Recording Bring Again the Now of Then
For me it’s walking. It’s when all my best ideas come. Their genesis, their development, and their resolution. It literally never happens whilst I am sitting at the pc. Something about the subconscious, I suppose. One day after watching a documentary on BBC 4, celebrating the centenary of the Bauhaus opening in Weimar, I went for a walk. I think you know what happened next…
That was 2019. What emerged was a play about the early spiritual years of the Bauhaus. The Gropius years. Walter Gropius had earned a mention in an earlier play of mine about an architect, They’ll Get You Now You’re Gone. I had no idea in 2017 that I would actually go on to write a play about an art school in Germany. Similarly, at the time of watching the documentary, I was putting the finishing touches to a play set in a Glasgow pub which was under the influence of Homer’s The Odyssey. Searching about for a title - having just watched the Bauhaus documentary - I settled on Dance the Colour Blue, the phrase used by a long forgotten female master at the Bauhaus which seemed to attach well to the protagonist: an artist and synesthete. It hadn’t occurred to me that my next project would centre on that female master! And although I have been asked about the seeming interconnectedness, it is merely a tangential link.
The first version of the Bauhaus play was titled The Now of Then and told the straight forward story of Walter Gropius’ struggles setting up a school in post-war Germany during a failed revolution. A society that is riven with nationalists, Spartacists, Bolsheviks, Socialists, Communists, and seasoned with a soupçon of DADA is one hell of an environment to kick off anything! The play focussed on the rivalry between school director, Gropius, and a fellow school-master, Johannes Itten (who had some rum ideas about spiritualism using garlic and bandages). Gropius, fearful of his own power, tries offsetting Itten’s influence by recruiting Swiss artist, Paul Klee, and the internationally renowned Wassily Kandinsky. My vision was a sort of immersive theatre where the walls would bleed with the words of the extreme events happening in the streets whilst the internal shenanigans played out. That’s the thing about writing…you can get carried away! Only upon completing the play did I realise how exorbitant it would be to stage. I had no interest in scaling it back. The whole purpose of writing the play was to realise this Brechtian vision I had in my mind. And having only recently secured Creative Scotland funding for Dance the Colour Blue (staged by ACS in June ‘23), I did not think I would secure yet more funding, nor had I an appetite to jump through those hoops again (the boxes I had to put myself in changed my self-perception!).
One day, whilst having lunch in an Ayrshire pub, my good friend Jill Korn suggested I turn it into an audio drama. Jill is an excellent and prolific dramatist. I had at that time been listening on BBC Sounds to Fault Lines: Money, Sex and Blood inspired by Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. In it, Glenda Jackson stars as the irascible ‘Constance’ who is both a character and the narrator. It gave me a nice angle of approach to transition my stage play into an audio drama. Rather than merely adding a whole lot of exposition (which would leaden it), I would change the focus of the main character to Gertrud Grunow, the long forgotten female master who exhorted her students to “dance the colour blue!”. A Google search for this woman will yield just two photographs, typically accompanied by one paragraph covering her life’s work. She wasn’t just a woman in the 1920s…she was a mature woman (a particularly effective method of making oneself invisible!). What emerged was something so much better. There was now a triangle of tension (Grunow, Gropius and Itten), a circle of students, all squared off with the internationalist Kandinsky: the three shapes which would define the Bauhaus. In the new audio drama, Gertrud Grunow appears twice: as female master, Grunow, in the 1920s, and as the narrator, Gertrud, speaking her mind 20 years later…reflected in the changed title.
The studio session which took place last weekend was sublime. I had a wonderful cast of actors: Jill Korn (Grunow), Mark Coleman (Gropius), Stuart Edgar (Itten), Andy Jones (Feininger), Iain McAleese (Kandinsky, Mayor), Dani Heron (Greta), Julia Keyes (Otti), Lauren Downie (Helga), Lorenzo Novani (Kurt)…and there was even a small part for me (Baudert). The weekend ran like clockwork. There was a lot of camaraderie, laughter, and solidarity. One by one, the actors left as the end of recording approached. As the day waned, just two actors remained, each with a monologue. And as Jill and Mark delivered their final words of Gertrud and Gropius, it felt like I was saying goodbye to these characters. Sad, but I guess therein is a release.
Well, whatever happens, the Bauhaus goes on…
The series ‘Bring Again the Now of Then’ will be available to listen to in January 2025.