10 things that changed my life: Playwright Jo Clifford

WHEN I was 12 years old my mum died very suddenly from a brain haemorrhage. I was at boarding school and she had come down to see me because it was going to be my confirmation the following day. She saw me on the Wednesday and said she would see me the next day but I never saw her again because she died in the night, bang, just like that. It knocked the bottom out of my life.

My dad turned up and took me out for the day then he just left me in the boarding school. It was a really harsh introduction to life. I had to deal with it on my own with no help from anyone. The school had no idea how to help me.

It was really, really tough and I don’t quite know how I survived. It was very hard. I had just had my first communion and thought God had played a terrible trick on me and that maybe I wasn’t good enough. It undermined my faith in everything.

2 BEING CAST AS A GIRL IN A PLAY

A COUPLE of years later I acted in my first school play, playing the part of a girl. I was very shy but as soon as I was playing Lucy I became confident and happy and just loved it. I loved getting dressed up for the part, I loved the make-up and putting on the wig. It was amazing.

The sad thing about it was that I was in another boarding school by then that was really horrible with a lot of bullying going on. I knew I was supposed to hate playing the part of a girl but I didn’t. I loved it and people understood how much I enjoyed it and I was just bullied out of existence. My life was made hell.

I was really frightened by the pleasure I took in playing the part. Looking back I realise that was me discovering my vocation. That was what I wanted to do in my life but because I felt really ashamed and frightened I repressed it and lost it for years. It could have been a wonderful and positive thing but it wasn’t because of the transphobia. That was in the 1960s so there was no understanding at all.

I survived because I knew I was going to be a writer from a very early age and I was writing everything down that was happening to me and I must have just instinctively known that anything that happened you could use somehow.

3 FINDING OUT I WASN’T ALONE

WHEN I was 17 I worked as a volunteer in a mental hospital in the Borders. One of the psychiatrists lent me a book called Childhood and Society and it was all about the way different societies brought up children. I found out that in America the native tribes had a custom where boys were encouraged to listen to their dreams. If a boy dreamt of the moon and it gave the boy a cradle instead of a bow he would be able to go to the elders of that tribe who would allow him to live as a girl.

I was just blown away by that because I was desperate to be a girl but it was impossible and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. But I discovered there was a society that just allowed people like me to be themselves and respected us for it. It was an amazing revelation and knowing that I wasn’t alone kept me going.

One of my earliest memories is looking in a mirror when I was about four or five, seeing a boy and thinking that it wasn’t me. It was the most terrifying thing. I knew something was wrong somewhere – I couldn’t understand it.

I just had big brothers and when I went to primary school I wanted to play with the girls and I wanted girls’ toys. I wanted to wear girls’ clothes but the idea of being a girl was impossible in those days.

4 MEETING SUE

I WAS in Spain for a year when I was at St Andrews University studying Spanish and Arabic. One of my flatmates in St Andrews worked on the student newspaper and he sent me copies of it. One of them had a picture of Sue Innes, the young woman who was going to be the editor of the paper the next year and I thought she was beautiful. I thought that if I ever had a girlfriend I would like it to be her.

When I came home I found her staying in my student flat and it was love at first sight.

She was the first person I came out to. That was 1971 just a couple of months after we met. It was terrifying as I thought she was going to hate me but she said she knew there was something feminine about me and that is why she liked me. That was amazing, it saved my life.

We got married and had two kids. We were together for 33 years.

5 MY FIRST PLAY

IN 1980 I was 30, our first daughter, Rebecca, had just been born and I had my very first play on at the Edinburgh Fringe, a translation of a Spanish play called The House with Two Doors. It was in a high school hall and it was a real failure. We had an audience of about 10. I would turn up every night with my daughter in a sling, so proud of my daughter and so proud of the play. Even though there was hardly anybody there, the ones that came laughed at the jokes I had made. And that is how I knew I was a playwright. Before that I had been trying to write novels but that is when I started writing plays.

Five years later when our second daughter, Katie, came along I took her to the Traverse which was playing Losing Venice, a huge hit. It was a kind of mad historical fantasy but everybody loved it and that really got me started.

6 1989

WHEN the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 I had just been in Los Angeles with my play, Lucy’s Play, and then about two months later I was in Dhaka in Bangladesh with another play, an adaptation I did of Great Expectations.

