The Everyman Theatre on Hope Street is home to many ideas, many moments of inspiration and suggestions that in its short period of time since its re-emergence from the ground upwards, it has become one of Liverpool’s brightest stars. It is fitting then to meet one of the city’s finest artists, who is fluent in poetry, music and scriptwriting in equal and abundant measure, inside the halls that have the feel of the hallowed seeping out of them.

Lizzie Nunnery never seems to stop, why should she after all? Not content with writing some of the most intriguing poetry in the city, as has been witnessed recently within the Everyman Theatre as she was asked to be the guest speaker at one of the monthly poetry nights in the Bistro, not satisfied with producing one of the albums of 2014 alongside Vidar Norheim in Songs of Drink and Revolution but also now an accomplished scriptwriter.

Following on from her well received play The Swallowing Dark, Ms. Nunnery has returned to the script writing department of her life with a sensational new play Narvick.  

Ahead of the plays debut in Liverpool this September, I was able to catch up with Lizzie Nunnery and ask her about the play.

How does Narvik – a play about the Second World War still resonate with you?

LN: “The starting point was Hannah, the Director, asking me if I had any ideas for a play with music as she was interested in me performing in a play that I’d written. We got talking about my Grandfather’s stories of the Navy in World War Two, and for years and years he never talked about the war. Then maybe in the last ten years of his life he started to talk about it, every now and again, just out of the blue he would tell you something incredible or something quite horrific that had been put away for decades. It was almost like at that stage of his life he felt the need to repeat these things and make sure that they were known. Some of them were funny stories, good times he had but I think the naval experience he had was very particular, especially his time in the Arctic, and it’s a version of World War Two that doesn’t necessarily get looked at all that often. It’s quite different from the typical World War Two story that we think about – war films about that period. We think a lot about the RAF for example.

I was really struck by the fact that there were all these boys freezing in the Arctic who came from ordinary working class backgrounds and suddenly they were out there sharing boots, sliding round on frozen vomit on the decks and enduring these incredible conditions. They also endured this really strange situation of sometimes months of nothing happening, this endless fear that something catastrophic could happen at any time, which I suppose is common to a lot of war situations, but there’s something about those mines buried under the sea and U-boats that could just slide under them that I think created a particularly tense and fraught experience.

We started with my Grandfather’s stories and Hannah and I read an awful lot of other real accounts and gathered a lot of other information together so what we’ve ended up with is totally fictionalised but draws on real events in these men’s lives. So hopefully it will be quite authentic and for me, I think the sea is such a great metaphor. I love the idea of being able to write about memory and about conflict using that metaphor. Actually I think that nearly all theatre that works is about the difficulty of human connection and there’s always that lovely metaphor in theatre that there’s a gap between the audience and the stage, or the audience and the performer, and we’re trying to bridge that gap. Therefore when it works it reflects what we’re trying to do all our lives – trying to reach out and connect with each other and really often failing. So I kind of wanted to use the metaphor of the sea in that way. It’s about this man Jim who falls in love and who also has this separate intense friendship during the war, and how those relationships were distorted, destroyed- how difficult they became under the pressure of war. The sea is the image that represents that gap.”

With regard to the amount of research you did, were there any particular stories that stood out for you, that may have corresponded with your Grandfather’s ones?

LN: “Yes, I was really interested in the fact that he’d had these strange days and nights in the Arctic .We read stories about people whose ships went down and they ended up waiting at Murmansk to be posted to another ship, or they might just dock in Archangel, way up in the North and be waiting for weeks or months for the next thing to happen. I was interested in the strangeness of that and of them mixing with the locals- the strangeness of the Russians being the enemy and then they becoming allies. All those tensions really fascinated me. I remember my Grandfather’s stories about how drunk they would get on home brew basically – ‘firewater’ in translation, local Russian vodka- and how that created strange, dangerous situations between the men. These men who were all cooped up together and have endless frustrations and were away from home- they’d all get off their faces and end up fighting. I suppose that setting really fascinated me and I was looking particularly at those stories and stories of being on boats in the Arctic, fighting against the conditions and fighting against the enemy because that really interested both of us.”

