Why Voices and what did we learn?
I’m running a little behind on these (too busy making new plays!) – but on the 14th of June we released our production of Voices by Hortense Flexner: this is my analysis of the play, our production, and what we learned from our visit with the spirit of Joan of Arc.
Hortense Flexner King (1885-1973) was an American poet, playwright and professor (thus spake Wikipedia). She was a brilliant mind, a fine writer, and a feminist – so naturally I wanted to include a piece of her work. But, well, Voices isn’t her best. So why the heck did I choose it?
A new play by a new playwright (at least, it was in 1916)
Voices (1916) was Flexner’s first published play. It’s pretty much a rant. She’s not long turned thirty and Europe is slaughtering its young men for reasons I think we can all agree were totally bloody stupid. If you spend any time on twitter you can find hordes of American liberals frothing at the mouth about their President locking children in cages and declaring Canada a military threat (which, you know, fair enough – makes me feel happy to be European). It shouldn’t be a huge leap to image the anger, frustration and outrage that early 20th century liberals felt about World War I. In Voices, Flexner condenses that outrage into the voice of one young woman – and one much older.
Women of the World Unite!
Women of the world unite is a rather tired theme. I think the thing I most dislike about this notion (if only all the women came together they could make the men stop fighting) is it treats women as one homogenous whole, lovely peaceful creatures who just want to make peace. But there are plenty of bloodthirsty women out there. Plenty of women soldiers – including some I had the honour to serve alongside. Ask Aethelflaed or Boudicca or Margot, all warrior queens, whether they want to hold hands and sing about peace until the men stop fighting. They’ll be too busy sharpening their weapons to give a polite response.
To be honest, it rather reminds me of Lysistrata, Aristophane’s comedy where the women denied their husbands sex until they agree to end the war. This at least had the virtue of being tongue in cheek. If we really believe in equality than we probably have to accept that the women of the world are no more capable of uniting than the men (see Brexit.)
Now there’s nowt wrong with a bit of naive idealism in theatre and the desperation for a peaceful solution is beautiful – particularly in times like these. The real power in this piece, however, is the discussion of legacy, and experience vs youth. Yvonne idealises Joan. Joan sees her career as a mistake, a vast error that resulted in her putting power right back into the hands of the enemy she had sought to defeat. And this is where the play strikes home. Women of the world unite may not be realistic but solving just about anything with war hasn’t proved particularly successful either.
Examples of how not to write a ten-minute play (maybe)
Voices carries lots of marks of a first-time play. There’s just so much stuff in the opening description that the director will look at and go “yep, not doing any of that for a ten-minute play.”
See the intro:
THE MAIN STREET OF DOMREMY, IN FRONT OF THE SHATTERED CHURCH SACRED TO JEANNE D’ARC. ROOFLESS HOUSES AND BROKEN BUILDINGS STAND HUDDLED IN RUINS. THE PLACE IS DESERTED AND SILENT. FROM THE RIGHT COMES A PEASANT GIRL, YVONNE, FINELY MADE AND YOUNG. SHE WEARS A COARSE, WOOL SKIRT AND A GRAY SHAWL LOOSELY FOLDED ABOUT HER SHOULDERS. TAKING HER WAY DOWN THE SUNKEN STREET, SHE PAUSES BEFORE THE DOOR OF THE CHURCH AND KNEELS. AS SHE DOES SO, ANOTHER PEASANT GIRL, SLIGHT AND ERECT, COMES SILENTLY FROM THE CHURCH. THE TIME IS LATE AFTERNOON IN MAY. THE SOUTH WIND IS STIRRING. YVONNE STANDS.
Yeah, no, what is this, a film? How big is my budget to recreate a shattered Domremy? You want me to paint flats showing roofless buildings that will take longer to put up and take down than the length of the play? The south wind is stirring? How the smeg am I showing that on stage? And it’s just full of stuff that’s hard to show. I guess I can put up a sign saying “Domremy” [there goes my sign painting budget], but how many in the audience will know that was the birthplace of Joan of Arc?
