Hopes & Fears - One year on
Caroline Carragher and Lara Martins (background Nina Bennet and Martins Smaukstelis)
This time last year we were printing the finalised scores for our first fully staged production - Hopes & Fears, and I want to take a moment to reflect on the project and get some perspective on what we achieved in creating it.
In 2019, inspired by our memory of our beautiful and talented friend, Laura Monaghan, Panaretos Kyriatzidis and I created an opera that spoke about the true experience of living with cancer through the music of Debussy.
The Hopes & Fears project began in early 2020 with a quiet and powerful meeting between myself, producer Dominic Mattos, and founder and director of Shine Cancer Support, Ceinwen Giles. We met on January 30th, just three months before Covid would change everything - perhaps most of all for people like Ceinwen, whose immune systems would never withstand this dreadful threat.
This was when I first heard Ceinwen's story. Diagnosed with an extremely rare cancer just weeks after the birth of her first child, and with the odds stacked against her, Ceinwen was one of the lucky ones. She survived. However, her life would never be the same. As with most cancer patients, Ceinwen was in what is known as 'remission' and will probably remain so for the rest of her life. From having a high-flying career in the aid sector, travelling regularly to some of the most remote and deprived places on earth, Ceinwen had to start again. She was told that ever being too far from a state-of-the-art hospital was now out of the question. This compelled her to found Shine.
When we think of cancer patients, we imagine people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond. Traditional cancer support charities mainly focus on the practical and emotional needs of these older age groups. But, as Ceinwen explained, people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, maybe newly married with young children, perhaps completing studies, many with mortgages and full-time jobs, caring responsibilities for parents, and all the chaos of work and family life, cancer poses a whole spectrum of different concerns.
It was stories like Ceinwen's that engendered Hopes & Fears. Not only by using the recorded voices of five cancer survivors, but also by weaving their experiences and emotions into the libretto, we created an opera that, as The Stage put it, brought "light and shade" to one of the most "painful" universal tragedies.
To inspire the libretto and feed into the work, I spoke with six volunteers.
My first meeting - on the outskirts of Oxford - was moving in ways I had not predicted. The conversation I had was frank, gripping and at times hilariously funny (if inappropriate). The interviewee spoke about the struggle for a diagnosis as her cancer - in an intimate area - was mistaken for a sexually transmitted disease. She was both philosophical and blunt. Her words were the first of the opera - "time is a balancing act." It's a powerful idea when spoken by someone given months to live. I recall her celebrating her weekly trips to Sainsbury's with her husband but wondering if she was "really living her best life" if the supermarket shop was the weekly highlight. Yet I understood what she meant. It's the little things which make us human that are so important at times of crisis. These are precisely the little things that many of those with cancer, or in remission, have lost completely since the pandemic.
My second interview took place in London, face-to-face, on February 18th 2020, just a month before this would have been completely impossible. This time, the person I spoke to had been in remission for many years having had a brain tumour in his early 20s. We talked about how isolated he had felt during his treatment that had taken him away from his carefree London life working in bars and clubs, and back to his family in Scotland. My favourite moment was when he laughed about a visit from his friends. Sick of the pity of everyone he met at home, his mate's greeting of "you still walk like a fucking penguin, eh?" was exactly what he had needed. He spoke about burning his radiotherapy mask when he was given the all-clear, and the way his parents responded to the idea that their son might die. And how, just months before, jumping up to sit on the kitchen counter, his mum had revealed that she had always known that the day he did that once more would be the day she knew he was better.
Martins Smaukstelis, Nina Bennet and Pauls Putnins
And then the world closed. Every other interview was conducted over Zoom, and we were all uncertain as to if, and when, the project would ever happen. As the Arcola had not yet announced whether or not the Grimeborn Festival would not go ahead, we had to keep going. The show had to be written.
