Heat! Camera! Action!
The planet’s losing.
We’re in a hole. Climate, nature and social inequality crises. Story with a swerve gets us out. It’s the shape of all our lives. Up-down, down-up. And this shape of slantwise story, it creates hope and agency.
In this podcast, we hear from culture leaders and wanderers, the crossers of boundaries, the story-tellers. They share their ideas on how we get out of holes. Good story is not just a hiding place. It’s a finding place.
The podcast vibe is the warm-dark daguerreotype photograph, invented at the start of the industrialised era, before human-induced carbon pollution of the atmosphere.
My guests are writers and poets, artists and scientists, environmental and business leaders, farmers and landowners, local and national activists, festival directors, therapists, religious leaders. All are storytellers too.
The music clips at the start and end of episodes were recorded at public dances in Punakha and Thimphu (Bhutan).
My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027. It is called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformative Stories for Climate and Nature Recovery."
Heat! Camera! Action!
25 Sarah Woods on being a playwright and systems activist, and how story changes the world
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We’re in a flower-rich meadow in Warwickshire to hear from award-winning playwright Sarah Woods. Sarah works on story across a range of media. She says, story is a way of being. It’s always co-created, including in our minds as we read or listen, changing the “dappled light of the now.” She has written 30+ plays and dramatisations, and an original opera. Her dramatisations for BBC radio, such as on Das Kapital and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, bring to life ideas and works that are rarely read in the original. These move from explanation to drama. Sarah is working on a project in Iceland that focuses on the lives of women in the famed family sagas from 1000 years ago, and works with women’s groups, particularly recent migrants, to turn story into action.
Story, says Sarah, “is always relational.” We should always ask. “Does this story make friends.”
Sarah’s object is a jar of honeycomb.
Her heroine is Jane Goodall, who noticed things.
Her book recommendation is Fritjof Capra’s “The Systems View of Life: A unifying Vision.”
“Origin” is her dramatization of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, and is available to listen to here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002htxs
Her article in Resurgence/Ecologist, “Changing the Story” is available at: https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/current.html
My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."
Well here we are in the heart of Warwickshire. Beautiful day. The country of the most famous playwright in England, Shakespeare's country, and I'm with playwright Sarah Woods. And Sarah, welcome to the show. We're going to hear a bit about the courage and effort required in writing and seeing things put on by other people. And we're also going to talk a little bit about Iceland as well, a project that you've been doing with women in Iceland, exploring the power of story and reinterpretation of story. So lovely to have you on.
SPEAKER_00It's brilliant to see you again, Charles.
SPEAKER_02And you're holding your object here, so let's let's start with that.
SPEAKER_00Well this is some of this year's honeycomb. I'm part of a community beekeeping team. So we we look after the bees together, and um all our bees have survived through the winter. Um and you know they're a perilous, all sorts of perilous times for bees, but they've done quite well, and this is where they'd uh started, they'd got really off to a good start, and they'd made um some honeycomb in the roof of their hive, so we needed to take that off. Um and it was I mean, I just they're amazing creatures in so many ways, and I just I'm always astonished by you know, a jar of honey, a pound jar of honey, which is a biggest jar of honey, but we'd pay even for even for a good honey, we'd pay about 10 pounds perhaps for a biggest jar. Um and to make that jar of honey, be the bees would need to fly something like 55,000 miles. So they'd they need to travel um you know twice around the world to make this one jar of honey, which um it it makes the honey taste very sweet.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, exactly. Um gorgeous. Well we're sitting um looking out on a wildflower meadow here with oxide daisies and buttercup and um yellow rattle also, um and we've got damselflies flying across, so we've we've got lots of wildlife here, perfect for the bees, um this kind of territory here. It's good, it's interesting that they survived, they would normally die off in winter, or is that not necessary? No.
SPEAKER_00No, they just um it's the damp more than the cold that affects them, and they they create a sort of a ball around the queen and just try to stay warm. But we did have uh a monk jack deer try to gain access and knocked one of the hives over, but I think was soon scared away by the bees. But they have so many predators, so many other creatures want that honey as well as us. So, um yeah, and there are various diseases including new things that are coming all the time. So, yeah, they it's it's a hard life, I think, for them.
