Post by Ayla on Mar 3, 2016 8:43:01 GMT 8
Jo Clifford thinks playwrights are dangerous people. Some think that Clifford is pretty dangerous herself. When a film of her play The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, in which she portrays a transgender Christ, was shown in Belfast in November there were protests outside the venue.
“There was a rather bedraggled group holding a banner that said ‘Tradition. Family. Property.’ How could I or my play possibly be a challenge to property?” she asks, shaking her head and looking bemused. Earlier this year she performed the show – a gentle, compassionate piece that reimagines Christianity and the world at large as a more tolerant place – in a Manchester church as part of the Queer Contact festival.
Clifford smiles patiently when considering the Mail on Sunday’s coverage and says: “At least the piece didn’t insult me, and referred to me as ‘she’ throughout. It’s some kind of progress – they used to just call me ‘the sex-swap playwright’. But clearly for some reason they see me as a threat.” She suddenly looks quite delighted at the idea. “I want to be a threat. I certainly don’t want to court controversy. But every artist has to express the truth as she sees it and that gives us a power to change the world in subtle ways. And that makes us dangerous and means we have a moral responsibility for what we say and write. Words are very powerful and so is the imagination.”
‘It came from a very desperate place’ … Michael Fenton Stevens, Nicola Weston and Nick Finegan in Every One. Photograph: Richard Davenport
At the moment Clifford’s imagination is working overtime on a number of projects. It hasn’t always been the case. The English-born, Scotland-based playwright, 66 this year, first came to major attention back in the mid-1980s with Losing Venice, written under the name John Clifford, but in the 1990s suddenly found herself out of favour. She recalls going into a library and picking up a directory of playwrights in which she had once featured prominently, to find that she had been excised completely. “It was very strange and unsettling, as if I no longer existed.”
At the time she thought that she was being displaced by newer, younger voices. But now she wonders whether it was because she was always pushing the boundaries. “I recently reread a play I wrote back then that everyone turned down, and I can see why they did because it probably puzzled them. I think my work has always been an attempt to move form on in a theatre that so often seemed still stuck in the 19th century. It’s more important than ever to keep trying to do that. We are in a very different place, one where the old institutions and certainties are failing us, and we have to keep trying to invent the form that expresses that place most eloquently.”
It’s partly that playfulness of form that attracts the writer and director Chris Goode to Clifford’s work. This week at Battersea Arts Centre he is directing the English premiere of Every One, a play originally staged at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh in 2010, where the Guardian’s Mark Fisher gave it five stars. It was a response to the 2006 death from a brain tumour of Clifford’s wife, the feminist writer and campaigner Sue Innes, and her own experience of life-saving surgery. “Susie’s death broke my heart,” says Clifford quietly.
A modern version of the medieval Everyman, it follows a family plunged into crisis when the mother suffers a stroke while doing the ironing. “Every One is such a fascinating play because it feels like a provocation,” says Goode. “It’s so much about the everyday and yet it’s so weird. It shows us the here and now but it’s also a play in which death is a character and dreams and history are fluid. The story melts and forgets itself as its goes along. It’s molten. My task as the director is to hold all its ambiguities in the centre so that we can all dream it together as an audience. That requires nerve.”
Apart from a period in the late 1980s when she was writing up to four plays a year, Clifford has never been busier, both writing and performing. The latter has happened increasingly regularly since Clifford transitioned, with the support of the two grown-up daughters she and Innes raised. Performing is particularly important to her because it was while acting a girl’s role, aged 14 at the all-boys Clifton college in Bristol, that Clifford first found herself confronting her gender identity head-on.
“I loved acting and I loved the rehearsal room and being able to be somebody else,” she says. “It was where I felt confident, the place where at last I fitted in, and I loved theatre because it made me feel as if there was a place for me in the world. But it was while acting the girls’ parts I discovered that I’d be so much happier living as a girl and that was such a horrifying discovery for me at that time that theatre became tainted by it. It was a place of fear and shame.”
