As an artist and theatre maker, Pamela Howard defies easy classification. A theatre designer by training, she later advocated for “a seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and spectators”, in her work.
She famously coined the term Scenography to describe this more expansive and integrated approach to theatre making. Her magnum opus, What Is Scenography?, in three editions is now translated into seven languages including Chinese, and has become the definitive text on the subject internationally.
But perhaps a simpler way to define Pamela is as a storyteller.
The daughter of a Jewish émigré father from Riga, and émigré grandparents from Belorussia, Pamela’s work has returned again and again to the theme of the dispossessed, the refugee… to those whose stories are overlooked or struggle to find a voice.
“We have to tell their stories”, she says.
So, I was fascinated to visit her in her studio and home by the sea in Selsey to understand what it might reveal about her story.
The Studio
“When you get to the sea and can’t go any further, you have arrived” Pamela had said by way of directions. On a chilly, grey day in late January, and after a detour around the flooded roads of the marshy hinterland of this part of West Sussex, we arrived at Pamela’s home.
She greeted us with a wave from the studio at the end of her garden. A giant broken pencil, a find picked up in a street in Elephant and Castle, swings over the entrance – “I work under the sign of the broken pencil” Pamela quips as she ushers us in.
The sound of the sea crashing on the pebbles a few yards away recedes as we enter the warm, cocooning, colourful embrace of her studio.
Allan Tsui, on a two-month professional development award from the Hong Kong Design Institute, sits at a desk working on a new project… the latest member in her extended “family” of students and collaborators.
Posters for shows in London, Brno, Ljubljana, Glasgow, Prague, Toronto, Los Angeles, Thessaloniki, and Belgrade cover the walls. Every square inch of space has drawings, pots of pencils and pens, itemised files, shoeboxes full of drawings. I spy a postcard given to Pamela by David Hockney – inscribed “Keep drawing, Pamela” – along with a Palomino Black Wing pencil now worn down to a stub. Drawing is self-evidently at the heart of her practice and is the defining activity of this studio space. Joyful creativity is balanced by a fierce sense of industry and order.
"It may seem chaotic to you, but I know where every single thing is."
A huge storyboard of a current project dominates one side of the space – a production celebrating the life and times of Irish playwright and poet, Brendan Behan. Allan shows us a model of Behan in a hospital bed, stomach extended – “that’s the booze, you know” says Pamela.
To the left, a drawing desk is crowded with the initial concept work for another production – this one destined to inaugurate a new theatrical space at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where she holds the position of International Chair in Drama. The College have acquired The Old Library in the Centre of Cardiff. The theme is close to Pamela’s heart – a new work to celebrate the Welsh history of welcoming refugees and migrants and incorporating their stories into the Welsh national story.
In the studio a seating area to one side is actually a bed and behind that is a well-equipped bathroom with shower and WC. A “tiny little kitchen” sits on the other side – “I don’t really cook in here, but I’ve got a little fridge I can use and occasionally end up staying the night.” It is an entirely self-sufficient space.
Pamela built the studio in 2003 after a divorce – “for the first time in my life I had what I now know is called liquidity. I’d never had liquidity. I thought it was a drink… but anyway, I had liquidity and I thought, what do I want most in the world? I want a studio where I can be myself.”
"I’d always worked in converted bedrooms, you know, and I hated it, but I dreamt that one day I'd have a studio... So this is why my recently published commissioned book by Bloomsbury/Methuen under their imprint The Art of Making Theatre is called An Arsenal of Dreams in 12 Scenes. Because you must dream to know what you want. If you dream enough, you get it."
We break for a picnic lunch, but before that Pamela invites us on a guided tour around her house.
From the outside her home resembles a charming but unassuming seaside bungalow, but inside the story gets more interesting. It was built in 1920 from two converted railway carriages placed parallel to each other and joined together by an apex roof creating a central living space and kitchen. The train carriages that Pamela calls Platform One and Two, house the bedrooms, office, and bathroom.
I venture to Pamela that it seems somehow fitting and symbolic that an artist who herself is a third-generation immigrant, whose work keeps coming back to the idea of the outsider and the displaced, an artist who has worked all over the world, finds her home in a building created from carriages that spent their lives transporting people from A to B. But as with so much with Pamela, the story she tells me is more multi-layered.
The facts alone of how the house came to be are extraordinary enough. The land on which the house was built was bought on a whim by Polish-Jewish garment maker, Jacob Berg, in the early 1920s, whilst on holiday in Sussex. He met a farmer while on a walk and asked him who owned all this land. The farmer replied that he did and after some negotiation Jacob Berg bought the land. He then went into partnership with a Masonic member of his Lodge who was Head of Redundant Trains at Waterloo “nothing is coincidence.” station. The trial ‘holiday house’ was ‘Stewarton’ and was the first of the ‘railway houses’ to be put down in this remote and beautiful part of the Sussex coast. And is now Pamela’s home.
But Pamela reserves the most remarkable part of the story until last – it turned out that Jacob Berg was a competitor of Pamela’s Uncle Louis in the East End of London, and who also worked in the “rag trade”. As a young girl of four living with her mother and maternal grandparents in Newcastle-on-Tyne during the Second World War, Pamela was sent on her own on the train to London to visit her Uncle Louis and his family, and here she heard stories about “the Bergs”…
“They were all immigrants, and worked on ‘piecework’… so much for an arm, or a leg. Jacob Berg had a big contract with Marks and Spencer and he offered the workers half a penny more per leg, per arm. And so, my Uncle Louis either had no work but still had to pay all his workers or he had to work but all the pieceworkers had been taken by Jacob Berg, can you believe it?”
Later Pamela became great friends with Jacob’s grandson, Elias, an actor, who also lived in Selsey, and told her stories about how his grandfather had made her Uncle Louis’ life a misery.
I remark to Pamela that, perhaps, as part of a diaspora, she is always looking for those things that anchor us as humans to a shared story. That she is less careless of the “wonderful web we weave” than those blessed with more certainties.
"Everything has meaning" she says, "nothing is coincidence".
I hug Pamela goodbye and shake hands with Allan – I feel lucky to have been co-opted for a brief period into Pamela’s story – part student, part family, part fellow traveller on a journey that has brought us temporarily together. I remark on the cold and suddenly feel a little sad that we have to leave.
The tide goes in and the tide goes out and you have to remember that.
Pamela Howard OBE is Visiting Professor Emerita at Arts University Bournemouth.
