Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money

I was embargoed by the BBC until last week. So I'm pleased to be able to say that the radio show I've been working on for the last eighteen months has now been announced. It's a large-scale adaptation of Émile Zola's twenty-volume 'Rougon Macquart' novel sequence. It's going out under the title Émile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money and will eventually be a 27-part adaptation divided into three intensive nine-episode seasons. The first season goes out in November, under the title BLOOD and I wrote episodes 1, 2 and 9 and was lead writer on the whole thing. I'm part of a writing team alongside Olly Emanuel and Martin Jameson.

The headline that's attracted all the attention is that Glenda Jackson is coming back to acting after 23 years as an MP to be our narrator, the 104-year-old Adelaide Fouque. She's also in scenes in episode 1. I can tell you, it was one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life sitting in a room watching Glenda Jackson speaking my lines. She carries in her voice undeniably commanding authority, moral integrity, a wealth of wisdom and experience. And she makes these astonishing choices, sometimes driving through the lines, sometimes gliding around them, finding doubt in certainty and always looking for complexity. And sometimes she alights on a word and she knows that it can take force and she pushes on it and all that experience, those 55 years of work turns the air into fire.

But it's not just the Glenda Jackson show; we've got together the most wonderful casts. Alongside Glenda Jackson in episode 1 are Robert Lindsay, Fenella Woolgar, Ian Hart, with Ashley Margolis and Shannon Flynn as the young lovers. At the beginning of each recording block you do a read-through; often actors, quite rightly, hold back, wanting to keep their ammunition dry for the actual recordings; this time, each raised their game, spurring each other on, outdoing each other, and the read through was one of the best I've ever attended. Listening in the cubicle as Robert Lindsay tries out different ways of saying a line to find the funniest version, Jesus: I wish I could meet the ten-year-old me watching and loving Citizen Smith or the twenty-year-old watching and loving GBH and tell him what was going to happen. 

In episode two we have the wonderful Sam Troughton and Carla Henry, and also the lovely David Annen (with whom I've worked on three plays with very long titles: Here's What I Did With My Body One Day, And So Say All Of Us..., and My Life Is a  Series of People Saying Goodbye). All beautiful actors. Sam Troughton full of warmth and feeling and exquisite comic assuredness, David Annen quiet authority, restless intelligence. In episode 9, we have the smashing Christine Bottomley, the wonderful Will Ash, and the lovely Sean Gallagher (who was also in My Life is a Series...). Will Ash all troubled intensity, Christine Bottomless seductive giggles and the most fantastic acting intuitions.

Elsewhere in the week there's Julie Hesmondhalgh, Bryan Dick, Robert Jack, and Georgina Campbell. It's a wonderful thing to be part of and I think it'll be pretty great.

The announcement got quite a lot of coverage, press and internet, local and international:

I'm not expecting you to follow those links. I just want to remember a time I wrote something that had to be embargoed by the BBC.

An Oak Tree Introduction

Ten years after it first appeared, Tim Crouch's wonderful An Oak Tree is being revived and performed at the National Theatre in its Temporary Theatre (I have no idea why they're no longer allowed to call it The Shed). It's looking all sorts of lovely. Oberon have republished the play with a few additions and emendations and - surely most thrilling of all - a new introduction by me. The intro talks about why Tim Crouch and his collaborators make experimental theatre that is actually just like ordinary theatre only more so. I try to suggest that the text only adds to the interest of the theatrical experience and suggests that it's a show that reminds us that language, theatre, and our sense of common humanity are things that rely on our shared imaginative belief.

It's available from all the usual stockists.

Stockists.

David Bradby

My old friend and colleague, David Bradby, died in 2011. I wrote about him at the time. A year ago I was asked to write an entry for him, more soberly, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. You'll probably need access via a research library, but here's the link:

Rebellato, Dan. 'Bradby, David Henry (1942–2011).' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, May 2015. 11 June 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/103473>.

 

 

Citizenship

Methuen Drama are producing a new series of play editions, under the title Modern Classics (see below). Each one has a new introduction by a theatre maker or academic. I've done an introduction to Citizenship by Mark Ravenhill. I talk about the relationship between theatre and citizenship, the history of citizenship in British education, and the play's complicated role in relation to these debates. I was helped by having interviewed Mark twice about the play for two of the three rounds of visits it paid to the National Theatre (I did programme notes twice for it). I enjoyed looking at the variations in the published versions of the texts and watching the play evolve towards greater and greater complexity. It was a pleasing opportunity to revisit this possibly rather overlooked play and I must admit I came out of the process with a reinforced respect for what Mark is trying to do with that play. It's a much subtler and more complex play than it appears; which is exactly how its tightly planned subversion is meant to work.

