Gemma Barnett is an award winning actor, and poet, due to bring her debut, full length play, Agatha, to The Pleasance, London, this March. The production which fuses spoken word with original music, is intended to speak universally to women’s experiences; their desires and intergenerational relationships. A predominantly character driven piece, Agatha brings to stage three generations of women, their traumas, their loves, and complex, frequently thorny relationships with each other.
Jo (Gemma Barnett) has a decision to make. She’s struggling to make it on her own. Mum’s (Suzanna Hamilton) no help. Stuck in the car, she needs someone to tell her what to do; what she wants; why she’s here.
Overview of Agatha by Gemma Barnett
Agatha (Olivia Carruthers) is dead and living her dream life running a blues bar. Her husband has no idea where she is. She had promised she’d be buried with him, but got herself cremated. Death is the divorce she always wanted.
Gemma Barnett, modest, but a creative star in the ascent
I start by asking Gemma to look back upon her creative life, and like a tour guide, lead me to those exhibits most critical to her story. The first stop, she tells me, would be back in university, the UEA (University of East Anglia) in Norwich.
“The course that we were on there was really focused a lot on collaborative work and devising and theatre making, and consequently I ended up graduating with loads of friends that were incredible producers, or lighting designers, or stage managers, and just had like an amazing network of people that went into the industry and started doing great work.
I took a year after graduating from Uni, a year out where I was just working normal jobs, behind bars and in a theatre box-office, all that sort of stuff. And at the same time, I started writing and making a show with one of my best friends from Uni, called Goggles, which we got funding for and ended up taking to the Fringe, and it as well.
Then at the same time in that year, whilst I was in that show, I was auditioning for for drama school again, and was offered a DaDA scholarship to do a postgraduate year at Oxford drama school.”
Gemma tells me that after that she returned to acting mainly, despite her prior success in creating her own material, and that it’s only been in the last two years or so, that she’s returned to the endeavour.
Lockdown appears to have been the ingredient “x”…”
“I actually think the pandemic kind of forced me into that a little bit more because I had the time. I started writing quite a lot of performance pieces: poetry and spoken word. I ended up doing quite well (she says very modestly indeed) and I became a finalist for the BBC Words First in 2021, and won the poetry prize, Poetry for Good.”
Appearances on Woman’s Hour followed, as well as her piece being featured in the I-Newspaper. For the past two years, along side these fine accomplishments, Gemma was also writing her new play, Agatha, which will premiere on March 1st, at The Pleasance, London.
Selected as one of the VAULT FIVE, a 9 month mentoring programme run under the auspices of London’s biggest arts festival, Gemma was supported and mentored with a view to Agatha being debuted at the 2022 VAULT festival.
“When the festival was cancelled, they helped us secure a transfer to the fabulous Pleasance, and so that’s my journey to date.”
Agatha, a new play is born
I ask Gemma how Agatha was born, and how inspiration translated into a final manuscript.
“I started thinking about it when my Nana passed away, reflecting my experience of all the female relationships within my family.”
Processing this grief shaded transitional moment in her life, Gemma would discover aspects of her Grandmother’s history never mentioned before her passing.
“I was kind of asking my questions about why those big things only come up once someone has died?” she says, “Why we are so adamant we don’t want to talk about it when they’re around or here.”
Gemma’s Nana, she told me was an alcoholic, an elephant in many a family occupied room, which largely went unacknowledged.
“The last conversation I had with her, I just remember so distinctly her trying to pass on advice to me about not living with regret, not making the same mistakes as she did.
She was ill at the time, and rather vague. It was only when, trying to make sense of what she was saying, that I found out from my mum, that in the 60’s, she’d (her Nana) gone for an abortion and been refused it and so forced to through with the pregnancy. Obviously those children are very much here and alive and, and I’ve come away from that side of the story.”
Agatha, is, she is careful to stress, not an autobiographical piece. It’s inspired by familial experience, certainly, but definitely not a documentary drama.
“It is where the main part of one of the stories in the play came from: this woman is fighting to make a male medical professional listen to her what she wanted, and at that time women often weren’t. I think a huge part of what’s come out of this show is what happens when someone dies after feeling that she hasn’t been heard her whole life. So now we’ve brought that woman back as a somewhat comic compere. She’s in charge of the show and she’s living her dream life and death.”
Abortion, and bodily Autonomy, a conversation humanity can’t seem to stop having
Gemma’s familial discoveries coincided with a significant uptick in heated public debate over abortion laws in the USA, and the well publicised death of Polish woman, Agnieszka T, due to her country’s nigh ban on termination.
“It just seems to be that history keeps repeating itself,” she says, ” I’m thinking of the really interesting conversation I’ve had with Alliance for Choice, which is an abortion charity based in Northern Ireland. And we had a conversation about how fragile the rights surrounding bodily autonomy remain despite laws enshrining personal rights.
Yes, their laws have changed, but their rights are still up for question because there’s still so much shame around abortion. If we can’t tackle the shame, then those laws don’t really protect us until someone decides to take those away. Again, this is something we we’ve spoken about in the show: what happens when one generation of women are much more liberated than another, does that create resentment or bitterness? It’s such a very, very difficult conversation to have.
