Here’s April 2017’s issue, featuring some of my words….

Thank you for having me at Camden People’s Theatre to see your play.

Was it a play? It seems like many things – but multi-platform-genre-challenging-arts-project-open-to-personal-interpretation is both quite a mouthful and sounds a bit wanky. It was a mix of reading and performing; page and participation; set in the past, present and future; a dialogue between actors Lauren and Luca and us in the audience, as well as those from your workshops and website.

The setting at Camden People’s theatre is always small and sparse. You had just a school blackboard, letters, books and some parcels – but that’s fine, as it’s the words that matter here.

Letters are wonderful, to write and receive. It is communication; it’s a form of connection. Between the past and present, dreams and reality, inner and outer – with life. It was nice to hear the local letters, and the ones from your workshops. Each contained specific and personal tones and elements, but with a very common and human thread echoing through them all. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to think you were reading my words – and then discover that wasn’t the case. Someone else seemed to echo my thoughts.

There were many smiles from us in the audience but I would imagine some tears in the poignancy too. Nostalgia and remembrance, warnings and advice, hugs and hope – all seem to be covered. There’s funny quips ‘You don’t marry Keanu Reeves’ and some heartbreaking  ones – ‘Do not move to London…to a place where people do not love you and show it’ says one man.

I loved and hated Lauren and Luca – that hate being more the envy that they surely have it all – vitality, beauty, talent. They are bright and lively performers, but they also displayed vulnerability through their storytelling and revelations. The feeling is one of warmth, and so when you ask us to share, it feels comfortable to do so.

The board becomes filled with scrawls that don’t connect, there can be no algorithm as to the perfect letter for life. But I guess that’s the point. Adult life is messy. It needs accepting – all the shades of grey. We can guide and reassure, but never really get it right. Life just is.

You reminded me of this. Through connection and communication with others and ourselves, there’s always bright spots. It’s the little moments that make a life.

Thank you for the letter writing kit. Let’s keep this going. Enjoy your travels.

Perhaps I’ll hear from you soon?

Francesca x

—-

Letters To Myself is touring:

7.30pm, Tues 4 April – Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse

8pm, Thu 6 April – Seven Arts, Leeds

8pm, Fri 7 April – Lincoln Drill Hall

Sun 14 May – Coundon & Leeholme Community Centre [Donation on the door]

7.45pm, Thur 18 May – Upstairs @ The Carriageworks

8pm, Tues 22 & Wed 23 May – Live Theatre, Studio Theatre

Hollie McNish is a couple of minutes late to the Folkestone Quarterhouse stage. She keeps peering through the curtains throughout the hour long show. Like she’s not quite fully focused on the audience.

Which of course she’s not. Because she’s a mum. And since she unexpectedly became pregnant at the age of 26, her life has changed. Becoming a mother (her daughter, now 6, sits backstage watching Harry Potter) has been the best, hardest, most tumultuous, bizarre, emotional experience of her life, and is the subject of Nobody Told Me, a book of poetry and parenthood. It’s a collection of extracts from the diaries she kept from learning she was pregnant to her daughter’s third birthday, written in a mix of prose and poetry.

The reading is part of the Quarterhouse’s International Women’s Day Festival, and listening to McNish it’s clear that feminism and raising awareness of these issues is still needed. The book and show connect her own experience of motherhood with the political, society, race, relationships, commercialism and gender. Whilst occasionally admonishing herself for not being practical enough in delivering change, she knows that ‘creativity really is one of the best parts of humanity. It often brings out the structural and political issues I think and makes them easy to engage with in so many different ways. I’ve definitely felt before like I’m not being practical enough by doing poetry – my last job was working in planning and youth work. But actually, it is. It doesn’t have to be, but it can be. Hearing midwives say they’ve snuck my poems into hospital wards is probably the current highlight!’

You can see why they do. McNish is startlingly honest. Her writing and reading is conversational and real. Gritty and explicit. And this openness is needed in a world where pressures on new mothers are unrealistic and stressful and the practical aspects of such a dramatic life change aren’t discussed and the difficult elements side-stepped. She tells us about poo, sick and bleeding. About how alone she felt. The anxiety that comes from not knowing what you should be doing. How you’ll feel like a kid yourself, but have to get on with it. How she would find herself breastfeeding on toilets because after waiting ‘eight weeks to get the confidence to go into town / Now, the comments around me cut like a knife / As I rush into toilet cubicles / feeling nothing like nice.’