Creating mood vs ridiculous stage directions
Of course, what it does successfully is create a mood. Sometimes your scene directions are less for the audience and more to help your actors visualise where they are. Then you forget about it for the audience, and let the actors convey location through, you know, acting. But as a director I read this and think “of for fucks sake.”
Best of all is the closing line:
[SHE KNEELS UPON THE STONE STEP OF THE CHURCH, IN THE CRACK OF WHICH, STRANGELY, A LILY IS GROWING.]Yeah. Excellent. Animatronic lilies? Lead actress who is also a magician, and pulls a Lilly from her sleeve? How the heck is the audience going to have any idea what is going on? My solution was birdsong on the exit from the church – to contrast the gunfire from before. Hopefully we got the spirit right. But for a short play this is a hell of a lot of staging.
Is it a bad thing to write a play where the director is just going to ignore your first two hundred words of staging? Well, there’s a danger that they’ll just throw the play away and go with something more sensible. But at the same time, Flexner’s description of Domremy creates real atmosphere. And as she’s long dead and we’re free to take that were we wish… maybe it’s not so bad after all.
Examples of how not to record a ten-minute play…
… Maybe
Straight after the gunfire and Yvonne running into the streets, we enter the quiet interior of the church. She takes a few steps and, as if from nowhere, comes the calm voice of The Other.
Now, as director, I wanted to contrast of the volume of the explosions and the whisper of The Other. She’s not even whispering. Just quietly spoken amongst the chaos. But a few listeners complained they just couldn’t hear what she was saying. And you can lose a radio audience quickly – they don’t have to go to the bother of walking out of the theatre, they can just change the channel.
Let’s get this out of the way first: they have every right to complain. This is not a “stupid audience don’t understand my art” rant. I don’t do those. Or at least, I try not to do those. So, what was the issue with the volume?
There are a couple of reasons why the volume problem arises.
First, it’s difficult to hear quiet things after you’ve been listening to noisy things. So, there’s a balance to be found between the dynamic of going from loud to quiet (which is exciting) and making it impossible to hear (which is boring). I’m not sure what the trick is. In an earlier cut I had a longer period in the church before the first words were spoken, to give the listener’s ears time to adjust, but the feedback was that this period was too long without anything happening. I’m open to other suggestions. But the contrast was too much here.
Second, I could hear her just fine (with or without headphones). I have pretty good hearing, sure, but this is also because I knew she was about to speak and I knew what she was going to say. So OF COURSE I can hear her just fine. Because I can hear her without any difficulty (as could the rest of the technical team) I didn’t know there was a problem until after it was published. I’m hoping experience will teach me to identify problems I can’t here. Another lesson learned (and applied in the next play, “Mine”) – more volume on the actors is usually a good thing.
Recording on one bidirectional mike and other recording issues.
I was experimenting with this play (I usually try something different) by using my high quality built in bi-directional mike rather than my lower quality free standing mikes. The advantage is better quality. The disadvantage is that the actors are recorded onto the same stereo track, which make it more difficult to equalise
The SFX were mildly challenging for this one. Paris is jam packed with churches but finding a local church without accompanying traffic noise proved beyond me – Chris had to record one back in good old blighty. Gunfire is tricky – particular thanks are to Oddfox and Mike Koenig on Soundbible for some of the base sound I used to make the battle – but standing on the shoulders of better sound engineers I was able to build a decent world war I type background through several layers of different types of explosions/shots. That was fun to do.
Conclusions
This is a great actors piece – there may not be a lot going on in the play per se but there is some wonderful dialogue and it’s a great opportunity for them to demonstrate some range. I need to keep working on understanding how levels work, but asides from the early problem with The Other’s first lines in the church I’m proud of how this came out. I’m sick of recording footsteps (there must be a better way!), but the atmosphere was good, and I thought we got a beautiful and passionate performance from Stephanie and Meagan at the climax of the play. Plus, particularly now, we can’t have too many reminders that war is bad and people who want to be King’s probably shouldn’t be crowned.
PS. If you enjoyed this, check out my analysis of our earlier play, Outside.
