Radical Stories

“In a way, books probably saved my life,” says Clara Brennan. The playwright, for whom learning was a life raft, has now written something of a love letter to literature and education in Spine. The play, which tells of an unlikely friendship between an elderly woman and a disaffected teenage girl, is above all about access to knowledge and who has the right to speak.

It’s a pertinent question for Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award. The accolade, for which Spine is one of this year’s contenders, recognises the best theatrical Fringe efforts to speak out against injustice. It offers a platform for voices not usually heard and truths not usually spoken.

Amy, the character who delivers Brennan’s monologue, is an individual whose voice has been marginalised by British politics. Young, female and working class, she is part of a whole swathe of the population written off as apathetic and unimportant. “She’s already decided that the audience think she’s an idiot, that she’s young and not worth listening to,” explains Rosie Wyatt, the actor bringing Amy to life. “As far as she’s concerned, she’s already been written off.”

Brennan’s provocation to audiences is to think about how a girl like Amy might be politicised in the current climate. The play first emerged in Edinburgh two years ago as part of Theatre Uncut, a project created to mobilise theatre-makers and audiences in response to the coalition government’s policy of austerity. Despite wanting to “write about everything”, Brennan eventually settled on asking “at what point a working class girl could get into politics”. Her fifteen minute monologue married the closure of British libraries with an encounter between two generations and two very different attitudes to politics.

Since Theatre Uncut in 2012, that idea has been developed into an hour-long play. In the full version of Spine, Brennan tells us more about Amy, her background and the significance of her friendship with older woman Glenda, who educates and politicises her bit by bit, but the skeleton of the original story remains. “The bits that have survived are the bookends,” says Brennan, “pun intended.”

Another way in which the piece has retained its initial impulse is in the tenderness and emotional power of the central relationship between Amy and Glenda. Brennan’s politics are intensely personal, communicated through people rather than ideologies. “It very much became about their relationship,” Brennan reflects on the process of fleshing out the play. “For me the politics is embedded in that.”

“Glenda’s experience of politics is that it is a personal thing, it is something she has lived through,” Wyatt agrees. “It doesn’t feel like a set of ideologies. I think when she talks about what she believes in and how young people ought to be more angry than they are, she can’t fathom how a whole generation can be entirely disconnected from what happens in Parliament. Because to her she was there and she lived it and politics was on the street.”

Brennan admits that Spine is an emotional, cathartic piece, but neither she nor Wyatt see any contradiction between this and its politics. “I don’t see there being a problem with people being emotionally charged about a political message,” says Wyatt, adding that what audiences are moved by is as much the politics as the human relationship.

Some critics have described Spine as a sort of fairytale – a telling suggestion of how unlikely it is seen to be for a girl like Amy to become politicised. Brennan, however, is adamant about the need for hope in the play and ultimately rejects the comparison.

“We’re fed fairytales as girls,” she says, touching on the play’s implicit feminist message. “We perform our gender in that way, responding to princess mythologies. I take umbrage with that because her story is not solved by a man, she’s never rescued – in fact she rescues herself.”

What Brennan does agree with, however, is the importance of stories, whether fairytales or not. It is through the stories in the rescued library books that Glenda makes her read that Amy comes to a fresh realisation about herself and her place in the world, while the story of the play is itself a demonstration of how narrative can be politically galvanising.

“Glenda says stories are radical; you walk in another person’s shoes,” says Brennan. “It’s the basic tenet of empathy. For me that’s revolutionary, to get inside the mind of a character, to empathise with them. Ultimately that’s why I find storytelling radical.”

“It’s a love story about our teachers as well,” Brennan adds, returning to the central subject of education. She reflects on the popularity of mentor narratives, from Good Will Hunting to the Karate Kid, and on how her own teachers “saved me from the scrapheap”. Wyatt, however, chips in to point out that at the beginning of the play Amy actually is in formal education.

“Although Amy is from a working class background, she’s got a loving family, she’s got a group of friends and she’s at a school. It’s not like she’s a total lost cause at the start of the play, but she still slips through. I think that’s really telling of where we’ve got to as a nation.”

For Brennan, it all comes down to a sense or absence of entitlement and the basic inequality of our education system, which ends up dictating whose stories are worth telling.

“As Glenda says, the one thing that Amy is born without is a sense of deservedness. I think that’s the difference in our education system between kids who don’t feel like they’re going to amount to anything so why bother, and kids who go on to sixth form and get coached in how to interview for Cambridge and Oxford. There’s a massive discrepancy. We have a lack of social mobility in this country and we still have private schools. We’re not talking about that and it drives me mad.”