Relative Motion: almost at the starting line
We are doing a play! I feel like I should be more professional or formal as I write that but eh I don't want to be. That's how it feels. I keep thinking as I (slowly) progress in this career that I'll start feeling more official. But I don't. And maybe that's okay! Or maybe it's even better?
Anyway, Relative Motion is going to be at Southwark Playhouse Borough (The Little) from the 11th of November until the 5th of December. (Tickets on sale now!)
Yikes we are almost in a month countdown. For the first time, I had to write a little about the inspiration for the play and where the story came from. It was an interesting exercise and I thought I would share the ensuing couple of paragraphs here.
Relative Motion began as a short story I wrote on a train while I was in the middle of a turbulent relationship.
I actually posted that whole short story to the blog a WHILE ago so you can read it HERE if you'd like.
Looking out the window, I was struck by the idea of relative motion: I was still relative to those on the train with me, yet relative to the houses outside I was travelling by at speed. At that moment, my relationship felt like that. You can believe you are travelling in the same direction as someone, until so easily and without warning (although those red flags often appear upon reflection), you realise you aren’t.
Using Newton’s theories of motion became the perfect framework for this play and a nod to the original story I had written in my notebook that morning. Plus, I also loved using something as objective as physics to explain the subjective dynamics in a romantic relationship. The more I used the laws the further I found I could push the metaphor, revealing how every new force acting on a system can change everything that follows.
The most frightening thing about coercive control is that it slowly erodes your confidence, judgment, and sense of self without you realising. I had always imagined that I would notice the warning signs and that it wouldn’t happen to me. Surely! I was too independent! too strong willed! to ever lose myself like that.
I was wrong.
What surprised me most when I started writing this play was the response from readers. Almost every woman who read a draft told me that either she had experienced a relationship like this or had a close friend who had. I realised how common these stories are and CRUCIALLY how little we talk about them.
More than anything, I want the audiences to start out rooting for this couple. I want them to fall in love with Sam and Paul before they begin to question it, because that’s what makes it difficult to recognise the warning signs in our own lives. One of the reasons I write is because I believe that stories are inherent to who we are as people and also the way we see and understand the world (see my substack on that here lol not to be one of those people). I hope that as the audience are walking out of the theatre they are debating when they first recognised something wasn’t right, where Paul teeters from defensible to indefensible behaviour (if you think he ever dows), whether they spotted the warning signs before Sam and why.
There are actually quite a few blog posts from 2023 that I've just found that detail the beginning journeys of this play in development. I remember how it felt like the play was so close to be done. Ah how little I knew then!
But here they are if you want them:
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