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Kathryn and Lewis Howden - A Slow Air and A Family Affair

Kathryn and Lewis Howden don't look too happy standing outside the stage door of Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre. It's Tuesday afternoon, and the brother and sister actors have just arrived in town from their Glasgow homes to do their bit in Educating Agnes, Liz Lochhead's scurrilous Scots version of seventeenth century French satirist Moliere's The School For Wives, which is in the last week of its run, and truth is, they're both pretty knackered.

The reason for the siblings fatigue is that, rather than indulge in days off, they're currently spending their mornings and early afternoons rehearsing A Slow Air, a new play by David Harrower commissioned for The Tron Theatre's Mayfesto season. Previously advertised as Day Long, so fresh off the page is the piece, A Slow Air tells a difficult tale of fractured familial ties, as a brother who flew the nest of his Edinburgh home and his estranged and some time wild child sister are forced together for the first time in fourteen years. Now both in their forties, the verbal short-hand between Athol and Morna may still linger from their youth, but the intervening years have also left something more significantly unspoken.

Such a fractious liaison all seems a far cry from how the Howdens get on, however similar their Edinburgh upbringing may or may have been. You can tell, from how Kathryn deals with Lewis's inflamed and red raw face caused by some yet to be identified allergy.

“You'll need to get some proper cream for that,” she says with a quietly concerned maternal streak.

Round the corner in the Traverse Theatre bar cafe nestled in a dimly-lit booth tailor-made for flamboyantly illicit trysts, the Howdens contemplate the nature of A Slow Air and their fictional relationship within it.

“There are loads of issues that on the surface are quite mundane,” Lewis observes, “but it's families, so it's never mundane. The small things have a big impact.”

The roots of A Slow air stem back several years ago, when Harrower and Kathryn spoke about him writing some kind of vehicle for her. While originally intended as a solo piece, as the scenario expanded to include a brother for Kathryn's character, however much all parties tried to avoid it, Lewis, who last worked with harrower on the very first 1995 production of Harrower's 1995 debut, Knives In Hens, was the obvious choice to play opposite her.

“The actual reality of it is we're bang on the ages,” says Lewis. “We're from the right place. I did move west quite a long time ago. It's like it was written for us both. In the play I'm the older brother, the more solid and dutiful of the two, whereas she is....”

“I'm more of a radge,” Kathryn interjects.”

Lewis is more circumspect about the characters.

“She had more get up and go when she was younger,” he says, “so got up and went, and I was left to look after the parents. To say that I'm the sensible one isn't quite right, because she's very clever, but she's maybe made some daft choices in her life, whereas my life's more normal, and I've avoided making any kind of choices, really.”

Kathryn expands on this.

“When she was younger I think she was a bit mad,” she says, “and while she's not a victim, she has a tendency to blame everyone else except herself for her situation. She was a single parent, and when she was younger I think she was drinking a lot and went with men quite a lot. She was making bad choices, and when we meet her she's still a bit like that. But with both characters there are some heart-breaking moments, and because we're that age now as well, there's a poignancy there that's to do with what ifs and what they should have done. The fourteen year gap probably shouldn't have happened.”

Such family breakdowns are common enough in real life to lend A Slow Air a certain degree of universality. As with Blackbird, Harrower's last major work, however, it's what's left unsaid that matters.

“I think we've all been there in various relationships in families when you say something and you imagine that next week it'll all be okay,” Lewis points out, “but unless somebody goes and does something about making it okay it'll keep going. That's what happens with them. They just never get round to doing anything, and it gets harder to do something about it, and easier to be without the person. In the play they were very close at one point, so there's longing and regret there. It's funny, because it's the same in all our lives. You only know afterwards when the important moments were. When you're in the middle of one you don't know it.”

In real life, Kathryn and Lewis grew up in an environment where they were exposed to performance from their father, comedian and actor Alec 'Happy' Howden. It was Kathryn who turned to acting first, auditioning for drama school six years on the trot before she got in. As with his character in A Slow Air, Lewis was the pragmatic one in the family, and was well on the road to becoming an analytical chemist inbetween messing about at youth theatre. After realising that science wasn't for him, Lewis started managing pubs, and only took drama seriously after Kathryn, who by now was a first year student at RSAMD, shoved a prospectus in his hands. Lewis was on a kibbutz in Israel when he found out he'd passed his audition, and took extra pleasure from being the year below his kid sister.

Oddly, considering how long they've been in the industry, the Howdens had never worked together before onstage until last year. Neither party are sure whether directors had resisted casting them together, but their appearance as an elderly couple in Linda McLean's play, Any Given Day at the Traverse Theatre seems to have broken the mould. While the pair don't actually appear together in any scenes in Educating Agnes, A Slow Air will see them both onstage throughout the play's hour-long duration.

“I don't know whether people thought it was quite weird casting us together,” Kathryn muses, “but there was a woman who came to see Educating Agnes and said to my dad that she'd seen his daughter. He asked what about my son, and she'd never got it that we were brother and sister.”

“Two redheads with big noses called Howden,” deadpans Lewis. “How could she miss us? But I think after we worked together the first time directors realised we weren't going to kill each other.”

Beyond Mayfesto, A Slow Air is set for an Edinburgh run as part of The Traverse Theatre's Edinburgh Festival Fringe season. It's the sort of piece, too, Lewis observes, that's economical enough to be able to pull out of the bag at their and Harrower's choosing. In the meantime, Lewis is more concerned about the rash on his face.

“I've got to find out what I'm allergic to,” he says, making one last joke as he walks towards the Lyceum. “Maybe it's my sister.”

A Slow Air, Tron Theatre, Glasgow as part of Mayfesto, May 11th-21st
www.tron.co.uk

The Herald, May 10th 2011

ends

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