Linda Griffiths: her insight into George Gissing and plans for her next one person show Last Dog of War.

Age of Arousal is based on the George Gissing novel The Odd Women. It is not hard to see how Canadian actor Linda Griffiths would take an interest in him. One does not find these gems in second-hand book bins for nothing!

Gissing himself is a fascinating study. The son of a Wakefield chemist, Gissing was a model student, top in his class, who had a promising future at London University studying the classics, history and literature.

But all that changed when he got caught stealing a small sum of money in a school cloak room after becoming infatuated with a prostitute named Nell Harrison. Gissing did a month in prison and was shipped off to America for a year, where we wrote his first stories for a Chicago newspaper. When he came back to London, he married Nell.

Gissing had no money, and began to write in a highly autobiographical tone about the underbelly of London society, first in Workers in the Dawn. He also wrote about the struggles of an author with marriage and finance in New Grub Street and lack of opportunities for single, well educated women( the sort of woman he craved) in The Odd Women. Though Nell Harrison had caused him a lot of personal turmoil, she had also given George Gissing great insight into writing about London slum life.

In Part Four, of this interview series, Griffiths talks about Gissing’s love/hate relationship with women and her next one-person show based her English family roots.

Can you imagine going to a cloakroom, stealing five shillings and tuppence for a woman you want to sleep with, and then your whole life turns to hell?

"Your whole life... and really, what a harsh sentence for the guy. Gissing was 18 when he was sent to prison, and that even wasn’t the end. All the things he did, I can understand why. There's his marriage – he really was interested in crossing classes and crossing boundaries and not staying in his little world. I love that about him."

His second marriage to Edith Underwood didn’t work out either. She was nuts.

"Yes, and the third one ( to French translator Gabrielle Fleury) really worked, but he only lived a little while because he died of emphysema.

What a sad life…

"Well, you don’t know. You never know. You look at the picture and yeah, it’s a little gloomy, there’s no question about it, but you don’t know. Gissing was an innovator and that's never an easy life for anybody so he must have gotten pleasure out of knowing that."

I read a passage where he went to see Nell when she died and I think he was still torn because of his feelings for her. She was one who caused him to go to jail. The women he craved and the women he ended up with were so different. You also have a central theme of sexual awakenings in your work.

"I do have that. What’s interesting through The Odd Women, and something I didn’t like, even though it is way ahead of its time and even ahead of (George Bernard) Shaw in that he has so many women in the story, is that sometimes the women say the most horrible things about other women like how low other women are, and how useless they are, sort of this common run of women. So there is a lot of misogyny in the book even though the book itself is about enlightened women. But it really makes a distinction between those who are essentially New Women and the rank and file who are considered useless."

There were a lot of prostitutes and looters back then …

"Even then, sort of ordinary women are trashed in the book. I found myself wincing a few times. There are definitely contradictions in terms of Gissing's feelings about women when he wrote that book."

There’s a contradiction about sexuality all through that age... corseted women literally uptight walking around and what are they really thinking?

"That’s the inspiration for Age of Arousal".

Now you have another one person play you are working on – Last Dog of War…

"Yes. It is to do with the Second World War and my father and myself. My father was in the RAF and he was right in the middle of it. He did 29 missions with Bomber Command. It’s about my connection and his to war, to England, all of that. It is definitely in progress and in a way there’s two pulses going on. I think John McLeod talks about this. There‘s the epic. I think Age of Arousal is an epic – a two-act, six-hour, six-character extravaganza."

You have this knack for combining history and modern fact with various writing and acting techniques to make this unique brand of theatre.

"There's that and then, I will go much simpler into single performance and Last Dog of War is meant to be done with no tech – unlike Alien Creature which was lots of tech. We had extraordinary,light, magic and all of that. Last Dog of War will be very 'unplugged'. It’s a basic story telling and I’ve done it . I will do it for a couple of weeks and then workshop it and then have a showing just to my email list and I am still working that way. I want to circle Toronto for a while with it. I am talking to [Hamilton's] Theatre Aquarius and that’s the next thing although what the next major thing is, I don’t know. I cannot imagine my life without Age of Arousal. It has been so many years of such solid work on it."

Part Five - Linda Griffiths discusses Collective Creation, Maggie and Pierre, Alien Creature and her favourite playwrights.