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T H E O S T R A K A P L A Y S
A C O M P A N I O N
BY
FRANCIS HAGAN
An Author’s Introduction:
Ostraka: the process whereby a person was nominated by name using broken or ruined shards of pottery in order to expel them from the city-state; hence the word ostracism. That word somehow seems to fit the theme running through the plays I have been writing over the last three years. In all of them you will find characters who no longer fit in or who have been expelled or even indeed exiled from either the city-state, a house, a library, or even larger realms like history itself or a strange planet lost to its own time. These ostracised characters flounder as a consequence and what follows seems in many cases to be a forlorn struggle to either recapture their old place or re-define a new position almost out of pique or even indeed madness. Words and themes recur in all these plays - decadence, rebellion, stubbornness, acting, revenge, madness, the refugee, the damned, and so on. These characters are not easy people to side up alongside to as you watch them in these plays. They are wilful and monomaniacal in most cases. Many are driven by an ethics created by the extreme outside position they now find themselves in - from Hypatia alone and lost in the Ruins of the Library, to Inigo Jones failing to stage the last great Masque of Elizabethan England in a burnt-out House, to even Unwith himself now driven to remain in that single lonely body and denying himself even water to drink by. These characters exist as positions outside normality and by doing so engender a new perspective riddled with desire, politics and will. As such they are not sympathetic characters. The opposite in fact. You will not like most of them. You will not even identify with many of them at all. In fact, empathy, that old canard of narrative and story, will be missing for most of the time.
What you will find in the plays which follow is instead a poetic imaginative space outside of any easy realm: indeed a necessary space where all the usual habitual marks of identification will be at best provisional - if they are there at all. This is the dramatic world or diegesis of the Ostracised - those lost characters either wilfully expelled or selfishly cast out. These characters exist to irritate and provoke by their absence even as they carve out a new realm or aesthetics against our own. They are in the last resort the only really valid explorers left in that they move beyond and underneath that which we have all already accepted.
Thus the dramatic space in these plays is also somewhat wilful and selfish. There is no easy narrative in these plays. Some may flirt with narrative in the conventional sense - A Little Winter Love, for example, or The Andalusian Study - but most eject narrative as a consequence of these characters and their journey into a new space. Language fills these spaces as an excess; dialogue crumbles into monologue; action reverberates into violence on an almost aesthetic level. These bodies overlay each other with blood and cruelty as they flounder and create- all outside whatever convention has abandoned them.
It may be asked why a dramatic space? Why not write about these characters in a novel or indeed even in poetry? Because in the end these characters exist to fill space - a space outside convention and any easy empathy. That in fact as theatre is both the first and the last public space (from which politics and religion are bed brothers) these characters need to be seen/scene as bodies struggling beyond the limen of the known and the familiar. In doing so, they become profoundly political bodies arguing for the selfish, the willed and the unknown as acts to be seen and felt by a public body. In this sense, because dramatically these characters have been ostracised by a larger public body then it is only apt that another public body - the audience - witnesses that inevitable consequence which is their tragedy.
This in the final analysis is the world of that lonely and final tragic character: the Ostraka; a character alone who may show us a last horizon beyond morality and ethics or conventional politics, and who may if we can stomach that journey lead us to a new horizon within . . .
UNEARTH
This on the surface seems like a conventional science-fiction premise: that of the team of explorers lost on an alien world who stumble into a mystery which then allows them to discover a deeper humanity in themselves. And in some ways I suppose it is - but with a dark twist in the centre. Beneath that surface narrative lies a more complicated humanity where perhaps Blade Runner meets Solaris. For in this alien world the team is not a team at all and the man tasked with uncovering a hideous crime is himself not a man at all. Here in Unearth a single premise underwrites everything and that is what if a single mind can be projected not just into one clone but into multiple clones? And what if while distilled into a multiple cloned team, one of those clones is discovered murdered? Can you murder yourself and if so what would drive you to do such a thing? Out of that deeper science-fiction premise rose the story of Unearth - a planet doomed beyond time under a remorseless sun that never moves. Under that unblinking monolith, a violent act is committed and a solitary man - Unwith - enters to solve and judge those responsible.
This is the diegesis of Unearth - a place where the mind is scattered and fragmented and even in the end driven mad. A place where murder is not murder and time never moves. It is an alien realm shorn of empathy and consequence from which arises a monstrous act unthinkable to all who are involved in it. It is also a place so far distant from us here on Earth that it can of course only be our own space now twisted and distorted out of all easy perspective. For in the end, Unearth is our own planet now rendered alien and inhospitable. The cloned bodies our own now lost to all time. And the mind broken and scattered in these clones that of an alien mind from a world far distant from our own.
I had originally conceived of Unearth as being a Radio Play - as I imagined the dialogue and the environment suiting that medium better than the stage. However, the more I decided on the structure of the play the more I realised that in fact theatre was its true medium - for in the end this was a play rooted in bodies; those clones of the team all occupied by that singular mind and that these bodies needed to be seen onstage for the deeper themes to be really touched. On the radio, it would all be sounds alone and that would in some way betray what was actually happening here. This led to a debate on the staging of Unearth in my mind - I was deliberately avoiding dramatic action in the scenes given that the team were all one lost character - and I quickly decided that tone and a certain cold quiet staging would be appropriate here. This is not a naturalistic piece. The play is comprised of short scenes often no longer than a single page. Dialogue is clipped and terse - devoid of humanity except towards the end. Only Unwith talks easily with the other members. They themselves are minimalist in their words; somewhat less than themselves as it were. So in my mind the staging should likewise be unaturalistic: abstracted perhaps, or even stylised to the point of rendering them statuesque onstage - riveted in that awful space where the sun hangs above them all, never moving . . .
ITHAKA
This was a short piece written specifically for the National Theatre of Scotland’s Five Minute Theatre festival. It was staged in the Govan Theatre Arts Collective building at Water Row. This of all the plays is perhaps the most conventional - set in a lost cr
ossroads deep in an old Europe in the 20th century. An old woman rummages around collecting firewood and kindling as a scarred veteran in a nondescript army greatcoat drifts past. This is of course the last echo of Ithaca, that island home of Odysseus and Penelope, and these two characters are all that is left of them now in our world and our imagination - lost souls only really grasping fitfully at what they once had. It is a small and quiet piece and is perhaps of all the plays the one with the most hope in it. For in the end, this scarred veteran finally finds his home and love even as Penelope accepts him back as a man now no longer driven by adventure and war. Finally they can begin to really understand each other.
THE ANDALUSIAN STUDY
This is a play where I wanted to pose a mystery to the audience and leave it unsolved except for two clues - one major and one minor in the piece. On the surface this is a conventional story - that of the outsider being seduced into a private world wherein two players compete for