Actress on how abusive relationship informed role

"I felt like a robot, I felt nothing, nothing made me happy, nothing made me sad."

Actress Bella Merlin spent more than three years in an emotionally and physically violent relationship with an alcoholic when she was in her 20s.

Thirty years on she is playing a woman who is crumbling under the strain of her partner’s addiction in Welsh writer Lucy Gough’s latest play The Wild Tenant.

"I wanted to tell this story and be willing to share some of my own story as a means of saying 'we can get through this, we can survive'," she said.

Inspired by Anne Bronte’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gough's play is set in a semi-derelict mansion inside a snow globe where artist Heledd and her alcoholic partner Hunter, played by Jams Thomas, have been snowed-in for years as their lives unravel.

Melin was drawn to the play's subject matter but it was only once rehearsals started that she felt "resonances of residue in my own body from my experience that happened in my 20s".

"He was 10 years older than me, very charismatic, very intelligent, very talented and very troubled," said Merlin when recalling her former partner.

"Little by little it started being psychologically coercive and abusive and then fairly rapidly, although it was sporadic at first, physically abusive."

The abusive left Merlin's life in a state of turmoil.

"I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, I was confused," she said.

"We were so poor that I was feeling down the side of the sofa for small change to get to my temp job to try and pay for our rent, try and pay for our bills".

She is grateful to her family who intervened.

"I had the luck of family helping me out, not everybody does," she said.

Three decades on she is a distinguished professor of acting and directing at the University of California in the US, with a successful career in theatre, film, television and radio and is happily married.

When her partner died more than 10 years ago, she said she felt sympathetic to his family and friends, but there were also more complicated emotions.

"I myself felt - sorry, I'm going to say it - relief," she said.

"I continued to have terrible nightmares until he wasn't there anymore."

Merlin said she increasingly found herself drawn to projects about addiction and domestic abuse.

"These things affect our DNA, they're part of our story," she said.

Earlier this year she shared her one-person show Tilly No-Body: Catastrophes of Love with The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the primary intergovernmental body that focuses on gender equality and women's empowerment, where she was encouraged to share her personal experience for the first time.

When it came to playing Heledd, she said her lived experience had informed her work.

"It enabled me to take my work deeper, to be willingly vulnerable to audiences," she said.

The Wild Tenant has also been a deeply personal project for writer Gough.

"When you have relationships with people - for me it was my early childhood - with people who have real struggles with addiction and chaotic behaviour you still love them sometimes and it was that conflict... these relationships ricochet though our lives," she said.

She said her play was not a biopic.

"[It's not] about me or anyone in my family but there’s a lot of things in there, truths in there I suppose," she said.

Despite the difficult subject matter she said her play was playful and darkly funny and deliberately looked at addiction from both the perspective of the partner and the person with the addiction.

"Addiction is a disease and it is cruel. I wanted to look at and try to understand both sides," she said.

Gough, who is a creative research fellow in script writing at Aberystwyth University's department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, has also been working with West Wales Domestic Abuse Service.

For the past two years she has been supporting survivors of domestic abuse to write about their experiences.

"Their work was powerful, without a shadow of a doubt they felt doing the work had empowered them," she said.

"Having confidence in your imagination can give you strength to see your way out of situations."

The Wild Tenant is at Galeri Caernarfon on 25 September and The Dance House at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff on 27 and 28 September.

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