Nostalgia
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Lucinda Coxon on Nostalgia

About 10 years ago, I was in rehearsal with a play in Cardiff, staying at the director's house in Penylan—a little district of the city. I can remember sitting in that house, picking up a Sunday paper, and seeing a review of a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which said he'd visited Penylan in 1919 to attend a séance with a Welsh medium, hoping to contact his eldest son. The son had died as a delayed consequence of wounds sustained on the Somme.
That morning in that house was where the writing of NOSTALGIA really began.  It's a very unusual starting point for me—something so specific. I never work like that. But the more I found out, the more intriguing it all became. Doyle was a leading light in the resurgence of Spiritualism after the First World War, and like many other people, he particularly valued its apparently scientific approach.

Of course, this was a time when an incredible number of young men had lost their lives in the war. These were also the early days of photography, and there was a killing to be made producing "spirit photographs." A family would pose for the photographer, and the print would reveal a bright light right beside them—the "spirit" of a departed loved one. It was easy to manipulate people because they didn't understand the photographic process.
Séances were pretty good theatre at this time too—flying chairs, mediums spewing ooze, trumpets blowing themselves. If you've ever attended a spiritualist session, you know that it's a theatrical experience in other ways—an act of willed disbelief, of interpretation. You only get out of it what you put in. On a bad day it's a cheap mind reading act, as Harry Houdini was always trying to tell Conan Doyle. But Doyle believed; he was passionately committed.

This all tied in for me somehow with the Welsh pagan folklore of the Sin-eater - a person who made a living as an outcast, eating plates of food from the chests of the dead and dying, taking those sins upon him or herself, to leave pure the departing soul.  I think I'm slightly obsessed with sin-eating actually.  A number of my other plays (and films) seem somehow to be about this same transaction one way or another—irrespective of when and where they are set. I would struggle to come up with a more succinct encapsulation of what most of the world faiths and all psychoanalytic transactions are actually about.