She admits feeling guilty because she doesn’t want sex again when her baby and boyfriend paw at her and ‘I just wish sometimes no one needed me / and I don’t want to feel guilty and tired all the time / I just want a body that’s mine.’ As celebrities pop back into shape in a few weeks her ‘stomach bulges like a water balloon / Her hollowed-out body lies like a carcass consumed.’ And she catalogues the scathing looks resulting from a toddler tantrum that comes out of nowhere, being judged on how fit she is to be a mother on that one moment and feeling like a ‘wretched human’ as a result.

But there’s also the beauty of what a child can teach you, and one of the first pieces she reads is about her year-old daughter looking in the full length mirror she has just reinstalled in the house, too disgusted by her own body to use it. Her daughter is in awe ‘hands clapping in applause to it / naked, bold and proud / her mouth open wide and round like / wow / my body is amazing.’

Spoken word has recently become fashionable, and rightly so. A new generation of poets including McNish, Kate Tempest and other contemporaries are on the national curriculum and McNish herself runs a company focusing on poetry in education. The entry of 11 April where she writes how she ‘wrapped my lips around my baby’s nose and sucked the snot from it’ is taught in schools (‘probably as contraception,’ she deadpans).

Perhaps young people connect with her. Dressed in laidback trainers, hoops, shirt over t-shirt, bright eyes and blonde hair in a ponytail McNish doesn’t look to be in her thirties. She’s friendly, warming the audience with her vulnerability, and invites us all to have a birthday drink with her in the bar. She has always written, ‘all my days, love it.’ But ‘Nobody Told Me’ was meant to be just another diary, like her teenage ones, a way of articulating herself and dealing with the emotion of pregnancy and motherhood, not a book. After an evening of entertainment and wisdom, I’m so glad that she was persuaded, that ‘Nobody Told Me’ is out there in the world and Hollie McNish’s bold voice is being heard by men, women, old and young.

Hollie McNish’s play Offside, which she co-wrote with Sabrina Mahfouz, comes to the Marlowe Studio, Canterbury  on 10 & 11 April 2017.

Born out of love for Charlotte (and Kate Bush), We Are Bronte is an irreverent deconstruction both challenges the Bronte story as it reflects it back. Slipping in and out of character, bickering between themselves and speaking to the audience, they intertwine scenes from family’s lives on bleak moors with the scenes and character from their novels. The stage is lit as they explain, and plunges into darkness as they perform.

Symbols and tropes of gothic fiction are well known and familiar, and with only a handful of props and few words they tell tales of woe, tears and resilience, all wrapped up in wind, whips and madness. With creative use of pieces of cloth and cellophane they engage in an absurd extension of the emotion, metaphor and meaning that pervades the sisters’ fiction. An early ‘embodiment of wind’ for example plays with the notion of pathetic fallacy. As usual the rumbles of trains enhance performance in the Vaults, particularly when strange noises play such a role in fiction. Combining physical slapstick, mime, with random quotes and atmospheric music they execute themes rather than particulars.

The pair are not here to tell a story, or play a character, but instead their episodic production sees them play an amalgam of characters that owes as much to the reverence paid to the family’s nineteenth century existence as it does to twentieth century gothic horror movies and set school texts. In its episodic portrayal we see Cathy searching for Heathcliff on wild and windswept moors, stoic Jane asserting that she is no bird, us questioning who is the mad woman, and everyone wet from rain and dying from tuberculosis.

This isn’t a biographical retelling, and certainly not for purists, but then you don’t tend to come to the Vault Festival or fringe theatre if that is what you are seeking. Instead, this is playful, exploratory, and fun – something you wonder whether the Brontes themselves may have been missing at times.

Day 13 – It’s Friday so it’s time for a group challenge – today we would like you to collectively write a story.

This one was done in person, via text, email, Facebook, across Kent, London and Newcastle, and with friends and family.

It was snowing outside, white and wispy like talcum powder. People were slipping on the ice – giving rise to sudden gasps of surprise as they slid in a direction they had not intended to. As the precariousness of their situation became apparent to them, they adopted a shuffling gait, arms outstretched waiting for the fall, as though they were penguins shuffling across the Antarctic Tundra. To an observer watching from his seat in the warm and safe cafe opposite, it appeared that they had become afraid of the ground itself. As if the very earth was in a temper and people dared not set it off. He checked his pocket watch; it would be doubly difficult to be both unstable and late. It was almost time for the cafe to close up, at which point he’d to be forced to go outside and join the trickles of people slipping and sliding across the pavement. He stood, the pain in his lower back making him jerk upwards robotically, while his eyes and fingers scanned and reached for winter’s armour – scarf, gloves, hat. Thank goodness he was flying home to Havana in the morning.