The Scotsman

Let's do the show right here

HERE'S A TRUE STORY, SORT OF. David Leddy and Calum McCallum met on 19 May, 2000 in a nightclub in Brighton. They got "very drunk" together, sang Abba songs, found they had lots more in common than a taste for Swedish pop, and became lovers.

For the first 18 months their relationship blossomed, then disaster struck. Calum's kidney failed, he became too ill to work, and David suddenly went from being his partner to his carer. With only a small income from performing solo theatre shows and running a gay arts festival, he struggled to provide for Calum. The relationship was put under so much stress that they nearly split up many times.

To cope, David began nurturing an idea that would combine his creative and home life - he would write and stage a theatre show in their flat. Actors could hide in cupboards and jump out. It'd be hilarious, and Calum could be involved too. Five years on, David and Calum are about to perform that very show, Home Hindrance, in the Glasgow tower block where they now live. It will tell the story of their relationship, to a soundtrack by Abba. David and Calum will play themselves.

The story above is slightly misleading, partly to illustrate a point. Home Hindrance is not actually about David and Calum, although it sort of is. It does include music by Abba, but not, Leddy insists, because it was the music playing when they met; he only realised this connection the other day. The audience will meet David and Calum, but the pair are not actually in the show.

Confused? You're supposed to be. The point of Home Hindrance is to blur - and so explore - the line between real life and the telling of it. Can we trust writers of biography, or autobiography, to be truthful? If a story is fictional, what assumptions is it fair to make about its writer based on that fiction, if any? What is a "true story"?

"There's this huge power in the idea of 'based on a true story,'" says Leddy. He recalls watching the Coen Brothers' film Fargo recently; the film is entirely fictional, but a title card at the beginning claims it is based on a true story, simply because the Coens thought this would be a funny and subversive thing to do.

Fargo's star William H Macy, Leddy was intrigued to discover, had been shocked when he found out the film's story - about a heavily pregnant policewoman pursuing a gang of inept kidnappers - wasn't true as claimed. "He said to them, 'this isn't ethical,'" recalls Leddy, "and they said, 'Why not? These aren't real people. Who do we have an ethical obligation to?' For me this play is about the same thing. There does seem something ethically dodgy about telling people a story is true when it's not, but in many ways the ethical obligation should be the other way around. I think we don't often enough question our obsession with the fictionalising of real people's lives. For me the question that should run through your mind when watching this show is the degree to which it's about us." Hence the location. "It's vital that it's our flat. I would never allow it to be performed anywhere else. It's also very important that we're there."

Here's what happens in Home Hindrance. An audience of six are greeted each night as if arriving for a dinner party (Leddy and McCallum will be acting, they say, only in the sense that you would "act" at a job interview - for example, they will try not to pick their noses). The pair then disappear, and you move from room to room, while real actors tell the fictional story of Rory, who has died from an unspecified illness, and the wife, ex-girlfriend, sister and friends whose lives his illness affected. Some are telling lies. "Not the great big lies," explains Leddy, "just those social lies people tell out of embarrassment."

Many details of Rory's story are taken from Calum and David's life, but it is, Leddy stresses, a fiction. Yet here's where it gets complicated. "In many ways the fiction that we create, what we choose to talk about or not talk about, is more revealing than describing things that have happened in our real lives," says Leddy.

So, theoretically, could someone who came to see this fictional show, written by Leddy, learn as much about David and Calum as they would if the pair had just told their own true story? "Yeah, I think so, if they're paying attention."

An example: the play is about mortality, but religion, conspicuously, is never mentioned. Why? Because David and Calum are atheists. A different example: Leddy rewrote about 80 per cent of his fictional story after a real-life trauma - last summer, Calum became so ill that he nearly did end up dead, like Rory. His health has since improved, but the final draft of Home Hindrance reflects Leddy's new understanding of "the degree to which, naively, I had always imagined that when you're in that kind of crisis you would no longer be concerned with unimportant shallow things, and the reality is quite the opposite - you do argue about uneaten dinners and the washing up. That was a big shock to me." The rewritten show also became a way for Leddy to imagine what life might be like if Calum died.

This begs another ethical question. Is Leddy, as a writer, exploiting his partner? Leddy's response is that the show is about exactly that, "the ethics of fictionalising the lives of the people around you. Do I have a right to do that?" This dodges an awkward question by throwing it back. Surely it's all very exposing for Calum, who is not a writer or performer?

"I suppose it is, and yet in a funny way I don't feel exposed by it at all because of the way he's structured it," says McCallum. "There is this question of to what extent this is truth. And it's not saying anything embarrassing." Besides, he adds, he has always been very open about his illness. No great secrets are being spilled.

This also means, for better or worse, that the show will provide no catharsis - friends and family know all about Calum's illness, Leddy says, "so there's no element of confession. And I don't really care what strangers think because I don't know them." Given this apparent absence of any therapeutic value, the pair jokingly call the show "the miseryfest", although they have been pleased by the diverse reactions it has provoked among the cast - some think it is depressing and frightening, others uplifting. What remains to be seen is how the actual staging of this story will affect a relationship that has already endured so much strain.

"We are slightly concerned about the idea of having people in our flat every night for a month," admits Leddy. "If either of us were to feel now that we're slightly exposed by it, it's too late. The Arts Council has given us the money."

So why on earth put themselves through it? Because, it would seem, this is just what storytellers do - tell stories. "We've booked ourselves a holiday in Paris immediately afterwards, as a reward to ourselves," Leddy says, with a grin. I reckon they'll need it.

Andrew Eaton, 21 April 2007