MAKING MAUREEN
I have been contemplating a play that would be inspired by the work of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington for a very long time now. In 2014, while I was still living in London, my dear friend, playwright Catriona Kerridge, lent me her copy of Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet. Instantly I could her hear her voice leaping off the pages, it was vividly alive.
“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.”
Cat and I were immediately drawn to it’s theatrically and themes. The Hearing Trumpet has been described as a fantasia on being old and explores how one survives when there is very little left to lose in conditions of extreme oddness. After I had moved home to Australia, Cat and I continued our correspondence over these ideas from opposite ends of the globe. On one of my visits to London we met with Victor Wynd who owns the largest collection Carrington’s artwork in the UK; on display in his Museum of Curiosities in Hackney, alongside many weird and wonderful treasures! Eventually, over the course of distance and time, life started getting in the way of our grand plans together. Little did we know at the time that this research and work together, although it did not manifest in the way we had imagined, would follow us both separately to influence our future projects.
Brainstorming in London cafes with Catriona Kerridge
An original Carrington at Victor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities
It was in 2016 that I reconnected with the wonderfully charismatic human/ actor/ writer Jonny Hawkins. We had known each other in another life time, high school, and after not seeing each other in almost ten years realised we both still had plenty in common. Somehow we quickly discovered a mutual love for old ladies, and shared with each other our ideas for a show about this that we had both been sitting on for a time.
Jonny had long been collecting stories from glorious older women who he had made fast friends with over the years, and after I lent him my copy of The Hearing Trumpet, we each felt that we had found a missing puzzle pieces to complement and complete our initial ideas.
Committing to this new collaboration, together Jonny and I applied for an artist residency at Bundanon in 2019. Here we had access to a beautiful rehearsal room to explore ideas on the floor, and a peaceful cottage to spend our evenings in, feeding each other with inspiration before Jonny would sit and write into the night. Bundanon was of course the original residence of artist Arthur Boyd, and we felt completely surrounded by the warmth of his artistic spirit as well as the majesty of nature.
Arriving at Bundanon for the week.
Making new friends…
And the majesty of this sunset!
The more he wrote and played with performance style, Jonny quickly realised that it was one voice in particular that began to sit comfortably in our story. That of his friend Maureen. When Jonny first met Maureen she lived on her own in Kings Cross and was a self described working class glamour queen. She would later tell Jonny that she kept a list of all of her friends in the order of which she thought they would die- to make she could visit them all in time! And that she had also dubbed herself ‘Maureen the Harbinger of Death’.
Pulling on this initial thread of Maureen unravelled a brand new play that was becoming a story of duality; seemingly about death but affirming life. As it became clear that Jonny himself would play Maureen, this duality was echoed in its form.
The form was simple- a young gay man plays the part of an older women, not in drag, not in a disguise, just a simple costume that does not hide him, instead asks the audience to please suspend their disbelief if they’d like to go on the ride. She welcomes the audience into her home, tells some humorous anecdotes and offers a kind of philosophy lesson. It incorporated a myriad of stories from Jonny’s interactions with other older women, plus we also wanted to include our musing on older women throughout history; a celebration of the women who refuse to be invisible in a society that treats them as a burden.
While crafting the story itself we wanted to explore the unreliability of memory as a way of informing our composition. Robert LePage once said “people complain about the unreliability of memory, but we should rejoice in it. Use it as a creative tool.” And much like The Hearing Trumpet’s protagonist Marion, our Maureen drifts in and out of memories and dreams that bleed into the storytelling. To the point where believability is certainly questionable at times, but the challenge was to retain her truth at its heart.
“I do not wish anyone to think my mind wanders far, it wanders but never further than I want”
We were also very conscious of our choice to cast a young gay man in the role of Maureen, as it was extremely important to us that we were not attempting to speak on behalf of older women. We were inspired by a genuine curiosity around the secret power that sometimes accompanies being cast as invisible by a society. And it was with a very delicate hand we hoped to draw parallels from queer theory; where identities are not fixed and cannot be categorised or labeled, because identities consist of many varied components. Jonny addressed this directly in a wonderfully articulate writers statement of his.
“One of my closest friends is Angela, people call us Harold and Maude. Over lunch she asked me what it was with gay men and old women being such good companions, and before I had time to reply she answered for me - “The world makes you think you’re becoming us. You also suffer the patriarchy. And like us, you learnt how to pretend - countering sexual shame by being teacher’s pet. Like us, you’ve spent time obsessing over the retention of youth because you believe it will help you find love and survive. Also, you’re not commercially viable, so you have to be funny or really tragic to get any attention. Women like me used to be called witches and burned at the stake, and gay men have a similar history.”
While I don’t think it’s fair to compare the ways in which people are disenfranchised by the patriarchy, what she had to say got me thinking about the intersectionality between gay men and older women. An older woman can do just about anything and become a gay icon - we love her for being defiant, true to herself and unapologetic. For setting herself free in the same way we’d love to free ourselves - look at Iris Apfel, Cher and in some ways, Joan Crawford.”
And so, in a cottage in Bundanon, Maureen Harbinger of Death was born. In the weeks to follow we had the opportunity to present the new script as a work in progress performance at The Kings Cross Theatre, which we felt was very apt. We collaborated with designer Isabel Hudson to create a seemingly invisible, but meticulously considered set.
KXT, work in progress performance. Images by Clare Hawley.
Jonny is such a warm and charismatic actor and one of the best storytellers I know. The way he inhabits the character of Maureen reveals his deep love and respect for their friendship. And it was this honouring of intergenerational relationships that seemed to resonate most with audiences. From those first few sold out performances, squished in tightly at the Kings Cross Theatre, we knew this was only the beginning of something very special.