Remy de Gourmont

I’ve done a translation of Remy de Gourmont’s play Lilith, a retelling of the Genesis story but incorporating the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife… It is for a new collection of ‘Decadent’ plays, to be published by Methuen Drama in 2023/4. There was a reading of extracts from some of the plays in the collection at the Albany Empire in Deptford on 10 November 2021. They chose some of the scenes between Lilith and Satan, which are a wonderful vivid mixture of blasphemy, eroticism, and laughter. I gave an introduction to the play which I’ve written up for the website of the project, Staging Decadence. You can read it at this link:

• https://www.stagingdecadence.com/blog/decadent-plays-jean-lorrain-and-remy-de-gourmont

Peter Coulson

My old English teacher - and one of the reasons I do what I do now - Peter Coulson has died, aged 92. ~e’df been in touch so my name was in his address book and the family got in touch to let me know. He was a tremendous teacher and a great inspiration who championed theatre at my school, making drama a serious, central and creative activity for us.

I thought he needed an obituary, so I wrote one for my school’s website. You can read it here:

• Peter Henry Coulson obituary

Zola Rising

The third season of Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money, our epic adaptation of Zola’s 20 ‘Rougon-Macquart’ novels is being repeated on Radio 4 next month:

Saturday, 9 October, 3pm: Crash (based on Money)
Sunday, 10 October 3pm: Massacre
Monday, 11 October 2.15pm: Trapped (based on Germinal)
Tuesday, 12 October 2.15pm: Swindle (based on The Bright Side of Life)

Monday, 18 October 2.15pm: Inheritance
Tuesday, 19 October 2.15: Reap (based on The Earth)
Wednesday, 20 October 2.15: Fate (telling the prelude to the Franco-Prussian War through characters from the saga)

Saturday, 23 October 2.45pm: Apocalypse (based on Earth)
Sunday, 24 October 3pm: Ghosts (based on Doctor Pascal)

I wrote the first and last episodes. I like them all but I really love Inheritance and Reap written by Lavinia Murray and Fate is fascinating, in which Olly Emanuel basically adapted a non-existent Zola novel. I’m also very proud of both my scripts but I particularly commend Crash to you.

This was a complicated season because there is a season arc that involves the narrator, Aunt Dide (played by Glenda Jackson), who is almost entirely non responsive in the books but is the all-observing, constantly-commenting figure in our adaptation. In the books she also dies halfway through Dr Pascal, but in ours she is sprung from the madhouse by the eponymous doctor and plays a significant role in the final episode. It took quite a while to get agreement about that arc for various annoying reasons. Making the revised plot work this had to be sorted out in about six weeks rather than the usual twelve months. I’m pleased with the result, happily, and it makes a satisfying end to the whole saga.

Shouting about The Beatles

I think I was 14 when I got into The Beatles and it didn’t take long before I wanted to find out the story behind this band that made such a weird mix of music. The band who did ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ just couldn’t be the band who made ‘Hey Jude’, right? And, as it happened, a big best-selling biography of the band had just come out. It was Philip Norman’s Shout! The True Story of The Beatles. I devoured it. I must have read it two or three times. It shaped a lot off how I understood their story for a decade.

It was an odd read. I’d always liked Paul’s songs. I mean, I’d liked pretty John and Pal’s songs too, but I’d found his songs extraordinary in their range and memorability and melodic strength. But reading Norman’s book, I discovered that Paul’s songs were meretricious, cheap, sentimental and that Paul himself was only in it for the money, a conniving, manipulative schemer. John, on the other hand, the authentic working-class hero who connected to the avant-garde, was the real creative force behind the music.

It was probably a decade later that I discovered what nonsense Norman’s picture was and later still when he admitted (though it’s so weird an admission, I suspect there’s another deeper motive he’s not yet understood) that he was down on Paul unfairly because he wanted to be Paul.

Anyway, I’m on the excellent Beatles Books podcast - a prolific series of interviews covering books about every aspect of The Beatles - discussing Shout! with the host Joe Wisbey. We try to be even-handed, to acknowledge the book’s strengths, but we also talk about its weaknesses, the datedness of some of its judgments, how its up-and-down-the-mountain narrative forms distorts everything, and the role it played in Paul’s 80s slump.

You can listen here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-un52d-10a133d

You & Me in Perth

There’s been a (so far) one-off performance of You & Me in a gallery in Perth, Western Australia. The show was presented by Lit Live. The show was directed by Sarah McNeil and featured Andrew Hale and Caitlin Beresford-Ord as the two protagonists. There are a couple of pictures above. I am pleased to report that the show sold out.

