The journey towards the May 13 showing continues. 

I've just done the seventh rewrite of the original 1999 show, Topless*. 

New jokes have been added. Old ones upgraded or snipped off and left to curl on the cutting room floor. A keen eye has been put to the themes. Changes made to the songs.

I've written (with the invaluable help of my 'outside eyes' including producer Sharon Burrell) a brief bit at the top of the show to ready the audience to travel with me, to contextualise a script written 20 years ago.

My outside eyes are all women younger than me - they tell me how many of the issues in the show: identity, body image, autonomy versus relationship speak to them now. Hooray, the work is still relevant!  Boo, much of the muddle is still going strong...

Something about the date for the first work-in-progress  run has been nudging at me.
​
I finally go and look something up - oh, it's the anniversary of my Mother's death.  I don't like to be sentimental or portentous (neither did my Mum), but Mum (and her death) is/are in the show. There's other more fun stuff, too, I promise! Mum loved live theatre and lounge songs so might I think of it as a tribute she would appreciate? 

​

​Marking moments, marking changes, marking time? Moving forward and back. 

I am also currently reviewing Mad Men on netflix. Don Draper was pretty much my father's age. I just saw the Cuban Missile Crisis episode - an interesting resonance with the current 'major, major' stuff going on right now. It was interesting seeing all the characters weighing up their pasts and simply carrying on. May we all look back on this as an interesting moment in time. 

Back in 1996 there were some events that took my life right off-track. I didn't like it at all at the time, but I found after a few years had passed what a fantastic benefit it was to have been thrown a few existential curveballs. 

* Topless went to Edinburgh 1999 with the racy byline : 'a show about life and death and love and hate and sex and sticking plaster and breasts.' And was described this way by the press:

a macabre comic style...her accounts of failed relationships, low self-esteem, and her brush with breast cancer...are both hilarious in their frankness and moving. ..with her consistently high energy and warm, engaging stage presence, Peta Lily captures and maintains the attention of her audience throughout. Total Theatre
 a talented comic, she takes the departure of her husband and the illness and death of her mother and turns them into something which is not just entertaining, but is even funny  Edinburgh Evening News
a refreshingly comic, intelligent and informative exploration of the turbulent events in one woman's life crisis...consistently funny...Lily recounts her experiences with an incisive and inventive wit...guiding her audience away from unnecessary sentiment but not losing a sense of poignancy The Scotsman
instead of erotica, Lily gives her audience something far more outrageous and personal...told with consistent humour. Lily has lightness of touch, instinctive wit ...one of those rubber faces...and a silky singing voice. Lily manages...to keep them laughing right up to the end. The Stage
Do see her perform her uniformly funny, yet unabashedly realistic play about ageing, breasts, cancer, sex, music, movies, life and death. Totally HK (Hong Kong)

How would you feel if you were handed a transcript of words you said twenty years ago and had to speak them aloud, in public?

I am about to re-tell some awkward truths. Re-open a few old wounds.

Currently preparing for a first raw run of autobiographical show Topless - a show which opened at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre and played the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1999. Fitting slightly differently into the same dress is one palpable reminder of things changed since then. Cutting the cigarette smoked onstage is another.

Even more strange is revisiting a tone of voice I can hardly recognise. Sentiments and syntax reveal a different mindset.

Content-wise I am revisiting a time when I felt disoriented, helpless, lost.

Given recent world events we all now feel disoriented, helpless and lost.

​Doubt has always been a big part of my process (who knows whether it's a vital part or simply an annoying side-affect). One commits to a performance date. Progression towards that date moves  through spikes of fear, occasional elation and regret. (I even lost my voice on the run-up to the very first performance - nods to Freud and Louise Hay).

Back then it was the transgression of revelation which woke me in the middle of the night. This time the discomfort is different.

Topless was written in the present tense. ​I am having to mouth thoughts and attitudes on which I have since closed a door. 

