Viva Lewes Issue #123 December 2016

ON THIS MONTH: THEATRE
Can I Start Again Please
Dramatist/actor Sue MacLaine
“It’s done well,” says
Sue MacLaine, “but
it hasn’t been without
its emotional cost. It’s
about the incapacity
of language to
express traumatic
experience.”
I last interviewed Sue
a couple of years ago,
at the Basement in
Brighton, before the
debut in that venue
of her latest drama,
Can I Start Again Please. There’s a neat symmetry
to affairs: since then she has performed it 60 times
all over the country - including a well-acclaimed
run at Edinburgh Festival - and she’s currently
preparing for its last-ever performance, in the new
Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, on the
University of Sussex campus, on December 15th.
This time we’re sitting in the ACCA Café, and, after
a bit of chit-chat, we’ve quickly got to the nub
of the matter. The traumatic experience in question,
she divulges, is “childhood sexual violence.”
“Were you the subject of that violence?” I ask her,
a question, I’ll admit it, that doesn’t come easy. “I
was,” she says, in a quieter voice.
Sue is accompanied on stage by Nadia Nadarajah.
The script was written in spoken English and then
translated into British Sign Language - Sue is a
sign language interpreter, Nadia is a native signer.
“It is about how the two languages clash and
collide,” says Sue. “It’s about interpretation, and
misinterpretation; about the gap between telling
and understanding.”
There’s also a third presence on stage: “Much of
it is seen through the lens of semantic theory, and
particularly the theories of Wittgenstein, who figures
prominently.” It was important for Sue to add
an intellectual layer
to the narrative,
she says, to deflect
from the rawness of
the emotional content.
“That’s part of
the triumvirate in
everything I write:
politics; emotions;
intellect.”
I ask her if writing
and performing
the play has helped
her in the process
of coming to terms with the abuse she suffered. “It
wasn’t written in the eye of the storm,” she says.
“A lot of people have had something in their lives
that has changed its trajectory… it becomes about
accommodating that change.” The fact that the
play’s first and last performances have been in and
around Brighton - where the traumatic experiences
in question occurred - have, she says, helped
her “redraw my emotional map of my city.”
But the main benefit for her is “that as a writer
and creator I don’t have to tell this story again. It’s
liberated me, it’s allowed me to think I can write
something else.” She’s already thinking about her
next project, which she has given the working
title ‘Vessel’. “I haven’t worked out an elevator
pitch yet,” she says, “but it is taking the practice of
withdrawal as exampled by the lives of Medieval
anchorites, or anchoresses, as the starting point.
And questioning whether withdrawing yourself
from politics is in itself a political act. My politics
used be about participation in collective action:
marches, shouting, sitting in; and now it is about
individual action, my own and others, with the
focus less on 'doing' than 'being'.” Alex Leith
Can I Start Again Please, 15th, ACCA, University
of Sussex
Photo © Matthew Andrews
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