And like motherhood is something I think about a lot. And whether it’s expected of me, whether like, if I choose not to do it, am I viewed as less than…and all those things? I still feel that pressure is really prevalent now.
It got me thinking a lot about female inherited trauma and the why’s of that relationship. There’s a specific language with which mother’s and daughters communicate that I don’t see in any other relationship. It’s spiky, intimately familiar, but often so full of love as well. “
Agatha is no tragedy: expect to walk out uplifted
“Everything I’ve spoken about so far makes Agatha sound really heavy, but we’ve actually made, I think, a comedy out of it. The way it’s set up is that we’re putting on a show of memories and there’s the struggle between the women as to who owns the narrative. It’s a bit of a weird show, and really quite hard to sum up.”
That, I suggest is very much true to life: it’s rarely neat, and so often tragedy provides a backdrop to comedy.
“We were thinking,” she continues, “a lot about what we want the audience to go away feeling. When I’ve seen shows which deal with themes of trauma, I’ve sometimes left feeling traumatized and that’s, I just think that’s the total antithesis of what I want to do with my work.
For me, it’s a way of exploring that stuff, the same traumatic subject, but in a very safe space, so that you leave feeling lighter. The piece, is hopefully an aid to processing trauma…the whole point of the piece is asking if we can we find a way of — instead of passing these things down to future generations — find the way of healing from it? Talking about it and processing it in a much healthier way, so that other people don’t have to carry the weight of what has come before them.”
I ask Gemma to tell me more about her process, and her visions for the play.
“The best writers, better than me, probably think about structure to begin with, but this seemed to be a product of brain vomit.”
Agatha, certainly emerged in a truly organic fashion you might say. Without asking her to lay out her narrative, or provide “spoilers,” I asked Gemma to sum up the main thrust of Agatha.
“Speaking of it very in really simple terms, it is a journey play where the main character (Gemma plays Jo, avatar of the youngest generation in the play) is searching for the truth of her family history and finding loads of obstacles in her way, but at the end of it, she realizes that instead of having to be put through it all, she actually has to learn to let it all go.”
Agatha is a play about people, not causes
I ask Gemma that though I increasingly abhor the phrases “being part of,” or “starting a conservation,” whether she feels dropping the trauma of denied bodily autonomy into the play as its narrative bomb feels part of the current zeitgeist, or if she’s pointing to a topic we’re not talking enough about yet.
“I think that we’re getting better at talking about abortion. But I think what I was more interested in doing is — I kind of hate, I hate like leading work with themes…what I hope I’ve done is actually just write really honest relationships between mothers and daughters and, um, and show something that is nuanced in that conversation, it’s not like all, this is a pro-choice piece: it’s not at all. I think it’s more about who these women are and it’s character driven and that’s the sort of work I want to make.”
Music, the third dimension of Agatha
Agatha, you may recall from the introduction, is not a tapestry woven only from spoken word, and drama: music is a central element. I ask Gemma to tell me more about the musical collaboration which has been integral to the work’s development.
“Our composer is Katy Hustwick, and she’s an amazing composer.” Katy was selected from 90 applicants who applied. “She wasn’t really given a very specific brief at all. We just knew that music was going to play a huge part in the piece because we wanted it to be a sort of fourth character who could bring the three women together, or they could use it to claim control and weaponize each other with, so we just had very vague ideas of the sort of like genre and tone, but Katie has really come in and bought like a whole other layer to the story with it.”
The music isn’t performed live, Gemma emphasises, but it’s a fully realised, and scripted work of art.
With so many moving parts, I ask Gemma how rehearsals have been going.
Everything’s going really well!” I can hear her smile down the line, “It’s been a real kind of a short space of time, which has felt quite pressured because it is a relatively ambitious show, I think for like 10 full days of rehearsals, but we’ve got such an amazing team, I think we’re going to be fine.
The importance of being edited
I ask if there’s any one member of this tremendous team who might have edged the rest for particular praise.
“I’d say the director, Martha Geelan, with her it’s just been such a collaborative process. So much of the realizations has come from her. I think is so important when you, when you’re performing your own writing, it’s so important to have someone in the room, that shares your vision, but also can see it outside of your brain, because I’ve been with it for so long that I feel quite lost in it now. She’s the one who’s bought out all the specificity in it. She’s a real, real, real talent, and will go onto do huge things.
What’s next for Gemma?
And beyond Agatha I ask, what’s coming up for Gemma Barnett?
“That’s a really good question and I don’t really know the answer to it,” she tells me, “I’ve got a short film that hopefully will be going into production quite soon. So that’s coming up and will be like the first sort of short film I’ve written. “
Aside from exploring her creativity in a medium outside of live performance, Gemma tells me she’s still auditioning as an actor, and seeing what lands. All this whilst nurturing Agatha, clearly a project of both Gemma’s heart, and mind.
“I’m hoping this show will have a future,” she tells me, “and that this is only going to be the first outing. I’m hoping there’ll be a bigger version of it at some point in the future. That is my dream.”
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