In the making of recent show Chastity Belt I embraced Artemis. 

'I am not who I used
to be. I am not used.
I am not touched.
I no longer burn scorch smoulder with fire -
like an angel
-or a bathroom sponge-
I am the opposite
of desire.'
 
Topless recalls duvet days of bison grass vodka, the euphoria of pre-op medication and kitchen sex -  it's a little scary remembering the power of the libido and having to embody it again.

I was fortunate enough to meet Dave Pickering at a Devoted & Disgruntled event on the topic of Gender last year.

After developing my show Chastity Belt (2011-2013 and still touring), my thoughts were stimulated by wider questions of gender and associated issues. I got an opportunity to see Dave's show Mansplaining Masculinity which I found thrilling, informative and thought provoking. 

Dave interviewed me the other week for his Getting Better Acquainted podcast and it's fresh up today.
He is such a warm, informed  and generous interviewer and runs his podcasts like a conversation.

On twitter today, Dave (his twitter handle is @goosefat101) summed up what we covered as we spoke : 
In @GBApodcast 288 @peta_lily talks movement, memory, memoir, dark clown, solo shows, bereavement and so much more.

​And here now is the link to all of that on soundcloud.

This is where it started.
During 1996 and 1997, friends kept saying 'you should make a show out of this'. 

In 1999, I made that show. I asked a friend 'what's a funny title for a show about breast cancer?' and, experienced improviser as he is, he immediately said: Topless.

1996/7 were the years when I racked up 5 of the things often listed as 'the most stressful life events'. (I am ashamed to note, that, compared to the fates of so many in the world right now it was a bunch of nothing, but tell that to the subjective nervous system). 

Topless is not only about breast cancer it was also about divorce, upheaval, heartbreak and getting things off one's (my) chest, but ultimately (I only discovered through the process of writing it), it was about facing changes and the attendant necessity to renegotiate a sense of identity.  The show made its debut at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre (and subsequently toured to Greece, Hong Kong and Australia).

On opening night I had no expectations as to its appeal. I had made the show as funny as I could (with a couple of moments where pathos was allowed to rub through). I thought women might appreciate the show but was surprised in the bar afterwards to hear men engaging with it - one of them put it like this: 'everyone has had to deal with illness and death, or fears having to deal with it.' 

Soon people began to ask, 'what's next?'. I joked:  'It's going to be a trilogy'. 

In 2002, I made Midriff. About mid-life, family, loss, decisions, courage and cowardice. And theatre - the 'flesh and blood' as my mother used to call it.

It then took until 2011 for enough life to have been lived (including a 6 year period when I didn't perform at all) and enough thoughts to have been gathered for a third 'chapter': a show called Chastity Belt.

​This January I sat at my dining / work table with producer Sharon Burrell and did a read through of the shows asking ourselves how to approach a possible durational event where the pieces would be performed one after the other. 20 years of a life (with two intervals). 

We noticed, as I read, some of the sharp differences between the larger world then and now. At the personal level, I found myself facing  the vivid doubt whether this proposed project was, in any conceivable way, wise.

It was strange and little alarming to feel the rhythms and attack of Topless in my mouth. Certain passages shocked me; 'Wow, so I actually said that?' Someone once described Topless as 'raw and emotional' - I failed to see it at the time. Then there were details - details of my own lived life 'important' enough to have made it into a show text - which had evaporated completely from my memory, but were here, still, suspended in the strange aspic of a theatre script.

Midriff wrestled with choices and quibbled with chance and paid homage to few losses: a mother, a brother and a person who (I realised, in retrospect) provided the concrete start point for my theatre making career. But during the read-through, I saw how Midriff pulled together diverse threads of my life at that point. Threads which got slowly stretched and then fairly desperately unravelled in the six years that followed (see Invocation - a show which is chronologically but not anatomically implicated). It was after Midriff, in 2002, that I turned my back on self-indulgent foolishness in pursuit of future financial security (hold, hold your gales of laughter). By 2008, I had reached a flavourless and dusty place I affectionately call 'creative death'. I was working in a field where people are exhorted to 'find their passion' to take them to the next level. I began to feel uncomfortable but brushed the feeling off - after all, the recipie to success and fulfilment is 'getting outside of the comfort zone', isn't it?!

