Interview: Gemma Prangle discusses her bold and moving new play, Splinter

Rhys John Edwards

Gemma Prangle’s new play Splinter, performing this week at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, marks her debut as a writer.

Set in an imagined forest space, following two characters navigating the impending death of a mother and wife, and aiming to ‘unearth the restlessness of grief’, Prangle can hardly be accused of playing it safe on her first try.

When we meet, rehearsals are well underway and social media is now awash with promotional material. In many ways, this has been a long time coming, with the first-time writer having begun work on the piece before the pandemic.

‘It’s been a fascinating process and really exciting, but a challenge at the same time…’ she tells me.

Still, she doesn’t appear intimidated by this challenge. In fact, it was the fear of writing itself that was her main motivation for picking up the pen.

‘I experience the world quite physically, so I’ve always been drawn to performance that has more movement than text. I used to be quite anti-plays, but I think that was because I was scared of them – I didn’t really understand them.’, she says. ‘But then I became interested in the process of how writing and the body kind of sit together, and started to question whether text can have its own physicality.’

Indeed, Gemma has quite an unconventional approach to writing. The majority the text in this play has been spawned from improvised movements.

Movement

‘Movement is my way into writing. I do a lot of improvisation to create images or landscapes or textures and then I administer how these moves can be translated into narrative or text.’

This seems to me to be a fascinating process. Presumably, it’s far more common for plays to be enhanced by movement or physical theatre after they’ve been written, rather than the other way round?

‘Movement directing, for me, is about trying to bring out what is already within the actors’ bodies, not me imposing my interpretation onto them,” Prangle explains, having now applied the same process to the blank page.

‘I might be dancing around in the studio, and suddenly I’ll arrive at something, and then I probe where the imagination goes with that thought and consider how that feels in the body.’

‘Sometimes, I’ll start speaking from that position or I might go – well, that was a really fun image, let’s take that home and put that in a scene, let’s see what happens if the characters are in this space.’

Unique methods aside, Gemma still utilised an age-old writing technique: mining personal and painful experiences to create drama. Although, this was certainly not her intention.

“I lost my Dad in 2016, but I really didn’t set out to write a play about that experience. Actually, I was against it.’

“Otherworldly”

She describes how it felt too specific and says she was concerned that it would narrow the potential for the play to expand into a direction that was beyond her own experience. That, and ultimately it all felt just a bit too personal.

‘But sometimes stories sit so close to the surface of the body, they find their own way to be told.’

I refer to a quote from Splinter’s promotional material – ‘nature can hold us in moments of grief’. It’s an intriguing sentiment, a concept I think I can relate to, but I’m unable to really articulate why. I ask if she can expand upon this a little.

‘Grief really shifts dynamics in families, and you can sometimes feel like you’re in a big bubble, a place almost otherworldly,’ Prangle elaborates.

Given the play’s ‘imagined forest setting’, I ask if nature is used as a means to ground experiences of grief? Like how a long walk or a vast expansive view can be used to lend perspective on a dark day?

She agrees, but adds it’s our willing ignorance of nature’s contradictions that really interests her. ‘I think nature is a really good teacher because although we have this very comforting view of it on the surface, thinking of it all as a haven, it can also of course be a really harsh and violent environment.’

In this sense, she believes that we all have a natural inclination to seek comfort in areas of obvious discomfort, and it is this notion that fuels her storytelling in this play.

Splinter will not only mark Gemma’s debut, but also that of the producing company Red Oak, as Company in Residence at the Sherman Theatre. On choosing this play to introduce themselves to the Sherman audience, Director Matthew Holmquist said: ‘After reading Splinter for the first time, I was really moved. I hadn’t read anything that had presented grief in such an honest way. The world Gemma had created was hard-hitting, beautiful, funny and ugly.’

‘Our aim is always to champion early-career artists whilst encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration, and we can’t wait for audiences at the Sherman to experience all of the amazing work the whole team has made.’

Challenging

Prangle is clearly grateful for the trust she feels has been put in her and the Red Oak team to create a wholly original and challenging piece of work, irrespective of commercial considerations.  ‘I think being an artist or producing company, especially in the current climate, is really challenging. So, having the space and freedom to experiment without restrictions or considerations of what is and isn’t perhaps seen as traditionally ‘commercial’… it’s really been so lovely.’

Finally, I ask what she hopes the audience will take away from the experience, but she is quick to dismiss the idea that she could impose feelings on others through her art.

‘I don’t necessarily want to suggest the audience should feel a certain way or have a specific reaction to it, but I do hope it resonates with people,’ she says.

‘During the research and development phase last year, there were a lot of people in the room with lived experience of the death of a loved one and many said it gave them a real opportunity to speak about it.’

‘Because how do you bring up grief and loss in a normal conversation without feeling like you’re flattening it?  So, even if someone leaves the play with one or two sentences they feel they can share about how they’re feeling…’

She pauses, as if considering the magnitude of her point. ‘It would just be great to think we’ve facilitated a space for that conversation to happen. To make a heavy conversation a little bit lighter. Yeah, that would be really something.’

Showing this week

Splinter by Gemma Prangle is staged by Red Oak Theatre, and will be its first as Company In Residence at Sherman Theatre.

The play stars celebrated actors, Nia Gandhi and Rhys Parry Jones, and will be co-directed by Matthew Holmquist and Nerida Bradley. It comes to the Sherman Studio from Saturday 14 to Saturday 21 September 2024.

Tickets for Splinter are available now from https://www.shermantheatre.co.uk/event/splinter/.