Poppy + George has a past life with another name.
In the early 1990s, as Writer-in-Residence at Theatre Centre, a young people’s theatre company, I was researching into the lives, loves and misdeeds of women pirates of the eighteenth century when I stumbled upon various other intrepid women who lived outside the ‘feminine’ remit. I loved their independence of spirit. From the perspective of the end of the twentieth century, I found myself wanting to step into a moment in time when the opportunities (education, health resources and legal rights, etc.) from which I benefited, due in some way to these women of former eras, began to take effect for women in general. Looking back to where the century began I was drawn to the year after the Great War ended, 1919. Change was in the air. All the known boundaries and definitions of class, nationhood, gender roles that had been in place before the war were shifting in essential ways for men as well as women. Clothes were changing too. And clothes say and do so much. In my imagination, a tailor and dressmaker’s workshop, tucked away down passages and alleyways, hidden from many, took shape. Here, whilst the world outside was in flux, identities were being crafted and many different worlds created by the cut of a jacket, the flare of a skirt or the line of a pair of trousers. As Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…’ I wanted to explore the mystery of the visible. And so they sprung to life – Smith the Chinese tailor; George the chauffeur; Tommy Johns the music-hall female-impersonator back from a tour of duty in the trenches; and a young woman from the north of England, inspired by her Suffragette teacher, named Melody. Turncoat, as the play was then called, ventured on tour throughout the UK not long after a law introduced under Mrs Thatcher’s government a few years earlier had made the promotion of homosexuality in schools illegal.
Twenty years later, nearly a century after the play is set, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it has emerged from the filing cabinet with a whoosh. Watford’s Palace Theatre, once a music hall at the beginning of the twentieth century, is the perfect venue – a renovated building with a history that rings to the songs in the play. Same-sex couples marry, men wear dresses, women wear beards, many other women wear the veil – definitions of gender are shifting, veering from one extreme to the other, questions and certainty vie in volatile contrast. Who am I? Who are we? These questions are stronger than ever. A new time, a new place, and so a new name. Poppy + George popped into my mind without bidding. I felt moved to rename the young woman at the heart of the play, Poppy. I didn’t quite know why at first, despite the obvious connections with the commemorative flower for those fallen in war – although that wasn’t introduced until 1921. But as I immersed myself in rewriting, Poppy began to grow into her name and the play into its new title in unexpected ways. The potent symbolism of this flower has now infused the work – dreams, ending, roots, transformation, resurrection – and the way the seeds sleep silently in the earth until the soil is disrupted (often by war as much as farming or trampling of boots or hooves) and then the latent potential is released. Somehow this is a theme for these times too – a call to notice, to look again, to see how disruption and change, scary, shattering and unnerving though they may be, can enable hidden seeds of untapped flowering within each individual as well as the collective to stir into life, rise up and blossom at last.
Diane Samuels
January 2016