There’s also a short video on the Orangery Gallery’s Facebook page, which you can see here: https://fb.watch/50lj-PajpX/

There was a pleasingly thoughtful and positive review by Kim Kirkman in the Western Australian arts website SeeSaw: https://www.seesawmag.com.au/2021/04/gender-bender-is-timely

La sombra de Audrey

My 25-year-old play, Showstopper, is being revived in Madrid at the Teatro Lara with Laura Enrech, directed and translated by David Pintó who previously directed a version of it in Catalan (as Des de l’ombra in Esparreguera). David is a lovely guy who has been tirelessly devoted to this play over several years and, when I was in Barcelona several years ago, gave me a terrifying lift on the back of his motorbike through the busy streets of the city. The poster for the new production is above and it looks gorgeous. Spanish, it seems, having no direct equivalent of the word Showstopper, this new production is going under the title The Shadow of Audrey. (Audrey Hepburn is an off-stage figure who haunts this play…)

Performances begin on 11 April and run every Sunday until the end of May. Tickets can be booked HERE.

There was a short feature on Spanish TV about it which you can watch below.

The Ribos Operation

Toby Hadoke is an actor, comedian, comedy club host, and - if that’s weren’t good enough - a Doctor Who fan. He outed himself magnificently as a Doctor Who fan in his stand-up show Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf, a very funny and often touching account of a life lived with this wonderful TV show.

I’ve known Toby since 2006, because he was one of the sparkling cast that performed my adaptation of Dead Souls but we didn’t know that we had a shared Whovian secret until a few years later, thanks to the magic of Twitter.

And now Toby has started a podcast and video series about Doctor Who. There are several strands: he writes essays on aspects of Doctor Who; he offers a comprehensive episode-by-episode chronological guide to the series; he offers an even more comprehensive episode-by-episode chronological guide to the series; and he does positive episode commentaries - by that I mean, he asks friends to choose an episode they like and he watches them, chatting away to us, looking for the positives and trying to avoid snark. Given that among his early tasks were Time Flight and The Chase, this shows remarkable ingenuity and fortitude.

But the commentaries are wonderful. Toby is an actor and is particularly attentive to the creativity of what the actors are doing and he is also comprehensively acquainted with their CVs so the commentaries are always fascinating as well as very funny.

And he asked me to choose a story. I chose 1978’s The Ribos Operation, the first story in the 16th season. I have a great fondness for this story. I was 10 at the time and right in the middle of my love of Doctor Who (which I’d only discovered 2½ years earlier). Most importantly, this was the story where I started making sound recordings of the episodes to listen to again (this was way before VCR). It turns out this was a very common thing for Doctor Who fans to do, but I didn’t know that yet. And so I listened to this dozens and dozens of times - and by happy coincidence it’s a story that repays that kind of attention because it is written by Robert Holmes, still the best writer of Doctor Who, not just because he introduced some of the greatest villains (Autons, Sontarans, The Master), wrote some of the greatest stories (Carnival of Monsters, Deadly Assassin, Talons of Weng-Chiang), rewrote as script editor some weak scripts to make them astonishingly superb stories (Ark in Space, Pyramids of Mars, Brain of Morbius and - I suspect - Genesis of the Daleks), and contributed enormously to the mythology of the show (our sense of the Doctor’s home planet Gallifrey comes largely from him), but because, moment by moment, his scripts are the most imaginative, most expertly plotted, most richly characterised, and funniest scripts Doctor Who was ever lucky enough to have. So The Ribos Operation was worth registering because the script and the story absolutely sparkles. It’s about a real estate conman, but he doesn’t pretend to sell houses, he sells planets. It’s about an extraordinary heist that begins with the criminals breaking into a strong room and smuggling a precious stone into the jewel cabinet. It’s a story about a deposed tyrant, a redeemed heretic, a supernatural prediction that seems to come true, and it’s the story of the search for the key to time. It’s brilliant.

So I haven’t given Toby too hard a time and I’m pleased to say he likes it as much as I do. He’s full of information and insight about the story and he says some very nice and very funny things about me (his image of me is of ‘someone in a scarf on the South Bank talking to Gore Vidal about Rentaghost’).

You can listen to the whole thing here: https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-j86ik-fa1daf.

When he releases the video, I’ll put the link up here.

