Kaite O’Reilly
Kaite is a widely produced and prize-winning playwright whose awards include the Peggy Ramsay Award, the Theatre-Wales Award, the M.E.N. Best Play Award and the Ted Hughes Award for New Works in Poetry for her adaptation of Persians, produced by National Theatre Wales in 2010.
She was a finalist in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was shortlisted for the inaugural International James Tait Black Prize for Drama for her 2012 Cultural Olympiad commission In Water I’m Weightless, produced by National Theatre Wales/South Bank Centre. In 2014, she has productions in translation in Estonia, Belgium, and Taiwan.
She has written extensively for radio and is now completing her first novel, A Sky Without Stars.
www.kaiteoreilly.com
First published in the UK in 2014 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd
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Woman of Flowers by Kaite O’Reilly © 2014 Kaite O’Reilly
With many thanks to: Suzanne Mooney, Neil Gregory, Simon Smith, Richard Turk, Hinesh Pravin, Emma Lee Fitzgerald, Russell Manning and Charlene Jagannath
All rights are strictly reserved. The performing rights are held by the author.
For rights enquiries including performing rights, contact Kaite O’Reilly’s agents Conrad Williams or Isobel Dixon: www.blakefriedmann.co.uk
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ISBNs:
978-1-906582-90-6 (Print version)
978-1-906582-69-2 (Ebook version)
WOMAN OF FLOWERS
by
KAITE O’REILLY
AURORA METRO BOOKS
Forest Forge Theatre Company, based in the New Forest, is one of the UK’s leading small scale touring theatre companys. It specialises in creating professional performances and creative learning projects that share people’s stories and experiences, with the ongoing aim of inspiring, engaging and transforming communities.
It aims to nurture emerging talent and bring the best of new writing to its audience.
The creative learning programme includes an ensemble youth theatre and adults theatre group. Through bespoke projects the company works with a wide remit of participants which includes the more vulnerable and isolated members of the community.
Each year the company engages with over 40,000 people.
www.forestforge.co.uk
Woman of Flowers has been made possible thanks to funding from:
Created in Association with:
for more info contact: info@forestforge.co.uk
WOMAN OF FLOWERS
Artistic Team:
Writer – Kaite O’Reilly
Director – Kirstie Davis
Designer – David Haworth
BSL Creative Consultant – Jean St Clair
Musical Director – Rebecca Applin
Lighting Designer – Dom Phillips
Choregrapher – Junior Jones
Video Projection Designer – Kavi Briede
Assistant Stage Manager – Dave Hunter
Cast:
Pete Ashmore – Graham
Tom Brownlee – Lewis
Sophie Stone – Rose
Andrew Wheaton – Gwynne
Forest Forge Management Team:
Artistic Director – Kirstie Davis
General Manager – Nicola Cartlidge
Associate Director – David Haworth
Technical Stage Manager – Dom Phillips
Creative Learning Director – Lucy Phillips
Community Theatre Officer –Lisa Halpin
Marketing & Creative Learning Assistant – Hannah Evans
British Sign Language Interpreters in rehearsals – Katy Foot and Emma Sanders
BIOGRAPHIES
PETE ASHMORE – GRAHAM
Pete trained at R.S.A.M.D. Theatre credits include: The Itinerant Music Hall (Lyric Hammersmith); The Canterbury Tales (Palace Theatre, Watford); Mansfield Park (Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds & No.1 tour); Hamlet (Actors from the London Stage); Manchester, Sound: The Massacre, (Library Theatre); A View from the Bridge, The Winter’s Tale, Under Milk Wood, David Copperfield, Beauty and the Beast (Mercury Theatre); The Jungle Book (Lyric Theatre, Belfast); Macbeth (National Theatre); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Mikado (Stephen Joseph Theatre); Grimm Tales (Library Theatre); Vernon God Little, The Ruffian on the Stair, The Queen of Spades, The Lady Aoi, La Musica, Venice Preserved, Nothing (the Citizens Theatre & E59E59 Theatres Off Broadway); Public Property (Hampstead Theatre); Tom’s Midnight Garden, Jemima Puddle-Duck (Unicorn Theatre); Cutlery Wars (Soho Theatre); One Snowy Night (Chichester Minerva Theatre) and Faust (Malmo Opera).
TV includes: Silent Witness, Holby City and The Bill (BBC). He is an accomplished violinist, specialising in traditional music.
TOM BROWNLEE – LEWIS
Tom trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Theatre includes: Anne of Green Gables (Forest Forge), You Once Said Yes (Look Left Look Right), Alice & Victor (BLOCKseventeen), Stand Up Diggers All (Pentabus Theatre @ Latitude Festival), The Woman in White (Lincoln Theatre Royal), Anthony & Cleopatra, Treasure Island, Shelter, Blitz and Blood on the Laboratory Floor (Nuffield Theatre), Romeo & Juliet (Ludlow Festival / Exeter Northcott Theatre) and She Stoops to Conquer (Birmingham Rep).
