ASK FOR THE MOON
This week I drive up into the flat, bleak Fen country just northwest of Cambridge to collect three industrial sewing machines for our production of Ask for the Moon. Then the girls playing the parts of the sweatshop workers must get stuck into the process of learning how to master these decidedly undomestic beasts. Not only must they be able to hem, face & trim half-made garments with skill, they must do it whilst uttering lines. Having done the play before, I am nervously aware of just how brutish & cussed these huge sewing machines can be. So there will be extensive rehearsal done just on mastering their eccentricities. Not that Iíve suggested to the girls that there are any risks involved, but even the most dedicated & focused of actors is going to have difficulty staying in role after sewing all five fingers together.
The lace worker actresses have it easier in respect of personal safety. All they have to do is sit with lace cushions on their laps swinging bobbins loaded with gossamer-thin thread at speed around configurations of pins. I managed to locate a lace-making teacher in Letchworth, which was a bit of luck. The more so because sheís a fanatic for detail & protocol. An ex-Maths teacher & thus ruthlessly thorough & organised, she knows everything there is to know about lace & its manufacturing history in this country. Ready to be bored to sobs on our first meeting, I glued on my best receptive smile & allowed her to let rip. And it was fascinating. Three terminally cool adolescent girls & I listened enthralled to tales of starvation in freezing cottages, the sexual exploitation of young workers by ëlace mastersí, ëhanging bobbinsí which carry carved upon them details of local hangings of villains at the crossroads, & the multitude of different styles, stitches & patterns that distinguish regional lace making across Britain. Because the play sites the lace workers in Devon, our teacher insisted that the girls must make their lace in the Honiton style. Honiton is a small town in South Devon &, in the 18th & 19th centuries, it was a major centre for the making of exquisitely fine, small-scale lace, right up to the coming of the machines & the passing of the old cottage industries.
So, as they relax in front of ëFriendsí or ëEastendersí each night, my three actresses practise their lace making, watching the screen & trying to weave whole-stitch & half-stitch without looking down at the pillows. And, during the next four weeks, they must become entirely convincing Victorian girls with fully-fledged Devonian accents, working against the clock from dawn to dusk six days a week, making absolutely authentic Hontion lace. Meanwhile, the sweatshop workers will have keys to the Drama Studio so that they can go in during their bits & pieces of free time during the working day to fire up the machines & reel out swathes of cheap garments.
Education is in something of a crisis in this country. The last vestiges of the supposed progressivism of the ë70s linger uncomfortably alongside the new dispensation, whose catchphrase is, ëIf it can be verified by testing then itís learningí. Preparing this play is educational: all eight of us will learn more in 10 weeks about cooperation, collaboration, problem solving, character & motivation, history, stage skills, &, for what itís worth, making Hontion lace & hemming, tracing & trimming garments than we might pick up in a yearís worth of variegated schooling.
10:28:20 PM 
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