Circle Song is a play about re-membering … spoken to the audience from a narrator’s perspective across an arc of time. Two Irishmen leave the shore of Northern Ireland to search for a new sense of belonging; a letter written back in 1864 is found in an old trunk… After a severe brain operation, a woman wakes up as a fifteen year-old version of herself.
At an afternoon spent under the trees at the Company Gardens cafe and after a double exhibition by Aldo Brincat of his ‘Chasing Concrete Halos’ (Itself a pursuit of the shadows behind our ‘personal’ monuments) Rajesh Gopi, Aldo and I found most of the conversation moving into our stories of connection; Connection with the people whose choices led us to this point in time - whether it was to take a ship to South Africa in order to become labour in the cane fields of Natal; to leave a family behind in the collateral damage of a failed relationship, or to find love during war in Egypt. Those were the stories that still float part of our imagination about who we are in a country that has become our home but is not the soil of our ancestors.
Sharing the stories is what inspired the writing of them. Some are substantiated truth; some have developed a sense of truth in the imaginative visits to those moments in our past and those choices made by our people before we even existed. When we are able to gather and listen to these, we hope that it is not any gimmickry or staging that give value to the story, but the human connection that finds the live thread that cuts us to the ‘quick’.
“Imagine behind me, three generations ago in a busy Belfast street - two men leave the shore of Northern Ireland…" The creative process began with “touch points” - my mother’s scissors, hairdresser’s shawl, pipe …. objects which carry in themselves visceral memory. The script is a reimagining of the ancestral stories and journeys. Locations switch from “the old world in Ireland, to Africa and journeys within the sub-continent, ending in Durban. Actual family stories surface with the characters that make up that journey: my grandmother’s half-crown; her brother, arrested by a German tank commander in North Africa… The unexpected turn that is foreshadowed at the beginning of the story (a letter from an ancestor no one remembers anymore) is my mother’s shift into an interior world of her own, which operates parallel to the story presented through the eyes of a jaded surgeon and my father.
The final image is imposed as a ‘Happy Ending’: as she struggles with her final breath, there is the memory of a first date: my father’s vespa is heard in the distance and she waits in the rain under her umbrella for him to arrive. It’s a ‘moment stuck in amber…my way back to myself'.
Time is a stretch of nerve fibres: seemingly continuous from a distance but disjointed close up, with microscopic gaps between fibres. Nervous action flows through one segment of time, abruptly stops, pauses, leaps through a vacuum, and resumes in the neighbouring segment… the illusion of constancy and continuity, to cope with the uncertainty and unpredictability of life…’ Alan Lightman, ‘EINSTEINS DREAMS’
…if you don’t have ancestors, you have ghosts; and you end up living a very haunted life… your capacity to tell a story, to stand for a story, to let a story work through you, will help you articulate the lament of the dead. I’m not talking about séances, we Understand. I’m talking about knowing the ground that you stand upon. Martin Shaw, West Country School of Myth
Beginning with his forefathers leaving Ireland to travel to Southern Africa, his story goes way beyond the personal and raises questions about immigration, identity and belonging. Ashley plans to "expand the Circle" and then hopefully this piece will be seen by the larger audience that it so rightly deserves. Atholl Hay, McGregor
A parallel memory reel unrolled in my own psyche while the actor was on stage - my own grandfather, aunt, parent ... and the family secrets that never died yet never quite made it out of the shadows. The other impression was a more impersonal experience: we live in a time of loud claims of ownership with reference to land, culture, identity ... Yet we are all migrants of some kind. Everybody came from somewhere else - pioneers with vision or slaves without choice - and sank or swam. Ashley traced his roots without falling into this trap. Never at any point does he make statements; very original”. Pieter Holloway, McGregor
The acting is done with such a light touch that the virtuosity of the performance almost escaped one. Yet there was nowhere to hide: Props and costumes - 2 chairs, one beret, one umbrella. Dramatis Personae -Too many to count. Actors - one. Special effects - None. With sheer force of personality one is moved to tears and laughter. I got the sense that everybody in the audience identified with an aspect of the story at some point. One could not but participate in this empathic experience. Suenel Bruwer, McGregor