In 2023, Martha Loader was commissioned by Menagerie Theatre company to write a new play following her time on the Young Writers’ Workshop and winning her 2022 Bruntwood Judges Prize. The play that came from this was Albatross.
In February 2024, Menagerie’s associate producer Sarah Saxby sat down with Martha Loader following her leading one of the 2024 Young Writers’ Workshops as an alumni and ahead of Albatross’ preview performance at Hotbed Festival 2024.
Now, over two years later, Martha sits down again with Sarah, who now joins her as a Young Writers’ Workshop graduate herself, to discuss the newly developed version of Albatross which will begin touring in April of this year.
So last time we spoke about Albatross, I think it was on version one or two?
[Laughs] I don’t know if we can even talk in versions anymore, there’s been so many iterations of this!
Where are you up to now, seven-ish?
This is draft seven, and it will be draft eight that becomes the rehearsal draft. That’s the joy of the drafting process though, isn’t it? That you just get to sort of chip away at it.
It was really interesting coming back to reading it, because I’ve not seen any redrafts since the first preview at Hotbed 2024. What do you think has been the biggest shift in Albatross since then?
Hopefully this draft has clarified some of the relationships and brought Eve’s character to the foreground. It is still very much at the heart of it, a story about a mother and a daughter – and this guy called
Martin – but it’s a play about motherhood really and their [Eve and Alice’s] dynamic. The essence of that hasn’t changed at all in the last two years, but perhaps the mechanisms of it have changed a little bit.
Since version one of Albatross, you’ve won the George Devine award with your play, The Town. Has any of The Town worked its way Albatross or visa versa?
I don’t necessarily think that my plays are linked. Of course they have a relationship with each other, if only just that I’ve written all of them. I suppose The Town is about motherhood as well, and it’s about what it means to be the mother of someone who’s done something awful and how mothers are often judged for the sins of their children so much more than the fathers are. There is a certain degree of that in Albatross that Alice and Eve, because they’re both mothers, are judged more heavily for the decisions that they make. That’s a societal judgment, but it’s also a personal judgment – it’s something that they find very difficult to shake themselves. So yeah, it’s a very interesting question and a link I’ve not made before!
Since we last spoke you’ve done a lot more work with female Antarctic researchers. We spoke before about the links between feminism, climate change and motherhood. How have those conversations with researchers shaped and changed how you see the links between those three things?
Not that much has changed in terms of that research in the last two years; it’s been more about honing the story. Partly because it felt that I had a huge amount of research at my disposal and that some of the redrafting process has been to essentially distill the story that I want to tell. As we’ve seen major climate events that have happened in the last couple of years – things like the LA fires and watching families being forced out of their homes – I’ve been thinking even more about what does that do to you in terms of your finances, in terms of who has to clear up the mess of that? I would imagine, a lot of that domestic work is still falling to women. Experiencing a disaster like that whilst also having to go out and make money and still provide for your family.
We’re seeing flooding and coastal erosion here, and so much of climate change is linked to home, both for humans and for animals. That’s partly why I wanted to set this in a domestic sphere, because it feels that the main impact we will feel as individuals will be on our domestic spheres.
From the LA wildfires to issues closer to home of coastal erosion and flooding, there’s been lots of climate events that’ve been happening and that I think that we’ve seen an increase of in the past few years. One of the big changes I noticed from this draft of Albatross to the previous, is Martin has shifted from being a supportive character to becoming a counter to this scientific voice of reason in Alice. Is that an intentional reaction to the kind of political landscape we’re seeing developing around climate?
I feel with Martin, there was always that option to use him as either a super fan of Antarctica – actually, I think he continues to be a super fan of Antarctica, it’s just that the lens through which he’s seeing it has shifted in this draft. We’re living in a time of disinformation and a sort of fascinating fingers-in-our-ears approach to reality, which comes out in Martin. When I spoke to a lot of these scientists in the early days, they were finding it incredibly difficult to process. And that’s part of the disconnect I think between going away and being in Antarctica and being removed from the sort of cultural and political discourse [around climate]. It was so much harder then to come back and feel that all the things that they were doing and trying to achieve are being completely misrepresented back home.
I think it’s been a really complicated time for scientists to navigate that. I definitely played around with the idea in earlier drafts, of social media being a way in which scientists are being attacked for the work that they’re doing – mostly because the level of disinformation is so staggering that people don’t really know what to believe anymore. That’s Martin!
There’s a really clear sense of frustration, especially coming from Alice, when she’s speaking to her loved ones and being met with almost an eye-roll of contempt. In developing the play and talking to these researchers, have you noticed any conversations you’ve had where that tension has come through?
Some of the scientists I met were just actively quite depressed by trying to navigate it. But as it stands, people are struggling to pay bills and put food on the table and heat their homes. So, thinking about this wider thing, which at the moment feels like a sort of existential threat (even though the water really is lapping at our doors now), it’s not quite as urgent as ‘how am I going to pay my bills and feed my children?’ And so I can see why people are choosing to disengage from climate change. Scientists are also people too and are experiencing cuts to funding – again, if we look at the states researchers and big environmental centers are actively cutting jobs and therefore making scientists lives that bit harder as to also have to put food on the table. I think they’re very understanding of why people are perhaps not responding with as much urgency as they need to be.
