Artist Spotlight: Rowan Brown

By the time I sit down next to Rowan in Jericho Café, she has been there for ten minutes. Her drink arrives as I’m frantically putting my sunglasses away. I apologise profusely for being late, and she shrugs it off glamorously, sipping at her iced latte. Knowing that I barely managed to book her in for an hour slot, and that she’s busy shooting and rehearsing for the rest of the afternoon, I tell her, “This must be the longest day ever for you!” She smiles, sympathetic for my breathlessness as I continue to set up, and once again shrugs it off, thanking me for the opportunity to talk about her work. This is the dominant tone of the rest of our conversation:  balancing the Oxford workload and preparation for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival has made her schedule hectic, yet Rowan responds to every question with absolute calm and coherence, with more consideration for her audience than for herself. This is also her approach to storytelling.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Do you want to start by introducing yourself?

 

ROWAN BROWN

 

Yeah! I’m Rowan. I’m the co-founder of Tidal Theatre, which is a small, Oxford-based theatre company focused on movement and physical theatre. I’m a second year English student at St Hilda’s. I’m doing Launa—which is a play I wrote, and which we performed in November at the Burton Taylor—and now we’re taking it to the Fringe.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Very exciting! Can you give a summary of Launa for those who didn’t get to see it?

 

BROWN

 

Launa follows a young mother, Edna, who has lost her daughter a year before the play opens. What I’m really looking at is the over-romanticization of grief. There’s a line in the play which is, “grief is nothing more than unshaved armpits and supermarket flowers.” When something terrible happens, you just kind of have to keep going. It’s ugly and it’s messy, but there is also a real beauty to it. On the other side of that, the physical theatre comes in.

 

Theatre is a space where you can put the unsaid on stage, and I think we should use that more. We see so much naturalism on the scene and it’s beautiful, but I think there’s something so exciting about having the ability to show something physically, something bursting at the seams. The physicality in the show, the movement, the ensemble sequences, are this constant force, which is a sort of representation of Edna’s subconscious and her memories of her daughter. 

 

Launa herself comes back as a 21-year-old manifestation of what Edna thinks her six-year-old daughter would have been like in the future. But she also comes back as the memory of a six-year-old child—as the play progresses, she becomes this dangerous vessel for Edna’s buried regrets. The actress playing Launa is therefore embodying three different forms of her mother’s grief. Seeing Edna’s real life—her present relationships with her partner Joe, her sister, Beth, and her absent mother Helen—happening in real time; they’re processing the loss themselves. There is a line where Beth says, “it’s not just you feeling this.” We can’t, as an audience, purely project onto Edna. The story is really exploring whether we have to let go of the past to remain in the present. 

 

INTERVIEWER

 

There’s been an increase of explorations in film, TV, and theatre—of the relationship between a mother and her daughter in film and TV, and now, with the success of Hamnet, t the mother’s experience of loss. I’m wondering what drew you, personally, to that particular idea.

 

BROWN

 

This is a question I think about a lot, because I had this need to write this play. And people have asked me, ‘what inspired this? You haven’t lost a child.’ I was listening to something that Phoebe Waller Bridge said in an interview about how people often assume that her writing must be inspired by something she’s experienced. When, actually, it’s often inspired by what we fear. 

 

I think my big inspiration was… the film Arrival, which is just the most stunning film. I’d say my major inspiration was the way it tracks the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The mother knows throughout the film that her daughter is going to die, and we spend the whole film thinking that she’s looking backwards when, in fact, she’s looking forwards. But she chooses to have her daughter anyway, even though she knows that she will die before she becomes a teenager. So it’s playing with time. That brought about the question of, would we choose to have it again? Would we choose to experience that loss again? For something like grief… I’m trying to show that, when something’s that raw, it leaves reality, it becomes something surreal. I think that’s what this medium is trying to do. 

