Introducing Faultline
Ten years in the making, Faultline is the work of long experience and experiment. The intimate story of one woman, it speaks to all humanity. From her toxic parenting to the labyrinth of the Minotaur, Hester is variously a plaything for George and Babs and a powerful protagonist for the cunning creature of many transformations. The Minotaur exposes her to every facet of personal and collective challenge. Hester matches him with devices of her own.
The juxtaposition of these two contrasting landscapes enables the deepest realisation of what confronts each one of us. To move from domestic trauma to the world of the Minotaur, Hester must cross a Threshold where her desires are manifest to the limits of excess. The dancer will tantalise and tempt, playing with shades of sensual encounter until she breaks his hold, which is also her own internal prison. She can now begin the next stage of her journey.
The language of Faultline is volatile. It breaks, diverges. Fragments of memory, combat, recognition, call up meaning from buried dimensions that lie dormant within each of us. The action is translated into anarcheology, whereby Hester can makes her descent.
The currents that inform each of three scenarios, both prevent and permit. It is a play which wrestles with the intricate, deceptive reality we must now meet.
I hope Faultline will stimulate further exploration.
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STRING A Monologue for Our Times
Written and performed by Nicki Jackowska
Images of sculptures by Tim Shaw RA
https://vimeo.com/441407349
https://youtu.be/d9NI2149-sk
string from Nicki Jackowska on Vimeo.
One of the most vivid theatrical experiences of my life was, as a young man, seeing Max Wall give a mesmerising performance of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ at the (now sadly defunct) Riverside Studios in London in 1986. This pitch-black, yet deeply comic, Beckett monologue came to mind as I was listening to Nicki Jackowska’s recent work, ‘String’. It is a testament both to the brilliance of Jackowska’s writing and the steely wit of her performance that these two pieces bear comparison. Beckett would have relished the crabbed fury and isolated humanity of her protagonist in ‘String’ – the lashing out at the figures of supposed authority that we’re all meant to be obeying in these chaotic times, the ‘filthy laughter’ echoing off the walls, the sense of a human voice speaking in the dark not knowing if it will be answered. ‘Is anybody there? … Hello??’
The brilliance of this piece is that we hear the inner voices and questions that all of us have been asking ourselves over the last years, but have rarely dared to voice. And this is also where the hope is located. ‘We are doing time’. Yes, we are. All of us. We may not ‘all be in it together’, as the politicians keep telling us – but yes, we’re all doing time, we’re all in the dark, and so we feel an intimate sense of companionship with Jackowska’s protagonist as she rails against the bullshit and the lies. As her single voice insists on the essence and tenderness of human connection, even as our humanity is being buried in the ‘silence of numbers’ and the callousness of government decrees. That whispered voice reminds us of who we are, and urgently asks ‘What matters if we can’t enfold each other? If we can’t lean in to each other?’…
Dan Gretton, Author of I YOU WE THEM Penguin Classic 2022
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Text and Performance: Nicki Jackowska
Ukraine’s National Anthem, Uillean Pipes: Robert White
Images: Tim Shaw RA
Film: Jan Capinski
Gates to the City from Nicki Jackowska on Vimeo.
Crossing Faultlines
Three songs on the theme of Women at Work
Commissioned by dream.risk.sing
Composer: Charlotte Bray
Premiere The Oxford Lieder Festival, to be recorded on forthcoming CD
Previously…
FAULTLINE UPDATE, JULY 2019
The original text of this play was completed with the late Annie Castledine. The synopsis of its creation can be read below.
Two major transformations have taken place. I devised and directed Something Is Not Quite Right, performed at Waterstones April 2018. The evening included a re-worked monologue from Faultline, entitled Home for this event, which addressed the loss of home in all its forms.
Watching the Video of this, the new script began to germinate a further radical transformation of the play.
Hester, a woman in her seventies, is staying with her daughter and grandchildren. The narrative is outlined below.
Certain triggers bring Hester’s traumatic past to life. The play now develops and intensifies these moments of recall. Hester’s continuous project to keep all at bay breaks down suddenly. The ‘carapace’ of current reality cracks open and she descends the open Faultline, each time embracing fragments and fractured moments.
