"Going Gently"
I’d worked in theatres large and small, on site-specific shows indoors and out, in the UK (the North East, Birmingham, Wales) and in Germany (Wuppertal and Essen), but through my contact with Pink Lane Productions and the Pink Lane Poetry and Performance evenings, I was first led towards writing something I hadn’t done (or even thought about) before, a one-man piece.
And at the same time I was approaching 70 and very conscious of the fact.
The result?
A sort of semi-biographical piece called Going Gently, referencing, of course, Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle.
Ever since I was a young boy, I’ve been a reader—boys’ comics, novels of all kinds (classics, SF, crime, horror) and, as I got older at grammar school, plays and poetry became part of my reading. I developed an interest in musicals and opera, and, from an early age, I was a film-goer—I even became a committee member at the Saturday morning cinema club at the Havelock Cinema in Sunderland!
Words and language fascinated me. I did French at school, of course, and then Latin and Greek and, when I went on a school trip to Rome, I even taught myself some Italian. I read classics for my first two years at university before switching to English.
“You could almost say,” I thought to myself, “that I’ve lived my life through the words of others.”
That wouldn’t be true, not by a long chalk, because I had had a life outside of literature, but in this way the idea of Going Gently was born: an old man, partially me and partially what I might have been had things turned out differently, looking back on his life which had been “lived through the words of others.”
I used a whole range of very brief extracts from poems, Shakespeare and other dramatists, opera and even pop songs as a frame or even occasional commentary on our character’s life, and, encouraged by Jess Johnson and Robbie Lee Hurst, I performed the first ten minutes at the third birthday celebrations of Pink Lane Poetry and Performance, where it was quite well received, so I decided it was worth developing into a longer piece.
I worked on it over a period of some months and tried it out, directed by Helen Dobson, at two scratch nights in front of industry professionals before doing a script-in-hand performance for the Friends of the Customs House at one of their regular coffee morning meetings.
I learned from each performance and now it sits waiting to be done for a full audience, not as a stand-alone piece but as part of a trilogy which has the working title (because it isn’t finished) Fragment(s).