Then one day I looked down and noticed I was shuffling (dynamically shuffling, mind you) along with my tattered passion around my ankles. 

I was compelled to make Topless, despite my terror of how it would be received or what it would reveal about me. Theatre making is a compulsion (or so I believe). Autobiographical work will always have to justify itself against self-indulgence and rightfully so. But having visited a place where no compulsion was pushing at my back, I cannot help but champion the practice of honouring creative nudges and risking to express and examine and explore and tell stories and re-weave persistent themes. 

In 2011, Chastity Belt began as another joke - making light of my current personal situation. Ridiculously, and unexpectedly, it became a joyful and exuberant embracing of my single, celibate status - think Artemis, think autonomy! In the third anatomical chapter, I found a new place to stand. And I like to think I brought a little extra business to organic lemon growers. 

Midriff leaflet (above)
Photo: Graham Fudger. Design: Jamie Zubairi  (note clever repurposing of the flowers from the Topless shoot)

Years ago, I had the great joy of working alongside writer/theatremaker Claire Dowie (in her two-hander 'All Over Lovely' 1996 - UK tour and the splendid much-missed Drill Hall). A reviewer once said that Claire was 'against anything that you could define'. She spoke her unique truths in fiction and in biographically-based pieces.  Claire had been a comedian and 'got tired of joke joke joke' and together with her director and partner Colin Watkeys they created 'Stand-up Theatre'. Written texts performed no-fourth wall. Musings, drama, narrative, storytelling mashed-up.

After a gap in performing (divorce, cancer, parental decline and death etc), I returned to the stage with Topless, a show describing divorce, cancer, parental decline and death etc. Although I had used my life material in my work before (overtly in Red Heart and in a modified way in other shows), I was randomly given an opportunity to perform for a few nights). I had a performance model in Stand-up Theatre to say what had to be said. Because it did seem to me, to have to be said. Not because it was worthy but because it was the material to hand. Urgently to hand, because it was stuff I had not fully made sense of yet. 

Given the absurdities of hospital visits and life in general, friends would often quip: you can make a show about this. And so I, um, did. I would wake in the middle of the night and sit at a stark 90 degrees thinking: this is a really stupid thing to do. But I did it anyway. The show dates were in the diary. I sent the script to my ex-husband to approve, although the jokes were mainly pointed at myself. I asked my then boyfriend, sorry ex-boyfriend: I know you said this, but if I say this it will be funnier is that ok? I worried that a show about breast Cancer (there has been a lot more work ion the subject since, this was 1999) would be glum. I asked a friend, impro veteran Philip Pellew: what's a funny title for a show about breast cancer? Topless her said and Topless it was... though I wasn't, much to the chagrin (or something) of the six lone 20 year-old men who comprised my entire audience one evening in Edinburgh in my lateish Fringe slot...

Back at the start - I had the material but I did not know how to slant the story. 'Don't get it right, get it written.' And all the events tumbled forth and were sifted through to see what was worthy of inclusion. 

At a certain point in making a show you start to ask: I need a good finish, how's it going to end?  how does it all wrap up? what point am I making here?

I went to archetype - is this the story of Job? - nah not that message. Can Dante's seven layers of Hell be used to spin it off? Nope. Lists (7 sins, levels whatever) are undramatic and it's not about redemption...

I had a running motif about movies - how I feared to become Ann Bancroft in '84 Charing Cross Road', how my 'amour fou' ( the relationship after my marriage) reminded me of 'Betty Blue' ( without the eye episode and the suffocation with pillows), how during Radiotherapy treatment I cast myself as Sigourney Weaver in 'Alien', pitted against the beast of the deadly ray-giving machine.

