Sonja Mills and Kate Hennig
Sonja Mills on strong stories in theatre and actress Kate Hennig
In Part Three of this four part series playwright Sonja Mills talks about the theatre and its crucial need to tell good stories, while giving more insight into Agnete Ottosen and the actress reprising this role, Kate Hennig.
Some of the names in The Danish Play are based on real characters but Michael (pronounced Meehale) Bente and Helga are made up. How did Agnete impact their lives? They all go through so much.
"Those characters and what happens to them are necessary to narrate her life,"states Mills. "We see those characters grow in a way that Nete doesn’t. They meet at the intersection and they keep growing but she can’t. It is such a thing for us to be talking about it now – because now is when the attrition and the crap really is going to start to come down – and we are going to start to pull out of all these places where we are in conflict and have no business being. We are going to come out of there and now is when we will see the death from the poverty and the attrition and the bad nutrition and the decay."
Agnete's poetry is so powerful as she compares the bruises and cuts on her tortured body to a map of the world. Do you think the audience is constantly running two stories in their heads -the actual war and Agnete's private war of human cost?
"I definitely mean for this story to be a story of our time. Audiences appreciate a strong story, and if I may be so bold, one of the things that is making audiences shy away from a lot of theatre that is going on in this town and especially in independent theatre, is that we are forgetting how to tell stories. It’s really all about the story. I can’t always do this opening night. I have to hide during intermission but once we are into the run, I like talking to the audience during intermission because I am inevitably asked what happens to Agnete? Well, you have to wait and see. The second act is coming. I know that if people are sitting in the audience and they are listening to the story then they will get all the themes that I am trying to get across. If they hear the story, they will get everything I am trying to tell them."
How is Kate Hennig doing reprising this role?
"Kate is incredible. She really embodies the woman. It is quite amazing to see. She did quite a lot of research that the rest of the cast didn’t have – during the first rehearsal of our first run. She asked me if she could look at the originals - poems, and notes and translations of all forms, that created the scene where Agnete is being questioned – right off the top of the second act - where she is being asked a multitude of ridiculous questions. That all came from an actual form that Agnete had to fill out after the war. I lent all that stuff to Kate so she could mull it over and spend weeks becoming the person. It’s really amazing to see the transformation from Kate to my great aunt. Every night she manages to pull it off and that second act is a killer and the fact that Kate can actually act that. There’s going to be days where she has two shows a day and I don’t know how she is going to do it."
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