Ringo!

Only six months since the last one, I’m back again to I am the Eggpod, the Beatles podcast. In earlier episodes, I talked about Let It Be and about Back to the Egg. This time we’re talking about Ringo the 1973 solo album by Ringo Starr and widely considered his best.

The album’s great. It features what I still think is one of the all-time great Beatles solo singles ‘Photograph’, cowritten with George Harrison and given a spectacular arrangement by Jack Nitzsche, the ‘wall of sound’ arranger for Phil Spector. Other well-known highlights include ‘I’m the Greatest’ written by John. Lennon who plays piano on it alongside George Harrison on guitar, making it a 75% Beatles reunion (there’s a Paul McCartney composition on the second side). There’s a cute cover of the Johnny Burnette song ‘You’re Sixteen’ and the novelty dance single ‘Oh My My’, alongside lesser known gems like ‘You and Me (Babe)’ another Harrison song.

Anyway, Chris Shaw and I discuss the record, its highs and (occasional) lows, with great pleasure and I hope some insight. You can get the podcast from all the usual places or listen to it directly here:

• I am the Eggpod - Ringo

Contemporary European Theatre

Got two new books out, innit? I was in Hong Kong a couple of years ago and one of the people I was speaking to said how much they liked Contemporary European Theatre Directors, which I edited with Maria Delgado in 2010, ‘but now we need the same thing about playwrights’. And I thought that’s a very good idea. Maria and I started planning and brought on board my brilliant colleague Bryce Lease, who has great expertise on Eastern European theatre. Four years later (it’s a very big book) here it is. 21 chapters, a substantial introduction, a foreword by Tiago Rodrigues and an afterword by David Greig, it features 39 different playwrights from 18 different European countries, pretty much all of whom have emerged over the last 30 years. Most chapters pair different playwrights together, to compare and contrast their work’s journeys across different European theatre cultures, exploring what the new encounters between play and culture reveals about the play, the culture, and perhaps Europe itself. I’ve written a long chapter about European playwriting 1945-1989 that forms a kind of prelude to the bulk of the book.

At the same time, Routledge asked if we wanted to do a second edition of the Directors volume, which we were very happy to do. Each chapter has been revised and updated - my chapter on Katie Mitchell had a lot of new work to take in - and there are three new chapters on Deborah Warner, Ivo Van Hove and Krzysztof Warlikowski, plus a new preface by Mark Ravenhill. The book’s been rejacketed to make it uniform with the new Playwrights volume.

Available from all the usual places.

Play Podcasts

I’m a guest on two episodes of a new podcast - The Play Podcast, hosted by Douglas Schatz. Each episode is a conversation with a guest about a different play. I’m on episodes 1 and 8 talking about Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, respectively. Each episode is an hour and Douglas is a charming, informed host. Enjoy!

• A Doll’s House

• The Deep Blue Sea

Back to the Eggpod

A couple of years ago, I went on the superb Beatles podcast I am the Eggpod to discuss the final Beatles album, Let It Be. Well I’m back again and now discussing the final Wings album, Back to the Egg. Once again, it’s a conversation with the marvellous host of the show, Chris Shaw. I make a case for the merits of this record; we rhapsodise over Paul’s bass playing; we ask how punk Paul ever got; speculate on why Wings split up; disagree on ‘Theme from Rockestra’; and generally have a good old time.

You can listen to it HERE.

Happy Talk

I’ve done a bunch of talks over the summer and I’m noting them here, in part because this website is a kind of aide memoire for me. The title slides are above, but the fuller information is below:

• ‘Do Not Perform This Play’, keynote to Analysing Plays symposium, Royal Holloway (at Goldsmiths, 5 July 2019)

• ‘When One Door Closes, Another Door Opens: The “disgusting art-theatre project” of Naturalism’ Mapping the Past into the Future: A Celebration of the Work of Jacky Bratton, University of Manchester, Tuesday 10th September 2019

• ‘Danger! Craftsman at Work: Secrets from the Rattigan Archive’ British Library, 17 September 2019

• ‘Henrik Ibsen: Maker of Modern Theatre’, National Theatre, 19 September 2019

• ‘The Strange Success of Naturalist Theatre’, Bedford School, 23 September 2019

Programmatic

I did a bunch of programme notes earlier this year. One for each of the excellent Rattigan productions at the Orange Tree and Chichester Festival Theatre and another for Sam Adamson’s lovely play Wife at the Kiln. All these productions have now closed so I thought I’d share what I wrote with you.

