Viv Hardwick chats with singer-songwriter Beccy Owen about switching to acting and a one-woman show at Newcastle this week.

SINGER-Songwriter Beccy Owen has switched from attempting to climbing the charts to the equally daunting role of solo actress in the first experimental play from Live Theatre Newcastle’s Live Lab.

Bravely battling a cold the Newcastle-based performer talked about her collaboration with Scottish writer/director Laura Lindow which has produced Sawdust and Stardust, about over-ambitious mountain-climbing Stella.

The idea for the play came from the life of mountaineer Cathy O’Dowd, the only woman to have climbed Mount Everest from both sides.

“She was on BBC Radio 4 and told of coming across a woman who was injured on Everest and she had to make the choice to try and help her up to the summit or go back down. She ended up choosing to leave the woman and the body is still up there. The way Cathy O’Dowd talked about the situation was really quite beautiful and it captured our imagination. And we wondered what it was like to face such an elemental decision and it was also monstrous because there was no guilt in her voice and she was quite pragmatic about the situation,” says Owen about the “survival of the fittest” attitude which occurs on a mountain range where rescue is out of the question.

So the two women decided to create a play which put a woman in a similar position.

“But there is some comedy in there,” beams Owen to stop our conversation from looking too much on life’s darker side.

On the challenge of taking on this onewoman work, she explains: “It is a lot of words to learn, but during the work-in-progress session last year we took that bull by the horns for a half-an-hour piece. In some ways I’ve been thinking about how being a singer-songwriter has positioned my mind in such a way that I can cope with an hour-and-a-half set. Sometimes I’ve been putting a melody to the words, even when there isn’t one, just to help me.”

Surprisingly, apart from atmospheric sounds and snatches of song, Owen and Lindow opted not to include any songs in the project which follows the fortunes of a thirtysomething looking for a female climbing companion.

“We did have some songs earlier, but became more interested in a more experimentalpiece with more abstract layers of sound that I’ve created. We also needed sounds between the recorded voice and live performance,” explains Owen about her character re-living the memories of being rescued from the mountain.

“A lot of people don’t like their own voice or feel uncomfortable of singing or speaking in front of other people and we’ve used that idea quite a lot in the story. We decided to limit the sounds I created to the mountain, the weather and her voice because it’s about her relating back to what’s happened with whatever storytelling tools she can find at a time when she’s post-traumatic and probably hypothermic,”

says Owen.

The performer has been a singer-songwriter for the past ten years since leaving Newcastle University in the North-East.

“I’ve done a little bit of acting previously but this is the first opportunity for me to be an actor first and a musician second. Laura and I had known about each other for ages,” Owen says of Lindow, who became a clown doctor entertaining children in Tyneside hospitals in 2006 before creating the play Heartbreak Soup for the Edinburgh Festival in 2008.

“We’d always admired each other’s work from afar and I got more interested in writing so this play was a natural progression,” she adds.

So is Sawdest and Stardust preferable to banging her head against the wall of the music industry?

“It does feel like coming home a little bit. I’ve got my own record label and I engage with the industry when I have to, but it’s changed so much over the last few years. DIYers do have a chance now, but it’s really lovely to come back to theatre.

“It really helps having co-written the piece because we are not coming in cold. We know the character and I’m not sure how we’d fare if we didn’t know Stella. We’ve been living with her for such a long time,” says Owen who hopes that Sawdust and Stardust will tour after it’s week-long run ends on Saturday.

I ask about a follow-up work, which some seem to regard as more important than the debut project.

“It hadn’t occurred to me at all, so don’t say that… we’ll have one ready for you by March,”

she jokes.

* Sawdust and Stardust, Studio, Live Theatre, Newcastle, until Saturday. 8pm. Tickets: £8.

Age range: 14-plus. Box Office: 0191-232-1232 live.org.uk