SPEAKER_02It is. Um some of the some of the threats are human-induced.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Some of the insecticides have been serious threat to to bees. So now banned, but the neonics, um there was a period of three years where I live where we didn't see a single honey bee because of the effect of the neonics, and um uh they've got a lot to grow up against, haven't they?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, well, the whole of the insect world at the moment, and there is something extraordinary about just taking the time to, particularly at the moment, to look around and see, even in a you know, a bramble bush, you don't notice if you walk past, but if you stop, you see the enormous amount of different bees and hoverflies, all these different creatures who we owe our lives to really.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yes, exactly. Lovely well put. Um so the let's go to being a playwright. So that's your um is it your career? Is it your well how do how do we talk about that? It is the thing you're known most for is writing plays, but then there are also operas and there are also projects that active action-oriented projects as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I guess um I started out as a as a playwright, that was something, you know, a job that um I I I understood um and came out of really just you know making things up as a child. So that was quite a natural progression. Um and I I now talk about my work as working with story across a really wide spectrum of projects. So yeah, one and a commissions for theatre for BBC, radio, for opera, um, and then moving into working more directly with communities. I've done a lot of theatre of the oppressed work, so um Augusta Boale's sort of methodology for working with oppression, so enabling people whose stories are less visible and less often told to be told, um, and that can be through campaigning or a co-created opera or theatre project. And then at the other end, I'm researching into story and at the moment writing a book about how Story makes and changes the world, which I feel really passionate about, and I think is really important to us at the moment, and I guess that is a sort of gathering of all the work that I've done over the last 30 odd years.
SPEAKER_02How lovely. Um so is that does that become a sort of autobiographical in that sense, or is it more an analytical take on the mini forms of story and how they have varied in your treatment of them?
SPEAKER_00It's a mixture. Um you know, it it is a a book about story and a book of stories in the sense that you know it some of it is told through story through all the different people I've met through my work and the stories that they've told me and the way that story has been used, you know, at different times. So I think it's a bit of a mixture, um, enabling us to uh yeah see the world through story in a variety of ways.
SPEAKER_02Yes, which is what we humans have always done. It's been central to every single culture, it's central to our evolution and development and use of language and all of that, and it's welcome to see it become more kind of centre stage, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I guess sometimes as as human beings we're not so aware of the paradigm that we're in and how that paradigm is affecting everything from uh you know the the food we eat to the way we work to the way we think about other people to the stories that we tell and believe in. So it's trying to look at that really enable us to, as Donnella Meadows, the systems thinker, said, you know, move out of the paradigm we're in, which is impossible, because in order to do that you'd need to not be in any other paradigm, which you can't really can't be, but to try and have a good stab at moving us out of where we are in order that we can see the stories, you know, like the water we're swimming in more clearly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well we've kind of framed that on the podcast as being in a big hole with climate and nature crises, and knowing we need to get out, but actually not really knowing how and if we can do that. Um and it looks pretty steep at the bottom of the hole to get up. So wherever we can get courage and inspiration would be a good thing, and it's probably not going to come from the centre of those addressing climate and nature. I mean some of it will, because there are examples of recovered habitats and changed behaviours and things. We can draw on some of that, but the the big change of the paradigm, the world view that people have is going to be required, and that when you're in one, it's difficult to imagine another one.
SPEAKER_00It is really difficult. And I think I think it's there, I think there is an emerging paradigm that I would say we can see in the ways that we are thinking and talking in the world, but that that the the the pull back to the status quo, to the old world, is really really strong and that we're we're really suffering with that at the moment. And so beginning to notice what that status quo looks like and how it's impacting on us in the stories that we're telling and being told, and then starting to notice um what Paul Allen from the Centre for Alternative Technology would say is the sort of the dappled sunlight of the new. Um story is a good place to start to do that. Um and and really for me story is uh is a way that we think. We tend to think of story as a thing, but if we think of story as a process, as a way of of thinking and a way of of being, of a a language, then it affects every relationship we have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and by definition the story is to be uh told and listened. You know, it's it's a it's about togetherness, you know, it needs more it might need only one person to create it, but very often it emerges through the through the telling, and the process of the development of the story is influenced by the tellings as well. You know, you get feedback, you you kind of involve people, so it's co-created, yeah, whatever the kind of context.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's relational.
SPEAKER_02To a different degree, yeah.
