development

Four women + two writers…

20150403_173011One of Thorrablot’s themes is the way we interact with the planet and our place in the world’s fragile and changing ecology.

Emma and I both have some background and interest in the environment through our past and current day-jobs. In Canberra Emma worked for an Australian government agency responsible for renewable energy development. During my years scraping by as a (not-too-successful) engineer I worked on a few renewable energy projects. One of them was even for a little bunch of crooks called Enron – though no one knew they were crooks at the time (honest!). Not longer after I left Enron they went on to post the biggest corporate loss ever. (Maybe I should’ve have added a bit more onto my final expenses claim …?) I now tutor an Environmental Studies course for The Open University when not co-writing plays about the environment.

We both had a common view of where people fit into the global ecological debate and wanted the play to explore a wider picture than the one we seemed to be getting. This wasn’t going to be a play about how we should all drive smaller cars, switch off lights after ourselves, and stop using plastic-bags. Based on our own experiences working in sustainability we felt those discussions were ultimately leading nowhere very much, except into ever-diminishing circles.

We wanted to explore how huge ecological events have had an impact on the world and how such events are becoming ever more significant to our continued survival as a race. But told through the lives of individuals. It also seemed important early on – and now seems more important – that those individuals were women. Which is how Thorrablot has developed into a story of ‘four women across three centuries’, as the poster tells us.

From the starting point we follow Lief, a soothsayer living in the 17th Century; through to Helen who is living on a small farm during Manchester’s Industrial Revolution; on to Freyja, a weathergirl in a North Atlantic island nation a few years from now; and finally decades later to Ann, a Manc geologist investigating a recently active volcano off the coast of the same island. Their stories are still being written, talked about, taken apart, rearranged, put back together, looked at again. Emma and I are still enjoying the process – and surviving each other! (We are acting as dramaturgs on each other’s writing…) And we still have the very enjoyable prospect of casting, rehearsing, designing, and sharing the show to come. What a nice way to spend a summer!

Rob

Welcome to our Thorrablog!

This is where we’ll be sharing our journey during the research and development of our new play Thorrablot.

This play tells the stories of four women, across different time periods and places who find themselves caught in conflict between civilisation and nature. Thorrablot explores the impact of industrialisation on climate change, linking through history to a cataclysmic ecological event.

We’ve received R&D funding from the Arts Council England to work on this, our second collaboration, and later in the year will be workshopping with actors and sharing the work in progress.

You might be wondering what Thorrablot means? We took the title from the name of a traditional midwinter feast that takes place in Iceland as a sacrifice to the pagan gods. Þorrablót has similarities to a Scottish Burns Night where the community comes together for a night of storytelling, music and revelry – and of course some traditional food, most of which is arguably quite disgusting, but more on that another time!

Emma and Rob