You touched on the urgency of the climate crisis, especially in East Anglia. It might be a good point to ask why is Albatross a play that audiences should come and see, an why is it pertinent now?
I think because actually it’s not just a play about climate change. I think it can be a bit off-putting when you see something like that and think ‘Great, another thing about climate change…’ But it’s really about a mother daughter relationship and the way in which those relationships change and adapt as people get older, and how parenthood changes as you get older. Eve is very much playing both mother to her daughter, but also mother to her granddaughter, and that’s something that certainly my parents’ generation is seeing a lot now. There’s a really interesting debate to be had about how we parent in this time.
Hopefully it’s also quite funny! There’s a lot more to it than being a play about doom and gloom. It’s about how we can find humour and look for the light in the dark. Often people’s relationships are very funny and humans are very funny. And so hopefully that’s what this play is as well!
You, or Patrick [Albatross director] said, “Albatross really looks at the personal implications of the climate crisis”. I think it’s really important that there’s so many East Anglian voices in it and that it feels like a personal effort from everyone that’s involved. But in reading it, you have a really clear sense of rhythm in your writing that captures domestic and realistic speech. From having met your family at Hotbed 2024, I can see where that’s come from. Are there any other tidbits of personal life that have snuck into Albatross?
I like to think that me and my parents get on a lot better than Alice and Eve do! But it’s really interesting, your relationship with your parents does really change as you get older, and what’s been really nice about staying in my hometown [Ipswich] is that I have a completely different relationship with my parents now that I’m an adult. That’s been a really joyful part of staying around and seeing a lot of them. I think Alice really struggles to do that with Eve, and Eve really struggled to allow her to do that. So I think they’re quite different from my experience of my parents! But yes – the Peter Rabbit bowls, we had those growing up. Bye-bye Baby was my dad’s favorite book – it literally used to make everyone cry! It’s a really sad story with a nice happy ending as Eve says. I’m sure there are always things that you put in there without even really realizing. I do quite like to have little in-jokes, just to make myself laugh. Writing’s got to be enjoyable!
You’ve been writing Albatross for almost three years now. How do you keep up the passion and drive on a project that spans as long as this?
It’s an everchanging beast and trying to keep a play about climate change relevant to what’s happening in the world is also really important. As the world changes, this play needs to change. I think that’s why it’s been a difficult thing to pin down in some ways because potentially this play will be out of date, almost as quickly as it’s in date. So it has to keep adapting and changing as the years go on because we know so much more or we’re realising how little we knew in the first place. And I quite like these characters – I think they’re nice people to spend time with or they’re slightly crazy people to spend time with. That’s really lovely as a writer to feel that you’ve got these people that stay with you.
That sense of frustration that we talked about before, that feels really specific to the female experience in this play. It’s not just that you’re a climate scientist preaching doom and gloom. You’re a woman in an ever more misogynistic time. There’s a lot of interesting intersecting parts in Alice, including her identity as a mother. I wanted to ask quite directly, what does Albatross say about motherhood for you?
I’m quite reluctant to answer this question. In part because I’m not a mother myself. Although I have been raised by a mother and have friends who are embarking on motherhood and have considered what it would mean to be a mother. There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into ‘why write a play about motherhood?’ and a lot of this is about all of my own conflicting feelings about what motherhood means. I don’t think there’s one thing that I want people to take away from this because hopefully what this does is look at the impact of motherhood on multiple generations of women and what it means to be a mother in different decades and parts of different times in society. I suppose that’s why I’m kind of dragging my heels about what that actually means because I think it means so much! Hopefully people will take away the bits that ring true to them because no experience of motherhood is going to be the same.
I’m interested to know what is a moment of electricity for you? These moments of ‘electricity’ appear consistently throughout the play. Do you have an example of one of those moments in real life?
Possibly not off the top of my head! Those moments in the script were about Alice constantly trying to separate her identity as a scientist and her identity as a mother, and thinking she can put one down and pick the other one up interchangeably; and that is her greatest flaw really. It’s the thing that she is grappling with throughout this play. Those moments of electricity are her realising that these two things are inextricably linked, she can’t turn one off and turn one and turn the other on. That’s love for her – love for her daughter and love for her work. Those two things sometimes do feel at odds with each other, but perhaps that’s the reason that she’s good at her job and she’s good at being a mother.
I’ve come almost to the end of my questions, but I’ve got one more which I asked you right at the beginning of the last interview in 2024. What is the central question in Albatross?
I think there are lots of questions in this play and maybe the central one continues to be the idea of ‘what does each generation owe to each other?’ But, I think it’s also a very personal play and I hope that people have a very personal response to it. So, the question at the heart of what the play will be determined by the relationship that each person has with it.
Is there anything you’d like to say to the readers?
Please come and see it – it’s going to be great!
I’ll second that! Thank you so much, Martha.
Albatross will be touring across the East of England and London, starting at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester on Tue 28 – Wed 29 Apr, which you can book here. To see our full list of tour dates, please visit menagerie.uk.com.
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