INTERVIEW: End-of-life issues come into focus in dark comedy ‘Killing Time’
Photo: Zoe Mills and Brigit Forsyth star in Killing Time at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Darren Bell / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
Killing Time, the new play at the Brits Off-Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan, has a mother-daughter team bringing conversation and cello playing to audiences. Brigit Forsyth plays Hester, a cellist who is facing some deep issues about the end of her life. Also appearing is Forsyth’s daughter, Zoe Mills, who wrote the comedy.
Killing Time, which continues through May 12, tackles such issues as the right to die, music, life and inspiration. Forsyth impressively plays original cello compositions for the play, in addition to some classic pieces.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Mills. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired Killing Time?
This play started out as series of images inspired by a piece of music my mum (Brigit Forsyth) composed for four cellos called HeartTime. It is an extraordinary and beautiful piece, and it seemed to tell a story all its own. I had just finished a long job as an actress in 2012 and was kicking my heels — I started writing a scene about a woman making videos of herself and playing the cello in the middle of the night whilst drinking an entire bottle of red wine … and the character of Hester was born!
Gradually the story began to emerge that she was dying, and she was trying to leave a legacy in the music. I wanted to explore the idea of what we choose to leave behind, what inspires us, and well … Hester is just so much fun to write for! An uncompromising and, by all accounts, wild woman, she is a professional cellist who finds she no longer wants to play and is now trapped in the flat with her cello and memories of a life she is no longer sure she should call her own.
Sara, a misfit and trainee social worker, comes from a very different world — a younger generation, socially isolated yet obsessed with social media, digital legacy and death. The two become thoroughly entangled in each other’s lives in ways I honestly never expected when I started writing this play. I knew what the beginning looked like, and what the end sounded like, so with a few drafts and lots of brilliant feedback, eventually the story evolved into Killing Time.
Was having the play be a dark comedy always the plan? Did you think about different genres?
I think the seed of dark comedy was always there, as both myself and my mum are blessed/cursed with the kind of humour that gets you into trouble, to be honest. The more serious the situation, the higher the chance of hysteria. And once I had discovered Hester was dying, well, the mechanics of death and the ridiculous questions you never thought you would have to ask yourself made the comedy kind of inevitable to my mind.
I always felt I was writing a play that was more about inspiration than death, and I wanted to keep the door open for the audience to relate to the characters fully, to keep them human. If you allow the audience to laugh, I think you can actually go to a lot darker places without losing them altogether.
I have been to a few plays which completely broke my heart, and however brilliantly it was done, I have ended up pretty depressed in the bar afterwards trying to drown my sorrows and forget the whole thing as quickly as possible. Once I realised it really had become a play about someone contemplating their own death, without letting the characters have a sense of humour, I think it might have become a very long and grim evening of theatre in the making!
As it is, there are some pretty dark times in the play and then some very ridiculous and playful moments, and I was more interested in writing a play which explored mixed- medium theatre, than worrying too much whether the play was a tragedy or comedy.
I love film, and as both of the characters are obsessed with legacy, I wanted to explore projection in the staging and how technology is so woven into our lives, whether we want to engage with it or not. And with Hester being a cellist who no longer wants to play, it made sense to use soundscape as well as live music to give a surreal insight into what Hester is thinking and feeling as the story develops.
What do you feel the play says about mortality and facing the end of one’s life?
I never set out to write a play about death, but what I hope it says is that mortality seems to be an entirely individual experience. And yet it is something that genuinely unites us all. I, like the characters in the play, sometimes find death both fascinating and terrifying, and I suppose what I have really learnt from the whole process of making Killing Time is — talking about death is really talking about life. It is impossible to think what death might mean to a person, without them thinking about their life and what they really care about.
I grew up in the U.K. in a fairly secular culture where it just wasn’t normal to talk much about these things even when someone actually dies. Funerals used to be pretty awkward, quiet and quick affairs, which seem to have very little to do with the person who they were supposed to be for. And the ensuing grief was something to be done later on in private and, ideally, silence. Thankfully it’s not such a big taboo to talk about grief, plan your own funeral and perhaps even have a ‘going away’ party these days, but it is still an enduringly difficult subject to talk about for many people.
