Compellingly evocative and a heartfelt invocation of time and place, Fort is a new play by Dorset writer Tabitha Hayward, developed in part at Lighthouse and returning as part of a regional tour to play the Poole venue’s Sherling Studio on Thursday 21 November.
The play begins at 1am where we find lifelong friends 15-year-old Viv and Daisy sitting on a hillfort in North Dorset waiting for a ghost.
“Daisy is adamant she has seen this ghost and now Viv wants to come and see for herself,” explains Tabitha.
“More broadly though, Fort is about friendship and growing up, particularly in a rural setting, and the tests of that friendship at a time in their lives when they’re starting to be pulled in slightly different directions.
“It’s about two teenagers navigating their futures with a bit of magic and folklore in the storytelling.”
Tabitha, who facilitated the Young Writers course at Lighthouse before handing over the reins to Fort director Rohan Gotobed, started writing the play on train journeys between Dorset and the Royal Court Theatre in London, where she was the only non-Londoner on a playwriting course.
“I wanted to write something which was really rooted in place and started to realise the things that were normal to me, that I had grown up with, like the Cheese Festival in Sturminster Newton, like hill forts, these are things that other people are not familiar with so there was something potentially interesting there.
“People always say to writers you should write what you know and I’d always gone completely in the other direction from that – what’s interesting about having had a nice childhood in the countryside? But actually, there is something really mysterious and curious about that.”
Dorset’s ancient landscape is littered with monuments left behind by previous inhabitants, including countless barrows, burial mounds and hill forts, any of which might have inspired Fort, but it turns out there is one specific location that captured the writer’s imagination.
“My parents live in Broad Oak near Sturminster Newton and up behind their house is a little hill that’s just used as farming land but it’s marked on the map as a fort. I was walking up there a lot in lockdown because it was easy to get to and you can see almost down to the sea and I realised that’s what I had in my head.”
As well as being about a place, it’s equally significant that Fort tells the story of two girls on the threshold of adulthood.
“I started writing the play when I was running the Young Writers groups at Lighthouse and doing lots of work with young people,” Tabitha explains.
“It was making me think a lot about my own teenage years and how it’s a really challenging time because everything feels equally huge – it’s a time when things like people not liking you at school feels as big as actual life and death things.
“It’s also that time when you start to realise the world about you isn’t completely safe, you’re not just in this bubble, there are things that grown-ups can’t protect you from, challenges you have to navigate on your own.”
Their sense of being apart from the world is heightened by the obscurity of the location.
“The fort is a sort of safe space away from their difficulties – like when you’re a kid you might build a blanket fort in your room and hide away in there. They’re doing something similar in somewhere that’s a bit cut away, but because the fort is outdoors and exposed, it’s also completely different; and it has all of this history which they are also interested in.”
The journey from page to stage has been long and circuitous, and Tabitha is still a little guarded about it being fully over yet.
“I started writing it at the end of 2019, but the first draft was totally different from how it turned out. It was set on a hill but it wasn’t a hill fort, there were six or seven characters now there’s two. It was a completely different play.
“I met Rohan, who’s the director and did a lot of dramaturgical work on the play with me, on a Zoom call in lockdown. He was setting up his production company Dorsetborn and looking for Dorset work and I happened to be working on Fort.
“It’s been through lots of incarnations and we had a week with the Sanctuary programme at Lighthouse in 2022, which was a big help. We did workshops with local schools as part of that and more workshops with teenagers at a summer school at Taunton Brewhouse.
“So it’s been through many different stages and I think it’s now really boiled down to what it was always meant to be. It takes so much longer than anyone tells you. But it has definitely made it a better play.”
:: Fort plays Lighthouse on Thursday 21 November. Tickets on sale now at Fort – Lighthouse (lighthousepoole.co.uk) or call 01202 280000.
(NC)