Michael Cox speaks with Abigail Docherty about her new play.
“Stories belong to all of us, wherever they come from.” So says Abigail Docherty in speaking about her latest project: adapting Fernanda Jaber’s one-act play Four Parts Broken. Docherty had never adapted anything before but in the end found the whole experience challenging yet rewarding.
In approaching the project, Docherty saw her role more as a champion for the original rather than as a person set on making changes. In writing her adaptation, Docherty describes herself as being “a fellow writer”—someone who had a duty to reinvent parts when needed but remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. She found it especially exciting to be given the opportunity to work on someone else’s writing as “you want to take particular care with it” and “challenge yourself to do justice to the other writer’s work" while finding something fresh within.
Docherty was immediately attracted to the darkness and humour of the original play. Though it contains heavily emotional themes, she describes Four Parts Broken as “quite funny”. The plot, set in a care home and centred on a boy who discovers something horrible in a river that he decides to carry around with him, can be rather absurd. It looks at dark social subjects but makes them more palpable through subtle humour. Docherty describes Jaber’s original as “quite fearless” and did what she could to keep that, along with its tone and energy, within her version.
Docherty’s adaptation has been written with a Scottish audience in mind. She decided to relocate the dramatic action to Glasgow, though the plot remains the same and the characters have only been minimally modified, mostly by expanding and developing them a bit. She believes that a good story is universal and not confined to the country or culture it comes from. “This play is about two boys who don’t have a mother, and that is relevant in any country.” The poverty of a slum in Brazil can be related to the “pockets of poverty” that exists in this very country. For that, Docherty believes that the play has a resonance anywhere.As for the audience, Docherty hopes that the production will have “given them a 40-minute experience that they have enjoyed from the point of view of the humour, but has also made them think about those two boys without families… it’s about looking at other people’s experiences and enriching your own.”
And as for herself, when asked if she’d learnt anything from this particular project, Docherty answered that “I have learnt the difference between poetry and action. Real action played is a form of unspoken poetry, and once you start to go into that area you don’t articulate poetry but let it speak for itself. Ultimately, get stuff that is really exciting.” She went on, saying that “Every time you write a new play… it’s like you are a different writer. Every time you make a new piece of writing, you learn a handful of new things about storytelling. Telling stories is the most exciting job in the world.”
Four Parts Broken has concluded its run at Oran Mor but plays at the Traverse from March 1-5
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