Eva Hudson’s female-led play Dreamphone is a coming-of-age story that follows teenage girls Aisling and Saoirse. When Father Malcolm provides them with the chance to move to London to work for a magazine company, they decide to take the opportunity. But when they arrive in London, they find out the company doesn’t exist and instead they find themselves selling strange products for free.
The Indiependent spoke to Hudson to find out more about her play.
The Indiependent: Where did the inspiration for Dreamphone come from?
Eva Hudson: The first inspiration for Dreamphone came from a story within my family. Like Saoirse and Aisling, my Nana, Claire, was convinced by her local priest to leave her small Catholic town for a glamorous “opportunity” in London. Like our two girls in the play, she was told that she would be “working in the magazines”: that this was an amazing opportunity, and it paid incredibly well. When she arrived there, she found herself flogging stacks of encyclopaedias and other strange goods, and working without payment.
Her story ended quite differently to Saoirse and Aisling’s: my Grandad swooped in and broke her out of what we now might consider to be a modern slavery/human trafficking arrangement, and she went on to have a very happy life. She sadly died when I was very little, so I only found out about the story from my Grandad, Larry, a couple of years ago. It struck me as absolutely unbelievable.
The impetus for the second half of the play came when I saw an article about the UK formally apologising for what was termed the Magdalen Laundries scandal, where Irish Catholic teen-mothers had their babies taken from them by the church, and put up for adoption, often sent under dubious financial arrangements to very wealthy families in London.
I knew about this vaguely from talk within my own Irish Catholic family, but it was not something any of my friends knew—or even to this day, know—about. So, when I went to write about my Nana and her story, it became quite political. I began to think about so many other young Irish women who have fallen victim to similar injustices at the hands of the Church, with hush-hush UK involvement. I felt a kind of rage on their behalf. I felt compelled to tell their stories.
What kind of reaction do you tend to get from the audience?
I really wanted the audience to first see two teenage girls at their silliest and most happy. So when their situation isn’t funny anymore, we really feel what we have lost. It was just before us, this sort of youthful bubbliness and hope, and now something has quite literally been taken from them. The ending is very sad. It’s real, and it’s sad, and it’s what happened. So we are—perhaps in a schadenfreude kind of way—strangely delighted to see people moved to tears. It means they’ve felt something, and that means the story resonated and was heard! The best feedback we can hear, which we have been lucky to receive at every show we have put on, is that the play moved people to think. That’s always the goal.
Dreamphone has been produced by female students, and also features an all-female cast. Why do you think this is important?
It’s funny, because it wasn’t totally intentional: I think that happened quite naturally! Perhaps because the play interrogates these very female issues—body autonomy and female friendship—I imagine it naturally attracted people who are invested, who have a stake. With a show like this it’s imperative that people can feel open and vulnerable with one another, with no fear of someone in the room breaking their trust, misquoting, or laughing at them. As a cast and a production team, we had so many beautiful conversations about the female experience that we might not have been able to have in the company of non-female (or female-identifying) people.
There were so many moments in rehearsals where people would say “I feel exactly the same way, but didn’t know other people felt that”, or moments of, “that happened to me too, and I told no one!”! For a show like this, I think that female environment has really allowed for more vulnerable performances and writing, knowing that the people working with you really understand.
What do you hope that people will take away from your show?
Gosh. I hope that they will think about all the women who have had decisions about their bodies taken from them, and how much violence can be enacted under the guise of religion. I hope that they will be kind to the women in their lives, because they don’t know how much they have gone through that they aren’t willing or able to talk about. Although what happens to Saoirse is quite extreme, it was something so many women had to go through. After all of the horrible stuff we have seen recently in America, if it makes one person think, or feel seen and represented and heard, that will mean everything.
What’s next for Dreamphone, and for you?
We are having an amazing Fringe experience in so many ways, but we definitely want to come back in a more central location and with enough time and money to allow the play to be seen by as many people as possible. We made some rookie errors this year location-wise and are a team of Fringe first timers, so would love to bring it back, bigger and bolder next year.
As for me, I’m off to Bristol Old Vic Theatre School to take up a place on their playwriting masters’ programme, and I’m launching a theatre company with my great friend and actor Max Raphael, called Berwick Street Theatre Workshop. It’s a new home for women/non-binary and global majority writers. We are going to be running workshops, networking events, and creating our own work. I think it’s going to be really exciting—we both want to make theatre that makes a difference—so everyone reading this should keep their eyes peeled!
Dreamphone will be performed at Merlin until 28 August as part of PBH’s Free Fringe.
Words by Ellen Leslie
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