Woman of Flowers

by Kaite O'Reilly

  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

  67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, TW1 4HX

  www.aurorametro.cominfo@aurorametro.com

  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

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  In accordance with Section 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Charles Way asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the above work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed by Imprint Digital UK.

  eBook conversion by Swift ProSys

  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.

  The sound of chickens in fear and flight, off. They squawk. Silence.

  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.

  Lewis

  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