Lewis Hetherington is our current IASH-Traverse Creative Fellow. Whilst his work as both playwright and performance-maker covers a variety of themes and genres, a consistent factor involves investigating the possibility of change. Our intern Amy McMonagle met him to discuss his fellowship, creative projects and the LGBTI+ community in advance of Pride Edinburgh this Saturday.
What has your work at IASH involved?
I’m thinking a lot about Queering history. We’re 50 years from Stonewall, but actually that’s not when Queer culture started, that’s not when Trans people suddenly came into existence. I think sometimes there’s a slight commodification of Pride that does attach it to the youth movement, the idea that it’s a sort of young thing. But it’s not: it’s as old as humanity.
One of the things I’m loving about my IASH residency is getting back into the world of academia, but it’s also a reminder that some parts of it feel inaccessible. Obviously the brilliant thing about IASH is there are people there who can help me navigate through that and actually decode it a bit. I suppose that’s something I’m interested in as a writer: asking ‘what’s the most innovative thinking about a certain topic or area? What are the boldest and most complicated ideas around an issue and then how do I turn that into a piece of theatre which anyone can come along to and feel included in and gripped by?' I like the idea of challenging without alienating.
As a Fellow on the IASH-Traverse programme, you’ve been developing a work-in-progress. How has that evolved since you arrived?
It could be so many things at the moment. I’m trying to read a lot about Deep Ecology and Queer ecology, and I’m trying to draw lines in my own brain between those things. I’m really interested in ghost stories, in the eerie and the uncanny, and IASH has a big area of interest and connection to the Enlightenment.
I’ve started to read more and more about the limits of these supernatural, eerie tales. I’m really interested in that explosion of ideas, how popular exploring the train of the uncanny was [around the Enlightenment], and it feels like there’s something explicitly Queer about it. It’s about rejecting those binaries of night and day, light and darkness, life and death: for me it’s all quite new and quite exciting.
I really like the idea of writing something that’s quite gripping and disconcerting. The first seeds of this idea were trying to ask ‘how do we deal with the climate crisis we’re facing? How is that all connected to a limited heteronormative worldview—or is it? And how do I join all that up in theatre?’
The biggest and most exciting challenge is that storytelling is so immediate, it’s about the drama that people have in their individual lives. Yet one individual life is not very meaningful on a geological scale, so I’m wondering how do I write a piece of theatre that speaks meaningfully to a geological timescale but also speaks meaningfully to the blink-of-an-eye kind of time that we exist in?
Alongside working at IASH, you’ve been collaborating on The Coming Back Out Ball with National Theatre of Scotland, All The Queens Men, Eden Court, Luminate and Glasgow City Council. What’s that experience been like?
We’ve been working with older members of Scotland’s LGBTI+ community and it’s been incredible to get to know these people. A big part of the process at the moment has been just getting to know them, to see what they want to say and how they want to say it. Whether that is to be really political, or to learn new dancing skills, or to make a film, or do a fashion shoot, or whatever it is that they want to do: it’s about working with them to explore the way that they want to be seen and made visible. All of which will feed into the Ball itself in May 2020.
That’s a really big focus of the project; drawing attention to a group who are really often overlooked, or oppressed or side-lined. And of course, there is a real diversity of elder LGBTI+ people, some who have been out and proud their whole lives, some who are only just beginning to articulate and explore that part of their identity. One of our challenges with the Coming Back Out Ball is that we want to attempt to represent that whole spectrum of experience, to shine a light on a group that are often excluded from narratives. Anyone who wants to can reach out to me via lewis.hetherington@nationaltheatrescotland.com.
You’ve talked about the LGBTI+ experience in relation to history and the elderly community. As a member of the LGBT community, what does Pride mean to you?
I think Pride is a day and a space where I can hold hands with my boyfriend and walk down the street and be really proud and happy about it, and feel safe, and actually, that doesn’t happen the rest of the year.
In a broader sense it’s just always about (and this is connected to what I love about theatre), it’s about continuing to have conversations and continuing to try and be open. I understand and appreciate why people might get nervous about language and about whether they’re using the right terminology, but I think so much of it is about intention. I would describe myself as a Queer person but I know that for other people, it’s not a word that they would use - it’s not a word they would feel comfortable with. It’s about listening and going ‘how are other people choosing to talk about themselves?’
What advice would you give to someone who is trying to navigate the dialogues and experiences in our current political climate?
More than ever, in a world that can feel quite fraught, especially on a big political level it feels like increasingly bloated, simplistic buffoons are the ones trying to set the political dialogue. I think the really important thing is to resist that, and to constantly have a much more nuanced and delicate, and still really robust, dialogue but one that’s not oppositional.
It’s really valid that people have different experiences with the LGBTI+ community, it’s really valid that not everyone (because it’s a community that’s made up of individuals and I’m very keen to stress that) who identifies as LGBTI+ is happy to fly that rainbow flag. We need to find ways to hold public spaces that acknowledge that all of that is valid. It’s important that we keep that public dialogue robust but respectful, to find new ways to celebrate the diversity, individuality and difference without ghettoising or polarising.
You can protest and party at the same time. The party is going ‘I am visible!’ Pride, especially somewhere like Scotland where we do have the legislation, is a reminder that certain rights were only given really recently, they’re really hard-won but they could roll back. We have to keep fighting for them, keep demanding them, and keep demanding to be seen.