(Photo Credit: www.ubutheatre.com)
With Spotlight’s origional production The Way Things Weren’t hitting the stage next week, I interviewed writer Brenda Callis about her inspiration and hopes for her debut full length play….
Can you give us a quick summary of the play?
It’s about this woman, called Laura, that her whole life has been devoted to the idea of soulmates, that there’s only one person for you and you can’t fit with anyone else. So when her husband dies in a car crash, she thinks the only solution is to clone him. She thinks everything can go back to normal, but is normal really an option?
Where did you get the inspiration?
I got inspiration from many places, actually. TV shows like Humans and Churchill’s A Number had a lot of influence – the idea of something being among people that isn’t quite human, but really is at the same time. I love Black Mirror and how terrifyingly close the episodes feel to our society, and everyone is talking about it so that was obviously a major influence.
But I’d say, more than cloning, the play is about relationships. The use of technology puts an interesting twist on a piece that is about how love and ways of dealing with grief are constantly being changed. With things like Married at First Sight and Tinder, I wanted to explore where someone who has a very conventional and idealistic view of love would fit into all this.
How long did it take you to write?
I actually wrote a monologue extract from this play for Dramsoc’s Write Bear this time last year – the monologue was performed in The Room Above and now my play is in the same space, which is awesome! So I had the idea for a while, but I kept putting off writing it for ages. I was a bit scared to write it because I felt like this was my big idea and what if I never came up with anything else? But then I bit the bullet and did it and I enjoyed writing it so much, and it happened really quickly. The idea, the planning and the beginning and ending took forever to work out, but the writing was done in a week of intense writing and a week of editing.
Who is your favourite character and why?
It’s actually quite hard to choose. Billy was really fun to write, he’s a funny character. If I had to choose I’d have to say Laura, because she’s really heartbreaking. Phoebe-Waller Bridge, writer of Fleabag and general goddess, said how angry women feel “guilty and apologetic” about their feelings and this needs to change and I love writing Laura in a surge of openly angry, complex female characters in tv, plays and film. Although she’s not an angry character, she has moments as someone would in her kind of situation – losing her husband, bringing him back, struggling with this switch in normality- and I really enjoyed writing a complex woman who has feelings and needs to learn to release them. I think she has really heartbreaking moments and I hope other people agree with me.
Is there a particular message you are trying to get across?
Don’t clone your husband, or do something that resembles Black Mirror in any way. It won’t work out like you want it to.
Watch The Way Things Weren’t at The Room Above next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday!