Edna & Denis

       a Love Story despite it all

A Labour defence minister on holiday: a witty, funny & moving look at the sheer slog of political idealism, the challenge of an empty nest, PTSD & the threat of nuclear winter.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THIS SCRIPT:

“Beautifully crafted. Set against an idyllic backdrop of bucolic serenity and childhood freedom is an intriguing portrait of an unusually principled and deeply cultured politician and a loving and mature partnership with a remarkable woman. Contrasting with this is the slow unfolding of the older man's hitherto untold emotional scarring and his wife's struggle to understand and re-connect with him.

The younger female student and orphan, with her well-meaning naiveté and directness, helps shine light on both partnerships. Though the setting is the French Pyrenees in 1970 we are simultaneously made aware of the connecting strands of pre-war disintegration and our own perilous times, of the plight of refugees and the blight of nuclear weapons.

This is a profoundly humanitarian, compassionate and exceptionally timely play.”

David Banks, actor, director & author, June 2021.

Story

In 1937 & again in 1938, with War looming, undergraduate Denis Healey stayed at La Coûme, a spartan youth hostel in the French Pyrenees, run by penniless German refugees Pitt & Yvès Krüger. Denis' encounter with the Krügers so impressed him, that he mentions them in all his various memoirs.

Whatever young Denis was searching for, he found the seeds in La Coûme.

But the play opens in 1970. Edna & Denis are fresh from election defeat, a first holiday alone since their youngest flew the nest. A time to take stock, he of his political life, she of a new personal freedom.

They go in search of the Krügers, & what they discover brings Denis to tears.

For all their banter & edgy moments, Edna & Denis are a most loving couple & their warmth quietly underscores the whole play. It's high summer & whenever appropriate the stage will be suffused with heat & sunlight. La Coûme is now a music school, mostly for migrant waifs & orphans, & from time to time, like a warm breeze, the magic of cheerful kids invades the stage, as does a background hum of music practice & young high spirits.

A play about idealism & the sheer slog of political endeavour, about redemption & its limits, about time & hope & healing.

And beyond the loving & the sunlight & the quiet joy, like the flutter of birds in a chimney, plays a distant uneasy whisper of nuclear winter.

This play has powerful roughly equal parts for three mature women & two mature men, & scope for community participation by as many youngsters as the space can handle. In line with theatre law, the junior children are not needed after the break.

PERSONS OF THE DRAMA:

DENIS HEALEY: just short of his 53rd birthday, recently defeated Defence Minister in a Labour Cabinet, stocky, busy, inherently shy, a mix of the sensitive & the overwhelming. His accent has strong echoes of Yorkshire. Enjoys making funny accents.

EDNA HEALEY: 52, loving wife of Denis, mother of three, an intelligent mind in her own right & future biographer. Still has warm traces of her Forest of Dean accent. Recovering from a twisted ankle.

IRIS: 36, student of psychology, orphaned by the Spanish Civil War & former pupil at La Coûme, busy & intrusive. Has 'poor boundaries'. French-speaking. Of uncertain ethnicity.

YVÈS KRÜGER: 67, formerly Swiss German, but has lived in France since 1933. More assimilated than Pitt, so the accent is predominantly French. A Quaker, progressive educationist & co-head of La Coûme. A strong but sensitive woman, altruistic, devoted to others. Probably a 'wounded healer'.

PITT KRÜGER: 66, a German Quaker, & tho with one significant interruption he has lived in France since 1933 & been French-speaking, he keeps hints of a German accent. Scarred, & still digesting wartime trauma. Occasional limp. Passionate about the role of arts in education & of education in the quest for peace between peoples. Slender & totally white-haired.

AS MANY CHILDREN AS CAN BE MUSTERED, SOME MUSICALLY-GIFTED:

They will have minimal lines & mostly walk-on-&-off roles, but are integral to the spirit of the piece: sunshine, laughter, music & hope, despite the underlying stress of political tension & military threat. NB: in 1970, some of the refugee orphans can (& should) be from Biafra, Algeria & Vietnam.

SETTING: July 1970. La Coûme, an orphanage & music school in the French Pyrenees, & its mountainous surroundings.

The ACTION of the play takes place in just over 24 hours.

