Four Letter Words

Posted on: 21 May 2024 by Hannah Greenstreet in Posts

Thanks to funding from the University of Liverpool’s Early Career Researchers and Returners’ Fund, the Centre for New and International Writing and the Department of English, I was able to hold a 2-day workshop for my new play, Four Letter Words, which culminated in a rehearsed reading to an invited audience. The Everyman & Playhouse Theatre kindly provided rehearsal space and New Works Associate, Tommo Fowler, offered his dramaturgical support. I was lucky to work with a brilliant team of collaborators on the workshop: director Millie Foy, actors, Ged McKenna, Katie Erich, Nadia Anim and Alicya Eyo, and BSL interpreter Leanne Morris.  

 Four Letter Words, which was shortlisted for the Homotopia Award in 2023, follows Gemma, a university student isolating in her room during the Covid-19 pandemic due to her dad being clinically vulnerable. Looking for distraction and trying to explore her sexuality within the restrictions of lockdown, Gemma enters an intense online relationship with a woman named Moira, who she meets online via The Site. However, Moira turns out not to be who she seems. The play explores loneliness, how technology has changed intimacy and questions whether you can love someone you have only met online. Inspired by other plays that have staged the internet, such as Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Four Letter Words explores different communication technologies through its form. One of our key challenges in rehearsals was testing out how a WhatsApp message in the family group chat might be staged differently from a message on The Site, which is different again from Facetiming with a friend. Much of the play is set in Gemma’s university room to capture the isolation she is experiencing. However, the online world becomes both a lifeline and an intrusion as the play continues.  

I often tell my playwriting students that the best way to learn about your writing is to get it on its feet. I find the rehearsal room to be a creative, collaborative space, in which actors often tell you far more than you knew about your characters when writing them – as well as asking insightful questions that push you to think harder about your writing choices. Given the constraints of the 2-day rehearsal period, Millie and I decided to focus on getting a version of the play ready to share within that time – a script-in-hand performance that was theatrical enough to indicate how we might approach staging the play in the future. Millie came up with the idea of using microphones to allow the actors to experiment with offline and online voices. While the play requires doubling between certain roles, Millie decided to have multiple actors voice Moira’s lines at once. As Moira is first and foremost an online persona, this device created an unsettling sense of shifting identity and had the effect of separating Moira from identification with one actor’s body. This is an ambiguity I will continue to explore in my next draft of the script.  

The rehearsed reading of the play allowed us to share Four Letter Words with an audience for the first time. I was pleased with how many audience members resonated with the depiction of lockdown, the isolation and disorientation, the separation from loved ones. Some audience members were drawn to the online world and pushed for the play to become more of a thriller. Others were more drawn to the realistic scenes focusing on the relationship with Gemma’s family. There were also, thankfully, quite a few laughs to leaven the darker moments.  

Director Millie Foy and I are currently working on an Arts Council Application to support a further research and development period and a short production, hopefully in Liverpool. In the next phase of the development of the production, we are particularly interested in exploring how to use sound, lighting and video design to capture the online world in which the play is set. Watch this space!