It’s almost man versus nature in many different ways. It’s his own personal nature, whether he agrees with some aspects of what he’s fighting for or fighting against but he’s also fighting against the people who have a different view but who are on his side.

LN: “Yes, that was something that really moved us, reading a lot of naval stories: everyone had the sea as a common enemy. Germans or Britons, whoever was out there. There are lovely accounts of how after a German ship had been hit by a torpedo, they pulled out as many men as they possibly could. There may have been instances when that didn’t happen but we were reading stories that claimed that was always the case- that actually the enemy had always been the sea. They were always allies against the sea, those frozen waters. That’s my impression from the stories.”

It’s certainly different from fighting on the battlefield or fighting in the air. You’re right there is almost that hour upon hour of waiting but out in the fields, or in close quarter fighting, your adrenalin is constantly up. How does that fit in with the music, which you’ve already alluded to, not to make the music tell the story as it could be? Was that difficult where you’re trying to display the lack of things going on?

LN: “I think the trick with story structure is that you pick the most dramatic moments. So you know that they’ve got hours of tension and boredom but you’re not going to put that on the stage, you’re going to pick the times when things are happening. I wouldn’t like people to think that we’ve got lots of scenes with people sitting around, waiting for something to happen, we definitely haven’t! Hopefully, that off-stage tension and anxiety feeds into these explosive moments of drama when the character Jim does have to contend with his ship being attacked or when he is confronted with his lost love after the war.

We’ve hopefully focused on those really explosive episodes and with the music, the nice thing we’ve hit upon is that the music operates as part of his memory. The whole play is told in a way through the filter of memory. We start with the central character Jim at night time. He’s 90 and falls over in his basement, and then we move back into these key incidents in his life which he’s never resolved, he’s never confronted or understood.

While developing the play we played around with songs in all different kinds of ways, sometimes too literal ways. What we found worked was for each song to be an echo from an old experience. So there’s a song in there that his dad sung to him as a child or a song that his girlfriend in Norway, who is at the centre of the play, sang. Once you’ve planted these songs in a literal context, you can take them up and transform them and do weird things with them. They become part of the soundtrack but we understand why they are there as they are part of the fabric of his memory and they won’t leave him alone. That’s why we keep hearing them.”

It must be very exciting for you, the fact that you’ve used your Grandfather’s stories as the basis of this play, seems perfect that you’re back at the Playhouse with something that you’ve created. It must be especially comforting and pleasing for you?

LN: “It is, it’s brilliant. I was in the Playhouse Studio with my play The Swallowing Dark a few years ago and it was a great experience putting a work on in there. I love The Everyman and I feel like I’ve been really lucky to have been involved with that theatre because from a point when I was quite a new writer I was told to think about big spaces and big audiences, because we never used to have a studio theatre at that point in either the Everyman or the Playhouse. Equally, there is something different that happens in a studio. It’s almost a different art form really. You’re engaging with the audience in a really different way and it overlaps with film in a way. You can get close-ups, you can tell stories slightly differently. I think the play is going to be around a hour and 20 minutes through and I love that thing of drawing the audience into the darkness and doing something so intense and immersive, and then throwing them back out into the light to digest it.”

Do you find that your work, regardless of whether it’s music, poetry or theatre, that your work gravitates towards the darkness in that there’s more darkness in humanity than we care to admit?

LN: “I don’t know, it depends on what you mean by darkness really. It goes back to what I was saying before about human connections. In attempting to make connections and explore that difficulty, you might take on issues that you might call dark like grief, separation or murder. I think it’s just about being kind of brave and confronting difficult things. Audiences do like to look at them; audiences want to be pushed to interesting places and to have a good time as well. This play has a band in it, it’s fun, we’re going to have big songs. There are Russian folk songs in it and there are jokes. I think you need all that joyfulness because it’s also part of the fabric of life and relationships and if you do something unremittingly gritty it’s not very truthful- it’s not how people actually interact. But at the same time I’ve always been aware that I don’t want to shy away from taking on challenging issues because audiences want to be challenged. I don’t think people go to the theatre to be reminded about things they already know – be told stories they’re used to reading every day in the newspapers. I think theatre audience are clever, they want to be pushed.”

Ian D. Hall