Like a Fishbone

There are two playwrights that I sometimes, jokingly, claim to have discovered. One is Paul Godfrey, because when I read plays for the Bristol Old Vic, they gave me his play Inventing a New Colour to read and I loved it and they put it on. The other is Anthony Weigh, because I was external examiner for the University of Birmingham MPhil in Playwriting Studies and gave his play a good mark. In fact, the Bristol Old Vic were always going to put on Paul’s play and if anything they were testing me; and Steve Waters had already spotted Anthony’s talent and I was no more than rubber-stamping it.

Anthony was working on his play, 2000 Feet Away, at the National Theatre Studio when I was there, working on Longship. It was a big success at the Bush two years ago and this play is his follow up.

He specialises in sustained, edgy, even handed duologue scenes that firmly but elegantly debate a point: the prisoner and the sheriff in 2000 Feet Away, and, here, an architect who has designed a memorial after a rural schoolhouse massacre and the mother of one of the dead children. This play is on the night the architect is due to present the design to the town. The design will be a perfect preservation of the school as it was on the day of the murder, except for the eerie absence of children. But the mother, who is blind, has appeared. She wants the school razed to the ground. The mother has a simple but rather fanatical faith (it was a church school) and seems confused by the architect’s atheism. The architect, meanwhile, is rather awkwardly unconcerned by the woman’s situation and more than a little concerned for her own prestige. The two build to a confrontation where it is revealed that the architect’s design expresses something of her contempt for the town.

It’s got a couple of good meaty parts, which Deborah Findlay and Sarah Smart tear into. The latter maybe slightly more than the former, since the architect is given rather a lot of lines that condemn her out of her own mouth which is awkward to play. There’s also a fabulously funny smaller part for an intern in the architect’s office which Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays beautifully. The arguments that drive the play are between reason and faith, art and religion, town and country. These are all pretty well ventilated over the course of the play’s 80 minutes. What I was less convinced of was the architect’s atheism being shaken. I didn’t see much that made that happen, though it was interesting to see a devoted religious person on stage not being presented as a figure of fun or hate. Four years ago, Nick Hytner said he wanted to explore religion at the National, and that year saw Paul, Two Thousand Years, and The Life of Galileo. Even Complicite’s Measure for Measure might be considered to contribute to that debate. Since then religion’s been a pretty frequent topic for the stage, with Love the Sinner being a recent addition to the roll-call.

Here, though, I was reminded firmly of David Greig’s The Architect, particularly the scenes where Leo Black is confronted by Sheena Mackie about Eden Court, the estate he designed and in which she is living. I guess I prefer David’s play because it’s more sprawling; it ranges across Edinburgh, onto the roofs of buildings, out into the motorway network. Its characters are ghosts of each other, phantoms, and archetypes. But of course, Anthony Weigh benefits from the pressure-cooker environment of Like a Fishbone. Leo Black is never forced into a confession; the play is too cool for that and besides, for Greig, you sense that the characters are mysteries, even to him. These characters are confident and articulate and when they break, we know where they’ve broken.

The play has a number of classic dramaturgical devices: the ticking clock (they have to make a meeting in town to present the designs), the locked room (it’s raining outside but hot in here and they can’t get the windows open). In a particularly smart move, he has the mother grab the model of the schoolhouse from the model of the area; it’s because it’s such a delicate piece of work that the architect must keep talking to her and cannot lunge to get the thing back. It keeps her in the room (which is the classic problem with pressure-cooker plays - if things are heating up that much, why not get the hell out?). All of this does require some messy and perplexing business with taxis that get hired but then just leave and finally, when the architect decides she can’t go and they won’t be able to show the designs, one wonders what all the fuss was about. (A squandering of another clever moment, when a cup of tea is spilled near the model box: the extremity of the response is what tells us the importance of the object and the event.)

Where I had most problems - and was also most full of admiration - was with the dialogue. He’s written it in a kind of  repetitive, halting, overlapping, stichomythic dialogue that has become a contemporary trope. The patterning of repetition didn’t seem right for this play: it’s a psychological drama, basically. There are bigger themes, but if you’re going to put people in a room with big emotions, backstories, revelations and outbursts, it’s a psychological play. But sometimes it’s hard to square the dialogue with a plausible psychology.

Maybe this was, in part, about the direction. Rather as with Nick Grosso’s play, earlier in the week, the rhythm of the dialogue really gave no room for a sense of thought process; you were just hearing people speaking the lines to bring out the rhythm. Sometimes I don’t think I believed they had heard what the other person had said and were responding.

But sometimes it really is the writing. Take this:

ARCHITECT. Yes. No. Look. It’s like. You know what it’s like? It’s like a Venus flytrap.
​MOTHER. Venus? (p. 50)

Why does the mother say ‘Venus’? It’s not ‘Venus...’ like she’s struggling to keep up. It’s ‘Venus?’ which suggests she’s querying that word. But that doesn’t make sense, because anyone, even if they don’t know what a Venus flytrap is, can hear that it’s part of a phrase. You don’t pull a word out and query it. It’s not like there are many other, more common flytraps that she might be thinking of and querying this unusual Venusian attribution. I think it’s just about maintaining the pattern of call-and-response, of statement-and-echo, the pattern of the dialogue.

I’m picking on a tiny moment and I’m not intending to flog it to death, but in several places in this play I caught the slight sense that it was too much a product of someone enamoured with his facility for dialogue and that damaged my engagement with some of the really meaty, exciting things he was trying to do in bringing these characters together.

On a broader note, I was struck by two, maybe opposed, by interestingly so, tendencies in contemporary dialogue writing. One is the Martin Crimp school, which Weigh is attending in this play: hesitations, interruptions, overlaps, stuttering, capturing the patterns of specifically middle-class (and upper-middle-class) speech, in all its vainglorious failure to achieve what it wants to achieve. And then there’s the Simon Stephens school, in which people can sometimes come out with extraordinary eloquence, without embarrassment, without excessive concern for the unreliability of language, instead speaking from a powerful utopian sense that, despite everything, you can touch each other with words, reach from one person to another, simply by saying what you believe and what you think to be true. Simon Stephens’s is the more generous approach; perhaps Crimp’s is the more intellectually rigorous and formally interesting. This evening I felt like I wanted more Stephens and less Crimp.