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"I'm most proud of the things that took me the most courage"
Jean Betts
Jean Betts
My Heart is Bathed in Blood, by Michelanne Forster
I've written five plays based on historical events. The first, Daughters of Heaven, was about two schoolgirls convicted of murdering the mother of one of them and was subsequently made into a film by Peter Jackson called "Heavenly Creatures" (not, unfortunately, using my script but that's the way it goes). My second play in this genre- Larnach: Castle of Lies- was about a turn-of-the-century politician who shot himself in Parliament, and anyone who has been down to Dunedin will have probably toured Larnach's castle, one of the big draw cards for tourists on the gloriously scenic Otago peninsula. This Other Eden, my third historical play, was about one of New Zealand's first missionaries, and the author of the first Maori-English dictionary, Thomas Kendall. He was forced to resign from The Church Missionary Society in 1824 for embracing Maori values, deserting his wife and "going native". More recently I revised "My Heart is Bathed in Blood" for the Fortune theatre in Dunedin - a play I originally wrote on commission for Unitec. This play was about the sad story of a Riverton small town girl who went from Dux of Southland Girls to murderer after shooting her lover, a fellow doctor, in the house surgeons quarters in Dunedin. Senga ended up in Mt Eden, serving her time alongside with Juliet Hulme which made a rather eerie full circle for me as a writer. Finally, last summer saw the longest professional season I have ever had for a play- in Oamaru of all places. The Great Storm of 1868 was commissioned by a forward thinking business man from Auckland who relocated to Oamaru and realised the huge potential of the historic district there. The play was written for specifically for tourists so that they could more fully appreciate the story behind Victorian Oamaru's rapid commercial rise and decline.
So, as a starting point, I think I can safely say that history has been kind to me in terms of providing a slew of fascinating stories which have adapted well to the stage. But in spite of writing plays about the past I have no training as a biographer or historian. In fact, I suspect I'm an historian's nightmare because I purposefully go looking for the contentious, the salacious, the quirky, the confrontational and the tragic. I like to publically declare I'm writing a work of fiction once I start work on these history based plays. Partly I say it to protect myself from accusations of defamation or inaccuracy -- but it's not just fear that has me crying "it's fiction! I'm also keen to put myself in the creative camp because I knew the great biographer Michael King as a personal friend and there is no way I could ever compare my work or methodology to his. His journalistic and research skills and knowledge of history far exceeded my own. We didn't even work in the same neighbourhood!
The public is generally very accepting of the idea that fiction is off the hook in terms of needing to give strict or objective rendering of "what really happened". Film and theatre goers expect something more than a biographical or factual account of a person or event when they go to a film or a play. Ideally, they want to be engaged with the material being presented. Film and play going are leisure- time activities and who wants to spend their precious leisure hours in an unasked for history lecture? To tell a good dramatic story you need a new angle on an old story, deftness of touch, clarity of purpose, and psychological aptness. Plain old facts just don't make the grade with drama.
So what is it that the playwright must do to harness historical stories and make them riveting?
I guess if I knew the answer my work would be on Broadway or on the screens saying "Miramax presents". But, alas, this isn't the case. But what I can tell you is that stories in theatre and film must unfold in real time. You've got a two hour period with a twenty minute break in the middle for popcorn and soft drinks to deliver the goods. But you've also got to provide a text which can be studied as literature -meaning you must provide depth and texture to your writing. They are also has to be room in your vision allowing different directors, designers and actors freedom to make their creative contribution. You've got to get used to the idea that your text is not only a finished product but also a blueprint, a working plan, a set of theatrical or filmic possibilities which can offer radically different experiences to different audiences depending on the skill and creativity of the production team and players.
I think a playwright's over-riding concern must be to make a meaningful connection with her audience. If you use historical events as subject matter you must be willing to compress time, conflate people and events, and mix known facts or people with imaginary ones because your priority is to finding a dramatic structure and characters who will excite and convince that audience. In other words, your play has to be bigger than mere events. Your play must explore some universal theme larger than "he said, she said". Strangely, I don't think it works to do this in a conscious way when you write. Instead, you trudge through the detail, the specifics, the slow building of action and reaction and out of this intense concentration arises, almost as a force of its own, some real and recognizable deeply felt human experience. If you are lucky. Sometimes all the hard works still amounts to dross.
