Blackbird, a play about a sexual relationship between a man and a 12-year-old girl, never takes sides or imposes moral boundaries. Playwright David Harrower talks to Christine Madden
David Harrower's play Blackbird opens in Ireland to a public unsettled by recent child abuse scandals. After court confusion and public outcry concerning the cases of Mr C (who made a successful claim against a law denying him the right to plead ignorance of a girl's age - he was 18, she 14 - after having sex with her) and Mr A (41, who was released for a time from prison after claiming the law by which he had been convicted for raping a 12-year-old girl did not exist), debate continues regarding changes to constitutional law. To create a "zone of absolute protection" for children in such cases, the removal of a perpetrator's option to plead an "honest mistake" in the age of the victim, as well as a possible lowering of the age of consent, may feature in an upcoming national referendum.
Harrower's play, in which a 12-year-old Una actively seeks out and almost stalks the object of her desire, a 40-year-old man, culminating in a relationship that gives both happiness and pleasure but subsequently blows up in their faces due to societal constraints, may well further muddy public perceptions of one of society's ultimate taboos.
On the cold morning of our interview, he sits in a Dublin hotel foyer, far from the fire, looking like he'd be much happier with a mug of tea in his own kitchen, stroking the cat and waiting for the toast to pop. Ostentatious is not a word you would use to describe David Harrower. He'd had a very big room for one night's stay, he says, too big, really. And all the towels. He'd used only one, as it seemed such a waste. This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Harrower's work. His emergence as one of the UK's most respected playwrights came with his 1995 debut Knives in Hens, a sparse piece of writing that says more with its deceptive emptiness than most plays do with their maelstrom of words. After a foray into writing "proper plays", such as Presence, he's returned to this pared-back style for Blackbird, his latest work, which caused a sensation at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 and subsequently transferred to London. And a new Landmark production, directed by Michael Barker-Caven, is coming to Dublin's Project this month.
We move to the hotel cafe, where Harrower sips not the glass of tap water he requested but bottled spring water in a fancy glass as he discusses his work. His original script for Blackbird contained a great many elements, as much pomp and circumstance as his imagination would provide. "I wanted it because it was the Edinburgh festival. They have a lot of money, so I thought, pack the f***ing stage with as many people as I can, just go crazy in a way that you couldn't normally do." The initial script boasted three acts and 16 characters, one of which was the ghost of Marvin Gaye.
Then he had a shattering experience. "I was telling my wife about it, I had a month before I was handing it in, and I was really excited about it. And as I told her, it just kind of cracked, and fissures ran through it, and it just fell to the floor."
THE WORLD OF Blackbird's two main characters similarly splinters into fragments, following their momentous and traumatic encounter in the past. In the ambiguous world of the play, Una finds and confronts Ray 15 years after the sexual relationship she had with him when she was 12. He'd been imprisoned for child sexual abuse, changed his name and gone on to another life, but she'd sleepwalked through her subsequent life, not understanding who she was or what had happened to her, and seeks this moment out like a fix.
In a work that never takes sides or imposes moral boundaries, Harrower explores the murky, repressed depths of desire, dredging no-go areas of the human psyche. The subject matter lies so buried, and has so little to do with conscious, rational thought, that the play's ambiguity often reflects Harrower's own uncertainty as to what's going on. "There's bits when he takes her to Tynemouth and stuff like that, I'm still not sure what happened there," he admits. "Why he did that - was he really wanting to go to the ferry? And there's the bit after he has sex with her and he goes for a walk and doesn't know what to do. I'm not entirely sure what he's thinking then."
Harrower isn't even certain what he was thinking while he was working on it. "I still can't quite say why I wrote it the way I wrote it. Part of me wonders was it because it created a little barrier between me and the actual emotion. I don't remember making any conscious decisions. I do remember I didn't doubt for one minute that this was the absolute right way to write this play."
