Soul Searching: Katie Hims. 

We ask five of the playwrights undertaking a feminine Faustian interpretation for the Globe’s Dark Night of the Soul, a series of questions about the project and their approaches.

Katie Hims is a writer and has written for both theatre and radio. She has spent time on attachment to the National Theatre Studio and has recently written Variations for National Theatre Connections 2019. She is currently working on The Stranger on the Bridge for Postcard Productions at The Tobacco Factory, Bristol. Her previous stage work includes Billy the Girl for Clean Break at Soho Theatre. Her radio work has won several awards.

Seventeen Minutes to Midnight 
by Katie Hims 
Just before midnight. A writer and her niece are waiting. While in the room next door a nurse attends to the writer’s sister. The sister is dying and the writer finds she cannot resist scribbling down a scene about her sister’s death.  A scene which reveals the secret of her sister’s life. The writer’s niece finds the scene in a notebook and accuses the writer of selling her soul. 

What made you say yes to Dark Night of the Soul?
I was completely delighted to be asked to write for Shakespeare’s Globe. I’m afraid I would have said yes to anything that Michelle Terry asked me to write! But the fact that there’s a gang of us and that to a certain degree we’re developing the material together made it very appealing. Also, I think the brief is actually very open, so we should all be able to find our own quite different stories that we’re keen to tell.

What interests you about the Faustus myth or Marlowe’s Faustus? And what are you hoping to explore with your piece?
I’m still getting my head around what the Faustian bargain might mean for a female character. Faustus is about ambition and what he will sacrifice to achieve. Traditionally men have been expected and encouraged to be ambitious and women haven’t. I’ve always felt embarrassed by the idea of my own ambition like I want to disown it. I’ve often felt like I should be pursuing something more worthwhile and less selfish. I don’t know how many male writers are plagued by this feeling. I’m sure they are out there – and of course, I might be entirely wrong – but I imagine they are greatly outnumbered by women.

And yet I really do want to write. It’s the only ambition I have. So where does that leave me when it comes to writing about the Faustian bargain? I don’t know yet… Voltaire said: “One must be possessed of the Devil to succeed in any of the arts.” There are plenty of clichés around success coming only with sacrifice and what could be a greater sacrifice than your soul?

But what is a soul anyway? It means different things to different people. We talk of writers selling their souls and it usually means writing something terrible for a lot of money. But what’s so wrong with that? Maybe nothing. Maybe it depends on the nature of what was written. But I can imagine a story in which a woman sacrifices her soul for a lot less than absolute power and all the world’s riches. Which is potentially a story about equal pay…

How do you start to write something?
It depends what I’m writing and who I’m writing for. I’m happiest when starting with a character or an incident or some other small detail, and then following the trail of where that detail leads. One of my favourite ways to begin is to overhear something someone says in the street or on the bus. When starting with a broad theme I struggle more to find my story. The canvas is so big and you don’t want the theme to be writ large across the work. Whereas if you begin small you discover your theme and you don’t need to go hunting for a story to fit.

What made you want to be a writer?
I loved writing stories as a child but it never occurred to me that a writer was something I could actually be. Then in the final year of my drama degree, we did a playwriting course and I immediately lost interest in every other element of degree because I just wanted to be writing plays all day.

How important is storytelling?
I think it’s incredibly important. I think we’re telling each other stories all the time. They’re part of our everyday lives. There is a need to tell them and a need to hear them. I’ve got the writer’s guilt about not doing something more useful with my life, but my husband says to me imagine the world without any books and plays would you want to live in that world? And of course, I wouldn’t.

Would you say that there are any themes you are particularly interested in across your work?
Lost children who somehow make it home again seem to recur again and again even when I’m actively trying not to repeat myself. I’m a fan of a happy ending if I can get away with it.

Do you like to be involved in the rehearsal process?
My absolute favourite rewrites are the ones that get done in the rehearsal room. Hearing the actors say the lines tells you everything about what’s wrong and what needs to change and what ought to be said instead. It’s urgent work and removes all the doubt and umming and aahing. But I think you can drive the actors mad if you keep changing material too far into the rehearsal process. I think I need to stay away after a certain point because I would just keep rewriting.

What’s it like seeing your work being performed?
That depends! There’s something very nerve-wracking about it. At its worst, it can be cringe-worthy; like listening to your own voice on tape. But when you are sitting among an audience who are watching a play you’ve written and they are really really laughing or crying – that’s pretty amazing, it’s probably the best bit of the whole strange business.

What’s it like to be working on a production in chorus with other writers?
We’ve spent one workshop day together and I absolutely loved it. There’s a contradiction that writing is very often an isolated process and yet storytelling demands an audience. Stories grow and get better in the telling. So during the workshop we kind of functioned as an audience for one another.

Dark Night of the Soul: The Feminine Response to the Faustian Myth opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 29 December.

On four evenings we will perform a selection of the pieces together as ‘Anthology Performances. Check the website to see when Katie’s response, Seventeen Minutes to Midnight will be performed.

This interview first appeared in Globe Magazine, available to buy in the Globe Shop. Become a Member of Shakespeare’s Globe to receive the magazine three times a year.

