Pieces of String is a new musical set simultaneously in the 1940s and the present day: following her father’s death, Jane is clearing out his house, but while she is going through his possessions she unearths a secret that she is unprepared for.
GUS GOWLAND has written the book, music and lyrics for the show which continues at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester.
What more can you tell us about the show that we won’t find on the website?
One of the things that you can see on the website is that it’s set in two time frames but the real puzzle of the show is that those two time frames happen concurrently. A lot of the action happens in one house. We see it today as it’s being packed away, as Edward the father and grandfather has died, and then we see it back in the 1940s where he’s a young man moving in with his wife.
We see both of those time zones happening in the space at the same time which is really exciting and adds a level of interest to the show. I’m trying to say something about the way that history repeats itself and how space has a memory, as well as people. The fact that you can be seeing interactions between a couple of characters in the 1940s but also at the same time be seeing their descendants in the modern day on the stage, it’s quite an exciting thing and adds another layer for the audience.
Can you explain a bit more about how time works in the show?
It’s essentially like two musicals that have been placed on top of one another, certainly for the actors that’s the biggest challenge. If they’re in the modern day they have their show, which is set virtually in real time, in one space, just in the house and then the characters from the 1940s and 50s are in lots of different locations. We see them during the Second World War, we see them in different houses and we see a time period from 1944 to 1952.
(left to right) Ella Dunlop, Gary Wood, Andy Coxon, Lauren Hall and Craig Mather in Pieces of String at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester. Pictures: Robert Workman
Alongside this overlapping, you have competing chronologies which, for the actors, can be a tricky thing to master. If they’re waiting to continue a scene, they have to come back in with the same energy they finished the previous one with, but there will be another scene happening in the 1940s that has a different energy. The real challenge is that they don’t then take on that energy and they keep it distinct.
That’s been a real puzzle in rehearsal, trying to really separate those two narrative arcs for the two halves of the cast. Also noticing other actors on stage because obviously they can’t see them, they can see them as people but they can’t see them as characters. I think that’s a real challenge, but the way it has been staged by our director and choreographer makes it really exciting to look at.
Do the actors from one time period freeze when another scene starts?
We’ve tried as much as possible not to freeze. What often happens is that I’ve written that the characters in the contemporary scenes will be doing something, looking at photographs or reading a letter so they’re active but not taking the focus. Then the scenes from the past sort of crash in, in the way that memories do. The idea behind it was memories come out of order, just when something triggers them, so I tried to do that with the way that I’ve written the show. You see these memories burst in and I’ve tried to reduce freezing as much as possible.
Where did the idea for this show come from?
It was a combination of things really. I’d wanted to write a show about gay relationships in the Second World War. I’d only ever heard about persecution that gay people had suffered under the Nazis. I didn’t really know much about service men and women having relationships, so I wanted to explore that. I also wanted to look at contemporary gay relationships and the starting point was look how far we’ve come but look how far we’ve got to go.
By putting those things together and realising I could show different generations of a family, it made me really interested in exploring families and how you can see a thread through your family through past generations. That just allowed me to create the connecting character of Jane who is Edward’s daughter and is the mother of the characters today. I decided very early on that it was really important to me that it was a gender balanced show, even though it has a gay male backdrop to it. I didn’t want that to be a reason that there should only be male characters, I don’t think that’s okay.
(left to right) Gary Wood, Craig Mather and Joel Harper-Jackson in Pieces of String
By adding in the female characters, it made the show much richer and much more about family and secrets and the courage to be yourself with the people that you want to know you best but maybe don’t always know you the way that you want to be known.
Do you think there’s still a lack of gay leading roles in the theatre industry?
I do, I’m actually doing a PhD at the moment about gay representations in musicals, I’ve been immersed in this. There are loads of tropes that are associated with gay characters, there’s a complete dearth of lesbian and bisexual characters full stop, there really aren’t that many. The gay male characters that exist often fall into very particular areas, so I think that there’s a way to go to have a bigger range of stories and of characters on the stage, particularly within an industry that’s colloquially associated with gay people.
