From Jo Clifford’s blog.

This is my second day back in The Tree of Knowledge rehearsals.

It’s been an extraordinarily happy and productive day. Like all the others.

We’re now at the stage where we all know the play pretty well; and we can all co-operate on the business of making the changes that need to be made to make it better.

It’s such a joyful process.

I’m struck by the extraordinary change in me since I was last in Traverse rehearsals.

That was way back in 1992, or Light in the Village.

I happen to think that’s one of my best plays; but I can remember before the read through had even begun one of the actors coming up to me in great agitation and saying:

“I can’t say this line”.

“The story begins”.

“To tell a story”

“Where am I coming from?”

“Off stage”.

He hated that. He was completely stuck in realism, and wanted me to remove all the story-telling aspects of the play.

I refused. He left the cast.

Soon after that, another cast member left. “Too difficult” he said.

And soon after that, I came down with pneumonia.

I felt guilty about it all; it was all my fault, i kept thinking, for being such a difficult writer.

”I could not appreciate myself at all. Only years later did I begin to understand that it wasn’t me being “difficult”.

It was me breaking new ground.

As I am now.

The Tree of Knowledge is at the Traverse Theatre from 8 - 24 December.

www.traverse.co.uk.

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog.

You recognize this fella? Sure, it’s the tree of life as sketched by Charles Darwin in “red transmutation notebook B” early in the 1840s. Famously, the words “I think” are clearly and charmingly visible up in the top left corner.

Darwin was lovably and maddeningly diffident. Afflicted with afflatus, he was always reluctant to discuss the implications of his work in print, let alone in public. But this scratchy graphic, with the figure “1” standing for the common ancestor of us all, ranks with Crick and Watson’s model of the double helix as the icon of a materialist, historical understanding of what wepersist in calling “life.”

I’ve cut and pasted another and more recent version of this famous graphic at the bottom of this post. This one is derived from the microbiologist Karl Stetter, and reflects his research priorities as much as Darwin’s did his. I saw it first in a cracking book by Andrew H Knoll called “Life on a Young Planet” which joins the book list I’m going to be posting as recommended reading at the end of this residency (once I’ve read them all myself!).

Knoll and Stetter are enthusiasts for the small and slimy end of things. You’ll note that what we think of as “life” most of the time occupies a mere sliver of the diagram. Up there at the top right, look. Plants and animals and fungi. Overwhelmingly we are living, say Knoll and Stetter, in a bacterial world. And we always have been.

Shaded in red down at the bottom is a great big idea about the origins of life. What all our ancestors had in common, as well as the rudimentary chemistry of life in their combinations of RNA, DNA and amino acids, was thermophilia. . Most of what we know these days as “archaea” still live in hot springs and at oceanic thermal vents and under the earth’s crust, which, while not recommended as holiday destinations, may well be where most of what we call “life” still lives. They all liked it hot

They also liked (and like) it without oxygen, which was lucky, as there wasn’t any yet…or not much. Oxygen was poison to them. They excreted it as a waste product when they’d done munching on Carbon Dioxide. Which is lucky for us. Life itself, on a microbial scale, created, eventually, the conditions for large scale agglomerations of tissue like you and me and the elephants…and the fruit flies…but only after most life had derived energy from light and heat. Photo and Chemo-synthesis.

Darwin was famously flummoxed by the fact that life, or the fossils/traces of life, seemed to appear quite abruptly in the ground. It seemed that complex animal life, (overwhelmingly trilobites in Darwin’s day and ours) were suddenly just there! Darwin’s tree of ancestry demanded a root…at least one…that had to extend in time back beyond that borderline where hard bodied fossils had been found…that explosion of complexity in the Cambrian epoch, which we now know to have been around 480 million years ago.

That invisible ancestral world is where Andrew Knoll lives. And it’s a riveting and exciting place to explore. Especially when one comes to understand that the earliest life yet found is in rocks in Greenland that have miraculously survived uncrushed by tectonic forces that have now been dated (using the wonder radioactive decay clock of Zirconium) as beingsomething like 3.8 BILLION years old.

That’s right, Martha. Plants and animals and fungi only arrived on earth eight ninths of the way to the present day. We are all Eucarya…that is, our cells have a nucleus surrounded by another membrane. And these two cell areas have precisely demarcated duties when it comes to memory (our genomes live on strands called chromosomes that live in the nucleus) and the more energetic activities of energy storage and expenditure -and reproduction -which all happen in the outer part of the cell, the protoplasm.

The overwhelming biomass of planet earth was and remains procaryotic, single-celled life with its genome nicely arranged on a single, circular chromosome. And nothing like us would work in the present, or would ever have evolved in the past, without “life” - that is, bacteria - working away at the heart of it.