The initial inspiration for the play came from the case in 2003 in which 12-year-old Shevaun Pennington from Manchester went missing. It was later discovered she had left the country with US Marine Toby Studebaker. She had been corresponding with him over the internet, but apparently never mentioned her age. Harrower presented the idea to Peter Stein, the director of the Edinburgh production, and worked it, as he describes, to the "bombastic" initial draft. When it fell apart, he recounts, "that's when I got the dramatic power of the play, which is two people who could easily have sex now, but can only think about this memory of what happened to them.
"The woman in this play is caught between this belief that she was doing something that she felt was absolutely right, but has been told by everybody that it was wrong. So she wasn't allowed to properly express it. To try and contain these things is like the divided nature of childhood, to be told you are not adult enough to have proper feelings, but then to have those feelings and have them encouraged. She also wants the ability to think, 'well, I was 12 years old, I knew exactly what I was doing, this is what I felt for you'."
While he was writing the play, Harrower did a great deal of reading, much of it on the internet. "There's an organisation," he says, "called the Ipce, which actively promotes adult-child relationships and has conferences every year." The Ipce website offers statements, newsletters and magazines in English, French, German and Spanish and considers itself as providing a scholarly and studied approach to relationships between children/adolescents and adults. "It was quite a weird world to get in when it's as ordered and set up as that. I read a lot of testimonies from people who had had relationships with older men when they were young. And it's remarkable, especially in the gay relationships, that overwhelmingly the responses of those 11-, 12- and 13-year-old boys used words like 'protected', 'safe', 'warm' and 'loving'.
"It didn't happen so much with the girls. But then I've had many letters and responses from women who saw the play and had written to thank me for writing it. They said, over the years, they'd seen so many abuse stories that just castigated the men and didn't give the victim any sense of self or complexity and what they wanted going into that relationship."
And what about letters of complaint or hatred, did Harrower get many of those? "No. None. I thought I would." It raises the unwelcome question of what actually constitutes protection of our children. Does denying their complexity and individuality, even in their formative years, when they have less knowledge of the world, represent the best manner of protection? In demonising the already intimidating and utterly confusing desires and emotions they experience in early puberty, do we provide them with optimum care and attention in the fragile years of their development?
Harrower's style ideally reflects the uncomfortable turmoil of this situation. "I realised, listening to rehearsals yesterday, that a lot of my writing is predicated on ambiguity. There's a line in the play where he says to the woman, 'And you were the only one'. I actually think he's saying: you were the only child I ever slept with, I ever felt desire for. That in itself is really awful. On the other side of it was 'You were the only one I ever loved'. It's got a different meaning to it."
The power of the play has only really begun to hit him. In watching the rehearsals with Stephen Brennan and Catherine Walker, it was the first time Harrower had heard or had contact with the play in nearly a year. "I got really spooked, because I couldn't really remember writing those words, and heard them from somebody I don't associate with those words. Suddenly I thought, 'Jesus, I don't like this, I don't like you, I don't like this man, I know what he's capable of, he scares me'. Then the next minute I thought, 'Actually, no, I see your point'. So I'm changing all the time, every time I see it. As soon as I heard Catherine Walker yesterday, I was almost in tears."
The play charts a defining moment in the lives of the two characters - as well as Harrower's life. "They can't put, drop abuse on that moment," he argues. "Because what happens to the richness of being human and your own self-expression and free will and stuff like that?" As for Harrower, his plays are often accused, he says, of being different, each one different from the last. "I thought that would be a strength. It's something I feel strongly about - each one should be different. Because I'm responding, each time, as I get older in the world, and the world gets more complicated.
"I've got a play that I started before Blackbird, and my problem now is that I have to go back to that and I don't know what it is now, because Blackbird has been such a huge thing in my life, especially the way I wrote it and the structure. I can't go back to an older, more conventional way in which I arranged characters in a setting. So it's kind of thrown me a wee bit. Which is good, you've always got to be thrown, haven't you?"
Landmark's production of Blackbird at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, previews from Feb 7 and opens on Feb 12