Introduction and Interview with Jan Woolf by George Dimitrakopoulos
The Year 2016 was the centennial from the time that the Arabs decided to rebel against the Ottoman Empire. It was at that time that a talented young British Intelligence Officer, archaeologist by education and knowledgeable of the Middle East, under the name of T.E. Lawrence ,would play an important role influencing the outcome of the events, since not only rallied Arab Tribal leaders behind the cause, but envisaged the future of the Arab tribes the day after the revolt would be over.
His knowledge placed under the cause of the revolt, his ideas about the future of the Arab tribes and his vision about how, on the basis of the above the area should look like have been presented in his book entitled “ The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” as well as in the map he drafted and presented in the British cabinet in 1918. The map was considered lost for a long period but was discovered in 2005 and presented in The Imperial War Museum in London in the context of an exhibition entitled: Lawrence of Arabia: The Life, The Legend.
The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire had been viewed by the Allies and the British in particular as an important development that would further weaken the Ottoman Empire having to fight two wars at the same time. However, British and French colonial interests , secretly ,influenced developments so as to reach a settlement in the area that would better serve them , rather than acknowledge the sensitivities of the Arabs as well as the different characteristics of the broader area within which the revolt was unfolded. British military Officer and later diplomat and MP Mark Sykes and his French counterpart Georges Picot had concluded an Agreement that bears their names aiming at ensuring the British and French spheres of influence in the area . The Agreement that was kept secret for sometime but , after the Bolshevik revolution, was revealed by the new Soviet Government in the context of wider disclosures of the secret archives of the Tczar. The Arab leaders and tribes once they heard about the Agreement felt betrayed. Betrayed and disillusioned was also T.E Lawrence who as it can be seen, from the map and the plan he presented to the British cabinet in1918 ,as well as from thoughts and comments in his book, felt that the sensibilities of the Arabs rather than the European colonial considerations should have been a priority.
Analyzing the evolution of events as well as the developments that led to the current unprecedented crisis in the Middle East, one easily understands the shadow that the Sykes-Picot Agreement still casts upon the area. And it is not by accident that many important historians and writers Noam Chomsky included, have been criticizing this Agreement characterizing it as “ the Source of all the Evils” for it’s harmful consequences. At the same time, today perhaps more than ever, it would be a great injustice not to insist on the fact that had Lawrence’s ideas been heard and adopted the situation would have been different and certainly to the better. Lawrence’s vision and proposals plant a flag for a project in “ Applied History”, a method currently taught at Harvard University by Prof. Graham Allison , which consists of the attempt to illuminate current policy challenges by analyzing historical precedents and analogues. Lawrence’s vision included a separate state for the Kurds similar to that proposed by the Kurds of Iraq and Syria today. He had proposed the grouping of the people of Jordan Syria and parts of Saudi Arabia in a state based on tribal patterns. He envisioned a state called Palestine and did not want to separate Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites a matter that to this date divides the country.
It is clear that the comparison between recent developments in the area and Lawrence’s ideas as well as the juxtaposition of later ideas and proposals about the” status quo” in the area make T.E Lawrence a legend. So did Film director David Lean with his well known film “ Lawrence of Arabia” in which the late actor Peter O’Toole impersonated Lawrence ,filling audiences all over the World with enthusiasm. However, although the production is by all means a fascinating one, it would be unfair not to underline that the personality of Lawrence, his life and his ideas have inspired historians and play writers who have written articles and plays on his life and work. It would also be unfair not to underline the important role of The T.E. Lawrence Society , established in 1985 and ever since existing to provide information about the life and career of T.E. Lawrence. For the centennial of the Arab Revolt and the role of Lawrence, the Society has organized a series of interesting events this year, which will culminate with the Symposium to take place in September at Oxford, U.K. A major event during the Symposium will be the presentation of the very interesting play on T.E Lawrence, entitled “The Man With The Gold” written by author Jan Woolf who in 2013 has been writer in residence for the Great Arab Revolt archaeological dig in Jordan. There is certainly an art in establishing and revealing the connection between the past and the present, the impact of the landscape within which events were developed and, the values and messages of universal nature that the life, the work and the ideas of T.E Lawrence includes. Jan Woolf has succeeded in doing both with a magnificent manner in her play that is read and will certainly be seen with breathless attention.
