Special birthday prompts new show on ageing

After ten years of innovative theatre, Paper Birds are staging their latest work in their home town. Yvette Huddleston spoke to them.
The Paperbirds present On The one Hand at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Picture: Richard DavenportThe Paperbirds present On The one Hand at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Picture: Richard Davenport
The Paperbirds present On The one Hand at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Picture: Richard Davenport

LEEDS-based theatre company Paper Birds celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and that special birthday sparked off a creative idea that has resulted in their latest production, On the One Hand, a lyrical piece about women and ageing, which comes to the West Yorkshire Playhouse next week.

The company was founded in 2003 by Jemma McDonnell and Kylie Walsh while they were still students at Bretton Hall and the pair have been making work together ever since. “We started thinking about ageing because Kylie and I had both just turned thirty and we were talking about ourselves growing older and the company growing older,” says McDonnell, the company’s artistic director.

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“We were aware that roles for women in the theatre diminish when you hit forty, so we thought ‘let’s write some roles for older women and discuss the idea of ageing.’” McDonnell and Walsh specialise in devised theatre using a process of research which they first employed in 2008 for their show about sex trafficking, In a Thousand Pieces. “We knew so little about the subject we had to go out and speak to people,” says McDonnell.

“Getting real opinions and experiences gave us so much more depth and presented us with things we wouldn’t even have considered writing.”

In 2011 the company devised Thirsty, a piece about young women and alcohol exploring the stories behind the headlines about the UK’s binge-drinking generation.

The show used as its basis real-life experiences shared with them by young women who were invited to contact the company through a ‘drunken hotline’ and an online questionnaire. The production fused verbatim text with physical theatre to create a non-judgmental observation on the ramifications of, and reasons behind, excessive drinking, particularly from a female perspective. It gained a lot of attention and won excellent reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe and beyond. “Because of our devising process, there is an honesty about our work,” says McDonnell. “For Thirsty people told us their biggest, darkest secrets and they trusted us to take that material without judging them. We were just saying ‘this is what’s really happening out there’. It makes the work more resonant to audiences because they understand there are real people in there.”

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For On the One Hand the company initially spent two weeks working with HeyDays, a drama group for the over-60s based at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. “A range of women volunteered who were between the ages of 60 and 92,” says McDonnell who has directed the piece.

“They were just wonderful. They all had so much they wanted to say. It was a phenomenal two weeks that really kick-started the idea.”

The women shared their stories about ageing as well as their memories of being younger. The original idea was that McDonnell and Walsh would use the material they had collected to perform a show at the end of the two weeks, however that plan soon changed. “They were so up for it, we realised quite quickly that it would have to be them who performed. So they took over the show and we watched them.”

At this point in the process, the company won a Title Pending innovation award from Northern Stage in Newcastle which allowed them to develop the idea further. “We decided we wanted to explore the idea of ageing as a life-long process,” says McDonnell. “How women are treated differently, and what is expected of them, at different stages in their lives.” They carried out more research and conducted interviews with women, this time between the ages of 17 and 65, taking note of stories that were recurring, and distilled their collected material into a script.

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The show eventually became about six women of different ages – played by four actresses – with the characters identified by their age: teenager, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty and ‘elderly’. Fifty only appears in voiceover – which is apt since her character is an actress who is heard complaining about the lack of roles for women of her age – and the actress playing sixty also plays her elderly mother who is suffering from dementia.

Some of the issues raised in the show include women’s relationships with their mothers, career aspirations, the ticking of biological clocks, shrinking ambitions and the changing reflection in the mirror. “Each woman has her own story and all the stories are running at the same time,” says McDonnell.

“For all the women it is about fulfilling certain roles that are expected of them at certain points in their lives and the kind of trouble they have if they are not fulfilling those roles.”

Presented alongside the show, in the Playhouse foyer, is an interactive installation entitled Hands. “People may look younger than their age these days, but your hands give you away,” says McDonnell. “You can tell so much from looking at someone’s hands – they reveal your true identity.”

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Nov 21-23. 0113 213 7700.

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