‘We are so bad about dealing with grief and death’ … Jo Clifford
For 15 years she turned her back on theatre, trying and failing to become a novelist, only starting to write plays in the early 1980s. It is only more recently that she has taken up performing in a significant way. Later this year she will take the title role in Eve, a piece she is co-writing with Chris Goode, based on her own experiences as a trans woman, that will be performed as part of the double bill Eve/Adam produced by National Theatre of Scotland.
“Rediscovering that original joy in performing, that sense of being totally at home on a stage, has been wonderful,’ she says. “But it’s painful too, because it made me realise that for so many years my creativity has been denied and blocked. If I’d been able to act – perhaps my real vocation – I’m certain I’d have been a better playwright. It has been a long struggle to come to a proper understanding of who I am and to be able to live out that identity openly. To do that is a gift beyond anything I would have been able to dream of when I was young and so afraid. Just to be free of the fear and shame is so liberating, both personally and creatively.”
It shows. Her version of Anna Karenina was revived by Ellen McDougall in Manchester and Leeds last year. Jesus, Queen of Heaven is this year going to the Festival Internacional do Teatro in Belo Horizonte in Brazil, a country where many trans women face daily physical threat. She’s got other plays too – including one on ageing – that she says are demanding to be written. It’s not bad going for someone who, despite having more than 70 performed scripts, once thought she had dropped off the playwriting map.
Every One is clearly a deeply personal play and one which reminds us that death is all around us but we prefer to avert our eyes rather than acknowledge its presence.
“It came from a very desperate place,” says Clifford. When I wrote it I was opening myself up to my own grief, a grief that I thought would destroy me. But also a bigger collective grief and trauma. We are so bad about dealing with grief and death. When my mother died my father came and took me out of school and then at the end of the day he took me back to school and the message I got was that you don’t cry, you just grit your teeth and get on with life. That can’t be right. We need to be able to cry about the things that distress us. It helps us deal with it.
“If my play helps people deal with their grief, makes them realise that you can have terrible experiences and not be destroyed by them, then it is doing some good in the world.”
www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/mar/02/jo-clifford-transgender-christ-overcoming-fear-every-one-bac-london
“There was a rather bedraggled group holding a banner that said ‘Tradition. Family. Property.’ How could I or my play possibly be a challenge to property?” she asks, shaking her head and looking bemused. Earlier this year she performed the show – a gentle, compassionate piece that reimagines Christianity and the world at large as a more tolerant place – in a Manchester church as part of the Queer Contact festival.
Clifford smiles patiently when considering the Mail on Sunday’s coverage and says: “At least the piece didn’t insult me, and referred to me as ‘she’ throughout. It’s some kind of progress – they used to just call me ‘the sex-swap playwright’. But clearly for some reason they see me as a threat.” She suddenly looks quite delighted at the idea. “I want to be a threat. I certainly don’t want to court controversy. But every artist has to express the truth as she sees it and that gives us a power to change the world in subtle ways. And that makes us dangerous and means we have a moral responsibility for what we say and write. Words are very powerful and so is the imagination.”
‘It came from a very desperate place’ … Michael Fenton Stevens, Nicola Weston and Nick Finegan in Every One. Photograph: Richard Davenport
At the moment Clifford’s imagination is working overtime on a number of projects. It hasn’t always been the case. The English-born, Scotland-based playwright, 66 this year, first came to major attention back in the mid-1980s with Losing Venice, written under the name John Clifford, but in the 1990s suddenly found herself out of favour. She recalls going into a library and picking up a directory of playwrights in which she had once featured prominently, to find that she had been excised completely. “It was very strange and unsettling, as if I no longer existed.”
At the time she thought that she was being displaced by newer, younger voices. But now she wonders whether it was because she was always pushing the boundaries. “I recently reread a play I wrote back then that everyone turned down, and I can see why they did because it probably puzzled them. I think my work has always been an attempt to move form on in a theatre that so often seemed still stuck in the 19th century. It’s more important than ever to keep trying to do that. We are in a very different place, one where the old institutions and certainties are failing us, and we have to keep trying to invent the form that expresses that place most eloquently.”