SPEAKER_00The story is always relational and always about connection to ourselves, to others, to society, to ideas, to change. It is, you know, it's a systemic and connecting form, really.
SPEAKER_02Um so you're writing a book on that, um and the thing about a book is that when you finish it and uh you hand it over to the publishers, you hope they say, fine, that's great. And and um and that's how it get how it goes forward. Um but the process of writing a play and seeing it put on and put on and on again, and if we take the Shakespeare example, everybody's reinterpreting them. I'd like to think that if somebody like Shakespeare knew how many interpretations there were of his plays, he'd think it was wonderful. I hope so. I imagine he would. But tell us a bit about how that works and how that feels when without you as the playwright, there's not a play, so there's nothing to put on. But you've got directors, you've got actors, and um their engagement brings creativity and interest, and maybe the thing swerves off in this direction. You think you think you might think, oh wonderful, you might think, oh crikey, you know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Do I shut up at this point or do I intervene? Yeah. I mean, how does that all work and feel?
SPEAKER_00Well, I guess across you know, decades of work, you've had all of those experiences. Um, and I'm lucky that I've got some long relationships. So, you know, the produ radio producer I work with at Radio 4, Emma Harding, is just a wonderful collaborator. She's a writer as well and understands the creative process. So, you know, at its best, um it's something that I think I naturally gravitate to in all sorts of ways. So I work a lot with um experts, whether they there are people who have learnt expertise or lived expertise. So the work I do is is very relational at all stages. Um and then as you say, there's the relationship that takes something into production, and and I think like any good relationship, it's you know co-creative, it's you know, there's there's space for for change and for for everybody to have their say. Um and you know, you just set the conditions for that and hope for the best. And it's a funny job in that I can spend quite a lot of time on my own and then quite a lot of time in intense relationship with people, you know, meeting deadlines. But I enjoy that variety, and I'm I feel very lucky to have some fantastic collaborators.
SPEAKER_02That sounds wonderful. And and those those literally actors are bringing their own interpretations of roles to something, and if they're good and they are good, they're going to be courageously pushing it in different kinds of little small directions as they as they enact out the characterizations that you've written on paper. Is that so is there a um this is a naive question I think, um, but is there a kind of final product? You've got is it play version one that is the one that that is your one, and then version two, three that are the ones that get to be put on, whether it's radio or in theatre or yeah, it depends really.
SPEAKER_00I mean, with a radio play, you know, one side percent in the first draft, it's a co-creation then with myself and Emma, who I work with a lot, um, and then when we move into well, taking for example the last one we did, which was a dramatisation of Darwin's The Origin of Species, which we recorded at Downhouse, which is where he lived for most of his life.
SPEAKER_02On the Downs in Kent, yeah, gorgeous spot.
SPEAKER_00He's lovely with his wife and family, and um so you know, we were working then with the place and in the locations where these things happened with an amazing cast, so you know the there was something that was you know changed by just where we were. So you're working all the time with the conditions you've got, and then sometimes with a play, I've had plays that have then been translated into other languages, and you know, I went to see a play of mine in in Germany, and my German is really like GCSE level German. So um I I didn't really know if they're performing my script or not, but um well you can tell from the general architecture, but yeah, things do move move from you out into the world in all kinds of different ways, and also you know, as soon as a radio play is broadcast, you know, there's I think a million people listening live, and then another X many hundred thousand downloading it. How they imagine the story that I've told is up to them. Yes, it's up. It's outside of my jurisdiction, and I think that's what I love about it really.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I remember once having worked for a number of years in Kenya on and off, introducing a kind of set of participatory methods to agricultural research and extension to get them to work closely with farmers and to learn their indigenous knowledge and experiences and feed it into these ideas on soil conservation. And we went back after maybe kind of four years of having introduced this, and I was walking around with a young extensionist, and he was full of energy and excitement about the methods and describing them all. And the end of it, he said, you should try this sometime.
SPEAKER_01Brilliant.
