GIVE ME YOUR LOVE
GIVE ME YOUR LOVE
OBERON BOOKS
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First published in 2016 by Oberon Books Ltd
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Copyright © Jon Haynes & David Woods, 2015
Jon Haynes and David Woods are hereby identified as authors of this play in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The authors have asserted their moral rights.
All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to c/o Oberon Books. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.
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PB ISBN: 9781783193448
EPUB ISBN: 9781783193455
Cover image by Sarah Walker
Printed, bound and converted
by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
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Contents
Introduction
Characters
Chapter
By the same authors
Introduction
As I write this Britain has just joined Russian, America and France in airstrikes in Syria. Economic exercises have dominated the debate but as we have learned from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan the real cost to both civilian and military lives is incalculable and enduring. For veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) the source of trauma is often indefinable and inaccessible. Talking may trigger nightmarish hallucinations that are hard to shake off, and innocuous stimuli can trigger violent reactions and self-harm.
Give Me Your Love is the second in a trilogy of productions1 by Jon Haynes and David Woods, Artistic Directors of Ridiculusmus, that are specifically concerned with the relationship between therapeutic innovation and mental health service users.
David Woods and Jon Haynes have developed a process of making theatre that incorporates academics and therapists into an iterative cycle of devised experiments. Give Me Your Love has been informed by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) founded by Rick Doblin, research by Michael Mithoefer into MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD in North Carolina, by Tom Shroder’s The Acid Test (2015) and by Ben Sessa’s account of the cultural and medical history of the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, but also by their specific personal experiences of the ways in which masculine identities and notions of the hero have been formed through childhoods in England and Wales.
As students I remember we harvested magic mushrooms from cowpats in the fields outside the city. At home we stewed them up and drank the psilocybin as a gritty tea. Outdoors, under the glowing orange street lamps, the forms of flattened maple leaves were reproduced in multi-coloured fractal trails. Steam from my sweating head prickled and mingled with the drizzle, and the wet tarmac seemed to become a sublime extension of my body. I felt atomized and emotionally charged by the array of city lights in the distance.
I am alarmed to read now on Gov.uk that Magic Mushrooms, Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and LSD are still listed as Class A drugs in the UK and the penalty for possession is seven years imprisonment. In the 1970s MDMA-assisted therapy was used in the UK to treat relationships, or ‘marriage problems’; but following tragedies resulting from an unregulated recreational use of Ecstasy (from contaminated drugs, or overheating at raves or excessive water consumption), popular and media interest has focused on an apparently hedonistic counter culture and makes exaggerated associations with addiction and drug-related crime, while glossing over the social effects of legal drugs such as alcohol.
ZACH: I’ll be coffeeing off my tits.
Give Me Your Love visits these popular misconceptions and hypocrisies and revels in the comedy of amateur self-medication by a pair of veteran Welsh squaddies.