I'm a careful writer. I try to be both tidy and rigorous in mastering the facts and historical context of my subject matter. But at a certain point - and it's always difficult to know exactly where that point is - researching has to stop and the business of imaginative conjuring has to begin. Writing a play based on an historical event is not simply a matter of lassoing thousands of slippery little facts and herding them into a sequence of events. Facts have to be a springboard for the imagination not a substitute for it. Good scholarship does not necessarily make good fiction. I'll never forget a dinner I had once with Elric Hooper, the former director of the Court Theatre. I brought boxes of notes to his living room in preparation for our discussion about the play Larnach: Castle of Lies, which the theatre had commissioned. I had just spent six months researching the story and was as hyped up as a contestant on Mastermind who just can't wait to press that buzzer. I rabbited on for five minutes, leafing through Xeroxed copies of letters, wills and genealogical charts. I stopped just long enough for Elric to silently shut the box lid."You don't want to see the rest?" I asked, surprised. Elric shook his head. "My dear," he said. "Just write the play."
Now on to what I will refer to as "the ethical considerations" of writing from real life. Let's face it -- writers of fiction have stolen stories from real life life since the beginning of time. Art and life are intertwined in splendid messiness and always will be. The dead have no recourse to a writer's interpretation of their life, so that usually isn't a problem except if there are children or husbands or wives jealously guarding the reputations of their loved ones. But what about the living? Do we own the story of our life or is it anyone's to take and tell? Everybody knows real people from the here and now feature prominently in much of the drama we see. Writers appropriate the stories of other people's lives routinely, especially for film and television dramas which lend themselves to this particular genre and it is commonplace for people to sell their stories to the highest bidder. Art and commerce appear to walk comfortably hand in hand - the seller and the buyer both happy chappies. But the question of using "real life" becomes much more problematic if the story is about people who don't have any desire to tell or sell their own stories.
I first ran up against this dilemma in writing about the Parker Hulme murder. The top legal eagle I could find explained that the facts of a story belong to the public domain. The Parker Hulme trial and the Senga Whittingham trial were fully written up in the newspapers of the time and the public was free to sit in on both trials- if they could get a seat. (The Christchurch public gallery was packed to the brim each day with citizens practically falling over themselves to see two accused teenagers in person... and in Dunedin, housewives and professors alike stormed the High Court to see Senga.) The public record for both murders was fulsome and, by supplementing this with interviews and background reading, I had the guts of both plays provided for me. What I had to imagine was the psychology, the driving motives, the quirky private details that make characters blossom from cardboard cut-outs into real (but imaginary) people. The other key thing I had grapple with was the entry and exit point of each story. Where should the journey actually start and end for my viewers? The public record doesn't really give you any of those kind of answers.
It is my view that, when you are accused or a crime- and particularly if you are tried and found guilty, you enter not only the public record, but also the stream of history- whether you like it or not. This, along with your conscience and memories becomes your life- long burden to bear. Some people (like OJ Simpson) seem to perversely enjoy their notoriety while others only want to shrink back into invisibility. I also believe that, after you have served your sentence, (or your public obligation) your story is your own again- which is why both my plays about females who have killed, finish where they do. (One ends with fierce hope for the future and the other with overwhelming regret) Here is the final speech from "My Heart is Bathed in Blood":
"I don't know why I did what I did. It was as if I slid into a kind of fog... a darkness that banished ordinary reason and perspective. I was unable to find my way between good and evil - or even to calculate the distance between them. They took away his body and I became the doctor who killed her lover. I was convicted of manslaughter and I went to prison. When I got out I created a new life for myself in Australia- but I kept my name. Senga Whittingham. I've seen sunrises and sunsets, oceans, great cities, mountains...and in every place I think, what right did I have to take all this away from another human being? I am alone. I have always been alone. And I am sorry."
Nevertheless, any fictionalized interpretation of the events on public record presents some risk to the writer. Although you try to make clear to anyone who is interested that what you are offering is a primarily a work of the imagination, those involved with the real event can still be offended. "Leave the poor soul alone, she has suffered enough" one of the actors was told in Dunedin while doing the supermarket shopping. And Senga herself, with whom I briefly corresponded, did tell me she could see no good coming out of it. That was hard to hear. For her, there was no redemption in retelling the story.
Using real stories and events is what writers like me do. Some of us get as far as writing fictionalised TV dramas based on current scandals, and a precious few, like our greatest dramatist, William Shakespeare, turn historical events into literature that sustains and deepens cultural heritage over centuries. My thesis is that the need to use history - whether recent or far away- exists because yesterday speaks loudly and urgently to today. Memory gives meaning to the present. So, in summary, for historically based dramas to be more than just an excuse for great costumes or exotic settings, they must find a way to tell us something about our lives and what they mean - or don't mean. I love this quote which I found some years ago in The Guardian newspaper- the author's name I have forgotten. The writer said that the past was "filled with men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts and swayed by their own passions ... and are now as gone as utterly as we ourselves shall be gone like ghosts at cock crow". Isn't that haunting... and so true? Ultimately, the playwright who uses history has the power to make the audience live within vanished time and feel, even if only briefly, the poetry of that comes from past and present co-existing. When that happens, we somehow understood that we belong not just to the here and now but to the continuum of time ...