SPEAKER_02And that was it, I kept quiet, and I thought that's lovely. That's success, isn't it? That's all I need to know. You know, he doesn't need to know who I am, I'm just some um some white guy from somewhere else. Um they're leading with the kind of innovation as it gets embedded into the system, and you do feel a little bit of satisfaction when something like that kind of happens. Um people take it on, yeah. That's a that's a great thing. Um uh so you've been working on some of the oldest surviving stories, um, a thousand-year-old stories from Iceland, the sagas, of which there were something like 150 or so long family sagas that were written and a number of kind of shorter ones as well, um, uh from the the kind of late 900s to 1200-ish, something like that, so kind of 200, 250 year period. Um and and looking at those stories afresh and then using them to turn the story into action, which we're kind of interested in, you know. So we want we want story, we want to tell story and to have story at our fingertips, as you were saying. Uh, but in order to address the big crises, we need agency and action from that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So you've been taking it right the way through with a focus on women in the sagas and women in Iceland today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, women in the Icelandic saga landscape, really. So um, so yeah, people, place and the stories. And Iceland is the best place in the world to be a woman, it's the the most equal country in the world. Um, and when you then look at the that body of of the sagas, um the women's lives are really quite fragmented and they live sort of in the light of the men. So what we wanted to do, and I'm working with someone with a huge amount of expertise, so I'm very lucky to be learning a lot from uh Emily Lethbridge, who's at the Arnie Magnuson Institute in Reykjavik. So we've been working together on this three-year Ranis-funded project exploring um different stories in the sagas of women, from you know, uh a main character like Hashgeder to um you know a a woman like Brauch, who's some some geese flying.
SPEAKER_02I just say it's very appropriate because a lot of the geese from Iceland come to the UK and but actually I think these won't be ones, they will already be back in Iceland.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The pink footed geese and others that fly up, but it's a rather nice intervention there. It is nice. Yeah, so um women characters in the stories.
SPEAKER_00And um a character like Brauch who uh uh appears um just in a nine-line fragment, um, and that's her whole life, is uh is told, and you know, dies at the ha the hand of um her employer. Well uh uh she's a slave, really. Um so she's you know she's not the main story. And when you go to Borgeness, which is where her story is set, a smallish town in Iceland, then um, you know, the guy who killed her has got um Hashla Grimm has got a whole garden that was tended by the WI up until recently, the the Icelandic version of the WI. Um, and and really Brauch is sort of out literally on a lemon that she ran out to see and jumped in and was just trying to swim, you know, 50 metres to a little island, but was uh uh hit by a rock that this guy threw at her. So it was just to enable working with women from that community from young women aged sort of four and five in one of the kindergarten to women um living in the local care home, which is actually named after Brauch. So um, you know, women in their in their eighties and and onwards. So drawing together a big community of women um to talk about Brauch and what what does her story mean for us because I think the received wisdom is that you know women's lives are great in Iceland, which they are comparatively, but there is still work to do. And going back to some of those stories that are the literal bedrock of Icelandic society enables us to really sort of deeply explore the fabric of women's lives.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So we have we have uh a body of work, uh a thing called a saga, Ayol Saga or the saga of Burnt Nielk, the one with um Hattelgirdler in that that stand alone and survive for getting on for a thousand years, which is a pretty good record. Um I often say when talking about story is can you can you imagine, can you write a story that will last a thousand years? You know, think of it in that kind of way, that it will have emotional heft and a kind of a weightiness that is going to be relevant to people as unimaginable changes occur, although perhaps fewer changes in Iceland. I mean that might be something that we could come back to. I mean landscape scale changes of social changes clearly. Um so we've got the sagas, but then you use that material, even fragments of that material to open up a new conversation, a needed conversation, but a new one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so Hashgather, who you mentioned, uh the her husband's burial mound is intact, and you are not allowed to even remove a teaspoon of the earth from it, but it looks like Hashgather's burial site is now under a draw carriageway on the edge of Reykjavik. So these are very gendered differences. And we've been working more recently, um, looking at two saga stories. Um, Mel Corker, who was an Irish woman who was taken as a slave over to Iceland at the age of 15, um, immediately made pregnant and then taken to live with her owner's family in Iceland, including his wife. Um, and Helga, who travelled from Norway having married an Icelandic man, and taking those two stories, and they those women both had enormously difficult and disrupted lives in in different ways, but are really central to the Icelandic. Sagas, and you know, Melkor's son becomes a huge character in the Icelandic sagas and in history. So those immigrant women's lives are really woven into society, and we wanted to look at those together with stories of women who've arrived in Iceland in the last, I think, 10-12 years. And it just changes our point of view in terms of how we approach for the women we talk to, how they approach their own stories and their sense of belonging in Iceland, and for the native Icelandic community, how they then think about these new incomers. So stories really, I mean we've talked about story being relational, story is very good because of that, because of its connected nature, enabling us to take a different perspective. And we often talk about Story helping us walk in someone else's shoes. I think actually what story enables us to do is to move out of a single position into a more plural position. So that plurality we've created using a number of stories, as you say, from a thousand years ago then up to now, to so that we can really start from a different place when we talk about, you know, immigrants or people seeking asylum and refuge.