Soul Searching: Athena Stevens. 

We ask five of the playwrights undertaking a feminine Faustian interpretation for the Globe’s Dark Night of the Soul, a series of questions about the project and their approaches.

Athena Stevens is an associate artist at Shakespeare’s Globe; an actor, writer, and director. Her most recent play is Schism at the Finborough Theatre which garnered several five-star reviews and earned her an Offie Nomination for best female performer. 

Recompense
by Athena Stevens
Twenty-five years ago the course of Sophie’s life was changed by a single human error. A settlement was given, and justice was paid out, at least on paper. But Sophie disagrees. Now she is determined to take justice into her own hands.

What made you say yes to Dark Night of the Soul?
This is my first commission so it’s pretty exciting to have it come from Shakespeare’s Globe.

What interests you about the Faustus myth or Marlowe’s Faustus?
I think the arrogance of Faust is pretty impressive frankly. Given the terms of the bargain, we know it’s not going to end well and yet Faust has the gall to say “I bet I can beat these terms and come up better off”. I think deep down many of us have that arrogance; we don’t think we’ll become addicts if we start using, or we won’t get caught in an affair. Sooner or later though, our actions catch up with us and take their toll.

What are you hoping to explore with your piece?
Is it worth it to remain complicit in the world’s problems and stay comfortable? Or should one risk burying one’s soul to fall out of favour?

How do you start to write something?
I’m a plotter by nature, I need to know where I’m going and the plot steps that it’s going to take to end up where I want to go. That means I usually spend a lot of time staring at post-it notes on my wall trying to figure out what it’ll take to get from point A to point B. If while I’m writing something unexpected comes along, I know that it’s true and I have to include it, but sometimes that means unpicking what I’ve already sewn together.

What made you want to be a writer?
Looking back I don’t think I had much of a choice. It was always a given and something innate in me that wanted to write and explore ideas.

How important is storytelling?
Storytelling is essentially a way for us to name our problems and what has happened in our life. It’s a form of therapy as a society, where we can examine our actions fearlessly and begin to recover from the trauma that seems inevitable if you live long enough.

Would you say that there are any themes you are particularly interested in across your work?
My work completely deals with autonomy and free will. Given my own physical condition [Athena has athetoid cerebral palsy], this shouldn’t be surprising, since I am so dependant on other people. And yet maintaining that freedom of spirit becomes very difficult when you need someone else to help you eat.

Do you like to be involved in the rehearsal process?
Well I’m an actor and I usually like parts that I can play since no-one else seems to be doing that at the moment. So I’m afraid I don’t have a choice! But I’m a huge advocate of a division of labour, I don’t want to direct my piece. Once that rehearsal room opens, whatever the director says goes.

What’s it like seeing your work being performed?
Being heard and having a voice, I have learned in recent years, is incredibly vital to my mental health. When I don’t have that I feel myself start slipping in terms of feeling like I have a place in this world. So to see my work in performance is a bit like a salve; it says you are valid and you have a place.

What’s it like to be working on a production in chorus with other writers?
It’s wonderful to see ideas develop and how they might fit together. I think there would be a lot more pressure if any single one of us had to come up with a female response to Faust – the play itself is just so big and unwieldy. To have responses diffuses the pressure a bit and helps us all find our own voices, rather than feeling like we are in dialogue with one writer who has been dead for centuries.

Dark Night of the Soul: The Feminine Response to the Faustian Myth opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 29 December.

On four evenings we will perform a selection of the pieces together as ‘Anthology Performances. Check the website to see when Athena’s response, Recompense will be performed.

This interview first appeared in Globe Magazine, available to buy in the Globe Shop. Become a Member of Shakespeare’s Globe to receive the magazine three times a year. 

Photography by Christian Banfield 

Soul Searching: Lisa Hammond and Rachael Spence (Bunny).

We ask five of the playwrights undertaking a feminine Faustian interpretation for the Globe’s Dark Night of the Soul a series of questions about the project and their approaches. 

Lisa and Rachael are an artistic partnership who work across television, theatre and community performance projects. They have been writing, devising and performing together for the last ten years to create work that gets them talking. Their work is honest, at times brutal and always full of love and laughter. Their work includes the plays No Idea and Old Street/New Street, and the Channel 4 comedy Lowdown.

Souled Out 
by Lisa Hammond and Rachael Spence 
Ever wondered what you would sell your soul for? Or worried you might not have one?
Best mates Lisa and Rachael have. When they asked each other the question, “What would you sell your soul for?” they realised they might be soul-less. How could they sell something they don’t have? And if they don’t possess one then what could they offer in exchange for something they really, really wanted?
Using interviews of each other and women from the Southwark streets Lisa and Rachael create an intimate and surprising response to Faust’s dilemma. Expect harsh humour, verbatim, double act banter, devil costumes and real life confessions provoked by the question “What would you sell your soul for?”

What made you say yes to Dark Night of the Soul?
This is the first time we have been commissioned as a pair to write something, so it was an incredibly exciting offer! We both love the Globe and hearing Michelle talk about her ideas for the season was so inspiring and refreshing – we were hooked.