At the very heart (nadir of the descent) she must engage with a landscape wherein her own breaking is evoked in equivalent collective human violation, genocide, warfare. She meets victims of such atrocities.
Examples: Nazi Concentration Camps; the Irish Border; the rise of fascism; poverty, homelessness and migration; Parliament’s breakdown.
The final scene begins with Hester winding wool for her grandmother. The Faultline takes her into a web of string. The more she fights, the tighter its hold. There then descends a grandchild, Lucy, representing Hester herself. Lucy unwinds the labyrinth and is embraced by the woman Hester, now grown so old she is curled in upon the child in this final reconciliation with her past. Who is the shelter here?
In the light of this, Faultline is being considered as a monologue, events then translated into remembered scenes. The final work is nearly done – the interface between the original text and Hester’s journeys into the Faultline. Narratives interrupted, disrupted and transformed by these intrusions. I need to bring the two dimensions into relationship, with whatever changes to the original that may be necessary. As ever, the work remains open to the creativity and invention of collaborators. A number of artists are already involved.
Something is Not Quite Right poster
I have collaborated with director Annie Castledine for many years. I‘ve followed closely the work of Complicite from their first shows and have always been aware of Annie’s close relationship with the company’s work and that of Complicite’s Founder and Director/Actor Simon McBurney.
Annie directed my Monologue Bluebells and Bordellos at the Nightingale Theatre, Brighton 2010. This was hugely successful and marked the the beginning of a long and dynamic relationship. We worked on several plays – topics related to the Holocaust, the children of high-ranking Nazis, before turning to issues more personal to me.
Faultline, a play for theatre or broadcast, is completed to a satisfactory first draft, (Annie’s assessment).
Annie’s death on July 4th 2016 was a terrible loss and shock, being unforeseen and sudden. The development of Faultline since would have given her enormous pleasure. Her support and faith in me was strong and enduring.
I have added two further scenes, in collaboration with director Maria Pattinson. I’ve introduced The Shadow Dancer and re-drafted the last scene to create a more gritty finale.
This work has opened up the script for invention and improvisation by its director, the cast and hopefully my further collaboration. Support for the play’s production is enthusiastic and growing. Annabel Arden, co-founder of Complicite, has read the script, was close to Annie both personally and professionally, knew of my work with her and provides the following Reference:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I have known of Nicki Jackowska’s work for some time through
our mutual friend, the extraordinary director Annie Castledine .
I was impressed by the dramaturgical collaboration between them
and when I came to read Nicki’s play FAULTLINE, I instantly understood
why Annie Castledine’s very considerable mind had been so taken
with it.
In my opinion it is a beautiful and unusual play dealing with
intimate and painful relationships which are common to many people
yet are transformed in this work into something on a more universal
scale.
I have met Nicki Jackowska and am certain that she has the vision
and energy to ensure that the script finds a theatre and a production.
I am certain that the play should be produced and hope you can support
the writer.
Yours
Annabel Arden, co- founder Theatre de Complicite.
I also have the support of The Old Vic, with permission to quote their response:
Thank you so much for sending us Faultline and we are all so sorry to hear about your recent loss.
It’s a really beautiful play – very personal, painful and strikingly real. An impressive piece that deserves a great production. Unfortunately, in the context of our current slate of upcoming work, we feel this isn’t the right fit for The Old Vic. The large size of the auditorium can be a challenge for work on a smaller scale with a smaller cast size, and this feels like it might find a happier home where it can breathe a bit more easily, perhaps a venue like the Hampstead for Hampstead Downstairs or Hightide.
Thank you again for thinking of us, and we wish you all the best with finding the right home for it.
Kind regards,
Georgia
Georgia Gatti
Creative Producer
The Old Vic
Faultline
A Play for Theatre in Eight Scenes
Synopsis
Faultline was conceived from the conjunction of two moments: staying in a small house I rent in Valldemossa, Mallorca, a disturbing family incident occurs; in close dialogue with Annie Castledine, with whom I’ve worked and lived for a decade, Annie says: enough of this (the Holocaust), write about what you know, where you have authority. My mind leaps to the scene in Valldemossa, I recount it to Annie, and begin. Autumn 2014.