SPEAKER_02And if we were to if we were to kind of jump to other countries and say this is although this is kind of this has a unique feature which is in Iceland, the things called the sagas are a body of work and they have survived over this period. And people feel a deep kind of identity to the sagas. They're a they're of they're about the recent settlement of Iceland at the time, but they have survived and people feel there's something kind of important in that. But the representation of women in them, or non-representation, um, is similar to medieval stories of knights and castles and wars, and you know, you ask the same question of British history or French history or whatever, you would find the same kind of but I wonder whether it would be so easy to have that kind of analysis and that interpretation. Perhaps it would, actually, why not?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I think it could work really well. I think it's just a really it's just very clear in Iceland. Um, so it's a very good model. Um, and you know, you can talk to any Icelander and they'll be able to tell you whether or not they're related to any of these saga characters, and we've had that experience of a student saying, Yeah, oh yes, I'm I'm related to to him, the this guy that we're looking at. So um that's very pure, isn't it? Yes, yes. Um and and sort of very grounded. But you know, we were talking as as as we walked over here this morning about history of you know enclosures local to this area, which I didn't really know. And I think just be our stories are just more fractured and fragmented, aren't they? Our story history.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00But I think we could do exactly the same very effectively and to draw out patterns that people might feel passionate about in history that relate to them and that could be set alongside today's patterns that we you know we need to engage with.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, actually that's a really nice point. We're we're saying that this part of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, slightly to the east of here, or the northeast of here, is the the area where there's a large density of what are now called deserted medieval villages, which weren't deserted because that implies a sort of passive action, they were forcibly removed. People living on common the common field system or the open field system and enclosed to allow private ownership from common ownership. Um and um for a long time nobody believed that such desertions occurred, they weren't in any history books, and it took one person, Maurice Beresford and his team, from the 1940s onwards, and he's a crotchety kind of strong character who was able to kind of actually say, Well, we're going to go and do this stuff, and people said, No, you'll discover nothing. And and in the end, he and his team and the people he trained and the leaders they became discover 4,500 deserted medieval villages, DMVs in England alone. Um and that model of desertion, enforced desertion, is then the one that is copied for the Highland Clearances, which everyone in Scotland will know about. And uh so this was hidden history until somebody then went and discovered about it. Now what we haven't got is the written history that the sagas have got, where we've got the archaeology which allows us, and and actually some Parish, well Parish records don't begin into the 1500s, but some records, some written records, but not that many, not of ordinary people. So this kind of opens a little bit of space. But even then you've still got these inherent biases of women's stories not being told, slave stories as being you know side characters, um enter stage left, leave stage left quite soon afterwards.
SPEAKER_01When you told it.
SPEAKER_02That's when you told it. So how how tell it tell us a little bit about the the the the project um and your colleagues and how you've then opened up these conversations with women in Iceland today, um recent arrivals, long-term um Icelandic families and women, and how that's kind of how that's appeared to them. Um the action and the agency, I suppose.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm gonna sneeze. Excuse me.
