A New Audio Play

These last few months have been busy ones. Writing a play is often a process of discovery. You have the map of some previous navigation, but it rarely turns out to be of much use. And sometimes the things you discover are not immediately apparent from the content on the page.

I had, sometime back, written a play about the early years of the Bauhaus. My vision was to try and contextualise it within the times it operated. 1919 was a very unstable time for German society. The fact that the Bauhaus existed and operated within (and beyond) this period is nothing short of extraordinary. When I looked at my Brechtian take on the story, I realised one thing: the cost to stage would be exorbitant. I threw away the map.

Having taken sometime to think of it, the best approach, I decided, was an audio-play. However, this requires serious revision. There’s an intimacy to audio that is not necessarily required for a stage play. Identifying the centre of that intimacy was key. I had been aware that there was a teacher at the school who had been all but omitted from the story for being both female and of advanced years. And yet a lot of the philosophy of the Bauhaus during its early period relied heavily on her research. Gertrud Grunow had been present in my stage version of the play but only as a small part. She is now the centre of this new audio world…and I very much hope you will enjoy her version of events when finally Bring Again The Now of Then airs.