It’s not just “Yakult”, you know.

You’ll also notice a whole third kingdom on here. These “archaea” were discovered to be distinct from bacteria through genetics. They look pretty similar, even under a microscope. But they ain’t according to their genomes. More recently, they’ve been found to be closer to us genetically than bacteria are, hence more recent shared ancestry. There is some other big news tucked away at the bottom of the chart.

Though our shared ancestors in the hottest world seemed to have used that heat to split into the three main kingdoms…two procaryotic, one eucaryotic…it seems that THEIR common ancestor arrived when it was cooler. 50 degrees or so. So that is now the temperature range in which these clever folk are seeking the materialist holy grail of what’s called “abiogenesis” - where stuff that wasn’t “life” became “life”.

DNA, you see…couldn’t possibly have evolved from RNA in those sort of temparatures. It seems that it had to have evolved before a mass extinction event, (which left only the thermophiles), and to have carried our chemical building blocks unused through the whole boiling epoch so that it could then be used as the information store that could make bodies.

Just as at the KT boundary, which killed the dinosaurs, and at the Great Permian Dying, the mass destruction of most life was as essential to evolution as all the cuddly stuff, like sex.

All this is fantastically challenging to my idea of “reality” at a far more fundamental level than I was expecting, and weird analogies with my equally patchy understanding of Hindu scriptures are starting to intrude uncomfortably on what I’m, still pleased to call my “consciousness”.

One thing for sure, “life” will never escape from quotation marks ever again.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse TheatreEdinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

www.traverse.co.uk

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog.

“This is What I See” becomes replaced by a question: “Is This What I See?”

Cezanne famously painted the same views over and over, obsessed with changes in light and atmosphere. As this residency goes on, and as I obsessively ask myself, over and over, “What is Genomics?” - I go through a rotation of answers. It’s a set of techniques, it’s the social and intellectual implications of those techniques - and I am eventually coming round to my own “perspective”. Or rather, renunciation of any such thing.

Genomics is a way of seeing the world by being in it. It challenges ideas about scientific “reality” as something out there waiting to be discovered and both integrates “being” with “seeing” and renounces, like Cezanne did, the idea of mastery. Of the viewer as a one eyed stationary God looking at a world they do not inhabit.

Which brings me to “Eyeless”.

Like most of the first identified genes, “Eyeless” is defined double negatively. It was the absence of “Eyeless” that made a fruitfly that was without eyes. It’s on chomosome 4 of a fruitfly and was identified in the “Fly Room” - the Palo Alto lab of TH Morgan, the first great explorer of the connection between molecules found in the nuclei of cells…and how bodies were made, how those things we now call genes are “expressed.”

In the 1990s, Eyeless in Fruitflies was one of the first genes to be sequenced and identified as being “homologous” with genes in…well…lots of things. Including us. These days, having sequenced the genomes of mice and people AND fruitflies (inter alia), we call it a Hox gene for short. Its ubiquity as a molecule in the cell, and as an eye making agent in developing animals as ancestrally diverse as flies and mice - whose last shared ancestor was kicking about a LOOOOOONNNNNGGGG time ago- argues for its extreme ancientness.

Indeed, the gene for making eyes may have been around, as a molecule (or bit of a molecule) for much longer than there have been things with sufficient complexity and size to grow an eye - or leg or spleen - at all.

The eye was once thought to be the proof above all of an intelligent designer. It turns out to be an elementary adaptation to light…at least as old and established as photosynthesis in the earliest plant life.

We - you and I - in this view, are accidental agglomerations of molecules that just happen to paint pictures and think thoughts - themselves activities no more or less miraculous than gravity and breathing.

Perspective…it’s not reality. “Reality” is a place that only exists for animals big enough brained to imagine it. Making a theory, interpreting the points of light above our heads as distant-in-space/time nuclear reactors - may well be “accurate” or “useful” as ways of seeing.

But that is all they are, ways of seeing and imagining. And, in the case, here and now, of what we call”genomes”, manipulating.

We only live twice…one life for ourselves, and one for our dreams.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse TheatreEdinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

www.traverse.co.uk

From Jo Clifford’s blog.

Early on in the play, a character says:

And do we? Know ourselves?

Let us use dialogue to discover!


That’s in a way what we’re doing just now. Or at least I am.

Reading the play to each other, pausing to reflect upon it, and ask questions on what it’s about.

Everyone asks me, reasonably enough, and I always answer. Or at least try to.

But actually the truth is that their guess is (almost) as good as mine.