This year 2018 marks the centennial from the end of the Arab Revolt. And next year 2019 will mark the centennial from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. T.E Lawrence was present at the Paris Peace Conference as an advisor to King Feisal who was trying to promote the Arab cause. Thus Jan Woolf’s play is , justifiably , in season and hopefully will be presented in London theaters and not only
An interview with the author of the play ”The Man with the Gold” Jan Woolf
When did you decide to write a play about TE Lawrence?
October 2013, after a few days as writer in residence with the Great Arab Revolt Project in Jordan. I had intended to write a short story about Lawrence for the World War One centenary, but as I scraped at the sand, digging out the detritus of war: chunks of train wreck, soldiers buttons, and cartridges my ideas were forming into a play. The processes of archaeology are, as Freud described psychoanalysis – those of delayering. So the first idea was a de-layering of Lawrence’s life and personality through the stripping of clothes – desert khaki, Arab robes, RAF uniform, down to shorts and vest and the wounded, violated person he was. I use this as a metaphor for the violation of nations – and the political and psychological consequences. ‘…I was unmoored you see.’
I had been working with the No Glory in war campaign – set up to challenge our government’s narratives of the ‘necessity’ of the First World War, where I met historian Neil Faulkner, the director of the dig. This enriched the history and background of the Middle East in WW1 – but I knew I wanted to write about the present, with commentary from the ghost of Lawrence. I didn’t want a purely historical play.
I was very interested in Lawrence as a teenage girl. Seeing the film at sixteen led to the predictable crush on the beautiful Peter O’Toole – but this was a portal to the real Lawrence, as within a year I had read all of his books and letters to the British political and literary establishment. He was a terrific writer and I was hungry for deeper historical and literary education and I draw on this adolescent experience for the play.
What are the main messages you want to project and stress through your play?
You have to be careful about messages in plays. If anything appears to be didactic, the drama suffers and the audience switches off. Messages and values have to be conveyed through character as part of that character’s journey. They also need ambivalence and complexity, so that good questions are asked, rather than answers given. There are several themes running through the play like a fugue; intimacy, betrayal, myth making, and the recent history of the Middle East. My ‘mortal’ characters (the middle aged archaeologists) are seeking intimacy with each other, and this is the comedy, pathos and drama. Lawrence, I believe, only ever found it once. He says in the play ‘…the absence of it after that is its own keen knowledge …His early relations with a mother who beat him would have made any intimacy difficult. But I hypothetically explore the emotional intimacy with the young Arab boy, Dahoum – the assumed dedicatee in the poem that prefaces the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. ‘I loved you so I drew these tides of men into my hands, to earn you freedom…..’ and so on. It’s a marvelous poem and I play with it during a scene where it is misinterpreted, where the character Adrian does not see the ghost that Caroline is talking to, only the painting it has stepped out of. Dahoum died of fever before the end of the war – Lawrence’s personal tragedy – but the far greater political tragedy of Sykes-Picot – is what led to his nervous breakdown. I’m also interested in what Socialists used to call the National Question – what an individual’s relationship is to their country, why people will fight for it and under what circumstances does this become a progressive, rather than a reactionary thing. I explore this through the other ghost characters of Feisal (the leader of a potential country) and Auda Abu Tayi, the leader of a tribe ‘…where there were no universal values.’
Someone said that all good drama should address loneliness ‘…quite different from blissful solitude.’ Lawrence was a very lonely man and I explore Freud’s notion of the lonely psyche – through the metaphor of ‘…a missing dagger looking for its scabbard.
