The second 2023 instalment of the ACE & Creativity series is a one-act drama written by Phyllis Brighouse.
This is the story of a family breakdown, and the efforts to heal the wounds. In life, old Mr Scatchard had been a Classicist before becoming a famous and much-married poet. Now he’s died before he can overcome the rift with son John created by his multiple marriages. However, he wants John’s forgiveness even after death, and the play concerns the efforts of his priest, Father Maloney, to present John with the evidence that the old man really means it. Can father and son be reconciled? The plot is complicated by the old man’s cat, Iphigenia or Jeannie for short. John can’t go near the cat as he’s allergic to her, and Jeannie’s currently being looked after by the old man’s secretary, Liz, at her home. On the day of the funeral, Liz helps organise the gathering at the wake. As all their lives converge there, old Mr Scatchard looks down from the after-life, to see if he’ll get his wish.
The inspiration for the first draft of this play came, as my ideas sometimes do, from the words of a song. ‘Goodbye For Now’ is one of four Richard Rodney Bennett jazz songs. In it, the vocalist sings about those he’ll leave behind after his death, including his former wives and his cat. But who, I wondered, inherited the cat? Which is as far as I got for a long time. The play didn’t take off until I introduced Father Maloney as the intermediary between the deceased father and the son from whom he’d become alienated thanks to subsequent marriages. How could I show on stage the relationship between a dead man and his surviving son? Giving that role to Father Maloney proved to be one of those miraculous events where you sit at a keyboard and out pours the first draft, with the cat allergy as a symptom, even a metaphor, for the breakdown in their relationship and providing the glue that stuck all the strands together.
After some polishing, this first version was performed at the Leverhulme Drama Festival where it won the prize for the best new play. After the performance, we were then invited by a local restaurant owner to perform it again as the entertainment during our very first dinner theatre event. Here, we had our first (and thankfully last) encounter with one of the risks you run when your audience is sitting all round you drinking - the drunk who wanders onto the set. When she was asked by a cast member who she was, this lady answered ‘I’m the cat’. The cast kept her talking until a friend could nip onto the set and take her back to her seat, and the play could resume.
That first version, however, reveals a significant weakness – the longish letter from the father to the son which has to be read out by the family priest. It’s pure exposition setting up the rest of the plot. The answer I create in this draft is to introduce the father sitting apart from the cast in the after-life, watching what is happening and commenting on the action. This final draft involves him in the drama rather than as the off-stage character and author of a letter. In the first version, too, Liz was the old man’s nurse. In the current draft, she’s his secretary and so can logically continue to organise things after his death in the absence of the old man’s son who lives a long way away. This is the draft I would love to put on post-covid and post-austerity – both of which seem to have been with us forever.