Unlocking Past Trauma

Friday 4th October - Actors East, Haggerston

Present: Rachel Bavidge,  John Chancer,  Marie Collett, Colin Ellwood, Simon Furness-Gibbon, Valerie Gogan, Ben McIntire, Georgia Murphy, Simon Usher, David Whitworth

​Not That Kind of Child by Kristine Brusdal, translated by Siân Mackie (2024)
 
Part of an unexpected and very welcome delivery from Unge Viken, of four scripts from the most recent round of their Ung Tekst scheme (of which we have such good memories from our collaboration in showcasing the previous round's plays at the Norwegian Embassy in London in late 2022).

And what a discovery this accomplished, urgent and timely play proved
 
Three women of different generations enter the space…and, after a silence, begin a theatrical conjuring, a mutual evoking of an emergency that leads ultimately to a devastating (but perhaps ultimately salving) emergence: the teasing out of a long-suppressed secret and its multi-generational consequences. Dramatic storytelling and psychological 'processing' are here persuasively fused in this exploration of the long-term consequences of trauma, and of the value of emotional recognition and support, for being seen, of ‘attention being paid’ - however delayed - in the healing from it.  

And the attention here is brilliantly theatrical, the play being also an exploration of the value of performance itself. As often with Shakespeare, the actual performance and the fictional drama are brilliantly sutured together, the one becoming vertiginous metaphor and enactment of the other. Are we watching actors, or the characters themselves enacting? Theatre or therapy? Whichever of the foregoing, are the performers evoking an exterior reality or an inner stream of consciousness? If the latter, is it an interweaving of three minds perpetually in isolation, or a slow convergence and integration?  And In a theatrical present, or a therapeutic or theatrical reenactment of the past? All these options seem at times kept ambiguously and effectively in play

The speakers/enactors are ‘A Daughter’, ‘A Mother’ and ‘A Grandmother’ (the indefinite articles apt as what follows is both specific to a single multi-generational family and potentially emblematic of something possibly – and disturbingly – more widespread).  
 
The full action is as follows, run through here in the hope of communicating how well worked and ‘placed’ it is, with its various layers so powerfully and sure-footedly integrated and its revelations so telling and well-judged
 
From the initial evoking of (what seems like) a familial idyll, a ghostly double exposure hints at an underlying crisis: a drug overdose, perhaps even the suicide attempt, of A Daughter now in intensive care. This underlying implied ‘present moment’ initiates an intricate weave of probing, evoking, resisting, solacing and, ultimately, of revelation 
 
The older women’s hurried journey towards A Daughter’s stricken bedside becoming a reference point orientating us – at first – to the past celebration of a high achieving ‘good’ child. But we are in fact sharing the heartbreaking ‘trauma response’ of the older women as they try to make sense what’s happened, how such an apparently happy and virtuous child has come to be in intensive care.  

We begin to see through the celebration, glimpsing a child desperate to fulfil her mother’s expectations, emotionally ‘unseen’, hyper self-critical, short of self-esteem, while setting impossibly high standards for herself and deeply affected by the condition of the world.  We also sense a troubling emotional shutdown across all three generations. Some of A Daughter’s responses seem acutely typical of a modern teenager but, without access to recognition and support, a tightrope was clearly being walked across a very dark abyss. The relentless positivity of A Mother seems brittle and blocking. The spectre of her daughter on life support in the emergency room recurs, despite her mother’s attempt to reconfigure the image to one of her daughter on a cruise ship sun bed.  
 
Sparely and powerfully, the daughter’s past is evoked and enacted, like a drama therapy embodiment of mutually but tacitly ‘held’ family lore. We learn that Daughter’s parents are divorced, and no sign of a grandfather.  Daughter as a young child substitutes food for love and body issues ensue. The relationship between Mother and Daughter is complicated by the former's emotional projections, associating the child’s apparent weight issues with the body of the absent father/partner.

Puberty further tips the mother/daughter relationship into a kind of erotically-projecting Electra complex, and hints emerge that the once high-achieving daughter is going off the rails. As she reaches 15, her mother discovers her using her piano lessons as a fake alibi for illicit activities. There’s an attempt by mother to ‘ambush’ her daughter into a doctor’s intimate examination.  
 
The present-moment convergence on the emergency room is evoked again. Mother phones grandmother with a view to meeting her at the hospital.  Then a further vista opens, onto the history of the troubled relationship between mother and grandmother. The shock of her child’s overdose tips the mother into regressing. She needs her own mother and recalls her childhood. Mother and Daughter keen for their fathers, but Grandmother shuts this down. Then,  as if perhaps in therapeutic role play, Grandmother finds herself drawn to granddaughter for emotional support and guidance - or to the actor playing her. Daughter enacts Grandmother’s own emotionally distant mother ‘from another time’. And here finally, chillingly, we are afforded a glimpse of the family ‘primal scene’, the root of its curse and its passed-down emotional occlusions.  Grandmother as a teenager tries to tell her own mother about what we surmise was a rape; a stranger (?) in a car; the brief, spare evoking of  the insidious modus operandi of the practiced abuser.  How will her mother respond? She slaps her daughter.  The inference is that this rape led to the conception of ‘A Mother’. 
 
With what feels like acute psychological insight, the subsequent birth is overlayed with memory of the rape. The ensuing ongoing mental anguish is smothered beneath a coercive notion of motherhood as an incontestable positive.  For Grandmother, inevitable attachment issues are made worse by what feels like the cruel ironic twist of her child’s joyous nature. A brief moment of authentic connection is blocked as the shielding stoicism of Grandmother asserts itself. Her child is left feeling unloved, ugly, and when she herself becomes pregnant, her mother cannot bring herself to express joy despite her desire to do so. 
 
Back in the present day the matriarch finally arrives at the hospital and after a brief rendezvous with her daughter tries to get a vending machine to work:

 I can’t go back to my daughter/completely/empty-handed.

Surely no theatrical encounter with a vending machine has ever evoked such a powerful Chekhov-type combination of pathos and bathos, as she desperately tries to acquire a gift of, literally, peanuts.

Through this apparent cry for help – at least at the level of the wider performative ‘meta-game’- A Daughter and A Grandmother are suddenly again communicating, but this time as themselves, imagining a possible future meeting, where Daughter - in her 20s and a student - asks about her grandmother’s earlier life. We sense, finally, the small possibility of a real-world explicit acknowledgment of Grandmother’s distress and its cause, and perhaps even the potential of a healing empathy: 
 
Did you have anyone to talk to, about what happened...about the rape? 
 
In apparent shock at the knowledge this reveals in Daughter, Grandmother – or perhaps the actor playing her, or both - leaves the space. 
 
A Mother confesses:
 
I’ve always been a bit gabby’ 
 
The remaining older woman begins reminiscing again about supposed past good times with her daughter. But this time, the latter seems to offer a potential way out of their shared hell:
 
 We’ll never be able to move on/If you don’t stop now
 
She - or the actor playing her -  calls Grandmother back onto stage and coaches her to say what she never has before - that she loves her child. 
 
That’s the role you’re going to play now
 
Finally,  Mother and Grandmother go to see the daughter in the trauma room
 
The former again searches for reasons for the daughter’s overdose. Again Daughter draws her back to reality and now
 
Imagine any potential reasons are just excuses/…/this is the only important moment
 
The two older women seem now finally, truly ‘present’. They begin to  worry about the future. What if this overdose is just the beginning?   Daughter respond:
 
We don’t know yet
 
Do we just sit here?
 
Daughter again: 

Yes/now you just sit/ and exist/ right here
 
A silence 
 
The end, and hopefully – for the featured family - a beginning