This is almost a decade’s worth of work. Have you thought about turning the work into a book?
I was asked to write a book, I was offered a book deal a few years ago. I found it really difficult to pull together. I found it difficult to write about people who were still alive, and in the end I wasn’t sure what kind of book it was meant to be.
What about producing the works as they were presented as plays. Simply reproducing the text of the plays in the form of a book?
I’m just not massively enthused about mining that seam of my life in some other way. I think a book has to go much deeper than the scripts which have been produced for the plays. That requires a degree of protracted labour, of consistent application, which might not suit me and I’m not sure the world needs more of that when there are plenty of those available already.
You have said that performance is not your strong suit, yet you have performed these plays. That seems an interesting contradiction and how have you navigated that situation?
Partly I am a control freak, so from that perspective it made sense to do the plays myself. There was also a feeling that the plays needed a sense of immediacy and because it was about my life, and it was me talking about my life, it just seemed appropriate to act the part myself.
Now if I had looked at the plays a little more objectively, I might have decided that it would be better to get am actor to do the work and I have spoken to someone about that; a Palestinian – Irish actor who could have done it.
It would be hard to do it poorly given it is a story you yourself have lived through?
Yes I think that’s fair and mostly the audience is on my side, but it is still scripted so I can’t just wander off script completely; I still have to maintain a fair bit of discipline and I still have to deliver a decent performance. But I can say that, because it’s mine, because it is about me, I have been allowed a fair bit of licence by the audience. Even when things have been going massively wrong, as they did during the Imagine Festival Performance, that allowed me to play around with the situation, it offered the audience something unique, so that is definitely part of things as well.
