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Baring all
Memoirs can be tough to write and even tougher to stage.
"Writing a memoir is very vulnerable-making. Sharing the process of finding my voice and putting all that on stage is a whole other level,” the author Damian Barr tweeted recently.
Barr is currently adapting his acclaimed 2013 memoir Maggie and Me, about growing up gay in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, for the National Theatre of Scotland in collaboration with Scottish playwright James Ley and director Suba Das. Barr’s coming of age narrative, which was named Sunday Times Memoir of the Year, explores a childhood marked by divorce, physical abuse and his mother’s difficult relationship with drink. The potential grimness is offset by a warmth and lightness of touch in the writing, and it deftly intertwines his personal experience with the political backdrop.
Ley’s plays, meanwhile, are ribald, joyful, and times outrageous. His play "Wilf" charts a young man’s relationship with his Volkswagen Polo, which gets unexpectedly — and hilariously — intimate. "Ode to Joy" (subtitled How Gordon got to go to the nasty pig party), saw audience members issued with a ”glossary of gay” to keep up with the terminology. In his writing, jokes about butt plugs share the stage with a tender and warmhearted tone.
It makes sense that these two writers have been paired up for "Maggie and Me"; as Barr attests, there’s something particularly vulnerable and exposing about the act of turning one’s life into memoir, which is no doubt amplified by translating that memoir to the stage. On the one hand the adaptation attests to the book’s ongoing relevance, 11 years after publication, to the current political climate. “We see a very international, organised, well-funded attempt to unpack many of the legislative advances that our community has worked hard for with allies in the past,” Barr said in a recent interview in the Skinny. For the National Theatre of Scotland to be staging this play now makes a statement. On the other hand, revisiting material written over a decade ago is presumably not an uncomplicated emotional process, something which must be amplified by the fact that, while Barr has written several plays for radio, Maggie & Me is his first stage play. The sense of putting yourself out there must be intense.
There’s something particularly vulnerable and exposing about the act of turning one’s life into memoir, which is no doubt amplified by translating that memoir to the stage
"Maggie and Me" will join a relatively small pool of stage adaptions of memoirs, the most successful recent example of which is probably "The Little Big Things", the 2023 musical adaptation of artist Henry Fraser’s best-selling book about his life-changing spinal injury, which recently finished a run at London’s newest theatre, @sohoplace. With music by Nick Butcher and Tom Ling, and a book by playwright Joe White, the show was nominated for an Olivier for Best Musical, while Amy Trigg picked up a gong for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Musical for her role as a physiotherapist.
A 2017 attempt by writer Stephen Brown and director Simon Godwin to adapt Occupational Hazards, politician and podcaster Rory Stewart’s book about his experience as a governor in Iraq, was met with a more middling response.
Earlier examples include "The Year of Magical Thinking", Joan Didion’s adaptation of her memoir about the death of her husband and, then not soon afterwards, their daughter, which was turned into a one-woman show starring Vanessa Redgrave. The musical "Fun Home" is based on the graphic novel memoir of cartoonist Alison Bechdel, charting her relationship with her gay father. It was adapted for the stage by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron and has had productions on Broadway, in Sydney and at London’s Young Vic.
Later this year, The Outrun, the 2016 memoir by the Scottish journalist and author Amy Liptrot, about her experience of returning to Orkney after years grappling with addiction, will be reimagined for the stage by Olivier Award-winning playwright Stef Smith and director Vicky Featherstone — former artistic director of both the Royal Court and the National Theatre of Scotland — for the Royal Lyceum Theatre, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.
Memoir is an incredibly personal form of writing one’s past on the page. The process of page-to-stage adaptation requires the writer to literally put their life story into someone else’s hands, to see a version, or versions, of themselves on stage. At the same time, it is also true that theatre is a collaborative artform, in which stories are shared with other artists and the writer is just one part of a wider creative team. It’s easy to appreciate the source of Barr’s apprehension as he readies himself to present the show in front of an audience.
MaggIe and Me is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow from 7th-11th May and tours the UK until 15th June.
