What if time didn't exist?

Natasha Kaeda is a playwright. She is represented by Penelope Killick at David Hingham. She was on the Soho Writers Lab 2016/7 and HighTide Writers Group 2018. Her first full length play is being developed with support from Hampstead Theatre.

This interview is condensed from a longer conversation

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N What was I thinking when I asked this question? I'm writing a play and the whole first scene is set on a farm during lambing season and I've got no experience of that. I don’t have the time to go and do that, and someone who is a full-time farmer and has lambs to look after doesn’t have time to write a play about it.

T Is there something important in your gap in experience; your curiosity and desire to know something that you will never fully know is what drives you to write in the first place?

N Yes. One of the things I love about being a playwright is that you become an expert in one subject from a distance.

The third act is set in the Arctic, which I have no experience of either.

T But that's partly why you chose it right?

N Yes. I’m using the Arctic as a metaphor.

T How far do you go with research? Once you start finding out about something you become aware of all the gaps in your knowledge -

N Yes, and I worry about my right to tell any other stories. Which I think is something that you always have to ask yourself as a storyteller.

If there was unlimited time then playwrighting would be more accessible as a career choice. You'd have someone write plays after doing something else and then they'd go on and do something else after writing plays. You wouldn't have the same group of people filling London stages with their voices all of the time.

I'm interested in other people's experiences and I also want to have those experiences myself. Part of me would have liked to have been a researcher on the space programme or have been a marine biologist, but you don't have time in your life to excel at everything. I don't want to do anything half-heartedly, and playwriting is what I've picked. There's always this bit of me thinking I could have done other things. There's a melancholy in that. And it’s beautiful as well.

I'm in awe of people who have had patchwork careers, and retrained later in life. You need so much bravery to do that because time is always tapping on your shoulder. Time creates limitations.

And if you took time away then life would be uncrecongisble. Would I just throw playwriting in and think, I'll do that when I have more life experience, and then maybe never get round to it?

T Can you live your life without the pressure of time?

N I put aside this weekend to write and I'm already annoyed about how little I've done. Time is a constraint but it's what gets me up sitting at my desk in the morning

T If you had all the time in the world then would you still write?

N I find it hard to conceive of a world where I wasn't a writer but I feel like the writing would have so much less impetus, so much less drive.

T With endless time, comes no fear of death.

N All art is about how we are only alive for a finite time, and how do we deal with that fact. It’s interesting because perhaps one day we will get to a point where humans can live forever and then art will cease to have importance.

T Perhaps there will be more of a need because we will be trying desperately to make sense and meaning out of life. Theatre will be different formally...

N You always have a session in writers workshops on closed time and open time etc.

T Yes, and we make theatre (in the west) in terms of linearity. Theatre also allows you to step outside of the linear or chronological trajectory of how we are experiencing things

N A lot of the theatre I admire plays with time as part of the form. 'Anatomy of a Suicide', for example; that play takes your experience out of the present and allows you to make connections. Or 'Girls and Boys' by Dennis Kelly, where as you get to the end the past becomes more precious.

T What is driving innovation in form?

N Technology? With the speed at which technology is progressing I am aware that when my children will be grandparents, who knows with the world will look like? How will we be telling stories in the future? Now, when you see a play, you have no idea what you're going to see. Trying to find a form that you can also use to interrogate what you want to say, the best theatre does that.

T The collaboration in theatre means that form doesn't have to be made in the text, and there's something exciting about that happening elsewhere. For example, where you put on a play can be part of that formal gesture.

N Like when Hampstead Theatre put on Luke Barnes' 'No One Told me How to Start a Revolution'.

T Maybe that's what formal innovation was in Shakespearean times, it was where and how you were doing it rather than in the writing. Who was playing the part, and how you were saying the words. There's so many aspects of making theatre that we can't know from the text on the page.

N Yes, we're obsessed with the writer.

T Maybe if time wasn't an issue we wouldn't care so much about the credits either. The idea of a career and making a name for yourself is time-orientated - of having a trajectory to follow

N And that you can point out where you are on that trajectory

T If you're a writer in a room then you have control of that.

N I feel that at some point we will have to move out of this idea. At some point this will all have to break.

If time wasn't such an issue then venues would say here's five years and come up with what you come up with. My writing is always better when I've collaborated with others.

T In the UK it doesn't feel like theatre is normality, whereas when I was rehearsing in Germany it felt integrated into life in a healthy way - you rehearse in the morning, you take your kids home from school, you come back to rehearse in the evening. It also meant that it was OK if things didn't go so well that day, knowing that it's just one moment within an 8 week process creates space for friction, or for off-topic conversations that indirectly seep into the work. The idea of rep too, of a relationship with an audience over time

N If you are part of a team it is really intense and short-lived. That's really hard. It's really episodic and staccato. I’m interested in a drawn-out process where the performances are one part of the process, like how Gecko work. We're all trying to build all the time, and what are we all aiming for really?

T It's also about feeling like you're part of a community and your nurturing something bigger than yourself through your work - a community, a building, collaborators to go back to, an audience that you write for. Something that's outside of your work that's being fed by your work. Otherwise you can feel that no matter how successful your play is, it's momentary. That's what's brilliant but also distressing about theatre -  it's gone.

N Yes, there's nothing to grasp anymore.

T It's also what makes theatre relatively ego-less; you put so much effort into something that's going to be gone.

N I think it’s interesting to ask the question 'if I was to live forever would i still be a writer?'

We talked about it a bit at the beginning but I think I'd find it really hard to tell stories if I knew I was going to live forever. I feel that if I could live forever, writing would be a hobby that I needed to process life rather than it being so wrapped up in my identity. Something that I did rather than who I am.

T You've got me thinking about identity and how that is time-limited as well… Self-discovery is all about time.

N Yes it would open up a whole world of thought about our lives, for example, would you still have a middle age? Genre would have to change.

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