Finding Her Voice as a Playwright

KAREN EMSLIE considers the work of award-winning Shetland playwright Jacqui Clark

SHETLAND writer Jacqui Clark will collect the prestigious McLellan Award for Playwriting this month. The award is for plays written in Scots or Scots dialects. Her winning play, Will Shu’, is written in Shetland dialect and English.

It is set in Firth, Shetland, during the year 2001, exactly one hundred years after the Delting fishing disaster which claimed the lives of twenty-one local men in 1901. Clark interweaves the events of 1901 with the present as her central character, Jess, contemplates her future in her home community.

Will Shu’ brought Clark’s work to the attention of audiences outside Shetland when it was selected for the 2005 Playwright Studio’s EVOLVE programme for new writing. Under the mentorship of Rona Munro the play went on to have public readings, directed by Alison Peebles, in Lerwick and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Clark has a rich theatrical past in her home islands. To date she has written several one act and two full-length plays, established Serpentine Drama (a Shetland-based drama group promoting and touring new writing), written for the National Theatre of Scotland HOME Shetland, project and taken part in a Traverse Theatre Emerging Playwrights’ Residency.

Her plays are frequently poignant and at times disturbing. Through acutely observed characters and naturalistic dialogue (in English and dialect) she reveals the darker undertones of seemingly harmonious domestic situations.
However, her work can also be hilarious, raucous even. Whilst one play may deal with dark family secrets or bereavement the next delights in comic characterisations. She is also a dab hand at Panto.

Dark undercurrents, a poetic use of time and home were becoming strong themes in her work but Clark is not one for a comfort zone

In conversation she swings from a gentle Scottish accent into strong Shetland dialect and back, from being absurdly funny to being thoughtful and serious. She is, then, in tongue, character and imagination a many-faceted creature.

Born in Shetland in 1977, Clark was brought up in Mossbank on the doorstep of Sullom Voe, Europe’s largest oil terminal, during the oil boom. Originally from the Island of Yell on both sides of her family, she lived on the island briefly before moving to a house called Braehead in Mossbank, on Shetland’s mainland.

In the midst of the oil boom hundreds of workers and their families came to Shetland. Mossbank became the main residence for these temporary islanders. The oil brought new homes, a new school and new roads. The benefits were huge but also divisive.

Clark went to school with the children of the oil workers. She was one of the few Shetland children in her class. Hence her young Shetland tongue soon had to grasp ‘proper’ English in order to be understood.

“I was a Shetland kid, holidays were spent differently. We didn’t have the money or the perks but my childhood was really happy. I come from a very close knit, large family” she explains

The notion of home is fundamental to Clark and a theme that surfaces throughout much of her work. Characters frequently grapple with the decision of whether or not to leave home or they return and become embroiled in the events that unfold as a result. Home as universal theme intrinsically connected to family and memory.

Clark’s childhood was full of imagination and creativity, as it is for many Shetland children. Clark spent a lot of time with her Grandparents and extended family.

Her world was full of books and stories and she was always encouraged to be imaginative, “I was very close to my Granny and Granddad and my Uncle David. I’d come home with things from school to show them. Granny always said I’d a great imagination. ‘Du should write’ she’d say”

Clark is epileptic meaning that she occasionally had to spend prolonged periods of time off school with her Grandparents. She does not dwell on her epilepsy but does acknowledge that it is part of her and that this time at home has shaped who she is.

As she grew up her creativity began to find outlets; she had a week’s work experience at BBC Radio Shetland in her third year at High School and has continued her links there. She made contributions to a youth programme, Sound Now, with respected Shetland broadcaster Mary Blance.

But at the start of her fifth year her grandfather died. It was a traumatic event, prompting Clark to question what she wanted to do with her life. She concluded that she did not want to pursue an academic career. She wasn’t ready for University, nor to leave home.

“I wasn’t applying myself. I knew I was going to fail. It was a moment of realisation. I had wanted to go to Napier or Stirling University to study journalism but I knew I wasn’t ready to leave Shetland. I wanted to grow up and earn my own money.”

She left school before completing her Highers and got a job at Shearer’s Shipping in Lerwick. She was there for six months before starting work at Shetland Arts under the Youth Training Scheme.

Now working in the arts, opportunities to be creative grew. She was encouraged by two tireless champions of theatre in Shetland, Di Newbold of Splinters Youth Theatre and John Haswell of Shetland Youth Theatre. She became actively involved in both groups.

Greatly inspired and encouraged by Newbold and Haswell she acted in several plays but she wasn’t writing, yet. A seemingly disastrous event in 1997 changed all that. She was to act in a production called “Sleep Under the Dark Earth”.

“I had only had a week to learn the script and I got stage fright. I just froze. I didn’t go on stage again for a long time after that. I’d completely lost my confidence and had to find other things to do.” She explains

With her focus shifted from acting Clark started to co-produce shows with Splinters but it was her role as a Youth Worker at Firth Old School that first led her to write.

