Hello, I’m Grace and I was the assistant director on the R&D of ‘In the Remains’. The play was penned by Jose Socrates Reyes and won last year’s Woven Voices prize so it was already a highly accomplished piece of work before we began development. When the team gathered in sunny south London, starting the week off with a table read, I half expected us to dry our eyes, pat Soc on the back and spend a few days in the pub.
‘In the Remains’ is a devastating anti-war epic that follows an ensemble through the 2017 siege of Marawi, a city in the Mindanao region of the Philippines. As such, the Gate assembled an incredible, all ESEA and predominantly Filipino team: director, Anthony Lau; movement director, Chi San Howard; our ensemble cast of actors: Jules Chan, James Cooney, Lourdes Faberes, Ayn Ferrer, Jerome Lance, Ericka Posadas, Martin Sarreal, and Iverson Yabut; Soc and me, and dramaturg, Dominique La Victoria.
We shared our first reactions to the reading and there was definitely a feeling that it was really special to be gathered together to tell a Filipino story that is steeped in our culture, pastimes, traditions and language. Probably because I have the word ‘woven’ in my ears, I’m reminded that the etymology of ‘text’ is textus – to weave. And as we sat with the play, enjoying the rarity of our being together and our shared references, Anthony encouraged us to start pulling at its threads.
We set about identifying story beats, sticking them onto the wall to track character arcs, logic and iron out repetition. We did a lot of table work across the week, combing through the script and troubling our assumptions in search of clarity and tautness. We spoke about the significance of names, the challenges of a multilingual play, character backstories, the geography of Marawi city. And we punctuated this logical, knotty work by playing the range of Filipino games Soc has included in the script. We played bang sak, tumbang preso and clapping games (all in the name of research, of course!) which became investigations into movement under Chi San and Anthony’s direction. Our playing together directly informed our table work, but also offered to Soc a smorgasbord (or, I should say, kamayan) of techniques that theatre might deploy to support his words, like design, staging, multirolling.
I really loved my time on this project. I loved the challenge of trying to keep pace with Anthony’s brain, and hurtling through visions and variations as a company, splashing about in the play’s possibility together and doing that glorious hard work of imagination and rigour. But mostly I loved the kinship and camaraderie I felt hearing how our experiences overlapped and differed as Filipinos in the diaspora. We covered a lot of ground which is testament to the generosity and creativity of the team and also the scope of Soc’s writing. I’m very grateful to the Gate and Woven Voices teams for bringing us together and investing in this work.