What interests you about the Faustus myth or Marlowe’s Faustus?
We are interested in the mythical and the mundane butting up against each other and we love exploring the darker and contradictory sides of ourselves in our work, so this story is an ideal starting point for all of that.

What are you hoping to explore with your piece?
We will be starting with real interviews with women, where will be asking questions around what is the “real world” equivalent of a soul and if it exists. And if it does, what would it be worth? What is most valued to women now?

How do you start to write something?
We often start with ourselves, what’s happening in our own lives and real interviews with other people.

What made you want to be writers?
We struggled to find existing stories out there that we wanted to tell as a pair. So we are telling our own.

How important is storytelling?
It’s so important to see yourself and the world reflected back at you in stories to see things from different perspectives, or to work things out or to gain understanding about the world.

Would you say that there are any themes you are particularly interested in across your work?
Usually, the themes of female friendship, moral and immoral codes and truth saying.

Do you like to be involved in the rehearsal process?
We usually perform our own work, so yes!

What’s it like to be working on a production in chorus with other writers?
This has been lovely and feels like a very supportive and caring way to allow us to venture into new territory. Which is a great way to allow new voices and stories to grow for our stages.

Dark Night of the Soul: The Feminine Response to the Faustian Myth opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 29 December. 

On four evenings we will perform a selection of the pieces together as ‘Anthology Performances. Check the website to see when Lisa and Rachael’s response, Souled Out will be performed. 

This interview first appeared in Globe Magazine, available to buy in the Globe Shop. Become a Member of Shakespeare’s Globe to receive the magazine three times a year.

Photography by Idil Sukan 

Soul searching: Amanda Wilkin.

We ask five of the playwrights undertaking a feminine Faustian interpretation for the Globe’s Dark Night of the Soul a series of questions about the project and their approaches.

Amanda Wilkin is an actor, writer and jazz and blues singer-songwriter. She has performed at the Globe several times, including playing multiple roles in Globe to Globe Hamlet that toured the world. For Dark Night of the Soul she has written a piece called The Little Sob. 

The Little Sob
by Amanda Wilkin
A woman stands in front of a crowd. She’s been called to tell a secret. For our entertainment. She decides to tell a story. To unburden herself. But in order to heal, she’s required to admit the truth.

What made you say yes to Dark Night of the Soul?
I can’t imagine ever saying no to this! I love the Globe and was so excited when I was asked to write a response to the Faustian Bargain. For me, the subject asked big questions, about how we see our soul, and what does it mean to lose a part of yourself. I thought it was a really exciting idea. 

What interests you about the Faustus myth or Marlowe’s Faustus? And what are you hoping to explore with your piece?
What intrigues me about the myth, is that there’s a looming sense of dread afterwards – the question of whether what was asked for was worth it, in the end. I want to explore shame in my play, shame of your own actions, however long ago. We live in a society where we’re quick to pass judgement on others, without knowing the full story. And slow to look at ourselves and how we may have contributed to a situation.

How do you start to write something?
After procrastinating for far too long, I put on some music first thing in the morning. And I start with a voice. A monologue. I need to learn about the character whose eyes we’re witnessing the play through.

What made you want to be a writer?
I’ve been writing forever. But it’s only recently that I found the courage to start sending my work to different theatres and making connections that way. Ultimately, you can put things off, or dismiss yourself as not good enough. But if I didn’t write about how I felt, I don’t know what I’d do! I love theatre. Live performance is so special, because of the unique bond with the storyteller and the audience.

How important is storytelling?
It’s how we record history. It’s how we deal with our feelings – the good and the bad. It’s how we shine a light to ourselves and share something. I believe strongly that storytelling shouldn’t be limited to any certain group of people. All cultures are deeply rooted in storytelling. And our stages and stories should reflect the world we live in.

Would you say that there are any themes you are particularly interested in across your work?
I don’t think that society is good at admitting that we all have the power for good, and bad. We find it uncomfortable. But we have the capacity for both within us. This interests me greatly. Also, after I toured with the Globe for two years performing in Hamlet, I became interested in borders, migration and our and western privilege within that. 

Do you like to be involved in the rehearsal process?
I like to sit in the room and watch the director work with the actors. To hear them wrestle with the script – that’s how you really find out what you’ve written. It’s a group process. Your play takes on a new life when someone speaks the words. It’s magical.

What’s it like seeing your work being performed?
Honestly, the first time I hear something it’s petrifying. But seeing it up on it’s feet… it’s incredible. I feel grateful to be able to do something I love. And grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with others. 

What’s it like to be working on a production in chorus with other writers? We all met each other on a workshop day, where we read out bits and pieces we were thinking about or excerpts from books, and just bounced ideas off each other. It was perfect. It’s such a fantastic group and I can’t wait to see what the others have written. It felt like a space where I could speak freely, about the subject, and about what it meant to respond to it as a woman. I love that there was no judging. 

Dark Night of the Soul: The Feminine Response to the Faustian Myth opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 29 December. 

On four evenings we will perform a selection of the pieces together as ‘Anthology Performances. Check the website to see when Amanda’s response, The Little Sob will be performed.