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Some pieces of art are, like you said, not necessarily born from having experienced something, but instead almost a pre-caution for that experience. There’s the question of ‘can I explore this grief so fully that I’ve healed from it before it’s even happened?’ How did you navigate writing something so intrinsically tied to the experience of being a mother without going through it yourself?

 

BROWN

 

My own experience is… my mum is an artist. She had kids when she was 38. There’s what she wants to create in her career, and then there’s her role as a mother existing simultaneously. And it’s really interesting, just as an observer in life, to go to different friends’ homes and enter into different family dynamics. For some people, parenthood is the creative dream, and that is beautiful in itself. There are some that are so driven by their career, which turns them away from becoming a parent. And then are some that are balancing the two. 

 

In Launa, Edna is also an incredibly creative, ambitious young woman, and this is part of her regret—not knowing that her daughter would die, she gave up on her music career to be a mother. These regrets come back to haunt her. The play is questioning, could she have had both? 

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Because plays are able to touch someone you don’t know at all, they’re a much more intimate form of storytelling. Has anyone approached you as an audience member and told you how the story has spoken to them in a way you wouldn’t expect?

 

BROWN

 

We had a lot of quite intense responses to Launa, which I wasn’t totally expecting because… I’ve got quite a strong belief that I didn’t want it to be a devastating play. I wanted to keep the ending painful, but cautiously optimistic of Edna’s renewal. When you hand out a piece of work to other people to interpret for themselves, it touches something in them that you didn’t even consider. I had someone who had lost a parent who said the play spoke to them very intensely—which is fascinating because it’s the other way around from how I wrote it—but they saw it from the perspective of the child. And there was quite a powerful response from a lot of women in the audience who saw the dichotomy between maternity and womanhood, which I’d thought about but it wasn’t what I saw as the front of the play. We see a sister, a mother, a grandmother, and a child, so it’s a whole generational mix. So I had grandmothers and mothers come to see it, and university age people, and then kids as well. All these people who saw themselves in different figures in the play, and that was really special. 

 

INTERVIEWER

 

The Oxford theater scene is particularly intimate—you know not just the actors or production team, but even the audience and location so well. Drawing from that, how do you think performing this kind of play is going to be different at the Fringe?

 

BROWN

 

Before making Launa, I was on the hunt for experimental theatre. I’m privileged enough to have a lot of experience playing with puppetry, clowning, physicality, movement, all this stuff. So coming to the Oxford theatre scene, there is an absence of the physical bits in particular, and playing with different mediums. At the Fringe, everyone is experimental. What I’ve been saying to the cast as we go into this new period is, we’re not the only physical theatre company on the scene anymore. So we can’t get comfy and just rely on the medium. And while we need a strong selling point, I don’t want to lose sight of the story either. I think we’ve got a really important story to tell, and the physical aspects aid it, but ultimately I think Launa speaks for itself. 

 

INTERVIEWER

 

And what’s next for you after Launa? Do you already have something in the works?

 

BROWN 

 

Next term, I’m aiming to do an adaptation of Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight. I just had the privilege of speaking to Rhys’ granddaughter in a Café Nero next to Victoria Station, who was telling me about Rhys’ life and the rights to her work and such—so hopefully that’s going ahead. I love Launa, but I’m really excited to go into something new. Good Morning, Midnight is a darker piece, in some ways… but the beautiful thing about the book is, it’s got these seeds of hope spread throughout, and this relationship with hope which the protagonist sees as negative is actually enabling her to open up and start having relationships in the real world. We’re going to be using film and music, so it’s a different approach to multimedia theatre as well.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

I guess that’s the beauty of the medium. It gives you such a broad scope of things that you could adapt and bring your own spin to. And I will be there next term to see your Good Morning, Midnight!

 

BROWN

 

Thank you! It’s something I’ve always really wanted to do—honoring a writer whilst also allowing your own voice to come through is definitely a challenge, but, yeah. I’ll tackle it somehow.