I also consider betrayal – both in the characters’ personal lives and the big political questions. It is ultimately the museum technician Muzz – a young man of Jordanian heritage, and the most ‘sane’ character in the play – who is betrayed through misinterpretation of his motives. Another theme is how myths are made. My middle part – Lawrence the illusion looks at how myth is made through film. ‘Ah film – born at the same time I was.’ The American newsman Lowell Thomas needed a British hero that would help the American people support US entry into the war ‘…preferably one not mired in mud.’ Later of course David Lean’s film made Lawrence of Arabia a household name. Without these cinematic interventions Lawrence’s name may just have been found in military dispatches as an intelligence officer. These themes have to work in harmony, or the play will have neither balance nor integrity.
Can you give us some details about the plot, the main characters, the costumes, the music and the setting.
I’ve always liked the aesthetic balance of the triptych, so I have three parts in which three aspects of Lawrence appear – the ghost, the illusion and the actor. Two actors are required. The play’s setting is a museum where finds from the desert dig are being displayed – and where other ghosts, Feisal and Auda (only seen by the audience) are summoned. This way you can tell a story with split time. These ghosts by the way, spill little piles of sand, so we get the sense that the desert is intruding into the museum – the past into the present. As objects are laid out, the audience learns of the history of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in WW1, told through the dramatic tension of the trio of ‘mortals’ on stage.
I also look at how the myth was built in the middle part of the play, through dialogue between the ‘film star’ Lawrence, and Caroline, who has summoned him up from her imagination and who steps out of his portrait. This illusory Lawrence uses her to help him find a true death – so he is ‘…no longer trapped in a film.’
Music is important. Lawrence listened to music constantly after the war; Bach, Beethoven, Delius; all the important composers. ‘…It made my blood run smoother.’ I use the music he liked in the play and also some of the film music by Maurice Jarre, which is shallower, but very good. I’ve always been interested in the juxtaposition of music and image, and one morning on the dig, I wandered off and played a Bach Goldberg variation on my ipad to the desert. It was lovely, creating a new emotional state. This is the opening of the play – with the beauty of the music resonating with the beauty of the landscape. I think that film and TV producers miss a trick here, as there is a tendency to play ‘ethnic’ soundtracks against images of a country – sitar in India, oud in the desert etc., which is clichéd. I listened to French chamber music at Delhi station last year – it was stunning. I played Vaughan Williams’ (A Lark Ascending) while watching the sun set on a minaret in Turkey. Utterly lovely. I like drama that plays with these juxtapositions – it heightens the language.
Are there general themes and principles relating this play with the themes you have addressed in previous works of yours and if so which are these.
Intimacy I guess, in, how people seek it, fear it, and evade it. Also how personal relationships impact on politics. This will be my fourth performed play, and these themes always crop up – the comedy of Eros, the dance of human vulnerability playing out against big events. My short story collection ‘Fugues on a Funny Bone’ is a comic/tragic collection inspired by children in a childrens’ home, and their attempts to manage their own lives. I have a novel being serialized ‘Untitled’ where an aging painter reminisces about a life blighted by war as preparations for his exhibition are finished. Gallery and Museum spaces are a favourite setting with me. I’ve spent a lot of time in them, and was part of a campaign to keep museums free in the UK. For what is seen within four walls can be momentous in the imagination.
Looking at the situation in the Middle East today, and thinking of Lawrence’s ideas and actions what conclusions would you draw?
The Man With the Gold is a work of the imagination – yet it has to have emotional truth and political plausibility. My title refers to how the Bedouin really saw him – that it was British gold (guns and intelligence) that bought the allegiance. That behind war is commerce. Feisal, who had deep respect, even love for Lawrence notes that ‘… the British discovered the oil your warships needed in 1914’. And later in the play I use the magical realism of switching blood for oil.
