Photography: Cristian Solimeno How a vanishing, pre-internet south London and a chance conversation about a comatose patient inspired Mark Bastin to write To Have and To Hold
For me, To Have and To Hold is the realisation of a long-held ambition. I’d wanted for some time to write a piece which captured the world my parents came from. A working class south London long before the internet, a world of pubs, going to the pictures and meeting people at the local palais. I was also keen to write a love story, but one from the viewpoint of a life lived, as opposed to the heady rush of the first few months or years.
The idea for the play was eventually suggested by my partner’s aunt, who at the time was one of a team of three home-carers looking after an elderly woman who had for some months been in a comatose state. She remarked on how loving the woman’s husband was, how caring, which was ironic in a way given the terrible life she’d led him when she was well. I’m not sure why, but her comment stayed with me. Why was he so caring, I wondered? Was it that he loved her unequivocally? Or, given her many infidelities, did he finally have her all to himself? Was his caring for her in some way a form of revenge?
For me, To Have and To Hold is the realisation of a long-held ambition. I’d wanted for some time to write a piece which captured the world my parents came from. A working class south London long before the internet, a world of pubs, going to the pictures and meeting people at the local palais. I was also keen to write a love story, but one from the viewpoint of a life lived, as opposed to the heady rush of the first few months or years.
The idea for the play was eventually suggested by my partner’s aunt, who at the time was one of a team of three home-carers looking after an elderly woman who had for some months been in a comatose state. She remarked on how loving the woman’s husband was, how caring, which was ironic in a way given the terrible life she’d led him when she was well. I’m not sure why, but her comment stayed with me. Why was he so caring, I wondered? Was it that he loved her unequivocally? Or, given her many infidelities, did he finally have her all to himself? Was his caring for her in some way a form of revenge?
I wrote a first draft during the early days of lockdown as a monologue, spoken directly to camera or an audience by the husband character, whom I named Dennis Woodman. The piece sat on the hard drive of my computer for the best part of a year, and when Finlay, the play’s Director, reached out asking whether I might have anything written I’d like performed, I dusted it off and pinged it over. Finlay liked it and thought it had potential, but understandably questioned the commercial viability of staging it for an audience. Would there be any interest in a downbeat, 50-minute monologue by an elderly man looking after his stricken wife?
We discussed turning the piece into a more traditional play, possibly about the Woodman family, but I felt strongly that the piece should fundamentally be about a marriage. It’s a play about two people, a couple. It’s about why they got together and, crucially, why, after all they’ve been through, decades later they’re still together. The next step was clear: I needed to give Gina her voice.
I took the decision early on to write Gina as able-bodied and in full command of her faculties, a woman who, in her own words, is ‘up and about.’ This theatrical conceit allowed me to explore her lived condition, suffering as she is from unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. More important, though, it enabled Gina to reflect on the past, to recount her memories, often in response to Dennis’ remembered version of events. From being a faintly sinister monologue from a husband’s viewpoint, To Have and To Hold thus became a memory play, a love story and an examination of what we choose to remember and why.
Whilst Dennis is entirely a product of my imagination, Gina is undoubtedly based in part on my own mum. Chrissy is from a large working class family, born and raised in south Croydon, by parents whose relationship was passionate, volatile and often physically violent. Her marriage to my dad at the age of 19 certainly offered a degree of escape, although unlike Gina, mum enjoyed a rock-solid, blissfully happy marriage of 56 years which ended only when dad died.
I’ve appropriated some of her history for the play. Bunny, the flatulent gay dancing partner; Splinter, the disgraced neighbour who lives in the attic; these characters really existed in that semi-disappeared world of south London Royal British Legion clubs, palais-des-dance halls and ‘posh’ family-run Italian restaurants. As did people like mum and her sisters: bright, tough, entrepreneurial young women who in another world and with different life chances truly could have gone on to run FTSE-100 companies.
When all’s said and done, To have and To Hold is, for my part, an act of gentle defiance. In a world where theatre actively seeks to put the under-represented on stage, writing and working with Finlay on a play specifically for older actors, putting older characters and their stories firmly centre stage, feels suitably boundary-pushing. I’m very proud of it, and I’m thrilled to be collaborating with such a talented, passionate new theatre family at the beginning of my own, somewhat unexpected third act.
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD runs 29 Nov - 10 Dec, BOOK NOW
We discussed turning the piece into a more traditional play, possibly about the Woodman family, but I felt strongly that the piece should fundamentally be about a marriage. It’s a play about two people, a couple. It’s about why they got together and, crucially, why, after all they’ve been through, decades later they’re still together. The next step was clear: I needed to give Gina her voice.
I took the decision early on to write Gina as able-bodied and in full command of her faculties, a woman who, in her own words, is ‘up and about.’ This theatrical conceit allowed me to explore her lived condition, suffering as she is from unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. More important, though, it enabled Gina to reflect on the past, to recount her memories, often in response to Dennis’ remembered version of events. From being a faintly sinister monologue from a husband’s viewpoint, To Have and To Hold thus became a memory play, a love story and an examination of what we choose to remember and why.
Whilst Dennis is entirely a product of my imagination, Gina is undoubtedly based in part on my own mum. Chrissy is from a large working class family, born and raised in south Croydon, by parents whose relationship was passionate, volatile and often physically violent. Her marriage to my dad at the age of 19 certainly offered a degree of escape, although unlike Gina, mum enjoyed a rock-solid, blissfully happy marriage of 56 years which ended only when dad died.
I’ve appropriated some of her history for the play. Bunny, the flatulent gay dancing partner; Splinter, the disgraced neighbour who lives in the attic; these characters really existed in that semi-disappeared world of south London Royal British Legion clubs, palais-des-dance halls and ‘posh’ family-run Italian restaurants. As did people like mum and her sisters: bright, tough, entrepreneurial young women who in another world and with different life chances truly could have gone on to run FTSE-100 companies.
When all’s said and done, To have and To Hold is, for my part, an act of gentle defiance. In a world where theatre actively seeks to put the under-represented on stage, writing and working with Finlay on a play specifically for older actors, putting older characters and their stories firmly centre stage, feels suitably boundary-pushing. I’m very proud of it, and I’m thrilled to be collaborating with such a talented, passionate new theatre family at the beginning of my own, somewhat unexpected third act.
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD runs 29 Nov - 10 Dec, BOOK NOW
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