Television: Doctors (BBC).
Voice: English Language Tape productions for Pearson Education Ltd, The Crusade in Jeans (Kasander Film Company), Romeo & Juliet – The Anniversary Song (David Snasdell Ltd).
Tom’s voice also appears at www.damngoodvoices.com
SOPHIE STONE – ROSE
Sophie trained at RADA. Theatre includes: Mother Courage and Her Children for the National Theatre; Mine for Shared Experience; Frozen (Birmingham Rep); Two (Southwark Playhouse); The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project (Northern Stage); In Water I’m Weightless (National Theatre of Wales); Pandora (Arcola) and Multiplex, Fen and You Make Me Happy (When Skies are Grey) at the Watermill. TV includes Mapp and Lucia, Marchlands, Midsomer Murders, Holby City, Casualty and FM. Film includes Retreat, My Angel and Coming Home.
ANDREW WHEATON – GWYNNE
Previous plays with Forest Forge include: The World Outside, The Phoenix and the Carpet and Midnight is a Place. Other stage work includes King Lear, Pygmalion, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Richard II, The Winter’s Tale (Young Vic); Me and My Girl (Adelphi); Antony and Cleopatra, The Taming of the Shrew (Theatre Royal Haymarket); Jekyll and Hyde (Empty Space world tour); The Hired Man (New Perspectives); Hamlet, The Weir, Grimms Tales, Oleanna, Romeo and Juliet (Nuffield, Southampton); Intimate Exchanges (Dress Circle); Colour It In (Arcola Theatre).
KIRSTIE DAVIS – DIRECTOR
Kirstie has worked at many theatres around the country including the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith and Salisbury Playhouse. For six years she was the Associat
e Director and then Acting Artistic Director of Watford Palace Theatre. Plays included: The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Crucible in History, Mother Courage and her Children, Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Daughter-in-Law and Top Girls. She has also directed Fable and Brecht’s Lehrstucke for the Nuffield Theatre and she ran the Studio Theatre at Cheltenham Everyman where she directed Man to Man and led on their New Writing, Outreach and Professional Mentoring programmes.
Since joining Forest Forge as Artistic Director in January 2009, Kirstie has directed Around The World In 80 Days, Ashputtel – the Cinderella Story, Free Folk (2009), For The Record, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Peeling, The World Outside, The Phoenix and The Carpet, Bloom, Midnight is a Place, The Boy at the Edge of the Room, Free Folk (2013), Anne of Green Gables and Battle Lines.
Rehearsal photo: The company for Woman of Flowers
Photographer: Kavi Briede
Rehearsal photo: Andrew Wheaton and Sophie Stone
Photographer: Kavi Briede
Author’s Note:
A farmhouse, the grounds and forest surrounding it, and Rose’s imagination.
Four characters:
Rose
Gwynne
Lewis
Graham
Rose, Lewis, and Graham are around the same age. Gwynne is a generation older and carries all the gravitas that entails.
Rose lip-reads. She speaks English fluently and signs when private and alone. These ‘internal’ poetic soliloquys are predominantly in theatricalised British Sign Language/Sign Supported English (BSL/SSE), although there are moments when it is a fusion of visual and spoken languages. I have indicated passages in the script that could be in visual language. There is much to be gained in beauty, variety, and tempo-rhythm from using visual language and signed performance, particularly in the context of this story – and an extra performative layer through portraying both Deaf and hearing cultures but this is not mandatory, as I prefer to leave it open to individual interpretation.
The text is projected throughout.
I have tried to mix myth, lyricism and the prosaic everyday in a ‘time out of time’ dynamic, which I hope will confirm this is both a contemporary and ancient story.
I have anticipated a live music/sound score, performed predominantly by the actor playing Graham.
Blodeuwedd: flower face, woman made of the flowers of the forest, the bride created for a cursed man, transformed into an owl as punishment for falling in love with someone else and plotting to kill her husband … I have been fascinated with the story of Blodeuwedd from the fourth branch of the Welsh medieval text The Mabinogion for years, and have explored elements of the story theatrically before (Perfect for Contact Theatre, directed by John McGrath and winner of M.E.N. best play of 2004). This ancient story invites constant reinterpretation with resonance for each new age, but this text departs widely from the original and only takes aspects as inspiration.
Kaite O’Reilly,
Autumn 2014
WOMAN OF FLOWERS
The play was commissioned by Forest Forge Theatre Company and was first produced at The Pleasance Theatre, London, on 22nd September 2014, before touring nationally.
Characters:
Rose
Gwynne
Lewis
Graham
Set: A farmhouse, the forest surrounding it, and Rose’s imagination.