When I began this script, I knew the United States was proposing to augment its already gigantic nuclear arsenal, but did not anticipate the United Kingdom would join that suicidal arms race. This play is more timely than I knew. A McM

NB: The warning of nuclear winter is not stridently “in yer face” but insinuated within the fun & laughter in a way that (I hope) allows it to win home.

    Edna & Denis: script, treatment & blurb © Copyright: Alan McMurtrie, 2021.

In 1976, Sheila Reid & Richard Kay (National Theatre players: see Laurence Olivier's 1970 film of Chekhov's The Three Sisters} were wanting to mount a production of Stewart Parker's laugh-a-minute comedy The Actress & the Bishop. But it was not long enough to make a show.

I had an idea in the pipeline but little time to re-think it as a two-hander. I was teaching full-time but also single-handedly renovating a 17th cent house in Royal Hill, Greenwich. In the midst of which I was offered this wonderful opportunity.

I remember knocking out the script in three weeks. Has memory contracted the time? It certainly felt like only three weeks.

The result is dramatic, possibly histrionic, & very angry. For spiritual read political. This was the Margaret Thatcher era & I poured out my frustration at the new heartlessness I saw infecting my country, & from which we have still not recovered.

The play was directed by Michael Attenborough, young & up-coming. We opened for a Sunday performance at Oxford Playhouse & I was afterwards offered some warm words by Donald Swan. I was very grateful, for I was only too aware of the play's rough edges.

We then transferred to The Young Vic, where Richard Attenborough came to see us, but the piece was thinly advertised & we didn't always have the audiences that Richard Kay & Sheila deserved.

The Stewart Parker play had the accompaniment of a lively young rock band led by Mike Khan. Gross Prophet was performed first, with the comedy given pride of later place. But towards the end of the three-week run, Mike's band had a gig which required them to leave early. My protest piece played second, & suddenly the show took off. We had reverted to the sequence of Ancient Greek theatre, that the belly laughs come first & loosen the audience to face emotion & pain. Thereafter the show kept that running order.

PERSONS OF THE DRAMA:

JOHN, a Free Church minister in his forties, suffering (but not quietly) a crisis of faith & conscience.

SADIE, his wife, a few years older than him. A trim & busy person, conventional in dress. She has always seen herself as saving John. Can she (does she want to?) save her marriage?

TIME: Christmas, the late 1970's, Thatcher years.

ONE SET: implying a Victorian Gothic session room & a church apse.

A womb-piece, Bliss dramatises recent perceptions of the psychic development of the human embryo.

“What happens after birth is an elaboration of
& depends on, what happened prior to it.”

Thomas Verney, 1982.

As written, this lyrical piece would be difficult to perform.

NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE.

Krishnaji explores three crucial weeks in the early life of Jiddu Krishnamurti, philosopher & mystic.

The young Krishna has been groomed to be a Messiah of the Theosophist movement. At the critical moment of his outing as Prophet, he rebels.

The death of his brother opens his eyes to the wishful-thinking & charlatanism that has infected his spiritual family. Thus the play nods to the dangers of collective inflation & mutual self-deception.

Krishnamurti will go on to be an inspiration to many, but not by teaching in any usual sense. He will refuse to give advice or impart information. Simply he will ask questions & encourage you to ask questions of yourself, without evasion.

Krishnaji explores a turning-point in the making of this spiritual non-teaching.

Altho dealing with spiritual concerns, the play is neither po-faced nor preachy.

“Some of the lines hit the spot like blows to the solar plexus
- sharp, surprising and breathtaking.” David Banks, 1996.

From my blurb for the professional reading at The Living Theatre (New York, April 14th 2008):

An absurdist drama? Well, no, because the absurdity is all too laughably familiar. Is it the absurdity of a competitive mindset that invades our most intimate realities & controls & belittles our possible lives?

In five big chairs (dentist's chairs? electric chairs?) sit the hen-pecking, squabbling principals of our story. A complacent, self-serving Winner. A troubled, insightful Loser. A ruthlessly ambitious Riser. A confused but honest Youngster. And Mel.

All born into winning & losing.

From time to time, they are whirled about on a massive revolve, compelled to enact an ultimately meaningless game, the Method. Could this be the scramble of a Stock exchange?  The bitching of reality TV? Or just a wicked fairground? Anyway, it's all they've got. A tiny society dedicated to winning & losing. 'Compete to eat!' they cry. 'Compete to eat!' But, oh! where's the bloody food?

