Swearing it’s true
Hit play Mouthpiece may arrive in Auckland via the Edinburgh Fringe and London's West End, but it's pure Glasgow.
Hit play Mouthpiece may arrive in Auckland via the Edinburgh Fringe and London’s West End, but it’s pure Glasgow.
Scottish writer Kieran Hurley’s play Mouthpiece arrives in New Zealand with a “frequent strong language” warning. The drama, centred on the relationship between Libby, a washed-up playwright in her forties, and Declan, a jittery working-class teenager, contains the usual range of fourletter words, but it also includes an insult to older women peculiar to the northern tongue.
The spoken word itself actually sounds quite neutral, thanks to the Glaswegian accent: melodious, delightful and, occasionally, downright baffling.
Mouthpiece, winner of last year’s Fringe Festival Best of Edinburgh Award, has so far played only in Edinburgh and London, at the Soho Theatre, making New Zealand its first overseas landing. Let’s hope we can handle the heat, as delivered by actors Shauna Macdonald and Angus Taylor.
“Heh, heh,” says Hurley, talking to the Listener from Glasgow. “You never know, man, right? I think London struggled,” he laughs. “But we did all right. The accent is quite uncompromising. I don’t have an agenda with that, but I try to write truthfully. I’m not going to change how a guy speaks, but you’ll have no problem understanding because I am writing from a place of truth.”
Mouthpiece’s structure upends the traditional theatrical attempt to suspend disbelief by articulating devices such as “the opening set-up” and the “midpoint break” when the characters must take a decisive direction – often a mistake – to keep the narrative flowing.
Libby and Declan’s thoughts and words at key moments are also displayed via projected texts on stage.
“It’s like having your cake and eating it,” says Hurley. “It’s foregrounding the codified nature of the story we are watching. But at the same time, I am also wanting to provide the kind of storytelling that provokes an emotional engagement. It’s a love story, I guess. It’s about two people equally weighted in the story.
They both have a lack that needs to be answered in some way that the other one answers.”
Hurley, 34, majored in theatre studies at the University of Glasgow and acted in a student troupe. He swiftly moved on to an acting-writing career, launched by solo show Hitch, which was nominated for the 2009 Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland; his plays Heads Up (2016) and Square Go (2018) also won Fringe First awards. But Beats, a rave-culture play first staged in 2012 at Glasgow’s famed alternative venue, The Arches, pulled Hurley into an unexpected direction: film. The play about two 15-year-old boys fascinated by the 1990s rave scene was picked up for
“The accent is quite uncompromising. I don’t have an agenda with that, but I try to write truthfully. You’ll have no problem understanding.”
production by Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films, with American director Steven Soderbergh as executive producer and a soundtrack mixed by DJ Keith McIvor (aka JD Twitch/ Optimo).
Beats is set in 1994, just before the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which included a ban on free, unregulated dance parties where music – oh, the horror – featured “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.
The enforcement of the law resulted in the closure of The Arches, shut down by the police in 2015.
Hurley co-wrote the script with director Brian Welsh, with the film climaxing in an extended all-out rave scene filmed in one night at a venue filled with 1500 extras, a party so authentic the cops came to check it out.
The film, released in Britain last year to, er, rave reviews, is now screening in New Zealand. In transferring his story from stage to screen, Hurley had to abandon a good proportion of his original script, which was a monologue. “At first it was strange to share something I had such ownership over with someone else, but it was also freeing … I was able to learn a lot very quickly on the job and discover I had a real instinct for it, too.”
He added that he had long been “fascinated with the legislation of the Criminal Justice Act, particularly the infamous ‘repetitive beats’ wording”.
“I believe in optimism, it’s the most radical thing. But optimism has to be a hard-nosed take on reality. Hope has to be tethered to action.”
“It seemed to capture something about entrenched power’s inherent fear of young people and the weird radical possibility of young folk and social outsiders claiming shared space on their own terms, even when that’s just to dance and have a good time.”
Mouthpiece makes Beats’ scenario of people just wanting to dance together seem almost quaint, with its two leads so lonely and self-absorbed until they find good in each other. Libby supports Declan’s latent talent as an artist, while Declan inspires her to start writing a new play. But one of them goes too far.
“They become kind of in love with each other in some sense, but then it gets complicated and messy,” says Hurley.
By coincidence, Mouthpiece includes a small moment with a poignant connection to New Zealand.
When Libby takes Declan to the Scottish National
Gallery of
Modern Art in Glasgow, he is spellbound by a huge neon work outside the building spelling out Everything Is Going To Be Alright, a work by artist Martin Creed, who grew up in Glasgow.
An edition of Everything Is Going To Be Alright was gifted to the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2015 as a symbol of optimism. As Declan says to Libby: “Is that an art hing an aw, aye?”
“I didn’t know that, no,” says Hurley of the work in Christchurch. “That’s cool. I guess Declan, through the play, calls out some of that optimism. I believe in optimism, it’s the most radical thing.
“There’s no use in political defeatism, but optimism has to be a hard-nosed take on reality. Hope has to be tethered to action. Creed’s phrase is beautiful and important, but it’s dependent on what you do with it.”
Hurley wants to create a more egalitarian audience experience as opposed to the “alienating” theatre he has been exposed to. “I have a middle-class profession, but I still often feel alienated in the London theatre in terms of who’s in the room, who’s implicitly being addressed by the work, whose lives are being represented, and I’m saying this as a white man.
“It does seem like there’s a little bit of a shift – more gender representation, a few more nonwhite voices – but there’s still a huge way to go.”
Mouthpiece, Q Theatre, Auckland, March 19-28. Beats is screening at selected
cinemas.