I used to feel guilty about that. I used to think it was one of the many things about me that made me a bad writer.

But not any more. That’s just part of the process.

Because when I start to write a speech I hardly ever know how it’s going to end. The character does.

Nor do I really know what’s going to happen next. The characters do…

And now the actors are reading it, I listen to it in some amazement.

When I was a university student, and basically trying to avoid being a writer, I loved investigating other people’s work. (This being easier and generally less painful than creating my own).

I would look at the work and try to elucidate what the writer’s intention was.

But if my experience is anything to go by, there is no conscious intention. At least not in the sense that I was investigating it.

The only conscious intention that I’m aware of is the attempt to try to create something that works well on stage.

Perhaps the authors I studied were cleverer than me.

Perhaps it’s just arrogant of me to say I doubt it.

But I strongly suspect that in one sense all I was doing for those years of study was wasting my time.

At least on the conscious level. Unconsciously, I think I was doing something else altogether.

I must have been trying to discover a voice of my own.

something very special.

The Tree of Knowledge is at the Traverse Theatre from 8 - 24 December.

www.traverse.co.uk.

“The great thing about the first day of rehearsal is that I meet up with the people who somehow have to make all this happen.” 

From Jo Clifford’s blog.

Writing plays, as I’ve always tended to do it, is a solitary kind of thing to do.

Once the theatre’s commissioned me, I’m generally on my own. (I’m starting to find this quite an oppressive and unhealthy state of affairs, and I’m trying to change it. But that’s another story…)

That’s how it was for this play, at least. I read the books I could understand, about Hume and Adam Smith and Edinburgh and the Enlightenment, and I heard the stories about domestic abuse… But after that it was up to me to try to feel and imagine it all.

Try to imagine the set, too. Which, as usual, I couldn’t. I tend just to hear the words in my imagination, and feel the feelings that go with the words. But I never have any vision of how they’ll be staged.

This time, I didn’t pretend otherwise. So the first stage directions just says:

“ALL I ASK OF THIS PERFORMANCE SPACE IS THAT IT BE INTERESTING.
AND PREFERABLY UNUSUAL.”

And then I added, even more unhelpfully:

“THAT IT IS NOT ASHAMED TO BE A THEATRE.”

- just because I get cross with all the plays that look as if they really might as well be on televisions.

Then it gets worse. The dialogue makes it clear that sometimes we’re in David Hume’s new town house, that he was so proud of, and sometimes in Eve’s Glenrothes new town house, that she was so proud of too. 

And then sometimes there’s a stage direction that says:

“WE HEAR THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES”.

The great thing about the first day of rehearsal is that I meet up with the people who somehow have to make all this happen. 

So there’s the designer, Ali Maclaurin, with her beautiful model, and Tim Reid, who’s doing the projections - and there’s suddenly back projections to think of, and front projections, and where they’re all going to go, and I’m face to face, yet again, with all the difficulties i cause other people.

With the fact that a stage direction, that can only take half a minte to write, can cause hours and hours of serious head scratching.

But I generally know the stage direction is right. And collective the head scratching is just part of a wider creative effort.

I also get the strong sense that what’s going to emerge from all this will be something very special.

The Tree of Knowledge is at the Traverse Theatre from 8 - 24 December.

www.traverse.co.uk.

From Jo Clifford’s blog.

It’s a solemn kind of occasion, going into rehearsal.

I never quite know what’s going to happen. I want my contributions to be supportive and helpful, if they can be. Because life is so short and there’s quite enough suffering in it without adding more.

It makes me blush to think how terrible I was when I first began. I didn’t know what to do. But then no-one had told me. There was really no information about it at all. So I sat in the rehearsal room - which actually was the stage of the old Traverse, on the set of Chris Hannan’s “Elizabeth Gordon Quinn” - sat there not knowing what to do and feeling miserable.

I hated the sound of my play, and consequently spent a lot of time with my head in my hands. Which the actors took to mean that I hated what they were doing.

Which I didn’t.

And then if they ever asked me what such a such a line was for, I’d say “I don’t know”.

Because I didn’t.

None of this was very helpful. Afterwards I learnt to glue a smile onto my face, even if it was false, and even when I didn’t know what a line was doing somewhere, I’d always make something up.

Because that made everyone feel better. Including me.

But generally there’s no need to fake a smile these days. I love working with actors; and I learn so much.

And directors, too, I add hastily, and designers and stage managers and musicians and lighting designers and everyone involved.

My words are about to transform. Can’t wait to see what happens.

The Tree of Knowledge is at the Traverse Theatre from 8 - 24 December.

www.traverse.co.uk.