Next month writer Bethan Kitchen’s new play Gender the Elephant will premier at the Brainchild Festival in Canterbury.  The play will go on to be performed at the Camden Fringe this summer and the ADC next term.  Gender the Elephant is about twins who become obsessed with the myth of Hermaphroditus, the story of a water nymph and a young boy who merge to become one being of both genders.  In the play the twins become fascinated by the idea of one person as both man and woman, and try to make this a reality for themselves.  “Not physically – they don’t go through plastic surgery or anything,” Bethan explains matter-of-factly when we meet to discuss this exciting new production, “but spiritually.”

The title comes from a scene midway through the play in which the twins, who are brother and sister, realise that by trying to forget their respective genders they have paradoxically made gender their centremost concern; it looms large like an elephant in the room.  Bethan says, “They think – okay, in order to forget about gender completely, we need to distract ourselves … so that there is something going on in our lives which is completely vital to think about for survival.”  The twins starve themselves so as to replace their obsession with gender with a preoccupation with hunger.  She won’t tell me the ending “because it will spoil the surprise.”

The twin characters in Gender the Elephant appear in one of Bethan’s earlier plays, This Is Art (as yet unperformed): “I wanted to carry on with them because I really liked them as characters.”  She explains, “I really just wanted to use them more – I thought why try and come up with another character which I’m not that enthusiastic about when I can just use ones that I love.”  The decision to use the twins as her join protagonists has a particular significance for her theme of gender: “I think it’s really important the way that children are brought up to believe in gender binary … and I thought that the idea of these guys being twins and perhaps having a relationship which isn’t just brotherly-sisterly, but also something a bit further than that, could be really interesting in relation to … how we grow up to see ourselves as woman or man or neither.”

Speaking with Bethan, it is clear that she sees playwriting foremost as a craft, one whose mastery requires a lot of time, effort and thought (“it’s the hardest form of writing I’ve ever done”, the first year English student tells me).  She outlines the various challenges that she faced in writing Gender the Elephant.  One was the difficulty inherent in balancing entertainment with the serious themes of the play.  She says, “Although the play deals with important issues, I think that the way that you’re going to make audiences believe in those issues and ask questions, to challenge them and make them think, is actually by making them feel like they’re not being lectured.”  “The dramatic element of it is way more important than saying ‘this is what we’re trying to tell you’,” she adds emphatically.

Other challenges were posed by her decision to explore new forms of writing.  In contrast to Coco, Bethan’s other play to have been staged (at the Corpus Playrooms in Michaelmas term and last year in Bethan’s hometown of Newcastle); Gender the Elephant is not a naturalistic piece.  For one thing, it features a single performer throughout: she says, “the thing that I’m quite good at is writing conversation and this [play] is something where I couldn’t write dialogue.  I really wanted to challenge myself.”

Bethan hopes that the creative experience and feedback gained from the Brainchild Festival will contribute towards a stronger show when it comes to be performed at the ADC next term.  She describes the festival, which features a great diversity of art forms (from spoken word to life drawing), as the ideal context for the play’s first run: “it gives us such a great opportunity to be able to experiment with things in an informal setting, where people aren’t there to see our show, they’re there to see experimental ideas in practice – it’s really a perfect opportunity to give them something and also to give us something to work with.”

It is this kind of open, informal context for the collaborative development between art and theatre that Bethan regrets the absence of in Cambridge and more widely.  In the Easter term she held the LAND exhibition, which she hopes will be the first of many art exhibitions in the university to foster an atmosphere of creative inclusiveness across a range of still and live art forms.  Of the separation between theatre and other forms of art she tells me, “I think that within Cambridge it’s too closed off.  I think that in general, as a concept theatre can’t be separated from other art.”  And in part this judgement is based on her own experience of writing for theatre: “a lot of my writing is actually more inspired by film than it is by other playwrights.”

Bethan has several projects stretching into the next few months.  Gender the Elephant will be performed in week seven of Michaelmas term and she is planning another LAND exhibition.  She tells me that she will begin to research and write a new play over the summer about the life of seafarers.  “That’s the life of a writer I suppose,” she says with a wry smile.  “There are moments of doing loads of things all at once in public and then having months when I’m just on my own with my computer.”

 

The Brainchild Festival takes place from 5th–7th July and the Camden Fringe takes place 29th July–25th of August, with Bethan’s play being performed from 14th–17th August.