Since I know you'll want to buy it, here's a link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1472513835 and if you fancy not supporting tax-avoiding bastards, you could try here: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/citizenship-9781472513830/

 

British Theatre Repertoire 2013: presentation

So, I've been working with David Edgar and David Brownlee (of SOLT & UK Theatre) on a project to gather statistics about the British theatre repertoire. In 2008, the British Theatre Consortium was commissioned to conduct some research into the success (or otherwise) of Arts Council England's new writing policies. In the process we discovered that ACE had, since the mid-to-late nineties, had stopped gathering detailed statistics about the shows they were funding. That is, in the noble pursuit of light-touch regulation, they no longer required companies to let them know what they had produced. For our report, and with the support of the Council, we gathered those figures from 65 of the 89 'regular-funded organisations' and were able to offer a snapshot of the state of the repertoire between 2003 and 2008 in our report Writ Large.

Since then we've been encouraging the Arts Council to continue gathering those statistics. Finally a couple of years ago ACE gave us a very small grant to conduct a pilot, looking at 2013. We also hooked up with David Brownlee on the way who was enthusiastic about the project and had some great ideas about how these figures could be gathered with minimal disruption to the theatres involved. He was at Audiences UK at the time but, happily, moved to SOLT and UK Theatre (then the TMA), in which position, he was brilliantly placed to be able to gather all the data we needed. He was also able to identify a researcher, Clare Ollerhead, to 'tag' the data according to a set of categories that we all drew up.

As a result, we have the most comprehensive and detailed statistical picture of British theatre that has ever been produced. Our figures address only SOLT and UK Theatre and so exclude a great deal of fringe theatre. Nonetheless, the data covers 5,250 individual productions, 59,288 performances, 31,800,543 theatre visits, and £961,700,417 in tickets sold.

We have already published an interim report offering some basic information about the make-up of the repertoire. Yesterday at our conference Cutting Edge: British Theatre in Hard Times I presented some further findings about repertoire, the regions and gender. The full report will be published in the next couple of weeks but here are some of the headlines:

  • Of new plays by a single writer presented in 2013, 31% were written by women. However, only 24% of performances were of plays written by women. Women’s new plays are performed in theatres which are on average 24% smaller than those in which men’s plays are presented. They attract only 17% of new play attendances and 13% of box office income for new plays. So women’s plays are given fewer performances, presented in smaller theatres with lower ticket prices, and therefore attract fewer people and lower box office income.
  • Women have fewer adaptations staged. Adaptations – of novels and other works – are usually commissioned and involve a more active choice by theatres. 25% of all new adaptations are solely adapted by women, compared to 31% of new plays. The major adaptations in the west end – Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – were adapted by men.
  • Women are dramatically less likely to undertake new translations of plays staged – again, usually commissioned and thus actively chosen by theatres. Of the 24 new translations in 2013, only 2 were solely by women (a mere 8% of all new translations).
  • Nonetheless, women are more likely to have plays for children performed. 35% of plays for children and young people were written by women, as opposed to 31% of new plays as a whole.
  • Compared with theatre between 2003 and 2009 (in the study Writ Large, from a smaller database), it appears that there has been an increase in the average size of theatres in which women’s work is performed, and consequently the attendance at women’s plays has increased. However, the gap between the total attendances at plays by women and men has also increased. 
  • In 2013, the National Theatre presented 22 new plays, of which 13 were by men and 3 devised. Of the 6 new plays written by women, only one – a translation – was presented in either of the National’s large spaces. 
  • 16% of all productions originate in London, with 13.1% of the national population. But London presents 46% of theatre performances, attracts 54% of all theatre attendances, and 66% of all box office income. 
  • While the commercial sector (the West End) contributes a little over a third of performances in London, it accounts for three-quarters of all performances, and 82% of attendances, and 85% of all London box office income. 
  • However, the subsidized sector sells its seats more efficiently. Attendances as a proportion of box office capacity are higher in subsidized theatres: the average attendance in the West End is 71%, while the average attendance in London subsidized theatres is 86%. 
  • Although ticket prices are much higher in London, prices throughout the country are in line with average household incomes in each area.

UPDATE:

The findings and the conference have started to get some coverage:

And the final, full report has had good coverage too:

British Conference of Undergraduate Research

I was invited to give the opening keynote at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research 2015 on 20 April 2015. BCUR has been going for five years. It's an organisation that encourages students to understand their undergraduate work - usually in dissertations and other final-year projects - as research. Placing their work in this context encourages students to take autonomous responsibility for the work, to defend it intellectually, and, by presenting it in a conference like this one, fosters skills of economy, clarity and speaking to wide audiences. This conference was attended by over 300 students from across the world. I could only stay for the first day, but saw a stunningly good range of papers on subjects as diverse as  Napoleon's horse Marengo, detection of secondary semen leakage in crime scenes, and the evolution of research within undergraduate curricula.  

I was asked to set a tone, talk about the value of research, and generally be a bit of a cheerleader. My talk began with the material about Sgt Bertrand the nineteenth-century necrophiliac and I talked about the value of the unexpected discovery and the odd chains of research that lead you from Naturalist theatre to reading about the profanation of Parisian graves in the 1840s. I defended a view of research as 'a kind of pointless openness towards the world'. An inspiring day.