Time: now
Music: for use of the musical score specially created for this production, contact: Rebecca Applin
e: info@rebeccaapplin.co.uk www.rebeccaapplin.co.uk
Preset
All
The watcher of the dark.
Somewhere
in the no-time of the forest,
the place between
where there is slippage,
a no-space.
A story is told by its pauses
as much as its words,
by that hiatus between
the breaths
the blanks
the space
between
the petals.
One.
A farmhouse. Rose stands by a tin bath.
Projected text, visual language, and also possibly speech.
Rose
I fly in my dreams, over the farmyard and down towards the river. I can see the glint of a salmon leap in the moonlight. The water ruffles like a bird when it raises its feathers in fright, then lays them smooth – calmed – sleek as a peacock’s mirror. But there’s no reflection of me in this glass – nothing but a harvest moon – so low and full and yellow and I’m afraid. Afraid of the moonface and dark clouds arching above her and I see she too is on the wing and she hunts alone.
Flurried chicken sounds. Lewis enters the kitchen from the yard, shame-faced but defiant in his defeat. He looks at Rose, who exits.
Rose enters, carrying a dead chicken by its feet.
Rose
It’s done. (No response from him.) Wasn’t difficult. (No response.) Get it by the neck and –
Lewis
– Don’t.
Rose
So it does talk.
Lewis
And I know. I do know how –
Silence. She sits and plucks the chicken. He watches, then:
Lewis
Must you do that here?
Rose
Where else is there? Front room? Feathers all over the carpet, three-piece suite?
Lewis
No.
Rose
Or outside, with a gale blowing?
Lewis
Forget I – [said anything]
Rose
– Or the hen house? Maybe stay there all night to stop the fox or stoat getting in?
Lewis
Here’s fine. (Several beats. She plucks.) Doesn’t it bother you?
Rose
What?
Lewis
It was running around in the yard two minutes ago.
Rose
And it’s dead in my lap now. And in thirty minutes it’ll be roasting in the oven and in two hours it’ll be in your guts.
Lewis
Jesus.
Rose
Delicate, for a farm boy.
Lewis
I‘m not. It’s just the
Rose
Killing?
Lewis
Means of disposal.
Rose
That’s what comes of going to school.
Lewis
What?
Rose
Words.
Lewis
You’ve got words.
Rose
Not like yours.
Lewis
You don’t need mine, you’ve got your own.
Rose
Expect me to thank you for that? Down on my knees, grateful for my own words?
Lewis
No.
Rose
Have little else my own.
Lewis
How many times…? You want. You tell. We get.
Rose
Some cheap old thing – too tight, or too big, the wrong colour, wrong shape, maybe used already – and then wants gratitude.
Have you ever gone without?
Rose
Never went to school.
Lewis
Didn’t need to. Knew everything already, or as much as you’d need to know. Lucky. Some’d give their back teeth for that. Didn’t miss anything. Not much. Know near as much as me. Numbers, writing. Anything else, the farmer teaches.
Rose
He’s like you with words. No – better. Stories like rope: tie you up. Why d’you speak different to him than me?
Lewis
Don’t.
Rose
Do. You talk longer. Bigger words.
Lewis
How d’you know that?
Rose
&nbs
p; I see.
I watch.
Less, and small. That do for me? (She plucks.)
Maybe I prefer it. (She plucks.)
‘Means of disposal …’
What’s wrong with ‘kill’? (He doesn’t engage. She plucks.) You hiding with them words? It’s how it is. Don’t know why you’re afraid of it.
Lewis
I’m not.
Rose
Afraid of saying things as they are. Things live, things die, things get killed; it’s natural. It’s nature.
Lewis
I know that. But don’t you feel it when you wring its neck?
Rose
You’ll not get far on a farm with that. Best not tell the farmer you’re thinking that.
Lewis
I wondered if you felt sorry.
Rose
I breed them, hatch them, feed them, collect their eggs and when they’ve gone off laying, I make them into supper.
Lewis
It’s like you enjoy it.
Rose
Your Uncle wanted roast chicken for dinner, so roast chicken he’ll get.
Silence. Several beats. Gwynne enters from the yard.
Gwynne
That sow’s out again.
Lewis
The fencing’s broken. I haven’t had the chance to fix it, yet.
Gwynne
Then find the chance. I’ve told you: I’ll not have the pigs out loose.
Gwynne indicates for Rose to help pull off his boots. She kneels before him, but watches his face.
Lewis
I thought they could eat the acorns under the trees.
Gwynne
So you know better than me, then? Is that it?
Lewis
No.
Gwynne (to Rose)
Thinks he knows better than me. (to Lewis) Go on, then. We’re waiting to hear what the big pig man has to say.
Lewis
It’s just – the black sow likes acorns and –
Gwynne
– you thought you’d give her a treat. Is that it?
Lewis
No.
Gwynne