I think there’s a way to go but we’re getting there, there’s Miss Nightingale on at the moment, which is a fabulous LGBT themed show, and there’s obviously Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, it’s fantastic. There are real, positive things happening. I’m also really looking forward to seeing Fun Home when it comes to the Young Vic. So we’re getting there but it’s a process.
How’s the audience reception been so far?
So far it has been extraordinary, which has been very heartening for me. I’ve lived this show for a long time, doing workshops and hoping it will get to production, and now we’re finally here and it’s finally in front of an audience. An audience that isn’t an invited audience of movers and shakers that you hope will have some influence on it getting to this stage, this is people that have paid their hard-earned cash to come and see the show.
Thankfully, so far, they are responding really positively, crying in the right places and laughing in the right places. We’ve had fantastic word of mouth and I’ve personally had a couple of emails through my website from people who have seen the show just saying how much they enjoyed it which is just fantastic and really wonderful.
Marilyn Cutts in Pieces of String
Would you be interested in touring the show or taking it to festivals?
Yes, definitely. This has been a long part of my life and I would love for it to have another life somewhere. I would love it to come into London for a little period and for it to tour, I just want as many people to see it as possible. Knowing how the industry is and how challenging it is, I respect anyone who gets a show on because there are so many plates that they have to spin, from all different departments, in order for an audience to be sitting in front of a show on its opening night.
I’m just trying to enjoy this run as much as I can, live in the moment, and who knows what’s going to happen. Fingers crossed we get a good response and people want to take it on somewhere, that would be wonderful.
What message are you sending away with your audiences?
There’s a lyric in the show, which is a revelation moment where she sings: “Just love is not enough.” I feel that is the message because quite often we think that love is enough and actually you need compassion, understanding and patience as well in order to forge good relationships and see things from different viewpoints. Quite often people make mistakes under the guise of love, they think they’re doing the right thing because they have so much love. I want them to see that there are other things that need to be part of that to make understanding happen.
What were your influences when writing this show?
I’m a musical theatre scholar and before that I’m a musical theatre geek. I’ve grown up devouring musicals of all kinds from Lloyd Webber and Sondheim to Stephen Schwartz to more Fringe work. I just love the form when music and a lyric come together in the right place in the show, I don’t think there’s anything better than that when it can move you and make you laugh and do things that other forms of theatre can’t do.
I just wanted to make the best show that I can and I think all of those influences will be in me just because of a lifetime of loving and listening to musical theatre. I was very keen to find my own sound for the show, I didn’t want to write 40s period music because some of it is set in the 40s, partly because of the dual time frames.
Carol Starks in Pieces of String
I wanted to make sure that all of the songs from the past were also able to reflect on the present so if I made them too stylistically period, then I think that would be have been slightly problematic. I’ve hopefully found a sound for the show that is unique to Pieces of String and suits the characters and suits the story.
As the writer, you must have envisioned the show a certain way, does that make it more challenging to not also be directing it?
It doesn’t because I’m not a director, thankfully, I’ve done book writing, music and lyrics and that’s more than enough for me. I trained as an actor originally and I think I’m very good at performance coaching and I think that helps with my dialogue, knowing what works well for an actor to say.
Directing a show is a completely different thing and it involves a vision for an entire piece, visually and orally and that’s not a skill I have and I’m very happy to pass that on. The hardest thing about the show is that I’ve written it knowing that these two time frames will co-exist and obviously every time we had done a reading, you can’t see how that works because people are static and they have scripts in their hands.
It’s only in this production that we’ve been able to actually figure it out and a lot of the time I was like, “Oh, thank god!” In my head I knew that it would work but until we actually did it and had a set and people on stage, it was hard to see. Sometimes it didn’t quite work and I had to go back and make some revisions and go: “Oh, I forgot that character was there.” It’s definitely something I’m happy to let our director Ryan McBride, who has a fantastic eye, take over. Also, because when you’re writing a new musical and rewriting and tweaking and fixing in the rehearsal room, if I was directing then those changes would be much slower. You need a bit of distance from your work, I think.