Then one night I had a dream where I was onstage and didn't know my lines, in fact I didn't really know what play I was in. And the core theme finally hit me - this piece is about identity. I was surprised because I felt I was not a traditional wife and I had my performance identity (mind you, identifying as 'physical theatre performer extraordinaire', or even 'ordinaire' takes a bit of a kicking after a bit of surgery and vitality-sapping nuclear burning). So the ending saw me embracing my inner Ann Bancroft (it worked better in the show than it sounds, I promise, and a kicking playout tune really helped).

I lost my voice - literally - while writing and rehearsing Topless. I was being assisted by a student following the process for her Theatre degree. She would read my lines and I would mime. Intensive practice in playing Stanislavskian actions. I made it through the first show without coughing (the only time I have drunk brandy onstage). And after the run I discovered my singing voice had gained some breadth. Use it or lose it. Speak it or choke it. Say it and get bigger than it.

As I say, I 'had' to make that show. And I had so little to lose. I came into the bar to find people talking to each other, to strangers, about their parents, and illnesses they or friends had suffered. And scary old death of course.

Keep your eye on the entertainment, speak the truth, make sure your jokes are funny and you earn the right to tell your own story. Tell it well. Be strategic - think of your audience. Work on your conventions, polish your performance, manage the different textures, be clear with the story, embody your characters well, keep your eye on structure and pace, find the universal theme, have a good engaging beginning, an intriguing middle and the best end you can muster, and bingo - others can find the universal in your particular.

And of course - you can't do all these things in the previous paragraph from the go-get. Allow yourself to be in the not-knowing, the discomfort. Get ruthless later.

When you make autobiographical theatre, you have to get outside your story to write or devise it. then you have to get back in to play it. Being able to see things from different vantage points has to be a key skill. For life, not just theatre making. Yes I know, possibly an underrated one. Comedy is good for that - things are never the way you think. Comedy, like life, must be full of surprises. Getting outside your story frees you from the fixed vantage point of 'victim of circumstance'. You are Author and Editor (or your director is) and you are also, if not 'Hero' - at least Protagonist. You should also at moments be your future Audience. Assessing your work from their vantage point. Having to write publicity blurb helps a lot with that.

When I look back on two years where, at the time, there was a fair amount of crying and angst - what I see now is the cartoon version of it I portrayed in Topless. Talk about transformation. Talk about re-frame - NLP eat your heart out.

I can definitely vouch for the therapeutic value of autobiographical theatre, but you only get it if you are genuinely willing to examine and to 'go there' but while being rigorous about the theatre-making process.

Lucky me - in those days the real papers would actually come to see your show:
Topless: stand-up theatre - about 'life and death and love and hate and sex and sticking plaster and breasts.' Played UK, Greece, Australia.

a macabre comic style...her accounts of failed relationships, low self-esteem, and her brush with breast cancer...are both hilarious in their frankness and moving. ..with her consistently high energy and warm, engaging stage presence, Peta Lily captures and maintains the attention of her audience throughout. TOTAL THEATRE

a talented comic, she takes the departure of her husband and the illness and death of her mother and turns them into something which is not just entertaining, but is even funny  EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS

a refreshingly comic, intelligent and informative exploration of the turbulent events in one woman's life crisis...consistently funny...Lily recounts her experiences with an incisive and inventive wit...guiding her audience away from unnecessary sentiment but not losing a sense of poignancy THE SCOTSMAN

instead of erotica, Lily gives her audience something far more outrageous and personal...told with consistent humour. Lily has lightness of touch, instinctive wit ...one of those rubber faces...and a silky singing voice. Lily manages...to keep them laughing right up to the end. THE STAGE

Do see her perform her uniformly funny, yet unabashedly realistic play about ageing, breasts, cancer, sex, music, movies, life and death. TOTALLY HK (HONG KONG)