Lilly & George
Mum and Dad – It all begins with them.
During our childhood, our parents’ experiences and choices become our points of reference, and fundamentally dictate how we regard and relate to the world. We must assume that our parents’ parents influenced them in similar ways, but in spite of their best efforts – why do we sometimes turn out to be the kind of people our parents warned us about?
ANDREW WALE and ALAN ØYEN – who’ve written several plays together for winter guests – have, for some time, spoken about basing a story on conversations between themselves and their own parents, in which they confront their mothers and fathers with the choices and decisions they made for themselves, and also those made on their children’s behalf.
For ALAN, there’s always been something touching about so-called ‘ordinary’ people, the middle-aged woman with the heavy shopping bags sitting alone at a bus stop, carefully living her life and making few demands. Perhaps this has something to do with how he experienced his own mother’s life; but what of his mother’s mother, Lilly?
And ANDREW’s memories of his mother’s father, George; a warm, tall and humorous man, are tempered by the image of a small, frail body in a funeral chapel.
It’s uncertain how biographically authentic Lilly & George will be – the role of fiction depends on who’s telling the story, and no story belongs to one person alone – but as always, the warp of love, life and understanding will be woven through with the weft of resentment, death and incomprehension.
In attempting to unravel the various threads of our relatives’ stories, we’re not expecting to be able to re-thread our own, or weave them in to a new story-tapestry depicting impossibly perfect lives. We’re looking to find the flaws, and trying to understand why we have them. We’re looking for the holes – fully aware that one day, like everyone we’ve ever loved, we’ll fall through them…