LORAE Parry has just published Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl, a play based on the life of Katherine Mansfield. It’s launched on October 14 here in Wellington, which just happens to be Katherine Mansfield’s 122nd birthday.
“I had absolutely no idea! I found out two days ago,” laughs Lorae.
You may know her best for her television and theatre impersonations of Helen Clark, but Lorae Parry has performance credits to match the end of any film.
Lorae has directed a dozen plays here and in the UK and acted in even more. Through women’s comedy collective Hen’s Teeth, Lorae and co-writer Carmel McGlone portrayed Digger and Nudger, a couple of classic, good-time Kiwi blokes struggling to identify with the plight of women. Playwright Jean Betts was involved in early Digger and Nudger performances.
“They would get off stage and head to the bar, and people were shocked to find out they weren’t actually men,” she says.
Betts asked Lorae and Carmel to perform as Digger and Nudger in the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a production of her play Ophelia Thinks Harder. Because the role would require two women to play two men playing two men who were in fact women (phew!), the women declined. Betts then approached Digger and Nudger for the parts, and because one less layer was easier to get their heads around, the ‘men’ agreed.
“They’d never acted before but they made a good fist of it,” says Betts.
In 2006 Lorae’s partner was offered a five-year contract in London, and they relocated together.
“I very quickly became involved with the theatre and working as a director, which I felt were things I wanted to do, rather than had to.”
In 2008 Lorae founded Shebang Theatre Company with fellow actor, director and writer Ali Wall and together they put on a small festival of plays in London.
Despite her workload, Lorae comes back to New Zealand often and plans to return properly next year. Katherine Mansfield once said, “Life never becomes a habit to me. It’s always a marvel,” and Lorae echoes these sentiments.
“I never take for granted that you can wake up on Saturday here and decide to go to Europe that day. I’m still a wide-eyed colonial girl walking around wondering at what I can do and the newness of it all.”
Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl is Lorae’s fifth play to be published. The Bloomsbury Group, is referred to in the title, were a collection of writers, intellectuals and artists controversial for their open approach to sexuality and relationships, who gathered for discussion in the Bloomsbury area of London during the early 20th century. Virginia Woolf was part of the group, and Woolf and Mansfield shared a particularly intense relationship. Woolf is known to have said both that she loved Katherine; “the only writer I’ve ever been jealous of”, and that she “stank like a civet cat”. Lorae sees the second quote as a response to the feelings of the first.
“Woolf was extremely jealous of Katherine. She was a fantastic writer and the driving force behind the short story as we know it now. Woolf was quite influenced by her,” says Lorae.
The play came about in part from Lorae’s fascination with how “this little colonial girl from New Zealand infiltrated the most fascinating literary group in the world at the time”, and in part from a poorly thought-out suggestion she made to organisers of a UK conference celebrating 100 years since Mansfield’s arrival in London.
“I did a one-woman show once that had some Katherine Mansfield in it, so I asked if they’d like me to perform it. It was all lectures and seminars so they said ‘please do’.”
Except Lorae realized the show had five Mansfield lines in it, which just wouldn’t do considering there would be not only experts but also members of Mansfield’s family in the audience.
“I remember thinking ‘why’d I take this on?’”
So Lorae began researching. The epic research project was eventually finished with two weeks remaining for rehearsals and the performance was well received.
“It seemed a waste to put it in the bottom drawer and not publish it.”
Despite the plethora of material about Katherine Mansfield, Lorae believes the play’s focus is a new one.
“None of the plays about Katherine focus on her relationships with Bloomsbury women, of her passionate and supportive relationships with other women and on how much she relied on those.”
Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl, published by The Women’s Play Press in association with The Play Press.