"No Birds Sing"

No Birds Sing is the third play of the Fragment(s) trilogy and it still isn’t finished. It’s also very different to the other two.

For a start it’s not a monologue. There are three characters—Woman, Man 1 and Man 2—plus 13 others who only appear on sound recordings. Then it’s based on an early 19th century poem (echoes of Going Gently here!), John Keats’s La Belle Dame sand Merci. It also includes a lot of music, including a song in Welsh (Ar Lan Y Môr for those who are interested). And some of it is on the border between dance and physical theatre.

And it is, alas, stalled.

(My plays have a habit of doing this, unless I’m facing a very tight deadline. Does this say something about me?)

I got so far with it, then realised that I needed to see the physical section on the floor; I needed a workshop. So I got in touch with Jacob Ward who’d directed Curtains and asked if he’d be interested. He would, so I contacted an excellent young dancer / choreographer, Alys North, who had really impressed me when I saw her working with the very first Fertile Ground dance company, to see if she would be willing to contribute. She would too, so I sent them the script as it was then, with the section we were to work on clearly marked, and asked Alys to suggest a dancer who would play Woman to Jacob’s Man 1.

(Man 2 doesn’t interact with the others. It’s that kind of play…)

She brought along a young Chilean dancer, Gabi Serani, who had trained at the London School of Contemporary Dance and had worked with balletLORENT, and between them they came up with lots of good ideas—and we made a video of the whole workshop.

Now it’s stalled again. It’ll work, I know—eventually. But as often is the case, other work came along and this got pushed to the back of the queue where is has stayed ever since. But I will get back to it. I will!

Honest.

And there’s a couple of other things about it, things which started in this piece and have, in the last year or so, become increasingly a facet of my writing, a touch of—well, not perhaps the supernatural but definitely the paranormal, a sense of other-worldliness—and the occasional stepping outside of the dramatic illusion, a distancing, an almost (but not quite) Brechtian alienation. And if this doesn’t make the work easily accessible, so what? I’m writing what I want. I’ve been writing more or less to order for fifty or more years so hey, I’m the boss now!