It's not of course the evil chairs that hold them captive, but the web of the Method, its Rules & Procedures & above all its loaded, inescapable Language. For when the Method sleeps, they dance another forbidden, almost forgotten tune.

And who are these strange beings that minister behind the chairs, patient, often silent, but then whispering, whispering?

Tho Pru doubts & Sass queries, only Mel has the guts to defy & escape the Method. Courageously, painfully she clambers up & out of the mean deception that captivates their lives - & finds there is an alternative reality.

So why does she come back to tell the others? Why does she imagine they can listen? That we don't have to live like this, in the web we have spun for ourselves around ourselves?

Writing on the Wall is a re-working of Plato's Myth of the Cave, in which the Human Race is seen to be chasing the shadows of inadequate knowledge. And like any decent Myth, this new version is open to several interpretations. But whatever way you read it, Mel's cry against the starvation of the Spirit finds a contemporary echo in the thirst & desperation of lost realities.

Writing on the Wall is by turns witty, satiric, lyrical & painful.

The stage directions specify a spectacular revolve, & that would be my preferred option, but experience of the professional reading at The Living Theatre (New York, April 2008) suggests there may well be other ways to achieve that powerful effect. The Living Theatre reading also made it clear this is a text that is simply human & can be performed by any mix of humanity.

The principal actors need to be Movers.

In August 1914, as the B.E.F. fell back from Mons, Corporal Fowler of the 11th Hussars found himself alone behind enemy lines. He was given shelter by Mme Belmont-Gobert in the village of Bertry, & when German troops were billetted in Mme Belmont's house, had to hide in a kitchen cupboard. It wasn't until 1918, when Canadian troops retook Bertry, that he was able to report for duty.

Mme Belmont & her daughter Angèle were later awarded the O.B.E. From this germ of a true story has grown a fictional account of a British gunner sheltered for those four years, but now his gutsy saviour is a woman on her own. What kind of relationship would develop? & what happens when a sensitive, intelligent German officer is billetted in the same small house?

The drama that develops raises questions about how & why War comes about, is kept going & who benefits. It queries the nature of Allegiance & how an Enemy of very similar flesh & blood can be seen as other & alien.

Tho the play is a one-hander, three central characters are vividly evoked. Each transgresses the role allotted to her or him, till finally their true allegiance reaches beyond social custom, national pride & military duty, to the common humanity (courageous in its frailty) of each other.

Set against the enormity & horror of the Great War, a domestic situation that might have bred jealousy, spite & violence, instead feels for an answer of tolerance & mutual respect.

[I was asked to write a play for a small theatre in SW Scotland.]

In our modern world, both parties to a relationship must juggle the needs of work & career. And what if they work together?  And what if their profession is one specially susceptible to pulls of ego & inflation? And if one is doing better than the other?

Iona McAllister is said to be the finest Scottish soprano since Mary Garden. She has teamed-up personally & professionally with Australian tenor, Ralph Ruttledge. They can “sing & live & play with the one person who means most of all”. Heaven on earth?

But Ralph lacks Iona's scope & potential. What happens when professional ambition & envy threaten a loving relationship? In the event, Iona silences her wonderful voice (why?) & Ralph has to go in search of her on a journey that is more than geographical.

NB: this is a play about & with music. I can imagine a production that gives prominence to the music & becomes almost a musical, & one which prunes it back.

“While Langsdorff is in essence a good man brought down, Schmuttermeyer
is by no means straightforward as a villain... This is an extraordinary
achievement. The research is formidable & the uses to which it is put
almost always surprising & to good theatrical effect.”

Druid Theatre, Galway.

The name Hans Langsdorff may not immediately strike a bell, but the image of Peter Finch, cigar in hand, leaning over his maps in the captain's day-cabin of the Panzerschiff Graf Spee is known to millions thru the Michael Balcon & Emeric Pressburger film Battle of the River Plate (1956). Fine film, but necessarily it focuses on the naval battle & subsequent diplomatic dance, & gives a memorable but fleeting snapshot of Langsdorff - the courteous, gentlemanly German captain who, before the eyes of the world, didn't give the Nazi salute.

The play is set some two hours before Langsdorff's suicide. He has an uninvited visitor. Thru the lines of Langsdorff's understandable evasions & ironies, we get a glimpse of how it felt not to be able to speak out, not to be able to challenge.

