"The year before last I did a Year of the Artist residency with the Royal Mail, which involved talking to retired postmen , and visiting sorting offices. I wrote two plays about letters, and have been commissioned to write five more short plays for Radio 4. The plays were Venetia Love Goes Netting, a monologue about an elderly postmistress coming to terms with her husband's alzheimers disease, and coping with new technology. This monologue was part of Live Theatre's NE1 project, which involved many writers, including Lee Hall, Peter Flannery, Rachel Matthews, Peter Straughan and others.
The next play was The Last Post, which Live Theatre commissioned. This play toured around all kinds of venues, and was very well received by people, particularly elderly postmen and women!"
Julia adapted these two to create five short plays that were broadcast in May 2003 by BBC Woman's Hour. The actors weer Grace Stillgrove, Val McLane, Donald McBride, Judi Earl, Siobhan Finnerman, Madeleine Moffat, Roger Morlidge, Tara Prendergast and Jo-Anne Knowles. Music was by Dave Scott and Neil Blenkinsop.
The Last Post is an offbeat look at letters and their power and importance in people's lives. It asks questions about how people communicate with each other and in this age of computers and cyber communication, what part does letter writing still play in people's relationships with each other? Through the experiences of six characters, young and old, we see how letters help them through the ups and downs of life.
I have always loved letters, i think most writers do. I don't just love letters, I like everything about post: the stamps, the post office itself, post boxes, postmen. In England the post office is a cultural institution more than a business. As we get more and more waylaid by other forms of communication, I began to formulate ideas for this play and want to write something that looked at the importance of letter writing in our lives and to question if we were losing part of ourselves if the longhand letter gave way to emails and text messages.
Work on the play started with a Year of the Artist residency in 2000. I went to sorting offices, interviewed postmen and women, and talked to people around me about letters, gradually building up ideas around the post and what it means to us. I wrote a monologue for Live Theatre's ne1 project (Venetia Love Goes Netting) which centred on a retired postmistress who was given a computer that she didn't want. In this play, and in The Last Post, I thought about the different images and vocabularies of IT and letters and what they represent to us.
When The Last Post was commissioned I already had a wealth of stories and characters that I wanted to write about. James Stanley represents the many older and dedicated postmen whom I met, who were often saddened by the changes in the Post Office, feeling that it was now a business, no longer a service. Winifred, his estranged wife, writes letters to God, as a way of expressing her true feelings. I wanted to have a character who lived through letters, and the eccentric Merril Fisher is a woman who finds connection through belonging to a pen pal club, and who befriends a Yugoslavian asylum seeker Milosh, whose family are dead and who has no one to communicate with. Kenny is a young ambitious postman who relies on sending text messages. He and Tilley, a young post woman, are the least connected to letters, feeling that they are a thing of the past.
The Last Post is about how people communicate with each other, and is very much rooted in human weakness, emotion and love. It's a play that meditates upon how we tell others how we feel, and the power of the letter to tell the truth, in a way that an email can't. In the end, letters are about people reaching out to each other.
On other pages: How To Behave With The Ill, Inside Out, National Poetry Day 2004, Sudden Blossoms, The Manifesto For Tyneside Upon England, The Great British Public Cold Calling, Attachments, The Writer's Choice, Doughnuts like Fanny's, The Lost Birds of England, Personal Belongings and Eating the Elephant.
 |
Created by Julia Darling and Cornwell Internet. |
Last updated on 24 October 2003 by Roger Cornwell.
|