Rachel Trezise on the NHS’ 70th birthday.
The award-winning author and playwright Rachel Trezise chats to Carl Marsh about her latest play Cotton Fingers, written in commemoration of the NHS’s 70th birthday.
Since winning the first Dylan Thomas Prize (set up to recognise talented authors under the age of 30) in 2006 for her second book Fresh Apples, Treorchy-born Rachel Trezise has seized upon plentiful opportunities to write in different fields. Her latest project is a monologue play called Cotton Fingers, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the birth of the NHS. The project is being put together by National Theatre Wales as part of its Love Letters To The NHS season, and Trezise opted to tackle one of the more taboo issues in our great institution’s history, that of abortion.
Cotton Fingers tells the story of a young Irish woman who comes to Wales seeking an abortion. Due to the NHS, women in the mainland UK have been able to get abortions for decades now, but this still remains a controversial topic on both sides of the border in Ireland (and for that matter, here). The 1967 Abortion Act was never extended to cover Northern Ireland, where it is still illegal, with Europe’s harshest penalty for abortion; any female having an abortion in Northern Ireland could in theory face life imprisonment.
What compelled Trezise to write about this topic? She mentions that she was drawn to the fact that, despite the project being called Love Letters To The NHS, it didn’t have to all be about “sweet letters about how people had their lives saved by the NHS.” Why did she opt for something more difficult?
“Mainly because abortion is controversial to lots of people. It’s just so radical, even the idea of the NHS is so radical in the first place, but then a large proportion of society would disagree with women being allowed to have funded abortions, and yet the NHS do it. I just think that is wonderful as there must be so much pressure for [the NHS] not to.”
She was shocked by the fact that National Theatre Wales even said yes to the idea, but perhaps even more daunted by the next step: “‘Oh no, now I’ve got to write it!’” she laughs. So is that why she choose to make an even bigger impact by having the story be about an Irish girl coming over from Belfast?
“A large proportion of society would disagree with women being allowed to have funded abortions, and yet the NHS still do it.”
“It was to create more of an impact, but also the timing was lucky because, when I was writing the play, the law had just been changed”. As of June 2017, after 69 years, the NHS was finally allowed to pay for people from Northern Ireland to come over to the mainland and have an abortion, stopping women from having to fund it all themselves, and since then there has been a 14% increase in the number of women from Northern Ireland having free abortions. In another moment of serendipitous timing with the play, the results of the referendum on abortion in the Republic Of Ireland will be known by the time you read this, and it will be interesting to see how, if at all, the context of Cotton Fingers changes in that time.
Regardless of how radical or not the NHS is or how taboo the subject matter of Cotton Fingers is, Rachel ends by saying: “I just want people to appreciate how wonderful the NHS is and what a difference it makes to people’s lives in the UK. The play is about two generations of women – one who is the mother who came to the UK a long time ago and had an horrific experience, then her daughter has an abortion as well. They don’t talk about it amongst themselves but the daughter has a better experience.
“What I want people to take from the play is what an impact the NHS makes. In the UK we take the NHS for granted a lot.”
Cotton Fingers, Memorial Hall, Aberaeron, Wed 4 + Thurs 5 July; Merlin Theatre, Haverfordwest, Fri 8 July. Tickets: £10-£15. Info: 029 2035 3070 / www.nationaltheatrewales.org