It’s partly that playfulness of form that attracts the writer and director Chris Goode to Clifford’s work. This week at Battersea Arts Centre he is directing the English premiere of Every One, a play originally staged at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh in 2010, where the Guardian’s Mark Fisher gave it five stars. It was a response to the 2006 death from a brain tumour of Clifford’s wife, the feminist writer and campaigner Sue Innes, and her own experience of life-saving surgery. “Susie’s death broke my heart,” says Clifford quietly.
A modern version of the medieval Everyman, it follows a family plunged into crisis when the mother suffers a stroke while doing the ironing. “Every One is such a fascinating play because it feels like a provocation,” says Goode. “It’s so much about the everyday and yet it’s so weird. It shows us the here and now but it’s also a play in which death is a character and dreams and history are fluid. The story melts and forgets itself as its goes along. It’s molten. My task as the director is to hold all its ambiguities in the centre so that we can all dream it together as an audience. That requires nerve.”
Apart from a period in the late 1980s when she was writing up to four plays a year, Clifford has never been busier, both writing and performing. The latter has happened increasingly regularly since Clifford transitioned, with the support of the two grown-up daughters she and Innes raised. Performing is particularly important to her because it was while acting a girl’s role, aged 14 at the all-boys Clifton college in Bristol, that Clifford first found herself confronting her gender identity head-on.
“I loved acting and I loved the rehearsal room and being able to be somebody else,” she says. “It was where I felt confident, the place where at last I fitted in, and I loved theatre because it made me feel as if there was a place for me in the world. But it was while acting the girls’ parts I discovered that I’d be so much happier living as a girl and that was such a horrifying discovery for me at that time that theatre became tainted by it. It was a place of fear and shame.”
‘We are so bad about dealing with grief and death’ … Jo Clifford
For 15 years she turned her back on theatre, trying and failing to become a novelist, only starting to write plays in the early 1980s. It is only more recently that she has taken up performing in a significant way. Later this year she will take the title role in Eve, a piece she is co-writing with Chris Goode, based on her own experiences as a trans woman, that will be performed as part of the double bill Eve/Adam produced by National Theatre of Scotland.
“Rediscovering that original joy in performing, that sense of being totally at home on a stage, has been wonderful,’ she says. “But it’s painful too, because it made me realise that for so many years my creativity has been denied and blocked. If I’d been able to act – perhaps my real vocation – I’m certain I’d have been a better playwright. It has been a long struggle to come to a proper understanding of who I am and to be able to live out that identity openly. To do that is a gift beyond anything I would have been able to dream of when I was young and so afraid. Just to be free of the fear and shame is so liberating, both personally and creatively.”
It shows. Her version of Anna Karenina was revived by Ellen McDougall in Manchester and Leeds last year. Jesus, Queen of Heaven is this year going to the Festival Internacional do Teatro in Belo Horizonte in Brazil, a country where many trans women face daily physical threat. She’s got other plays too – including one on ageing – that she says are demanding to be written. It’s not bad going for someone who, despite having more than 70 performed scripts, once thought she had dropped off the playwriting map.
Every One is clearly a deeply personal play and one which reminds us that death is all around us but we prefer to avert our eyes rather than acknowledge its presence.
“It came from a very desperate place,” says Clifford. When I wrote it I was opening myself up to my own grief, a grief that I thought would destroy me. But also a bigger collective grief and trauma. We are so bad about dealing with grief and death. When my mother died my father came and took me out of school and then at the end of the day he took me back to school and the message I got was that you don’t cry, you just grit your teeth and get on with life. That can’t be right. We need to be able to cry about the things that distress us. It helps us deal with it.
“If my play helps people deal with their grief, makes them realise that you can have terrible experiences and not be destroyed by them, then it is doing some good in the world.”
www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/mar/02/jo-clifford-transgender-christ-overcoming-fear-every-one-bac-london