A History of Paper completes the final work of Oliver Emanuel at the Edinburgh Fringe
Susan Mansfield speaks to the team behind A History of Paper about what it means to finish the last work of playwright Oliver Emanuel and bring it to the Edinburgh Fringe
When playwright Oliver Emanuel died in December at the age of just 43, he left a legacy of more than 30 plays for theatre and radio, for children and adults. He also left a work in progress, which has now been completed by two of his long-term collaborators.
A History of Paper, premiering at the Traverse this August, was aired as a radio play in 2016. But its transformation into a lo-fi stage musical was well underway before Emanuel’s shock diagnosis with stage four brain cancer in May 2023. After his death, the decision was taken to continue with the show as he had wished, with composer and songwriter Gareth Williams and dramaturg Lu Kemp working with Dundee Rep director Andrew Panton to take it last few steps to the stage.
They talk about it carefully, as if holding something very precious. Loss was always a theme in Emanuel’s writing, drawing particularly on the loss of his mother to cancer at just 50. But they are keen to maintain a distance between the events of the play and anything which happened in the playwright’s life.
“We all feel quite strongly that the play has its own life and story to tell,” Kemp says. “There are correlations, which are fascinating, with what Olly’s life experience had been and why he wrote the play, but he didn’t write the play because of his death.”
Emanuel and Williams were working together on The 306 for National Theatre of Scotland, the ambitious three-part story about World War I deserters, agitators and rebels, which was performed over three summers from 2016 to 2018, when Williams happened to suggest that A History of Paper would make a great musical. “It was instantly attractive, because we were working on this big complex show,” he says. “The possibility of getting around a piano and singing was really appealing.”
They workshopped for a week at Dundee Rep in 2019, “wrote four songs together and came away excited”. Then, during the pandemic, they batted it back and forth, and Williams recorded a song for Scotsman Sessions. In 2022, Panton commissioned it for Dundee Rep.
“I enjoy talking about the origins of it because Olly and I spent a long time with it together,” Williams says. “The illness was not a huge percentage of the time we worked on this piece. Olly came to my house at the start of 2023 and we had a full read-through of the script.” After his diagnosis, he encouraged Williams to “go on and have fun with it”.
Kemp, who knows Emanuel’s work well having directed his plays for radio and for the stage, joined the team as dramaturg. Some songs still had to be written, and much of the script was still unallocated. “Olly wrote unallocated text all the time,” says Kemp. “So we had to start allocating parts to the actors.”
A History of Paper is the story of a relationship told through pieces of paper, from a love letter to a take-away menu. It’s a two-hander, with musical director Gavin Whitworth as on-stage pianist. Panton felt it was a good fit for the Fringe at the Traverse after the success of No Love Songs last year, also co-produced by Dundee Rep.
“It’s a show about all the losses we go through in life, from the minor losses, like losing your keys or a piece of paper, to the greater losses,” Kemp says. “One of the characters is writing a book called A History of Paper, and on a bigger scale we’re losing paper. There might come a time in the future when paper is enormously precious.”
Williams says the process involved both joy and a great deal of responsibility: “I was very nervous because I knew Olly was really proud of this as a radio play, and that he had done really good work on the script. But in the first few days of rehearsal, we felt it breathing, firing on all cylinders, everybody was bringing something special.”
Kemp says: “I thought it would be hard but it has been completely joyful. It’s been incredibly helpful and healing and easy and open. All the things Olly wanted people to do we’ve been able to do, to talk about grief, not make it something we put behind closed doors.
“It feels like we’re writing a love letter to Olly, because this is what he did and what he loved. The sadness is there because he would be really excited to be in this room - he would be king of the walk.”
A History of Paper is at the Traverse Theatre until 25 August, times vary.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.