SPEAKER_02Bless you.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, it's uh it's just myself and Emily Lethbridge, so there's just the two of us doing some quite biggish projects that you'd probably normally have a whole support team to help you with. But um we've we've just taken, we've worked on the stories, so gone out and done the field work, walked the walks that these women, the journeys these women have taken. Um and so we've sort of reached a depth of understanding about these women, and then just we've taken these stories into um just workshop settings, meetings with women, sometimes one-to-one, sometimes with a group of people. We had a lovely meeting in Borg which was facilitated by um the priest there, uh, bringing together a whole group of women from the area, and the those experiences have been extremely moving. Um again, we were supported by uh a priest in Reykjavik who's um a priest for um immigrants to bring together a group of um women from Iran uh to discuss the stories with us. And um and it's the easiest thing really, um just you know to to tell a story and then to hear people's responses to that story. Um and I think obviously there's a lot that's important about how you tell the story, the focus that you give to a story. Um, you know, what what it's like a magician, you know, what are you asking uh the listener to to pay attention to? Um and we just really told the women's stories, taking out for the most part, um the men. And uh and women really responded well to that. Um and I and in that process, I mean it's a really it needs to be a really well-held process because it's a process where you're building trust and where people are you know sharing quite personal things, it can be quite a moving experience to to to see your story um together with another story, um, and and you know, quite a strong story. So that that work's always really, really moving. And then it's a process of us, you know, transcribing and then working again with the women to say, you know, we'd like to use these sections of your story in this event, in this, you know, and the whatever the event is, the event is is always about those stories, about those women. Um, so it's not that you're you know coming in and taking the work away. And these are projects that are lasting 18 months plus, you know, so they're they're long processes, uh, and the women then often will come to the event and are able then to talk with a wider group. So it's a yeah, it's a complex, it's a complex process but also very simple.
SPEAKER_02Lovely. Um, and so people are hearing the events and the emotional content from a long time past and translating it into how that makes us feel today. Um and uh and especially with with migrant women from other countries like Iran, people are coming with their own story traditions. I mean, if you take Iran, it's not so far from the you know, the oldest written human story, well the one that survived the longest, the Epic of Gilgamesh in in Uruk, down just at the near the border of Iraq and Iran. Um so they've got these enormous traditions themselves, you know, the 1001 Arabian Knights. Yeah, you know, that that also is coming from that similar kind of territory. So people are bringing their own traditions into this space.
SPEAKER_00And and I think there's something really lovely about you know being invited to hear the stories, you know, and share the stories. Um so the the women in Iceland we work with predominantly from um well from different countries but biggish groups from Iran and also from Ukraine. Um both of those cultures, you know, very strong in in terms of story and also in in terms of uh you know how how stories are shared as part of the sort of cultural practice. So um they were really, really keen to learn more about Iceland uh in terms of culture and story. So um it's a yeah, it's a it's a a different and and I think deep way of communicating with people. Um beyond the day-to-day, beyond the immediate issues, beyond certainly asking people to tell you difficult stories and to do the emotional labour of that, which we would never do. Um it invites people to engage however they want to engage.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, exactly. Feels safer that way. Yeah. I mean, story is often about courage and innovation and thinking differently. Um so but you can get to that in ways that feel safe for people. Um there's a there's a phrase in Iceland um which I've heard people say that everybody in Iceland has a book in their stomach, which which is another way of saying everyone's got a book inside them that just hasn't kind of appeared yet, which uh we could just replace book with story, um, and then actually we've all got a kind of book in our stomach, you know, it's it's kind of part of who we are. And that that idea of creating the space. I wonder what the the some of the women that you've been working with will go on undo later. They may just say, Oh, that was nice, and we've kind of talked, but they may feel encouraged and um inspired to to do something different. Possibly write themselves, yeah, at least talk about these things. Yeah, at least feel comfortable being in Iceland.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I hope what it does, this sort of work, is that it creates connection. So it does that thing that we've said that story does. It moves us from the singular, whether that's just um feeling like you don't belong somewhere or whether that's just because you haven't imagined what it might be like for um a recent arrival, that it moves you into a connected plurality, and that really is what's at the heart of belonging, is moving beyond the self. Um, and and then you know what happens next, there's a variety of things. People have been meeting different people who they haven't met before, forming relationships. So, you know, it's just in every human way, it allows us to perhaps take some steps into feeling better connected with the world.
