A new production at the Ustinov tells the real-life story of a teenager who was the only survivor of an air crash in the Peruvian Rainforest in the 1970s. Emma Clegg talks to writer and director Emma Howlett, who cut her theatrical teeth in Bath at the Egg’s youth theatre.
To be a storyteller you first need a story to tell. For theatre playwright and director Emma Howlett the concept for her company’s first professional production came to her while listening to a podcast. She heard the story of 17-year old German-Peruvian Juliane Koepcke who was flying over the Peruvian rainforest in 1971 with her mother when her plane was hit by lightning. Incredibly she survived a two-mile fall and found herself alone in the jungle. She kept herself going for 11 days, until she was rescued, eating sweets from the wreckage and using survival skills learned from her zoologist parents. “I felt it was an incredible story that would really work as a piece of theatre, because there is such a clear structure to it, and it’s such a distinct, self-contained episode”, says Emma.
Emma set up her company TheatreGoose while still a student at Oxford University and wrote Her Green Hell, her professional debut show, just two years after graduating. The production opened starring Sophie Kean – who she had worked with at Cambridge when studying for her MPhil – at VAULT Festival (located in the tunnels underneath Waterloo Bridge) in 2023. It then transferred to Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was longlisted for the BBC Popcorn New Writing Award and attracted the attention of the artistic team of the Theatre Royal Plymouth. Now the production is coming to the Ustinov in Bath from 24-28 September.
“I’ve rewritten it, we’ve upgraded the set, and it has grown up into a piece that will particularly suit the space of the Ustinov. The set has always had the same sensory quality, and the DNA of the show hasn’t changed. The production centres on a row of aeroplane seats (found on eBay!) from the year the crash happened, evoking the ’70s with their retro blue fabric, and ashtrays still intact.
“We wanted the seats to spin because the reason that Juliane initially survives is because she’s on the window seat of her row of seats. The two other passengers, one of whom is her mother, disappear when she’s falling. And the way that she falls – in Juliane’s words, ‘the plane seat spun like the seed of a maple leaf, which twirls like a tiny helicopter through the air’ – is also essential to the story, so the updraft of the storm slows her down and then she is caught by the vines of the forest. So the science of spinning is the reason she survives – and I wanted that to be a central, physical part of the show.”
Once the seats have settled they transform into an imagined rainforest. Juliane had a wound on her arm that was infested with maggots and she resourcefully added gasoline to the wound to disinfect it. Her Green Hell portrays the maggots growing out of her arm using shredded paper. “We really employ the audience’s imagination, as Juliane paints a really epic picture of her journey through the rainforest within a tight circular footprint, a black void she is trapped within, surrounded by mossy mounds. So it’s that dissonance between the artificial, manmade plane that’s crashed into this world of nature. The show addresses her survival story, in the context of the environment’s, in the man versus nature struggle, and considers what that relationship is.”
Emma, who is from Bath, always loved to perform, taking ballet and dance classes, and she also spent five years with The Egg, in what was then called the Young People’s Theatre (YPT). There she encountered directors such as Amy Leach (now Deputy Artistic Director at Leeds Playhouse) using a physical ensemble style, one that continues to dramatically inform her work. “I work quite similarly to the way a choreographer does, as opposed to some stage directors. That’s because I like to work in my own head imagining performers in a space. It’s about staging, creating shapes on stage and defining a narrative by the movement of bodies. I use the same technique for a classic Shakespeare play or with an intense physical piece that I’ve written. I heavily rely on my instinct for movement on stage, which is totally rooted in my work as a dancer.”
Emma’s approach also involves close collaboration with both the actors and with her creative team. Her latest production is an experimental departure from Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, called Sisters Three. It was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe this year, also features actor Sophie Keen, as well as her standard creative team, set designer Ellie Wintour, lighting designer Ed Saunders and composer and sound designer Sarah Spencer. Emma describes this as ‘a creative collective’.
This production extracts the three sisters from Chekhov’s play and throws them into the lives of other sister trios through time and literature, to explore the trope they occupy. “The idea is what, beneath the surface of the Chekhov, are those three women really looking for, and what does it mean to discover different versions of their own lives? Also how sisterhood maybe hampers agency, or is a consolation for not getting what you want. I only wrote this version in June, so it will change a great deal when we transfer it to London next year.”
Emma explains that her method of staging through movement is especially useful in a one-person show, of which she has directed two in the last year – Her Green Hell and a production of George Brant’s Grounded at The Bridge Theatre, Brussels. “A one-person show is quite a different landscape to plot than even a two-person show, because when you add just one more performer on stage you are halving the number of lines an actor has. And you are giving them someone to feed off and support them all the way through. So in a solo piece, the relationship between me and the actor is much closer and slightly more co-dependent. That’s where the movement really helps because it gives them something to hold on to in the piece.
“The performer needs to build a ‘breaking fourth wall’ connection to an audience very early on. They need to find that connection very quickly and maintain it, but they must fulfil what the piece needs of them – it’s a really difficult thing to do.”
Having Her Green Hell playing in her home city of Bath is emotional for Emma: “It’s such a lovely homecoming having my work in the city, because it’s where my directorial inspiration began and where my career had its first seeds planted.”
And what are Emma’s thoughts on her creative destination? “When I went to university I thought I wanted to be an actor, or something very worthy like a human rights barrister, but when I started directing I knew I had found what I was best at. I’d love to think that I’m still managing to serve humanity with my work, making art that allows people to think about their lives in a new way, or that provides some escape.”
Her Green Hell, 24–28 September, Ustinov Studio, 7.30pm. Tickets £20/£16; theatreroyal.org.uk.
Featured Image: Sophie Kean in Her Green Hell