• While the Sun Shines

• The Deep Blue Sea

• Wife

Radio Drama

Yours truly, during the recording of Lorenzaccio

The BBC Writers Room is the organisation that encourages and develops writers who haven’t written for the BBC before. It does excellent work and works hard to bring writers into the Corporation, shares scripts, offers guidance and advice, runs workshops and more.

I was asked to write something for the blog about writing for radio and my piece is now up on the website. It begins with some reflections on my most recent script, Lorenzaccio, the challenges of that particular play, the solutions we came up with, and then offers some thoughts on the value of radio drama, its distinctive excitement for the writer, and the importance of getting good collaborators.

You can read it here:

• BBC Writers Room Blog

Audition Speeches

The blessed National Youth Theatre have published a collection of audition speeches drawn from plays they have premiered over their 50-year life. It’s a clever move because most of those speeches are for young people and it’s often young adults who are auditioning (for drama schools, etc.). Many of the plays are unpublished too, so students using the book will be offering some unfamiliar and original work to those auditions. (Unless, of course, the book is a huge hit and these monologues become wearily familiar.)

I’m thrilled that there’s a monologue by me in there. It’s from Outright Terror Bold and Brilliant, which I wrote for the National Youth Theatre in 2005, in direct response to the London Bombings. I still think it’s the first theatrical response to those terrible events.

The book is nicely produced and includes introductions to each monologue, giving context for the speech, and offering some thoughts on character and interpretation. It is available in all good bookshops and also Amazon.

Chekhov Awake

Drama school students at the University of the Arts, Saint Martins, are doing my play Chekhov in Hell this week at the Platform Theatre, Kings Cross.

Jonny Humphreys directs and the cast is Ojan Genc, Natasha Howard, Joshua Dunn, Dannie Harris, Olivier Huband, Naomi Tankel, Eleanor Barrett, James Warburton, Matthew George-Williams, Jules Chan, Prudence Prescott, Jack Trueman, Laetitia Valstar. The show runs till Saturday. I’ll be there on Friday and I’m looking forward to seeing how the play stands up almost a decade on.

You can get tickets here: https://www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/ba-acting-autumn-shows-chekhov-in-hell

Da Capo

The Arvon Foundation is an organisation dedicated to encouraging people to explore their creativity as novelists, playwrights, poets, songwriters, and much more. They run residential courses, workshops, from individuals, schools and more. And they’ve been doing this for 50 years.

To mark that anniversary, they’ve produced a book, gathering in short writings by some of their tutors to reflect on Arvon’s work and produce work inspired by it.

I’ve tutored six times for Arvon, running courses on Radio Drama, usually with Polly Thomas and Eloise Whitmore. These courses are a week long and we take our students through the process of developing a radio play idea, a short section of which is then recorded and professionally edited. It’s always a delightful week and a great, tough but rewarding process; the students come from all walks of life, are usually ferociously committed, and it’s a pleasure to work on, though I always come back exhausted. Last week I taught another course at the Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton in Devon with a wonderfully creative and engaged group of students.

I was asked to contribute to the book and I wrote ‘Da Capo’, a short dramatic dialogue that is, on one level, about tutoring creative writing but also contains the instruction that it repeats at which point the piece becomes a kind of infinite Möbius Strip, and reflects something about the reciprocal and mutual nature of nurturing the imagination.

You can get hold of the book here: https://www.arvon.org/about/golden-book/

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

There's a conference coming up next month on Shakespeare and/as Philosophy, organised by Jessica Chiba and Richard Ashby. They were keen to have input on this topic from a theatre maker, not just academics, and we were delighted that Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, was happy to participate. He couldn't make the dates of the conference, so we arranged that I would interview him on video which will be shown and then responded to during the conference. 

The reason for Tim being particularly appropriate is the wonderful Forced Entertainment project, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, in which, over the course of several days, the company retell the stories of Shakespeare's plays, each taking around 45 minutes, and using household objects to stand in for the characters. It's an enchanting concept and the results are - perhaps surprisingly - gripping, affectionate, and moving. Perhaps also surprising is that you start to realise that this is really what all theatre is like and realistic representation is a fairly marginal thing in theatre.