SPEAKER_02And is there a recognition in in the kind of policy space, do you think, within Iceland? Now this is kind of oddly abstract way of putting it, but the the the the influences on women's lives in Iceland, as you said, uh it's a pretty flat and equal society, but there are still problems. Of course there are kind of problems everywhere, yeah. Some more extreme in other places. Um so there will be people seeking to make things better. The president of Iceland's a woman at the moment, the Prime Minister previously was a woman and uh first female leader of a country in Europe, I think was the last Iceland. Some years, you know, 20 plus years ago. Absolutely. You know, so you can point towards certain things and say those look very strong, but this work to do, and here's a yeah, here's a platform for them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and being a woman in Iceland is different, you can feel it. There's a different space, women women have more space. Um, men take up a little bit less space, uh, I think, in general, in the day-to-day. Um so there is a huge equality and still work to do, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yes, exactly. Um well if we could make a jump from story applied in that way into how we address some of the kind of larger crises that we face at the moment, the climate and the nature ones. Um and the source of those is the economy that we have. You've written about uh play on neoliberalism. Excuse me. You've written about well Borderlands was about migration and people moving across system boundaries. Yeah. Um you've written a um uh an a piece about Descapita, as you can see.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a dramatic dramatisation of Duscapital.
SPEAKER_02So so you've gone into this space of of how the world is organised and created story about that. Tell us a little bit about some of those kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00So I guess, well, the I quite often do dramatisations of non-fiction for Radio 4 in their classic serial slot. So where you might get Oliver Twist or you know, um The Great Gatsby, then I'll do the non-fiction. So um the the the Darwin we've talked about, um did Tocqueville's Democracy Um and Marx's Das Capital and and a number of others. And um those ideas are so useful to us, I feel. And I think what has happened particularly through the second half of the last century, is that individualism has uh become so strong in society that all of those ideas have been filtered through that. So uh you know Darwin's work it becomes seen through the lens of the selfish gene, um, and in the in that process we forget everything that he said about cooperation and pro-sociality, and so I was working with people like David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, um, to look at that other side of Darwin's work, and certainly I mean all of his stuff is on online now. You can look at or you know, letters and even um you know his his wife's diary you can find online. So I was able to piece together their life and I felt his thinking reasonably accurately to explore the stuff that's useful for us now, you know, about cooperation and collaboration. Um not to say that there isn't competition, obviously, but um that's not all there is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I've tried to do that with some of those big ideas, you know, and I would never have read those books unless I'd dramatised them. You know, I it's it's it's a good discipline for me, and I think that's true of lots of us that we'd like to, and maybe we get to page 75 of Das Capital and think, oh, it's he's going on a bit, you know. So it's quite I I think it it always is an act of social good to say, okay, here it is in an hour, yeah. Um without losing any of the depth of it, um, in a way that enables us to use these ideas for today. So that was why I did it.
SPEAKER_02And and uh if I can put it this way, these are not kind of earnest explanations, they're dramatisations, they're dramas to take you through stuff that's happening to people and characters, but it but through that an understanding emerges of the ideas behind the thing that we've talked about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um great, it's really lovely. Um and and it allows us to challenge the well, we've talked a bit about the kind of dominance of certain narratives and hierarchies kind of emerging over time or set down in stories or later interpretations. The idea of all evolution being dominated by a kind of selfish gene kind of approach is is just really so dispiriting that that emerges at the time that neoliberalism kind of emerges. A heroine or a hero? So someone you would point towards?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, I mean there's loads, and obviously picking out one uh sort of goes against my nature, but um the person who immediately comes to mind is Jane Goodall, the um who who worked, she's most famous for her work with um chimpanzees um in Gombay and Tanzania, but actually uh just did a huge amount as a campaigner because she could see that it was all connected. If they if the chimpanzees were gonna continue, then she had to fight for for the world really. And there's just so many things about her. Um I did a dramatisation of her first book in The Shadow of Man and got to know her during that period, and uh she she just notices things. She has what you know in the Zen Buddhist tradition you'd call a beginner's mind. Um and uh one of our dogs has got no fur because he was very badly bred in a puppy farm. Um and she she had a mobile phone, but she didn't really use it as a phone, she used it as a camera. So she took like nine pictures of his tail, which as she said looks like a rat's tail, and she was fascinated to see to look at it and spent quite a lot of time with his tail and the rest of him attached, but um that ability to notice, even you know, she's in her 80s by this point, um, to really notice what's going on, and another thing, I mean, she worked a lot with Story. Um, she transformed the world in many ways through Story. Um, and one of the things I was really struck by, she talked about um as a child wanting to go and work with animals in Africa, and the only people who did that when she was a child were women, she said they'd be wives or they'd be missionaries, and they weren't doing the sorts of things that Jane wanted to do. Um, so when she dreamed of being in Africa, she dreamed she was a man. So she also had these sort of imaginative, creative workarounds that then enabled her to imagine that that would happen to her, which then it did, because she was able to imagine herself into that very, very different, very unusual future. So just the way that she would attend to things and and then create change, um, often using story, whether those are stories she's telling herself or those she's sharing with the world. So I mean, just so much rich inspiration.