We had a pop-up death cafe after the show one night in London run by some End of Life Doulas — it was a fantastic experience, and there was an awful lot of laughter, a few tears and some of the most extraordinary conversations I have ever heard — certainly enough to inspire another five plays if there was time to write them!
Facing our own death is the ultimate human experience, and watching characters living out and talking about some of the conundrums we hope we never have to contemplate is hopefully a positive and potentially cathartic experience. Killing Time does explore some strong ethical conundrums around end-of-life choice, but it is really not trying to push a particular viewpoint or say what’s right and wrong. Instead I hope it gives the audience a fresh perspective and perhaps even sparks a conversation they might never have imagined they would be happy to have.
After the experience of writing Killing Time, do you feel motivated to keep writing plays? What’s the future hold?
As an actress, I will always want to keep performing, and this makes it hard to make time to write. But I find acting in lots of different mediums also keeps me engaged and inspired in wanting to make new work.
Making Killing Time has been a great reminder of how important it is to persevere and keep pursuing what inspires you, even when it seems like nothing is ever going to come together or go anywhere. I wrote the play inspired by a piece of music my mum made, which she worked on for years on and off, and it was only a whole string of random events and perseverance that led to her finally recording it properly.
With Killing Time, I was also writing for a long time without ever showing it to anyone! A terrible plan of course — and then when I did eventually dare to share, it’s been a long, frustrating and also thrilling process of collaboration with the other creatives that has led us to make the final show. It has been an amazing journey and one I am very grateful to have been part of!
As a writer I have been developing my next play Oracle for a while now — I think it’s currently got too many characters in it, so the next rewrite I will have to work on killing off a few for practical reasons! It’s another dark comedy, a satire really, about personal power and accidental revolution. This time I have been working with our associate movement director, Christian From, to look at a movement language for the play whilst redrafting it. We are currently exploring a mix of Crossfit, flashmobs and the body language of passive resistance — so it’s been a lot of fun to work on so far as you might imagine!
Other than that I have a few other writing projects I am tinkering with for film and audio, and as an actress I am hoping to go out on an international tour with a two-person version of Macbeth I worked on last year for Volcano Theatre Company. Getting the right balance of work and time to think is always a struggle, and unfortunately I am really most productive when I am almost overwhelmed with deadlines … so the challenge is to keep making things and occasionally find time to sleep and eat, too.
What’s it like to work with director Antony Eden and your mother, cellist/actor Brigit Forsyth?
It’s an absolute joy to work with them both! Antony is a great friend of ours, and whilst my mum and I have a really fantastic friendship, we were very nervous about working together professionally! We first collaborated on a play called Effie’s Burning by Valerie Windsor a few years ago, which was a show mum first performed in about 30 years before that. It’s a brilliant two-hander, and Antony directed us in it — with myself playing the part my mum played before, and my mum now playing the older role. It was the most terrifying thing we could ever think of doing at the time, but it planted the seed of future exciting possibilities. Nearly seven years later, we have a theatre company together, and life is still pretty extraordinary on this front!
I feel extremely lucky to have such an inspiring partner in crime and muse, and coming to Brits Off Broadway at 59E59 as Word Mills Productions with Dead Letter Perfect and Stephen Joseph Theatre, too, is truly a wildest dream come true for us. We all wear a lot of different hats on Killing Time and are a tiny creative team in rehearsals — with Brigit also being my mum(!), Antony directing and co-producing, myself writing and acting in the show, and that does make for some confusing moments … but we all drink far too much coffee, have enormous respect for each other professionally and a strong sense of humour, so I am happy to say that solves most things.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Killing Time, by Zoe Mills, stars Mills and Brigit Forsyth. The production comes to 59E59 Theaters courtesy of Word Mills and Dead Letter Perfect, in association with Stephen Joseph Theatre. Click here for more information and tickets.
