Peter Arnott will be the IASH/Traverse Creative Fellow from April 2017.
We caught up with Peter ahead of his fellowship here and asked about what drew him to the fellowship with IASH and Traverse Theatre. We also wanted to find out a little bit about the play he will be working on during his fellowship. Here are Peter's thoughts:
"Friends and colleagues of mine, like David Harrower, Douglas Maxwell, Jo Clifford and Linda MacLean have been IASH/Traverse fellows before, and they all spoke very highly of the experience; both as a very congenial time and space to work, but also for the surprises they got from the work of other people they encountered, and I'm well up for a bit of that.
"I am working on a particular play for the Traverse, hopefully to be premiered at Christmas time, called Three Christs. It is based on a psychological experiment that happened in the United States in the 1950s, where three paranoid schizophrenics - all of whom claimed to be Jesus - were put into a room together to see what happened. I more or less want to reproduce that experiment with three fictional characters, and through this explore themes of acting and performance and, ultimately, how all of us get through our days with a narrative about who we are.
"The religious aspects interest me too, and I specifically want to look into the lecture series given by William James at the University of Edinburgh in 1902 that became his Varieties of Religious Experience. I hope by banging these two strands of thought together, I'll come up with something interesting."