We discussed the development of the project, the agency and artistry of objects, their role as bearers of emotion, the nature of character, the role of the storyteller, the effect on the audience, and what it told Tim about Shakespeare. The video is being edited by Jessica Chiba and you can watch it here:

• Tim Etchells Interview

Katie Mitchell

I'm in conversation with Kim Solga in this new book:

Fowler, Benjamin, ed. The Theatre of Katie Mitchell. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 

We're discussing Katie Mitchell's relation to Naturalism and feminism and the politics of that encounter. It's based on the video conversation we had, available of Digital Theatre Plus, and makes it more widely available (not everyone has access to Digital Theatre).

The format is that I talk first about her relationship to historical Naturalism; then Kim talks about the developing nature of Mitchell's feminism and then we discuss aspects of her work together and cover some interesting points, I think. The transcript is slightly emended, to add references and correct some egregious stylistic howlers, but it retains the feel of a conversation, making it easily readable.

It's the first of a series of publications based on the 4x45 video series (4 x 45' interviews and talks) and it's great to be part of the opening of that series. Our section is:

Rebellato, Dan, and Kim Solga. 'Katie Mitchell and the Politics of Naturalist Theatre.' The Theatre of Katie Mitchell. Ed. Fowler, Benjamin. 4x45. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 39-71. Print.

Consent

I'm very proud to have been involved in drawing up some new guidelines on preventing sexual harassment in university drama departments. 

It started after I wrote a blog about Max Stafford-Clark and various people got in touch with their own stories. One that particularly shocked me concerned a visiting tutor in the pub after a class who made an arrangement to give a student an interview later, at which he then assaulted her. It got me wondering whether we had any guidelines on what we considered acceptable behaviour. Not because I think sexual assaults are ubiquitous in our discipline, but because Drama involves some activities that are important to the discipline but, without clear ground rules, could be exploited. 

It turned out we didn't, so SCUDD (the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments) suggested a group be convened to draw up these guidelines.

I worked with Geraldine Harris, who's a friend, but also whom I saw lead a brilliant session at a conference 25 years ago on the way certain classroom exercises (contact improvisation, trust exercises, etc.) may falsely assume they are neutral but actually might need to be rethought. We convened a diverse group of colleagues from a range of institutions and at various levels of seniority. The full group comprised Leonie Elliot-Graves (Goldsmiths), Stephen Greer (Glasgow), Adelina Ong (Central), Karen Savage (Lincoln), Pedro de Senna (Middlesex), plus me and Gerry. And over a series of meetings and drafts, we produced a crisp, clear and I hope helpful set of guidelines.

There are complexities involved in these things. First, all institutions will have their own guidelines, so ours are discipline-specific suggestions for best practice. Second, all institutions will have their own disciplinary procedures, which ours are not intended to contribute to, so ours are meant to be preventative, not disciplinary. Third, it is not illegal for students and staff to have sexual contact, so it is not our business to ban something that isn't against the law; we are focused on abuses of trust and of the discipline.

While I guess we mostly had staff preying on students in our heads, we were mindful that students can harass other students, that it could be technicians, administrators, visiting tutors, workshop leaders, and others who become involved in acts of harassment and assault. In some cases, it would be possible for a student to sexually harass a member of staff too. Our guidelines are intended to be of broad application.

What emerged very clearly from our work was the importance of collective responsibility and of consent; collective responsibility because it is wrong that the responsibility and time and emotional labour fall only on those who have been subjected to harassment; we should share the job of keeping our spaces safe for our colleagues and students by agreeing common principles of behaviour and working together to address any breaches of those principles. And consent because it's easy to assume that consent has been given when a student enters a class, but consent needs to be informed (do they know what they are agreeing to), specific (agreeing to participate in a 'physical theatre class' doesn't mean they consent to being touched, for example),  voluntary (they mustn't be pressured into giving it), explicit (students should not be judged to have consented by walking into a room or by not objecting to something), and time-bound (consent is not a blank cheque; as the exercise changes and develops, check in on the consent).

The draft guidelines have been shared with all of SCUDD's member institutions and we got a lot of feedback from them, which we've incorporated. The guidelines have been sent to SCUDD who will formally adopt them and recommend that all member departments also adopt them and, most important I think, share them with their students so everyone understands that our discipline does not tolerate harassment.

So I'm very proud of what we've achieved.

You can read the guidelines here:

• Guidelines for Preventing Sexual Harassment

And there's an article by Gerry and me in The Stage which you can read here:

• New harassment guidelines: Consent must be at the heart of university drama teaching

And Matt Hemley's written a short news story about the guidelines:

• Guidelines produced to prevent sexual harassment in university drama departments