By Liz NIcholls, .ca
“Death,” says the pleasant Irish voice on the phone from across the Atlantic, “is the great unifier.”
The voice belongs to the much-awarded Northern Ireland writer/director Mick Gordon, whose his most-performed play Bea is now running in the Shadow Theatre season, directed by Amanda Goldberg. “Death, the great arc we all go through in life and our characters go through in drama.”
It’s a preoccupation that’s always been present, ever-present,” in the work of Gordon and his Irish countrymen, “both north and south, Beckett of course and my great mentor Brian Friel,” as he puts it. And it accounts, he thinks, for the “unanimously emotional and contemplative” reactions to Bea in theatres across cultures and around the world. “It’s true in London, in Ireland, definitely in the European productions I’ve seen, in South Korea, Australia, South America.”
In the 15-year-old play that introduces us to the playwright, death as well as life comes with certain strings attached. In the real world the title character is trapped, motionless and helpless, by a paralyzing disease. But she also lives, in her imagination and memory, as a vibrant, lively, mischievously creative alter-self. What she asks of her mother and her care-giver is … well, extreme. A dilemma beyond the call of motherhood, friendship, and the kindness of strangers, to be purposely vague.
Says Gordon, Bea “questions the limits of empathy. And in order to look at empathy, compassion, and try to put yourself in somebody’s shoes, it sets up a situation that no one, particularly no parent, would like to be in or could possibly empathize with…. And within that terrible dilemma is an examination of what it means to be loving, considerate, compassionate, funny — and the whole gamut of experience in between.”
Gordon, who’s based in the little seaside town of Bangor near Belfast, traces the origins of Bea to the end of the decade he spent working with the company On Theatre. “We produced theatre in an attempt to map theatrically aspects of the human experience.” And, perhaps unsurprisingly, death came up, a subject in which “we as human beings have curiosity and a vested interest.”
As he explains, Gordon was a director, as a student at Oxford, before he was a writer. And his career is unusually international, with theatre and opera credits in Buenos Aires, Sweden, Hong Kong…. His is a long and distinguished resumé, that includes the artistic directorship of the London company the Gate Theatre notable for its European connections, the associate directorship (with Trevor Nunn) of the National Theatre, and the artistic directorship of the national Aarhus Teater in Denmark.
He talks of “being fascinated by using theatre to explore questions of contemporary concern, philosophical questions. That’s why we started On Theatre. That’s why I started writing, and that’s when Bea emerged.”
Gordon’s early work led him into the world of fairy tales, with productions of Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Grimm’s stories. And that interest continues, he says, in his latest theatre venture, into the enchanted world of A.I. “At the moment I’m finishing a trilogy considering a re-definition of what it means to be human in light in artificial intelligence. The first is called Algorithms: A Fairy Tale, and it very much continues the fairy tale work … the hallucinatory power and appeal of A.I.”
Is that subject not scary to a theatre artist? “I don’t find the subject as frightening as I find the very small group of people who are both deploying it, will develop it, and will benefit from it,” says Gordon, who teaches script-, play-, and screenwriting at Queen’s University Belfast.
“I believe that the theatre is an emotional thinking space,” he says. “It is the art form that is the representation of (pop psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s) ‘think fast and slow simultaneously’…. The theatre offers us a space where we can consider emotionally as human beings huge philosophical ideas and themes that are difficult and complicated. And ironically it’s one of the oldest art forms, the oldest arenas of intelligence.”
“We are both experience (the biggest questions) and have time to think about them. Which is not the case when we are engaging with anything digital.” And the liveness of live theatre is crucial. “The ritual of a group of people coming together to watch another group of people pretend to be other people is in one way absolutely ridiculous,” says Gordon. “And in another way it gives us a sense of being present that we never have when we engage with the digital.”
Bea and its framing dilemma, the one that catches the Bea’s mother and her care-giver, is an example, as Gordon says. “The life of the character Bea is absolutely full in the moment. But it’s a life that she wants to discontinue for a very good reason.”
“They’ve been very good at updates,” says Gordon, impressed by the Shadow team led by Goldberg, the new artistic producer of SkirtsAfire Festival. “I only wish I could be in the room with other people to see the production.”
PREVIEW
Bea
Theatre: Shadow Theatre
Written by: Mick Gordon
Directed by: Amanda Goldberg
Starring: Karen Unruh, Michael Watt, Kate Newby
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: through Feb. 9
Tickets: shadowtheatre.org