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It may sound like a whimsical children’s book – and be the subject of the one-woman show she penned – but Jersey playwright Martha MacDonald really did inherit a pet tortoise from her grandfather.
Now, Martha is preparing for her show to be performed in a well-regarded London pub theatre.
She also gets to boast that she was obsessed with tortoises before they were cool – though she has “a slightly unhinged relationship with them”, she says.
The play promises to explore Martha’s strange relationship with a tortoise that is at once a pet, an heirloom, and which she suspects to be a reincarnation of her grandmother.
Martha’s grandfather claimed he bought the tortoise for a tuppence in a London pub in the 1960s – already a fully-grown animal at the time, which means Martha the tortoise is now in its 80s or 90s.
Her family then inherited the tortoise named Tuppenny, from her grandparents when she was a child.
“We said, ‘It’s basically a rock with legs, how can it be high-maintenance?’ But you would be amazed," she reflected.
So Martha took on the responsibility of keeping the tortoise alive, not least, she says, because “I was convinced it was my grandma reincarnated.”
Tuppenny is “still going strong”, according to Martha, insisting on his habitual diet of lettuce and tomatoes. Despite Martha’s family’s attempts to vary his diet, she says the reptile “turns his nose up at anything too millennial”.
And seeing Durrell’s Tortoise Takeover, Martha says, it means: “I get to say I loved tortoises before they were cool. When it happened, I thought, ‘I’m way ahead of my time here.’
“I love the Tortoise Takeover, seeing an emblem of my show as I go off to London.”
The play started as a commission from the Jersey Arts Centre, where Martha was an artist-in-residence.
It started out as an autobiographical one-woman show, which Martha wrote and performed in a sold-out performance Jersey Arts Centre in June 2022.
“The show itself, in that iteration, was a very candid telling of that story, of my story receiving that tortoise,” Martha says.
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In the revamped version to be performed at the Hope Theatre, Martha has cast her former classmate Molly Byrne and together, they moved away from a purely autobiographical show to allow for some creativity.
Molly and Martha, Martha says, “grew up together and I have always wanted to work with her.”
The show explores how strange a tortoise is as a pet – not only does its backstory include the underbelly of London illegal pet trade, it also tends to outlive its owners, forcing them to face their own mortality.
Martha has been writing her whole life. “Even as a kid, I was scribbling short stories and writing what I called ‘novels’ on my home desktop computer.”
At the age of 14, she entered a playwriting competition with Jersey Arts Theatre, the Spearpoint New Play Project, as the youngest participant – and won. The prize was for her play to be professionally performed.
“All of a sudden, I was working in a professional rehearsal room as a teenager. It was an eye-opening, invigorating experience.”
She was later lucky enough to do a few residencies in UK theatres. And having started early, she imagined herself writing three-hour epics to be performed in the National Theatre – “delusions of grandeur,” she says.
As she wrote, Martha realised that an element of comedy ran through everything she wrote: “Even when I was trying to be a very serious playwright, I was giving that a bit of spice.”
She initially created and performed the play herself, getting the impression that “in order for something to be impressive, I had to do it by myself.”
Pictured: Molly Byrne, also from Jersey, allowed Martha to stretch the text of her autobiography (supplied)
Now – having worked with Molly, Jersey Arts Centre, and the Hope Theatre – she is keen to work with other people.
She added that she is grateful to have had funding from ArtHouse Jersey, which has meant that she got paid for her work.
She says: “I’m really enjoying that process of taking something that was really personal and really exclusively about me, and seeing how far we can stretch the text and change the ilgc and create something more exciting.”
SHELL will be performed at the Hope Theatre on Sunday 17 and Monday 18 September at 7.45 pm.
Tickets are available on the Hope Theatre website.
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