In this first part, Michael Cox speaks with the director of Roadkill about the play and its orgins.
Michael: Was the idea for Roadkill yours, or did it come from someone else?
Cora: It’s very much my idea. It’s been in my head for six years, or more. It’s been a very slow burn, a labour of love.
I originally had the idea when I was still living in London, and I’d read a few articles at the time about a crackdown on trafficking rings in Scotland. It’s something that I’ve been aware of, and it struck a chord with me when I read about it. I put it in the back of my head, thinking that I’d like to do something about it at some point.
Later, a young girl came into my life. She’d been trafficked and she confided her story to me out of the blue (I guess she felt safe with me). She told me that she’d been trafficked here when she was 13 by another African woman. She came from Africa, and she’d been taken down south first and was eventually moved up to Glasgow. It just...you know, when something just stops being an issue that you read about and literally stands on your doorstep, and it’s a person who’s just a young girl who’s telling you this with no alterative motive other than just telling you what happened to her, it kind of hits you in a different sort of way. That was three years ago, and I started trying to get the funding to get it off the ground, and it’s only now that I got that ship sailing.
And let’s be clear. This story is not about her. It is an amalgamation of other stories that are very similar, unfortunately. I did a lot of research after she told me her story, and I found this particular relationship with an older madam and a younger girl seems particular to the African trafficking situation, whereas in Eastern Europe it’s more common to have a young bloke who would charm a girl, pretend to be her boyfriend and then trick her into coming into a different country.
I became very intrigued by that: how one woman can do that. In many ways, it almost seems doubly awful in some ways. There’s something in my gut that just goes ‘Hold on!’ We’re very used to that common story of European gangs taking women, but there is something more insidious about the fact that this older woman, who would quite often get the blessing of the family, and they would meet her, and she would charm them into thinking that she was going to take the girl to a better life, give her an education, give her a job. And it’s all a complete set-up.
Michael: Tell me why you chose to stage Roadkill in a flat.
Cora: I very much didn’t want it to be a gritty, naturalistic drama. That goes against the whole point. I wanted to immerse them in a very enclosed space where that girl could potentially be. The whole point of taking people into a house is to make you feel slightly disorientated, slightly uncomfortable and very much stuck in her world. So, I wanted to somehow try to recreate her feelings of disorientation and also try to view the drama from inside her perspective. I tried to make it un-voyeuristic. For instance, her experience of seeing all the different punters that come to her, there are some fantastic projections that has men projected on the roof and lean down onto the audience, placing them almost in her position, as it were.
Michael: Tell me about the casting process. What were you looking for and why?
Cora: I really wanted actresses with Nigerian roots because I felt that people who understood that culture would be able to bring a much more personal approach to the play. I do work in a very collaborative way and I wanted to integrate the Nigerian culture into that. I did the rounds and saw about 60 girls and chose the two, whom I’m absolutely delighted with: they’re fantastic performers and really powerful actresses. They really brought a lot to the process themselves. I do believe the older woman did in fact grow up in Nigeria the first fourteen years of her life, so she was able to bring a lot of insight, and Mercy goes back to Nigeria frequently.
You can do as much research as you want to have an academic overview, but to really know the way that those two women interact and the kind of cultural imprints, like the way that a young girl would show diffidence to an older woman, even if she was only five years older than her, is enormous and not something you’d get in a British situation. Anything that an elder tells you to do, you damn well do. And I think that was sort of crucial to really understand the relationship, the kind of distorted power relationship going on between the two females all the time. Their cultural knowledge was absolute gold dust to the whole process.
Michael: When you actually got into the production process, were there any surprises?
Cora: There was still a great unknown about just exactly how this thing was going to take shape. I had lots of ideas in my head, but there’s still that bit when you get in the room and go ‘Oh my God, that’s how we do it!’ It totally wasn’t mapped out. I deliberately leave...I have a certain amount planned, and I deliberately leave gaps I don’t want to fill because I want the energy in the room, those combined forces to go ‘whap-bam’ and that’s where we go from here. So there’s lots of surprises, particularly some nice, dark nightmarish scenes that we were trying to create and I came up with a cunning trick which I’m pleased with because it’s the point that I’m trying to get across, but I won’t tell you what it is.
And some of the work that both visual artists made, and some of the projections that they came up with, were real treats. We’d spoken about them, but when you see these huge faces projected on the roof, or there’s another moment where a sky is projected when she’s trying to burst the house open. And those were ideas that were...you think ‘This can either be really shit or really good,’ and thankfully (I hope everyone agrees) I think it looks really good. So yeah, stuff like that. It’s all ideas on paper until you see it. Sometimes those ideas don’t transpire, and sometimes they do. And it’s lovely when they do work.
Michael: This has already sold out at the Traverse. Are there any talks about extending this or getting more people into it?
Cora: I never thought for a moment that this would take wings like this. I really thought that this was going to be a little work-in-progress or workshop event that may or may not have gone any further, hence why I was happy to keep it so small and intimate.
And now, with the interest there’s been in it, I’m potentially thinking of ways I could adapt it out with a house location so that other people could see it. But I don’t want to lose that intimacy. It’s not just a gimmick putting it in a house. There’s something about being in a flat and going ‘Oh my God, this is going on in flats in Glasgow.’ It really isn’t a trick or jumping on the site-specific bandwagon. There’s a reason for it. But at this very moment I’m going ‘Right, how do we keep that and yet let a lot more people see it?’ I haven’t yet answered that question. Answers on a postcard, please!
Roadkill is part of the Traverse's Fringe programme. It will return to the Tron later in the year.
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