This two-hander is a tense, often vicious struggle to the death by a man of conscience against a resourceful opponent who is no less dangerous for being ill-informed, gullible & bigotted.

Challenging, moving & funny, a play about Dumbing-Down & the sickness of contemporary culture.

Octopus is a dark comedy, & its very funny moments delighted a first reader at the National Theatre. It was inspired by the news that the Tolkien family had a row over whether to give permission for the film version of Lord of the Rings. One faction said the film would inevitably cheapen a great novel. Others said OK, but let’s grab the money.

Christopher Tolkien: “They gutted the book, making an action film for 15-to-25-year-olds.. .. Commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic & philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.” (Christopher Tolkien: obituary, The Guardian, 20th January 2020.)

Taking a parallel plot, I examine the dumbing-down of our culture. As the piece was written a few years ago, it will need up-dating, but this is an opportunity for cast & director to contribute their own sense of the dumbing-down, whether it’s the jazzing of cricket into a slog-fest or the constant interruption of radio interviewees, so they never finish a sentence.

Octopus has two fine substantial parts for mature intelligent women, two for older men (one of whom has the handicap & shame that he has no sense of smell or taste) & two for young women, one of whom is of Kurdish origin & sings us a traditional Kurdish song of parting.

There is only one set & a very strong story. The intertwining sub-plot concerns a student protest at an octopus being killed & displayed in a tank as a so-called work or art.

Sam & her student friends have made their protest against the so-called 'installation' of an octopus embalmed in a tank of liquid. Tragically, Fergus (in smashing the glass) ingests preservative, falls in & cuts his own throat on splinters. The play opens with Sam scrambling away from the scene of this horrific moment.

One strand of the drama is the divisive aftermath for Sam & her family of this maybe worthy but criminal act. Another concerns Sam's uncles, Greg & Hilary, at sibling loggerheads over Sam's grandfather's cult book, & whether rights should be sold to make a trashy film version.

These two stories clash & intertwine, & as the relations gather for the funeral of Sam's grandmother Helen, so the family threatens to blow apart.

And what shall they do about 'Irene', young, pregnant, a devout Moslem & first generation Kurdish, whom Helen has befriended?

“Magnificent!” David Banks, 2015.

“Powerful & timely, a true story turned into a drama with real finesse. The plot develops with intrigue & drama aplenty. The dialogue is wonderful.” Papatango Theatre Coy, 2020.

January 1967. Kenneth Tynan (Literary Manager of the infant National Theatre) wishes to mount a production of a half-written play 'Soldiers' by German playwright Ralph Hochhut. This play claims that Winston Churchill (only recently deceased) instigated the murder of his ally,the Polish leader General Sikorski.

The Chairman of the National, Oliver Lyttleton (Lord Chandos) has been a colleague & personal friend of Churchill, suspects the claim to be a Lie, damaging not only to his friend's reputation but also to the Nation's self-belief after Suez. 

At a time when Theatre Censorship is being debated as repressive, an old-guard tool to gag dramatic protest, Chandos seeks to veto a production of 'Soldiers', not altogether, but certainly at the National.

Piggie-in-the-Middle is the National's first Director Sir Laurence Olivier, in failing health, trying to hold together the tension of egoes in his charge, cope with the jigsaw of theatre administration & hone the performances which alone will keep the public happy to fund the venture he so passionately believes in. Against his wont, he is forced to take sides, choose Artistic Freedom rather than tame expediency.

Neither party can back down & confrontation (in the all-too-public eye) becomes inevitable. But at what cost?

2017 saw the 50th Anniversary of probably the biggest scandal of British Theatre, a scandal that embraced issues of Free Speech, Patriotism & Britain's image & self-belief in a world post-Suez.

All the main participants in this struggle were well-meaning, even idealistic, but elemental differences of age, mores & vision bring them to screaming pitch & threaten their otherwise shared Project of founding a Theatre worthy of the name National.

In time, this scandal will break the health (but not resolution) of a great Actor-Manager, lead a fine left-wing drama critic to overreach & nearly bankrupt himself, & darken the last days of a gracious old campaigner than whom no-one did more to win World War Two, & without whom our National Theatre would not exist.

The following STAGE-PLAYS are available as HARD-COPY:

Giordano Bruno (1962), Bliss (1987), Edward’s Eyes (2003).

Please apply to Alan via his e-mail on this website. Prices on application.