She was looking for projects that could tackle issues such as drugs and bullying. Her first plays, Mr.E and Lucy, were born out of improvisation workshops based on these themes. The latter went on to be performed as part of the Shetland’s county drama festival.

Clark’s creative life was blossoming. However, she was travelling on a bus every day from Mossbank to Lerwick and back. A two hour round trip. She began to think about moving into Lerwick. Home, Mossbank, was changing too. The oil workers were leaving. Homes lay empty.

As the community emptied Clark struggled with the idea of going. “Over twenty five years the first lot of people came and went, then the second lot. New people just came and went, but I found it hard to leave.”
However leave she did. And in doing so she encountered an image that became the basis for her first full length play.

“I was moving a wardrobe and behind it there was crack in the wall. A home is more than bricks and mortar. Sometimes the family home shows the cracks that the family doesn’t want to acknowledge.”

Brimful of ideas Clark attended a workshop lead by Shetland playwright Grace Barnes but found she was out of step with other writers:

“Everyone was talking about what they wanted to write about, comedy and murder etc. I sat there with a deep, burning desire not to write comedy, not to be stereotypical. I didn’t say anything. I was hiding what I wanted to write about. People expected me to be funny but my idea was actually quite disturbing.” She went on write Crack in Daa Waa.

Crack in Daa Waa deals with a dark family secret that is only revealed on the eve of the wedding of one of the characters. Whilst the theme is not autobiographical it was her move from the family home that had provided the spark.

Her next full length work was Lookin tae da staars. Again a childhood memory, the delight of having a swing made for her by her Grandfather, was the catalyst.

The central character, Lara, returns to Shetland six weeks after her father’s death. She lingers on past memories of her father whilst her family question her decision not to return for his funeral.

As in Will Shu’, time fluctuates from scene to scene. We see Lara as a child, teenager and in the present day. Painfully poignant is the dialogue Clark creates between Lara and her father as he pushes her on a swing.

It was whilst writing Lookin tae da staars that Clark met playwright Nicola McCartney who was in Shetland delivering workshops. “Nicola was the first person to say ‘You are a playwright’. It was liberating and petrifying,” she explains.

Along with fellow Shetland writer Anne Dickie, Clark established Serpentine Drama. The group aimed to promote new writing and tour it to remote areas. Lookin tae da staars’ was performed by the group and toured Lerwick, Fair Isle and Unst in 2004.

Clark continued to work full time for Shetland Arts and wrote prolifically. But all that tap-tapping on the keyboard eventually took its toll and she sustained Repetitive Strain Injury in her wrist. She could not write for four months. She focused on directing and read, in particular about the Delting fishing disaster.

Then the EVOLVE competition was advertised. Entrants were to submit a scene in which one character wanted something. With her wrist on the mend Clark began to write again. She wanted to write about the disaster. Parallels between 1901 and 2001 began to occur to her.

The oil workers were leaving empty homes behind them, just as had happened one hundred years before, when the fishermen died and their families left. The ancient derelict crofts now faced the deserted 70’s houses on opposite side of the Voe (sea loch) at Mossbank.

With these themes in her mind Clark conjured up a startling image of a girl running into the sea. “It was the most exciting moment in my playwriting. I thought where did that come from? And I just let myself go”. The girl became Jess and the play, Will Shu’.

She gained a place on the EVOLVE programme and was mentored by Rona Munro. Clark describes this match as “the biggest stroke of luck”. Munro understood Clark’s voice as a writer. “She got me, she just got it. She gave me the confidence to say ‘I am a playwright’, and that is a phenomenal gift.”

With the mentoring scheme came exposure to professional playwrights and a new awareness of her own work. She recites her reaction to a question posed by Liz Lochead: “She asked me, ‘Why does Jess run into the sea?’ Without thinking I said, “Jess runs into the sea because in Shetland there is nowhere else to run.”

Her name was put forward to take part in the National Theatre of Scotland HOME Shetland project. Clark was commissioned to write dialect monologues to accompany poems by Jackie Kay and did so to much acclaim. She was then offered a place on the Traverse Theatre Emerging Playwrights’ Residency with twenty fellow writers. She worked on her first play written entirely in English The Edge.

Dark undercurrents, a poetic use of time and home were becoming strong themes in her work but Clark is not one for a comfort zone. She has also co-written a wickedly funny version of Cinderella with Anne Dickie and The Elvis Monologues, a character piece based on lyrics by The King himself. And then there is MagnieVision, but that’s a whole other story…

With The Edge in second draft form and a new play in development Clark’s work is pushing new boundaries. But back to Will Shu’ and Jess, the girl who must decide whether to stay or to go. Perhaps, never more so than now, Clark faces the same dilemma as her creation:

“I want to try and see if there is more out there for me as a playwright, I want to better myself. It’s not only about my work but about seeing other writers work. I’m facing a very difficult decision in the next little while. It’s not coming to me. I have to go to it”

© Karen Emslie, 2007