SPEAKER_02Yes, fantastic. Um a book or a book recommendation?
SPEAKER_00Um well I think Fritchoff, I've mentioned Fritchov Capra. I think his work is, I mean, it's seminal for me. Um and so he uh the system's view of life, even if you just read the introduction, I think really has set me on the right path. And then there's a course that he does, an online course with people from all over the world, which explores the systems view of life. Um I'd really recommend that. I think it's fantastic, and I've I've done that as a participant, and then you can move into being sort of a looking after a group of people as they move through it for the first time. Um systems thinking can feel quite abstract, but is I mean it's a version of story really, in that everything happens at once and is multiply connected. So his work, and I think his most recent work, which again um there are links to it, where he talks about the four principles of life. Um he's quite pleased with himself having reduced it all down, or reduced is the wrong word, distilled things down. Um and I've I wrote them down so he he talks about firstly, life organises itself in networks. So the idea that the network is the basic pattern of the organization of all living systems, um, and that that organization is not. Determined from the inside, but by the living system itself. So it's a systemic thing. Secondly, life is inherently regenerative, so meaning in its very nature, it's regenerative. So a living system is continually generating and regenerating itself at all levels of life. Thirdly, life is inherently creative, so the emergence really, the spontaneous emergence of novelty, of new structures, behavioural patterns, and processes, again, characteristic of life at all levels. And then the last one, the most contentious one, really, is life is inherently intelligent, which you know is seen still as quite radical. But that we you know, I mean Jane Goodall would agree that we get an intuitive sense of that from our pets. We know, you know, that life is intelligent, and that that's true for plants and for bacteria as well. In you know, the it intelligence in its widest um form. So um he he sums it up as uh life organises itself in networks, it's inherently regenerative, creative, and intelligent. So um that's I think a really nice uh way to sort of underpin everything. I I return to that as foundational, a real underpinning of everything that I do.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the second law of thermodynamics, which we might have been taught at school in physics or whatever science lessons said everything tends towards entropy. Well, actually, the one thing that doesn't is life. It goes in the other direction. It's negantropic, it builds up structures and builds up energy. Um and uh yeah, sure, um we die at the end of it, um but the life continues on. So the thing called life is works in the opposite direction to the second law of thermother dynamics, which is exactly the point he's making. Yeah, fantastic, well look well put. Um a recommendation for viewers and listeners, what would you say? Um be attentive, like James. Oh, I think uh yeah, it's I I guess I would I would come back to story again really.
SPEAKER_00Um and for me it's I mean Fritz or Capra talks about it being a thinking revolution that we're in. Um and I guess that's where I feel my work is and that story is an important part of that. So um, yeah, there are some questions that I think we could, you know, if we start by asking some questions of the stories that are coming at us, whether those are stories that we're getting from the um modern media landscape or from our local community or stories that we're telling ourselves. Um so the questions are who's telling this story? Who do they want to listen to it? Why are they telling it? And by that, you know, as a writer, when we think about our characters, we talk about their characters, what their characters' wants. So, what does this character want? Um, what does this person want in telling this story? Does this story seek to divide or to connect? And what or who does it want to connect or divide? Does it want to make enemies or friends of who? And what does this story want me to think or do and why? And so just to take a bit of a pause, a little bit like Jane Goodall did when she came across uh Herbert Pocket's extraordinary tale, and just think, what is this?
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly. Um, does this story make friends?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's a lovely way of putting it. Well, Sarah Woods, thanks very much. Playwright, um uh award-winning in lots of ways, and fantastic to be sitting here in the sunshine with the flower-rich meadow in front of us and the birds singing, and actually lots of different butterflies flying around us here, so that's been lovely. Um geese singing, cronking away, fans reversing. That's what happens in the countryside. So it's been lovely having you on. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you very much. It's just really lovely to have the opportunity just to open up um brains with you. Thanks very much, Sarah. Pleasure.