I have drawn upon family history and memories, but only as triggers. One writes fiction as soon as the pen meets the page. The dynamic of the play concerns extreme experience – union/symbiosis and alienation. We move in close as a camera might, and draw back to witness the broader picture and implications for all characters. Hester, her daughter Maggie, her grandsons Aiden (autistic, but mildly so) and the younger Lucy are on holiday together in Valldemossa, Mallorca. Hester has suggested this location, it being the village she discovered some 40 years before when in Palma with her father, George.
Conflict between mother and daughter is variously hidden and fully revealed. This being the place Hester fled to from George four decades ago, Valldemossa has huge significance for her. Memories are triggered, with Aiden as catalyst. This leads to re-enactment and then an imagined confrontation with her father. The telling of a violent and painful story – Hester’s exposure to herself as well as confronting her father – is followed by her disintegration. Alone, she addresses herself in the mirror and we witness further exposure of a fragile self and fragmented identity.
Maggie returns without the children, having intended to cut short the holiday and fly home early. The ensuing vitriolic scene between Hester and Maggie raises issues of incest, abuse, power, longing for union, childhood, Aiden and Lucy, divorces, parents and grandparents.
Longing for ‘home’, safety and symbiosis – the wish for this being often unconscious – can be played out in bizarre and manipulative behaviour and is enacted by all four in varying degrees. Echoes and resonances of the past, the potential future, weave in and out of the current narrative.
A further dimension concerns the tension between the hidden and the revealed. The workings of unconscious fear and desire are woven into conscious act, and dialogue. The ‘shadow-self’ is active, comes and goes. I have attached a full stage direction at the start of the play to introduce the shadow dancer as a character intimate to Hester. As I’ve explained, this can only be choreographed in workshop or rehearsal. Thus far, the script is complete, but doors remain open for further development of key moments and for the introduction of connections and resonances with historical pathologies.
George is a kill-joy. Hester’s mother, a tyrant. Their battle was fought through Hester and over her head. The legacy is seen in Hester, in Maggie’s impending divorce, in the conflict between the women.
A question mark hangs over the children, the next generation. How are they affected by what they hear and see, or what is sensed behind closed doors. They show signs of disturbance, however minute.
An uneasy normality hovers over the final scene. I have worked the dialogue to the smallest detail, but yet uphold a shifting landscape, ambiguity and mystery, whereby the crucible of workshop and rehearsal will ensure freedom to invent, expand/contract, perhaps introduce more overt links to the wider world. Saying this is probably superfluous!
The play contains a great deal of humour, fleeting and/or prolonged.
Stage Direction – Overview
The Shadow Dancer
In Scene 6, Hester’s Monologue, I’ve introduced the Shadow Dancer. It is difficult to develop this character further as text. I’ve indicated movements for Hester in this scene. These movements can be transferred to the onstage Shadow Dancer entirely. Or can be performed by both characters. These movements need not be the same for each.Thus Hester in intercourse with her own unconscious or shadow self.
I have kept this scene with stage directions. It is possible to remove these, and have Hester’s monologue as a continuous text. In which case, the choreography remains to be created from scratch.However, I have myself enacted most of those movements more than once, and given my own knowledge of Hester’s condition at this time, my own choreography thus far is a valid embodiment of the many roles she had to play for survival. And the fractured condition under-pinning such roles.
The door is open for the Shadow Dancer to appear at other moments in the play. I have marked my suggestions for this with an asterisk* + SD. She/he may be on stage for longer.
Taking the device further, George might well have such a shadow self, so unaware is he of his own motives and any intimation of the unconscious. Much hangs on his inability to face any outcome of his relationship with Hester, or his own motives.
Thus the play may have an entirely new scene, composed only of dance/movement.
Such choreographies excite me, their links to the Greeks, Jung and the analytic work.