![]() ![]() Be present in the moment, whether it be funny or sad, horrifying or fearful. Think what they think, feel what they feel, write out what they say. I just try to become the characters and in my imagination live out their lives. Of the fear we had, my wife and I, for the future of our children in so dangerous an age. Memories of deaths, mostly: my mothers, my father's, and my father-in-law's. I walked the winter woods, I prayed in the chapel: and somehow all kinds of memories came to my aid. We lived in a cottage on the outskirts of Edinburgh, in a place called Rosslynn, in a wild wood beside a magical chapel. But the first director, who was a close friend, persuaded me to try. And although that aggravated me at the time, in retrospect I'm grateful for it, because it gave the play the tightness of structure it needed.īut then I was given another commission, by the National theatre in London, and I could see no way of finishing INES in time. So all the actors, except for InŽs herself, had to double as protagonists and chorus. ![]() I felt I needed nine actors to accomplish this negotiations with the traverse in Edinburgh, the producing theatre, almost broke down when they told me they could only afford six. So I wanted to write something classical, that obeyed the classic rules: where everything happened in a very short space of time, where there was a chorus, and tragic irony, and where everything that happened offstage. Asserting the meaning and the value of human life. For tragedy is not simply a dwelling on pain or misery: it is about asserting, too. I always felt he had to be wrong: that in this age we need tragedy more than ever. Some years before I'd read a book by George Steiner called The Death of Tragedy, in which he argued that it is impossible to write tragedy in this age of ours. I saw the fearsome old women in black who wait on street corners: and I spent a long time staring out at the pitiless sea.Īnd the more I thought about the story (which every child in Portugal is taught at school) the more deeply it impressed me, and the more strongly I felt it had to be written as a tragedy. I saw an extraordinary fishing village called NazarŽ where they launched the fishing boats out from the beach through the pounding surf of the ocean. I saw the place where InŽs is supposed to have been murdered: the Quinta das Lagrimas, which means the garden of tears. I saw the tombs: the tombs designed by Pedro to face each other across the nave of the monastery church in Alcobaca, so that when they rose from the dead the first thing the two lovers would see would be each other. I had got involved for very cynical reasons: I had heard that a foundation to promote Portuguese culture in English wanted to commission a british playwright to dramatise the story: and I thought, well, at least I'll get a holiday in Portugal. Inés is a play that almost never happened. The Girl Who Fell to Earth or Shoot the Archduke! The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven ![]()
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