doom of Hypatia caught between martyr and victim. Her escape from that dilemma leaves her abandoned and alone beyond the pen of Gibbon.
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