| Tackling the last taboo |
| SUSAN MANSFIELD - The Scotsman - Sat 13 August 2005 |
ROGER ALLAM has been in court only once in his life, right back at the beginning of his acting career. "I was playing the judge
in a theatre-in-education project about Derek Bentley [the teenager hanged for his part in the murder of a policeman in 1953; the
conviction was posthumously quashed, in 1998] and I decided to spend a day in the court in Manchester to see what it was like."
He found himself sitting watching the trial of a young male teacher who had had an affair with a 13-year-old pupil.
It turned out to be a day well spent. Allam found himself recalling the case when, years later, he was cast in Blackbird,
David Harrower's new play, to be directed by Peter Stein at the Edinburgh International Festival, based on just this kind of story. |
 |
Roger Allam stars in Blackbird
with Jodhi May. Picture: Neil Hanna |
|
| Ray (Allam) meets Una (Jodhi May) at a barbecue. He's 40, she's 12. He knows her parents. They begin a relationship and try to elope
together to Amsterdam but are discovered. Ray is tried and jailed as a paedophile. Una is counselled as an abuse victim. |
| The action of the play happens 15 years later when Ray has changed his name and begun a new life. But Una comes looking for him, with a
headful of unanswered questions. Ray is forced, against his will, to consider again what occurred in the past. Did it really happen the way he remembers it? |
| It's an interesting part for Allam, 51, a veteran stage actor and regular in London's West End. His repertoire is broad, from Hitler to Mr Darcy, Javert in the
original cast of Les Miserables to an Olivier-winning performance in Peter Nichols's cross-dressing comedy Privates on Parade. He was highly acclaimed in the role of
German Chancellor Willy Brandt in Michael Frayn's Democracy, and in 2002 starred opposite Gillian Anderson in her West End debut, What The Night Is For. More recently
he has been making movies with Michael Winterbottom and Ken Loach. |
| He signed up for Blackbird mainly because it offered the opportunity to work with Stein, who is considered one of the world's top directors, and admits he gave the subject
matter of the play very little thought. "I was finally cast just over a week before rehearsals were due to start. I read the first draft and then I didn't think any more about it until
I got the job. I think what attracted me to it was how Peter saw it, how it's written, how to work that kind of material. |
| "Leaving aside the subject matter, it's very interesting to work on that kind of material with broken speech, and people not saying what they mean, not knowing how to say what they mean." |
| However, with a play such as Blackbird there is really no leaving aside the subject matter. Harrower is focusing his level gaze on one of society's few remaining taboos, paedophilia, a subject more
associated with tabloid hysteria than quality theatre. Even during rehearsals at Stein's idyllic home in Umbria, the required reading was the psychiatric pathology of sexual abuse. |
| The intense two-hander cuts back on extraneous characters to focus on the two protagonists. It challenges the notion that those guilty of paedophilia are somehow inhuman by homing in on the characters as
human beings and asking, one step removed from the judgements of society, what their motivations were. |
| Harrower says: "Right away I was aware that my first responsibility was to understand why either of these two people got involved in such a relationship, notwithstanding that it's illegal and that it might
be seen as abuse or coercion of a child. It's interesting for me to understand, in this fictional treatment, what would lead a man to do that, and how he then explains that to himself. |
| "I was aware from the start that there was paedophilia involved - or what some would label paedophilia. To an extent we have to label, we have to put people into certain brackets or there would be no law.
Ray and Una are labelled by police, doctors, psychologists, he is sent off to jail, and she looked after as a victim. But a certain part of both of them believes that what they had was a bona fide relationship." |
| Allam is less equivocal. "He's 40 and she's 12. It's paedophilia. There is an objective reality from which there is no escape. But she is post-pubescent, she's not a pre-pubescent child. At different stages in our
history there have been different ages at which sexual relations are considered legal. How you draw that line, I don't know. Some people who're 13 or 14 are obviously doing it anyway, others who are 16 or 18 wouldn't be ready at all. |
| "Ray defends himself in the court of his own head by saying that she was making all the running, she wanted it to happen, she seduced him. It wasn't a grooming, a planned seduction, it's something that happened to him. |
| "Also, in his head, she's not just any 12-year-old girl. She is unique, she is advanced, mature, sexually beyond her years. Now of course, he's 40 years old and she's 12, he was a fool, he shouldn't have let it happen, however
much he casts himself as the passive victim. But, in his head, this is the most extraordinarily unique occurrence, and the most powerful thing that's happened to him in his whole life, for good or ill. To both of them, really." |
| Was he in love with her? "I don't think it's as simple as that, but I think so, probably, yes. It's a kind of madness. I think for her it's a lot about not being a child, about getting away from being a child, being a grown-up,
with a grown-up man." |
| Reading up on the subject, Allam realised that even this issue is not without shades of grey. "There's such hysteria around the whole paedophilia thing, but when you read around it you realise it covers the most enormous area.
It could be someone who kidnaps, rapes and kills a three-year-old child, and it could be someone of 19 sleeping with someone of 15 and a half, it's all lumped together under this one word." |
| Harrower adds: "I was interested in the cracks, the fissures behind the official version. A paedophile is a paedophile is a paedophile, there is no allowance for desire, for the ambivalent attitude we have as a culture
towards children, how we distrust them, how we don't like them talking about sex, or dressing provocatively. |
| "I could just write an article about how bad paedophilia is. It is bad, everyone knows that, what's the point of just saying that again in a play? I'm not condoning it, but the play is saying there are shades of desire,
and unfortunately some people act on their desires, and then must justify that." |
| The treatment of Ray and Una at the hands of the legal system leaves a trail of damage of its own. Allam realised this as he sat in court that day many years ago in Manchester. "This poor girl was brought into the court
and questioned. She was rigid and shaking with fear and humiliation. |
| What became clear was that the experience of being in court was probably far worse for her than what had actually happened. And it destroyed this man's career. I'm not suggesting that anything else should have happened, but it just stuck in my memory that the experience of being in court was absolutely terrible." |
| The play is less interested in taking a moral line than in laying bare the human consequences of the affair. Allam says: "It was the most influential and powerful thing that happened to them in their lives, and the aftermath, the shockwaves, are still going on 15 years later. In a sense there's no escape for either of
them from what they've done to each other, they try to escape from it but they can't. It's really about that rather than saying paedophilia is bad, with which we could all agree." |
| Stein's style of directing seems ideally suited to getting under the skin of this material, probing the secrets and the undercurrents. "I've worked with some very fine directors, but I don't think I've ever worked with anyone who combines a brilliant overall visual sense with a very forensic analysis of the text and a very expressive use of body language," says Allam. |
| "Lots of his work is to do with how these two bodies are reacting to each other in the space, and they might be doing something which is entirely different to what they're saying." |
| Does he think the play will provoke controversy? "I'm not sure. We've been so close to it, locked away rehearsing in Italy, I really don't know what the effect will be. But it's on in Edinburgh for a short run ..." he ponders for a moment. "I don't think I'm expecting a big campaign from the Daily Mail or the News of the World to close us down." |
| Blackbird is at the King's Theatre, 15-24 August |
