Last summer, we were given the fantastic opportunity by the Tobacco Factory and Theatre Bristol to spend four weeks workshopping our new play. We started out with the image described in the last post':
Two astronauts stranded on a planet of rice.
We suspected that these astronauts, who are no doubt from somewhere in the distant future, would explore the planet, and dig up whatever they found. But what would they find? What would two intergalactic archeologists find and, more importantly, what would they be able to do with anything they dug up? In other words, what does the past leave for the future?
Both of us are in our mid twenties, and have recently lost grandparents. Like anyone who goes through this, we wondered what they left behind? What stories had been lost, what memories and anecdotes and knowledge of the last century was disappearing over the horizon? And would they leave any behind? (In fact, in the case of Thomas' grandfather, who suffered from Alzheimers disease, many of those memories had been lost long before he died.)
We become concerned with memory and time, and began to imagine whether it would be possible for these future explorers to know anything of our grandparents. Or would the second world war, like so many wars before it, become fossilized from memory, into history, then into myth?
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