You & Me

You’re lucky.
You’re lucky I’m a nice guy.

My new play for Radio 4 - my first full-length original radio play since 2013 - is called You & Me and it’s a kind of response to the #MeToo movement.

A young woman unexpectedly comes to meet her husband after work. She says she just fancied a date night together, but in fact she has something to ask him.

Like most people, I was very stirred and moved by the #MeToo movement and the waves and waves of revelations about exploitative and predatory behaviour carried out by men in the worlds of music, theatre, film, and politics. Lost most writers (I imagine), I also wanted to write something about it but was looking for a form that would give the play a particular way into thinking about the issue.

I admired the bravery of the women who spoke out and was horrified at the experiences they’d been through and the treatment they received for speaking out. I watched the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings full of admiration for the calm, serious, powerful testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and full of horror at the way she was treated, including by the President of the United States. The testimony about the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein, Ryan Adams, Donald Trump, Kevin Spacey, Max Stafford-Clark, Bryan Singer, Les Moonves, R Kelly, Israel Horowitz, Roger Niles, John Lasseter, Louis CK, Terry Richardson, and many many more has been sickening and - to me - shocking. And I say ‘to me’ because I appreciate that these things are probably not shocking to (a) most women, who are all too aware of how such men behave and how common that behaviour is; and they are probably not shocking to (b) the kinds of men who do this sort of thing, many of whom, I suspect, feel that it is perfectly acceptable behaviour. But I didn’t know about the extent of this, because women talk to each other about this behaviour and predators don’t boast about their predations - at least, not to me.

That said, I did and do feel that. want to keep open a space of empathy for these men; not because I want to excuse them or feel sorry for them or suggest, in any way, that they have been hard done by. In many cases, their reputations have been destroyed and rightly so. They have been punished and they have been shamed and this is sadly fitting for what they have done. But I want to keep a space of empathy open because I want to understand what it might be like to be like that. I am always suspicious when we turn human beings into monsters and animals, when we condemn a little more and understand a little less. And I think I’m not talking about the real psychopaths, the R Kellys and Trumps; I think there are probably men in this list who believe themselves to be good people but who find themselves drawn to do things they know are not right. Because those people I find fascinating. How do you compartmentalise? What stories do you tell yourself? How do your make your sense of self so capacious that it can include, like Weinstein, active support for feminist and liberal causes while also coercing clearly unwilling women into sexual acts? But mostly, I think I wanted to keep the space of empathy open because, without it, the chasm between men and women would seem to open up unbridgeably, locked into a state of blank incomprehension.

And so, one day, I found myself thinking about radio and how casting works. I was struck that there is a lot of cross-gender, cross-age, cross-race casting in the theatre but much less of it in radio (particularly cross-gender). What, I wondered, would it be like to do a two-hander between a man and a woman that was cross-cast? And immediately I realised I had a device for a #MeToo play. So this play has a framing device, in which the actors ask if they can swap roles early on. The effect of this is genuinely unpredictable to me. I did some workshops with a colleague and some students and in a theatrical setting, it didn’t work at all, because we are so used to adjusting mentally in the theatre that it wasn’t at all odd for a woman to be playing a man. On radio though, where the voice is our main anchor, I think the device will interestingly trip the reader up at certain moment.

In narrative terms I had a quandary. I didn’t want the story to span weeks or months. I wanted this to have a certain intensity, an unravelling of a story over a short period of time, something like the first part off Negative Signs of Progress. On the other hand, it felt implausible that this particular story could unfurl over one hour of real time. I wanted it to feel like real time but cover a longer period - say a few hours. I’ve used a version of something we tried in My Life is a Series of People Saying Goodbye where we changed location without necessarily changing time or character. This play does a series of jump cuts that tug us forward in time but keep the conversation flowing naturally.

So this is an experiment. I’ve been joking that I’ve written a #MeToo play ‘because what the world needs is a middle-aged man’s take on the movement’, but I hope the devices and structure, as well as the drive of the storytelling will make this provoke and move, question and clarify.

Cast:

Naomi Racheal Ofori
Tom Robert Lonsdale
Nick Chris Jack
Polly Polly Thomas
Dan Dan Rebellato

Director/Producer Polly Thomas
Recording engineer Louis Blatherwick
Sound design/Producer Eloise Whitmore
Executive Producer Joby Waldman

You can read the script HERE.