What’s the hardest part of the writing process?
For me it depends, music takes the longest for me because I’m a self taught musician. I will write a song, then I write the piano and vocal score, and that takes me quite a long time because Ive learned on the job, so I think that takes the longest. I think lyrics are the hardest to get right but the most satisfying when you actually get them right.
Gary Wood and Andy Coxon in rehearsal for Pieces of String. Pictures: Robert Workman
You say you trained as an actor so how did you get into the writing side of theatre?
I’ve always written, I was writing musicals when I was at school and writing songs. When I went to drama school, outside of my course I also wrote songs for things, so I was always doing that and I wrote two songs for a musical we did as well. It was only in my 20s, as I was not working a huge deal as an actor, I wanted to make something, I started writing a lot more and putting on some shows around the Fringe in London and one of those was a one-man musical that I performed in called Tell Me on a Thursday.
Doing that, the first show that I’d written that was sort of a musical, made me think that it was really something that I would like to properly pursue. That’s when I decided to go to Goldsmiths to do a Masters Degree in musical theatre writing and Pieces of String began as my grad show for that, as a half an hour long, one act, short musical, and I’ve just been developing it ever since with Perfect Pitch and now with our producers and most recently with Mercury. It’s something that I’ve always done, it just took me a long while to realise it’s what I should be doing properly rather than just alongside attempting to be an actor.
Do you remember the first thing you ever wrote?
I remember I was writing a musical about Marilyn Monroe when I was 14, which, I was very pleased to discover when Smash came out and then Bombshell, that I put songs in a lot of the places that they had songs. I thought I obviously had a sort of understanding, even back then of what moments should be the musicalised ones.
Obviously, their songs were far better than my 14-year-old attempt at it, but that was the first thing that I ever wrote which I think started purely because I’d heard Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ and I wanted to write my version of it. I started with a pop song about Marilyn Monroe a la ‘Candle in the Wind’ that then became a whole show that thankfully has never and will never see the light of day.
Andrew Lloyd Webber always says he wishes he wrote West Side Story, what show do you wish you had written?
West Side Story is phenomenal but I feel like I’ll spend my life trying to write Company. I was a huge fan of musical before that, I love Les Mis and Miss Saigon and I saw a lot of the Lloyd Webber shows when I was young. The Adrian Lester and Sam Mendes version of Company was on BBC2 when I was a teenager one Saturday night and I caught it just by chance and it just floored me.
The music was incredible, the lyrics were astonishing and the text: Pieces of String is quite text heavy, a lot of the performers have said that they feel like they’re acting in a play because they’re not used to being in a musical that has so much dialogue and that much scene work.
Joel Harper-Jackson and Craig Mather in rehearsal for Pieces of String
I really love the book in Company and the way way that it interacts. You could take the scenes out of Company and they would be interesting little vignettes and you can take the songs out and they’re lovely, moving, funny songs but when you combine them, they become something magical. I don’t know what I had in me at 16 that made me identify with a 35-year-old man who can’t commit but for some reason I did. That’s the show that has a really special place in my heart.
Do you have anything else in the pipeline?
I’m doing my PhD so that is going to take up a lot of my time and efforts. I’ve got to write a paper that I’m delivering at a conference in LA at the end of May which will be a performed paper, so it will be me for ten minutes doing a one-man musical, trying to talk about academic theory through song. Not sure why I decided to do that, now that I’m trying to write it.
There’s a show I’ve been working on loosely for a little bit while now called, The Red Virgin which is something that I’m really keen to crack on with and get to the point where we’ve got a full draft and can start presenting it to people, hopefully I can get going on that too.
* Pieces of String continues at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester until 5 May 2018.
Readers may also be interested in:
Pieces of String – Mercury Theatre, Colchester – Review
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