Making their mark: the York invasion of the Fringe (2)
Jo Shelley talks to Will Bowry and Nick Payne about taking their new play on paedophilia to Edinburgh
Few taboos remain in theatre, but there is one that is rarely tackled on stage. Paedophilia is not obvious material for a sensitive, searching drama, and offstage it can provoke reactions from sickened disgust to venomous public hysteria. Yet Nick Payne and Will Bowry, two York undergraduates heading for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, have devised a play that probes the illicit and illegal desire of a grown man for a young girl without, they believe, becoming a platform from which to condemn or condone. Instead, by questioning received notions of love between adults and children, it asks how the line between sexual attraction and sexual abuse may become blurred and, in a test of the generally liberal, un-shockable Fringe audiences, attempts to investigate the psyche of a paedophile.
It is a brave move, especially for a student writer and director. A non-sensationalist view of paedophiles, associated in the public consciousness with figures like Ian Huntley, is not one often made in the public forum, and a month’s run at the Fringe is far from a three-day stint in the comfort of the Drama Barn, with much more – a £5,000 budget, to be exact – riding on the response they receive.
When I meet Nick, the writer, and Will, the director, however, it becomes clear that money is not high on their list of concerns and people’s disapproval barely registers.
Both issues, in any case, quickly disintegrate at the prospect of being a part of what Will calls the “real, thriving environment for debate” that is the Edinburgh Festival.
Nick had just finished the script of Cild (the world for child in Anglo-Saxon) when we met and, from his description, it is indeed much more subtle than suggested by the pre-show publicity, which shouted “vigilante attacks, abuse and self-proclaimed innocence”. The reasons that Joe (Ed Watson), the accused, has moved up to the north of England are only gradually uncovered through his interactions with his brother, played by Tom Hunt, and two siblings who live in his new block of flats, Katie Kelly and John Hoyle.
The revelation that the relationship he has unwillingly left behind him was with a pre-pubescent girl is delayed almost until the end; and, importantly, it is never explicitly confirmed as having been sexual. Nick’s aim was to allow the audience to explore Joe’s character, “who has lost this relationship and who you engage with”. He wanted to put the emphasis on Joe’s love, rather than his desire, for the child.
“It’s all very sensitively written and very understated – there’s nothing graphic or gratuitous, because that would be sensationalising it,” offers Nick. “The sort of response I want is a genuine, emotive response, not, ‘oh that was horrible, that was disgusting.’ I don’t want that at all.” The project, he continues, was “just about writing something that represents how a paedophile may feel and how they might express themselves.”
So what is it that drives someone to spend months exploring this, something that the rest of us try not to think about? “It’s always about trying to push ourselves,” explains Nick, while Will says he was inspired to take on the challenge of tackling a “very dangerous topic” by seeing an “atrocious” play about rape at the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough.
Both were spurred on, however, by the research they did into paedophilia before starting to write the play. This involved reading government reports and meeting with Dr. Carol-Ann Hooper, a specialist in child abuse and protection at the University, but it also, for Nick, meant trying to contact a number of self-confessed ‘paedophiles’ over the internet. To his surprise, after his first e-mail, responses quickly began to arrive in his inbox. “I got in touch with a few people who, although they wanted to remain anonymous, openly wanted to be considered as paedophiles,” he explains. “They let me send them questions and they responded.”
An initial, instinctive disgust at what the men told him soon developed into an intellectual interest in paedophile psychology. “It has been quite grim – I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t – but it has also been pretty fascinating,” he says. Of the people he and Will came into contact with, a number were part of a paedophile liberation faction which likened itself to the gay rights movement of the last century and believed that, in another hundred years, sexual relations between adults and children would become the socially accepted norm. Both naturally “absolutely disagree” with this idea but, through other discussions, they found that their assumptions about paedophiles were being confronted and challenged.
“What was interesting was the way that they spoke,” says Will. “One guy, when he spoke about his feelings for children, used the kind of eloquent and affectionate terms that you would have expected him to use for a wife. If you removed the word ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ and replaced it with ‘man’ or ‘woman’ it would almost be quite endearing.”
Neither director nor playwright can hide their disdain towards the tabloid media for what they see as the encouragement of vigilantes in the wake of the Sarah Payne case, though Bowry offers that the average Festival-goer “probably tends more towards the broadsheets”. They condemn the News of the World’s campaign to “name and shame” abusers for cultivating a fear factor that led to attacks on suspected offenders.
Although Will tactfully submits that “it’s a very, very difficult subject to be able to get the dividing line”. Nick speaks adamantly of his scorn for the creation of fear in the national media and even York’s own local rag: “Some of that stuff is really inappropriate. Reading the York Press, for example, every day they seem to have a big headline saying, ‘lock this guy up’. What are they saying – that we should all walk around in fear, that we should all be panicked? I just don’t quite understand the logic.”
He presents Cild as a theatrical antidote to this tabloid frenzy. “It’s trying to get rid of this image of ‘stranger danger’ – men in long coats lurking at school gates – and get past it, really, because from the research I’ve done that’s not really what happens. Obviously it goes on, but only in an absolute minority of abuse and molestation cases.”
“I don’t think that you’re ever going to solve the problem of why society has the problem of paedophiles and how we should treat them if you’re hung up on this one image of a mythical, horrible child snatcher, unless you’re willing to understand or at least begin to talk to them on a basic human level. If you are so repulsed by paedophiles that you are never willing to actually listen to what they say and point out the flaws in their kind of logic, and you just shove them in prisons, you are never going to tackle the problem properly. To write them off as monsters, I can understand, obviously, because it’s such an emotional subject, but I think that it’s important to go the next step and say, ‘why did you do this – what do you believe you’ve done?’ I wanted to write something that could re-establish a channel of communication.”
The cast of Cild will do a reading of the play at 6pm in the Dixon Studio on Tuesday 27th June. Tickets cost £2.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has been running since 1947.
Recent York plays to go to Edinburgh include Candide in 2003, which the Edinburgh Guide rated as five out of six.
