It Snows - The Writer and Her Aims

Writer Background

Bryony Lavery, from Yorkshire, is a writer of various plays including It Snows. She began her career as an actress before moving onto writing. After the suicide of her ex-husband and deaths of her parents, Lavery (despite her age of over 50) came out as a lesbian and has dedicated much of her career to write better parts for women.

Why were they writing

Much of Lavery's work has feminist undertones and she has even written plays with almost entirely female casts such as More Light which only has one male speaking role. In this regard, she would seem rather similar to Churchill and her feminist tones, however, much of Lavery's early work seems to stem from showing the audience a good time. Lavery has written five plays for the National Theatre Connection series of which It Snows was published in, in 2016.

The aim

In the notes at the beginning of the play, Lavery has commented that she intended the play to be performed in the style of Frantic Assembly and indeed she wrote it for the company as well as for Connections hence why we decided on making a Frantic Assembly style around the piece. It should be noted that Lavery wanted It Snows to be an enjoyable experience for an audience and therefore included no political message or feminist undertones. This is one of the reasons why we chose this piece - it comes into direct conflict with Churchill's political agenda in Heart's Desire. Other reasons why we decided to look at this piece is because we loved the Frantic Assembly style and it was a play we hadn't encountered before and wanted to challenge ourselves.

The extract in context

Certainly, I feel that we have stuck to Lavery's aim. We have not made any political comments in the piece and have performed it in the style of Frantic Assembly. It must be noted, however, that Lavery didn't want any changes to the script and in one place we have done this - the split stage sequence between the party and the bus stop scene. Ideally, we would have liked to keep this juxtaposition in the piece, however, as we had a small group this would be impossible to get the feel that Lavery had described in the stage directions - that the party should feel more and more cramped.