1British playwright Diane Samuels is the author of several celebrated plays, among which Kindertransport (published in 1993 at Nick Hern Books), about a woman strikingly coming to terms with her past as a Kindertransport child having fled Nazi Germany.

2Her new play, Waltz with Me, was published in 2023 at Renard Press. It delves into the issues of education, womanhood, marriage and motherhood through the character of Maggie Byrne, a music teacher who visits her old convent school where she was educated according to the boldly humanistic principles of the founding nun, Cornelia Connelly, whose motto was "Be your best self, the self God wants you to be". The play is "held across time and space in a golden ballroom" and aptly brings to light the strong spiritual and existential link that binds together the two women who, at the end, are seen to embrace and "dance a messy, joyful, laughing, crying waltz, all over the place, in the golden ballroom".

3A more than two-hour performance rehearsed reading presentation involving the professional actors as "storytellers" alongside musicians took place at JW3 in London in June 2023. Diane kindly accepted to answer a few questions about the play and its staging, and about how the waltz theme had found its way into her creation which required an impressive amount of research and yielded a genuinely musical writing.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud: Could you perhaps expand on the waltz theme that appears in the title? What urged you to choose this particular title?

Diane Samuels: I was struck by what one of the students at St Leonards wrote about how when Mother Cornelia came into the room, if someone was playing the piano she would sweep up the nearest girl and waltz around the room. What really struck me is that it is something you would not expect a nun, a Reverend Mother, to do. Dance, music and drama were part of the education that she was offering. I felt that in a way the piece was a lot about marriage, really. The waltz was that nineteenth-century risqué, romantic kind of thing. Dancing meant that people were holding each other, something very naughty and intimate. So I thought it was a great theme to run through, and I wanted to have waltz music. I had this feeling that the play was a dance through time and space. I just liked the idea that it was an invitation. It is inviting the audience. The waltz theme just presented itself in different ways, and then threaded through and grew.

NVA: How were the music pieces chosen? Did you have any external guidance or did you make all the decisions on your own?

DS: In the original draft I chose all the music, and then we brought musicians in. They played alongside, and a lot of little readings were done in kitchens or living rooms to just keep airing the play and see how it worked. Initially, I just chose these contemporaneous waltzes, although "Musetta's Waltz" is not contemporaneous to the story, but it is such a beautiful piece of music and it seemed to fit in really well. Emotionally, it really worked. So that found its way in. When it became clear that we were going to have a public reading I had a musical director, David Osmond, who plays the piano and was more rigorous about the choice of music, saying "Why have you chosen that there?" or "This might work differently".

Initially I did lots of searching on the internet about waltzes of the time, what was being written at the time, and about folk music. And then David brought on a music consultant, a woman he works with for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She asked me about my choices and about what the music was supposed to do. I'd been a bit dreamy and intuitive – in a good way I think – but she was more rigorous. So the music evolved quite a lot. We cut a lot out.

NVA: Quite a few famous pieces do find their way into the play, but I really loved the idea of personal invention being woven into it as well.

DS: One of the pieces is "Bells", Maggie's composition which is part of her spiritual, emotional revolution, her coming into her own power and talent. Of course we had the Puccini piece, "Musetta's waltz", at the very end, which worked very beautifully, along with other musicans' waltzes that we did use. Part of it was emotional storytelling. The Chopin piece for instance, the "Adieu" waltz, that would have been around at the time of Cornelia, but whether she heard it or not I don't know.

But basically the music was composed by David the pianist, and it all seemed to grow out of the play, with David playing through the story, so that evolved really beautifully and organically because of his sensitivity to the piece. I like working with musicians in that way. They bring their expertise to complement the writing.

Also, the song "Trim thy Vine" sung by Maggie grew out of a little prayer that Cornelia wrote, in connection with the African-American roots of work songs. When they were living in the deep South there was slavery at the time. They did have a couple of slaves at home, and Cornelia wanted them to read and write and treated them as part of the family. Interestingly, one of Cornelia's schools is in Ghana and the actor who plays Pierce on stage is from Ghana. Some of the nuns from Ghana came into the reading and were very enthusiastic and vibrant. So that connection with the African source of the song is there, in the texture of Cornelia's world.

NVA: Music seems to be involved in your plays a lot. Music is for instance a defining feature of Kindertransport where music, either heard or imagined, helps carry the story forward and unravel parts of identities. Generally speaking, how would you define your approach to music as an individual and as a creator? And did you have any musical training that made you particularly inclined to use music as a specific feature in your works?

DS: I have no training in music at all. I am not a musician but I would say that all my writing is really musical and I'm termed a musical writer. When I write I am listening to the music of the writing. My writing works like music. There is a kind of poetic musicality about it. Some writers are more prosaic, and I can admire it and like it. But this is not what I do. Besides, I have worked on musicals with two different composers, one of whom was herself a kind of wordsmith, and that proved trickier because she would not leave the words to me, she had to get involved in the words, so we had too much overlapping. I also worked, more successfully, with someone who is a composer and who would leave the words to me. That was joyous. We wrote two pieces together, especially an opera, Song of Dina, which involved an orchestra, a choir, soloists, professional musicians and singers. We had three performances in London. It is based on a biblical story from Genesis, the story of the only daughter of Jacob, which is a very tough and troubling story.

NVA: The motto « Be your best self, the self God wants you to be » that we hear in the very first scene really sets the tone of the whole play. It runs counter to the kind of education that girls used to receive, and perhaps still receive.

DS: Oh yes, to the kind of education that most people receive. Cornelia says that you educate the whole person, so that they may come to themselves and not just fit into the system – which would be horrible and antithetical to education. I've always been a teacher and I've always thought that my job is to equip people to come fully into who they are, to be free, independent-minded and curious, and make mistakes!

NVA: Talking about the live performance, you described the readers not quite as actors in their own right since they have the script with them but as « storytellers ». Could you comment on that?

DS: That was mainly to tell the audience that they were not seeing a production. People come to the theatre with expectations about what they're going to see in a play. They think they're going to see actors acting it all out. It is impossible to deliver that if you've got only three days to rehearse. We actually had two days in May to prepare and then two more days plus the day of the performance in June. They did an amazing job and really communicated the script to the audience through their reading and storytelling and invited the audience to bring in their imagination. Lots of people preferred that. They loved seeing the workings of it.

I just said I wanted the audience to have a little sense of what it would be like if they were performing it, of how this play moves, since I see the whole thing as being movement, basically. So I told them from the start "I want you to learn the last scene, just the last scene, because you've got time to do that". So they learnt the last scene, the scene with the two women dancing together, and we put away the script.

NVA: I was really impressed with the interaction between the musicans and the readers, with the musicians eventually turning into readers. The music itself is a kind of storytelling, isn't it?

DS: Yes, absolutely. The music is a character and also a kind of setting. It is definitely not just a soundtrack but a living part of the whole piece. The musicians did a very good job.

NVA: I think the two plays Kindertransport and Waltz with Me may be considered as two different ways of approaching identity and relationship. They seem to echo each other somehow.

DS: I would see Waltz with Me as a sequel to Kindertransport. Kindertransport sees that breaking, shattering of the mother-child relationship from the view of the child, whereas Waltz with Me is from the view of the mother. So I wondered about the possibility of having the same company do both plays, which would be fascinating.