On the day that Boris told us all to "stay at home", I conducted my third interview for the project. Having been told he had just months to live, this person was still going strong years later. He talked about how he felt his veganism and his new outlook on his physical health had kept him going, and about the painful subject of how he had had to explain his illness to his children and be as "honest as he could." He spoke of the guilt he felt about how his illness had cut a scar in the lives of his family.
Then, thinking about children, my whole world changed again for a rather different reason. I gave birth to my first child, a daughter, Madeleine; born at the peak of the first Covid wave. As I was processing all these stories of human sadness, resilience, weakness and strength, my own world was turned upside down in the best possible way.
By now, I had begun the process of writing the libretto, even though there were a few more conversations to be had. I remember early mornings with Madeleine awake and feeding while I pieced text into Debussy's music. It was an unusually hot, sunny April and by 5am the light would already be streaming into the house as I worked, and Maddie napped. It was a strange experience to be writing a piece so close to death with life so much around me.
The fourth interview focussed on a friend and colleague’s experience of her own cancer, but also, and perhaps more poignantly, on enduring the disease taking her father. We discussed the physical brutality of his cancer and how weak he became. For the first time in these interviews, the grief was overwhelming as she described how they had never managed to get him back to Ireland and to his family in his final months. It struck me how much more intense the pain of loss was than the pain of enduring the disease had seemed for the other interviewees I had spoken with. This agony became the crux of Hopes & Fears as Clair de Lune accompanied the Lover's excruciating discovery of their partner's death.
My fifth interview was with Ceinwen herself. Bubbly and self-deprecating, Ceinwen brought such humour to her experience. Even as she described the impossibly painful thought of "looking at her child" and wondering whether it would be better to leave no memory of herself behind for her, or for them to have time together, although she told me "I'm going to cry now," she was so strong and stoic. Her description of being sent a tactless French vicar in hospital and requesting a Buddhist monk instead had me in stitches.
Becca Marriott
My final interview was with a lady who had never had cancer but with whom I wanted to talk about the experience of supporting a family member through it. As she was so busy at the time with home-schooling and work, we never met, but she sent me a recordings of herself speaking about her husband’s illness. She talked about her pregnancy and the fear that she would give birth to a fatherless baby. She explained how "numb" she felt when her husband was diagnosed with leukaemia just days before her 20-week scan. She spoke about how, as a society, we need to talk more about cancer and not be afraid of the word. She spoke about how she kept going throughout her husband's illness before hitting rock bottom much later.
Her words never made it into the show (mainly because they were professionally recorded and did not technically work with the others) though everything she said was inspirational as I created the relationships between the patient characters and those whom they loved. I want to share some of her words now: "I am thankful every single day that my family is complete, that I'm not a single parent, that my husband got to see my daughter, watch her grow."
As lockdown eased a little we decided to make a video to try and raise some funds for Shine. Like all charities, so much of their sponsorship and event income had disappeared during the pandemic and we wanted to give something back. Even if only something small.
It took a year, but by August 2021 we were in rehearsal. The process was one of the most profoundly moving I have ever been a part of. Just hearing the opera sung through for the first time brought the room to tears. One of the most powerful experiences we had during this time was performing the piece to Ceinwen and her family in their garden, filmed by BBC London. Her work had been so central to the piece, but as a Covid shielder, there was no other way she could have seen the show. As the piece took shape I realised that we had made something very special and very beautiful.
When I look back on this project, I am hugely proud of the work we created as a team. I am so thankful for the talents of Jorge Balça, who directed the piece, and Panaretos Kyriatzidis who made it musically possible, and to all the cast and crew who threw their hearts into the work at such a strange time in the world.
But there is sadness looking back too, perhaps inevitable sadness when you speak to so many fantastic people, all living under the shadow of cancer. It was the day we performed for Ceinwen that I learned that one of the people I had spoken to was no longer with us. The shock I felt was like a punch in the stomach; what I could not have imagined was that the person cancer would take away was the one person I interviewed who did not have, and never had had the disease.
