The Danish Play
Sonja Mills on shaping the story of her great aunt Agnete Ottosen
In Part Two of this four part series, playwright Sonja Mills reveals more about the research involved and her fierce creative drive to bring her great aunt's story to life.
"It’s a bitch to write a play", admits Mills. "It’s really hard and it is why it takes so long. And I think a lot of playwrights get frustrated after a year or two and they don’t produce their second or third draft but when you just stick to it and you work in those kind of layers like The Wild Swan thing ( Mills has a deliberate parallel to Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans inThe Danish Play )- it’s a hell of a process is what it is. I spent the first year of my process just reading about the Danish Resistance – not that that the play is historical. I don’t need it needs a whole lot of exposition about that time or those events but I felt that I needed to be up on it all to feel in that time in order to write about that time."
Did you visit the concentration camps where Agnete was held prisoner?
"Yes, I‘ve been twice to Ravensbruck. I haven’t been to any of the others, but Ravensbruck is a camp just outside of Berlin and it’s quite haunting… because not a lot of people go there – it’s not one of tourist ones." describes Mills. "So you don’t have to wait in line to see the barracks – the whole thing is kind of falling apart. There’s a display there with some photographs and they are falling apart and falling off the walls a little bit. It’s interesting. You can really, really see the ghosts."
Have you ever thought of translating this piece ?
"When we performed this show in Denmark I wanted to keep it in the English and do it in a Danish accent so I think it would actually lose something to be translated into the Danish because it is grammatically already is Danish so it is interesting to hear it in the English. There is someone looking into translating it into German right now – there is an interest in the play in Germany and they are not open to reading things in English as the lovely Danes are."
The Danish Play is very much about inner workings of Agnete’s head. You have so much information, so many notes, forms, diaries yet only a certain amount of space.
"I am strongest as a writer in that I don’t like to overwrite. This is two hour and fifteen minute play which is unheard of for me. I generally won’t even sit through a two hour play. I like things to get to the point. All of the information that I went through – all of Agnete's poems, all of her diaries, and all of her tidbits of her life and the stories that I heard from all the people that she worked with in the Resistance – I just know that if it brings a tear to my eye and it makes me feel something than I know that that’s the thing the audience will feel. If the ending makes me cry, that’s the ending I am going to write. I try not to write for what I think an audience is going to find dramatic because then I think when you write that way, things tend to be melodramatic.
I write about the thing that made me cry when I heard it, then I think I am on the right track. I cried for three days over that one tid bit – of course that was how I was going to end the play. That’s given to you on a platter."
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