Starlings (in development)Written and Performed by Miranda Gold
Directed by Jacob Wolstencroft “Ranging from conversational to poetic, this play explores beginnings and endings and family relationships, and the difficult question of whether connecting with your family’s beginnings can provide closure and thus enable fresh starts.” |
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Adapted for the stage from Miranda Gold's first novel, Starlings reaches back through three generations to illuminate the visceral yet intangible experience of inherited memory.
Sally leaves London hoping to reconnect with her brother, Steven, who moved away four years ago in an effort to free himself from their shared history. Fractured family stories of surviving the Holocaust and fleeing Nazi occupied Vienna alongside first-hand experience of their mother’s desperate physical and emotional fragility loom over the siblings, whose opposing ways of navigating their inheritance have made them strangers to one another. The pulse of the ghosts Sally carries continues to beat as an undercurrent that will not recede, threatening to eclipse the present.
When the reunion she imagines crumbles, she is compelled to sift through a store of hand-me-down memories and silenced voices to uncover how their bond broke and find her way closer to Steven. In doing so, she unwittingly reconciles her own relationship to what haunts her.
Sally leaves London hoping to reconnect with her brother, Steven, who moved away four years ago in an effort to free himself from their shared history. Fractured family stories of surviving the Holocaust and fleeing Nazi occupied Vienna alongside first-hand experience of their mother’s desperate physical and emotional fragility loom over the siblings, whose opposing ways of navigating their inheritance have made them strangers to one another. The pulse of the ghosts Sally carries continues to beat as an undercurrent that will not recede, threatening to eclipse the present.
When the reunion she imagines crumbles, she is compelled to sift through a store of hand-me-down memories and silenced voices to uncover how their bond broke and find her way closer to Steven. In doing so, she unwittingly reconciles her own relationship to what haunts her.
An abridged workshop presentation of the play was shared as part of The Springboard Festival in Coventry, UK in May 2024.