I was in Cairo when I turned on the TV and the Berlin Wall was being knocked down. That completely blew my mind because I had been in the richest part of the world then the poorest part of the world just within a few weeks of each other and I had seen that it was all one world. It really was. The riches in one part of the world came from the poverty in the other. It was all interconnected.

And when I was growing up it was the so-called free world against the communist world so when the wall came down I had a really strong sense that capitalism was coming to an end.

I started to write in a completely different way because I thought what I had to do as a writer was look at these massive global changes, try to expose the weaknesses in the old world and try to help people dream a new world into existence and think about how things could be different. That was an amazing year. It completely changed everything.

7 SUE’S DEATH

I HAD a play called Celestina opening at the King’s Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival when we found out Sue had a brain tumour and might die at any time.

She had had a stroke and then got terrible headaches and was taken to hospital. The play was opening on the Monday and on the Friday before I was told there was nothing they could do. It was just unbelievable. She was only 52. It was horrendous, just a nightmare. Katie was 18 and Rebecca was about 23.

In fact, she lived another six months and she was able to see the play. I just kept writing all the way through.

Yet the weirdest thing was that this tremendous stress pulled us together as a family. As well as the most intense sadness you can imagine, there was this amazing sense of joy and thankfulness for the intense love we had.

She was wonderful, a well-known feminist and writer and one of the founders of the biographical dictionary of Scottish women which is an amazing publication. She was working on that right up to her death.

8 MY BROKEN HEART

HER death almost killed me. My heart was physically broken and a year later I had to go to hospital where they tried out a new scanner on me. It was a bit like an ultrasound but much clearer and on the screen I could see inside my own heart. What was wrong was that one of the valves inside my heart wasn’t closing properly so instead of being pumped out, blood was falling back down into the chamber below. I could see my heart bleeding. It was incredible. I thought “that is my death and if they don’t sort this out that is going to kill me”.

I realised I wanted to create things that make me feel better, that healed me, empowered people and made others feel better about the world. That was another thing that really changed the way I wrote. It was an amazing moment.

A lot of film, theatre and TV is depressing and I just can’t be doing with it. I trace it back to that moment of seeing my broken heart on the screen. It was terrifying but it has also given me a great joy of life. Having to confront your own death makes you appreciate life.

I had an operation a few months later and they put in a little plastic ring to hold the damaged valve in place and that is what saved my life. It is incredible. I feel lucky to get that and be in a country where you don’t have to pay for it.

9 JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN

IN 2009 I wrote a play called The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven which I performed. Turning up at the first night in the Tron Theatre I found the whole street in front was full of hundreds of angry people protesting about my play. They were furious. There were Catholics who had brought along a statue of the Virgin Mary because I had offended her apparently and then there were really hard core Protestants who had signs that said “God says my son is not a pervert”. It was terrifying.

The weird thing about it was that when I was young and playing girls’ parts I thought ‘if anyone knows I like this, people will hate me’. That was what I was afraid of. Fast forward to 2009 and all these people did know I was trans and they did hate me. Yet it didn’t kill me. I survived and I knew that play really mattered somehow and I had to try and keep it alive.

When I wrote it, I read the Gospels and I was so moved. They hadn’t been particularly important to me up till then but I was so moved by Jesus, the courage he had and the way he resisted prejudice that I was really inspired. The funny thing was I wanted the play to be a tribute to him yet the Archbishop of Glasgow said it was hard to imagine a bigger affront to the Christian faith than my play. I was so horrified. That’s not what I meant at all.

We’ve since taken the play all round Brazil where it has been a huge hit and all kinds of places in Britain. In 2019 we had a tenth anniversary season of it in the Tron back in Glasgow.

10 ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL

THIS week I am performing it in St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh which is just amazing. We can’t have an audience in but we are filming and live streaming it. I am dead excited. It’s wonderful working there. It’s huge and has a real history.

The thing about this pandemic is it has brought lots of people together in many ways but it has also exposed the injustice and inequality in our society. It has exposed the horrible damage the Tories have done to the health and social services and it has shown us that we can’t go on living the way we are. We have to change. We have to live differently. We have to remember we belong together and the selfishness and competitiveness you get in a capitalist society just isn’t working any more and it is not going to get us through this pandemic or the next set of crises that global warming and climate change are going to bring about.

We have to live differently and we can live differently because human solidarity is more important than human selfishness and competitiveness.

www.queenjesusproductions.com/a-space-to-bless-st-marys