I also suggest what Lawrence, Feisal and Auda, might have thought about the present, particularly in the formation and actions of Islamic State – a pathological (but not surprising) response to the barbarity of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Feisal says in the play ‘…you released the dark things that inhabit the crooked corners of the mind.’ It was Lawrence who said this, but I’ve used it for Feisal as he has a kind of double act with Lawrence’s ghost at the end of the play. This is to break up Lawrence’s big speech and to show that Feisal was an urbane and sophisticated person. My characters can be emphatic, even if I dare not. I also explore Lawrence’s guerilla tactics, which hold true today ‘…but how do you bomb a thing intangible, without front or back?’ The other aspect of Lawrence’s thinking is that a United Arabia, free of the colonial yoke was a cause worth fighting for. But Lawrence’s romanticism didn’t reckon on the tenacity of the imperial powers. He was intrigued by Lenin, but where Lenin looked forward, Lawrence looked backward into a romantic past – and was stung by it ‘…I was too intellectually freighted to imagine another future.’ He couldn’t negotiate Arab independence at Versailles, where Sykes Picot was played out. ‘…fighting a war from desks and chairs, that’s what really saps the spirit.’ I recently read Ali A Allawi’s fine biography of Feisal and noted how Feisal was objectified and romanticized at Versailles.
You have travelled in the Middle East and visited certain areas, e.g. Petra in Jordan. While you were there did you feel tempted to reconstruct the conditions within which T.E Lawrence lived and worked? If so, which were the main thoughts and “ images” that you would like to share.
I didn’t go to a city so my experience is limited. My time in Jordan was spent mainly in the desert, and working with archaeologists gave me a privileged insight and experience. I was absorbed by the extraordinary silence and beauty. People think there is nothing there, but the richness of layered colour, is completely unlike anywhere else I have experienced. It’s not too hot in October, so I could appreciate this in comfort. I did wonder about warfare in searing heat though – how horrible this would have been. Scraping at that train wreck helped me imagine the horror – and to understand the methods of guerilla warfare that Lawrence developed. You can only do this with an intimate knowledge of landscape.
Wandering around the small Jordanian town of Wadi Musi I was struck by how tactile and relaxed people were with one another, particularly with children, who seemed to be happy, perpetually smiling. I’d liked to have gone into a Bedouin tent – but wasn’t invited. I found Petra stunning, and riding a horse there, in the early evening, the call to prayer bouncing off the rose red walls, was wonderful. That’s why I have chosen this picture to accompany the interview. The blue iPad cover, bought in Wadi Musa makes me laugh, I have modern and ancient in the same picture. Wadi Rumm was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. It’s a tragedy that tourism is so low because of the neighboring wars in which the west is implicated.
Finally, thanking you for this interview , what would be the message you would like to send as a writer, and active and sensitive citizen to your fellow citizens.
Stay active and stay sensitive. I have made the political and dramatic points already, so I’ll finish with this – If you have an itch to write – and are fascinated enough about the subject then write about it. The older you are the more you have to write about and the richer the writing. Don’t be stuck by genre – find the form that suits what you want to say. For this project I am a playwright. My next idea may suit a short story, or novel. Don’t define or limit yourself through genre. It’s the energy and commitment that are important. Reading and activism are important too – to keep the mind lively. As is working with others. So find some others for a feedback group. Just do it, and enjoy it.
Jan Woolf
The Man With the Gold had its first play had its first reading at London’s Cockpit theatre in January this year, where it was generously supported by the T.E Lawrence Society to help develop it for the performance at their symposium this September 23rd.
Biography Jan Woolf http://janwoolf.com . Born in 1949, she trained as a painter and taught art and special needs in London schools for many years. She later became an events producer, with a brief spell as a film examiner. She had a parallel existence as an activist, working on many campaigns for the peace movement – and held the first writers’ residency at the Hackney Empire, London. Author of a book of short stories ‘Fugues on a Funny Bone’, a novella ‘Untitled,’ many reviews and articles, and four performed plays. She has a son.
