Get yourself comfy and get ready to chat all things stagey!

Hi Josie, how are you? It's so lovely to chat to you today! Would you mind introducing yourself and telling our readers how you first got into the theatre industry?

My name is Harry Josephine Giles. I'm a writer and performer. You asked how I first got into the theatre industry. I think that I would have been playing a chorus clown in a school production of Sego, The Clown when I was about six years old, maybe seven. Let's call it seven. I fell off the back of the stage, though that was fun, and I have never left theatre since. I think the answer you might have been looking for is that I did a Masters in theatre directing and then sort of tried to have a theatre career, and it didn't really work. And then I ended up as a writer, and then I started adapting my own books as multimedia performances, which is something that's happened over about a 15-year period, but really it's about Sego, The Clown.

You're going on tour from 26th June with your show, Deep Wheel Orcadia. Can you tell us more about the story of the piece?

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a gay love story in space. It's about two characters called Astrid and Darling. Astrid is an artist who is coming home to a distant space station after being in art school on Mars. And Darling is the child of some very rich men who is running away. And the two of them end up together on this distant space station, which is called Deep Wheel Orcadia, which is almost but not entirely unlike the Orkney that I grew up in, and they fall in love and find something of what they wanted in each other and conflict over their own ideas of what home might be.

The show is based on your novel of the same name. How did you go about adapting the piece from a book to a stage show?

I'm a performer, and I've always been a performer, and performance is kind of integral to the way that I write. Whenever I'm writing, I'm always finding ways and thinking about how the texts that I write are going to exist in a stage context. Those are different in different cases. Sometimes it's for a theatre show, sometimes it's for performance poetry nights, sometimes it's as a piece of sound art, sometimes it's as an installation. My writing is always oral and its approach. So, as I was so, as I was writing this book, you know, during the writing of the book, I was working with Atzi, who is the composer and cellist. And from the start of writing this book, we were developing a poetry and music performance of it, and that started with just a 15-minute sketch, and its' evolved into an hour-long show. And so, I suppose the book and the show kind of happened at the same time and they influenced each other. The idea of the music and the idea of a narrative performance was there as I was writing the book.

As well as writing the book and the show, you're also performing in Deep Wheel Orcadia. Do you think this enables you to form a deeper connection with the story when translating it to the stage?

No, no. I think actors are perfectly capable of forming an extremely deep connection. I think sometimes authors because we're too close to the work, sometimes we can struggle to make the kind of complex connection that actors are able to make. So that's not what it's about for me.

There’s not that many performers that are comfortable with Orkney language. It’s partly that I'm doing it, and it's partly just that I love being on stage and that I've been performing this work while I was writing it.

And performing and writing are natural complements to each other for me. I can bring some of my own energy, I can bring some of my own perspectives, I can bring some of my own voice, and that brings one interpretation of the text. Doesn't have to be the most authoritative. I think what's interesting here, then is that collaborating with other artists, musicians, a director, a designer, and that way that theatre is means that there are several different perspectives, a few different visions of what this world is, and then all of these are in collaboration. And that's what's exciting about theatre, isn't it that? But there's a sort of collective interpretation of a text which is made up of everyone's individual minds. 

Our blog is called Stage to Page, but if you could choose any book to take from page to stage, what would it be (besides your own, of course!)?

Sea Witch by Angeline North. It's a very beautiful, very compendious book of experimental writing, imagery, fables, auto fiction, inchoate screaming. It's an extraordinary text, scribbles, obscenity. It has all these elements, and I would adapt it to stage, because it's completely unadaptable, because it's not a simple story, because it has more characters than one could possibly have on a stage, because, because impossibility and difficulty, should I think what be what theatre is for? I would like to see more weird and experimental texts on this stage. That is what I live for, is doing things that only theatre can do, because they're impossible to imagine in other forms.

And finally, why should anyone reading this book tickets to Deep Wheel Orcadia?

That's why they should come. Since when do you get to see a gay, trans sci fi Love Story performed with a live string quartet accompaniment? Come on. This is a one off. This is a one off. Why else? Because it's work about northern Scotland, rooted in northern Scotland, being performed for its premieres in northern Scotland, and that too is special, I don't know, because a lot of love has gone into it, and I hope you feel that love from the stage.

You can book tickets to see Deep Wheel Orcadia on tour, here.