Coalition

The coalition in government is really a coalition between a friendly-faced, pale-Green, touchy-feely public face and the hardline ideological market-fundamentalist neoliberals, blue in tooth and claw.

We are promised cuts. We are threatened with cuts. We are warned of cuts. Cuts as inevitable as a new day. Cuts to be dealt out with a heavy heart. Cuts that were made inevitable by Labour’s recklessness and waste of public money.

All of this is nonsense. This government has a deep ideological investment in downsizing the state; they want to complete the Thatcherite project, to go much further than she ever managed. They have a disgust at the state and a blind faith in markets. Our enormous deficit was brought about by the recklessness of the financial markets and the steps necessary for the state to save them from themselves. And for this the state is going to be punished.

They want to clear the deficit in four years. Why? Our borrowing has a 14-year limit on it. No other country has had to cut like us - except Greece, who are on the verge of bankrupcy. We are not. In Sweden and Canada, where they had to make similarly savage cuts to welfare in the mid-nineties, they cut much more slowly and did so with a view to building a foundation for further expansion. This lot want to cut because they hate the state.

They’re in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats but only one fraction of the Liberal Democrats: that group that created the Orange Book which attempted to restore the classical liberal roots of the party. They were a bit of a fringe until now. Will this be any good for them? I doubt it. They risk being sucked into the Tory project and being associated with this wanton destruction of cherished things. Worse, they risk being seen as the figleaf.

Labour planned cuts. I think we’d have accepted Labour cuts more readily than we will accept Tory cuts, because we know Labour are fundamentally behind a strong welfare state. We know that for thirty years the Tories have been hostile to the state, happy to see people sink or swim, ready to accept poverty and suffering as signs of healthy competition.

What is remarkable is that the credit crunch is providing the basis for this. What the credit shows more than anything is that markets are not rational or self-correcting and they don’t  necessarily distribute wealth through a system; just as readily they spread poison through it. There was a moment when we might have sacrificed a bit of growth and tempered competition for a system that was fairer, more responsive to social need, less fuelled by greed and fear. There might have been a deep change. Instead, the state is going to be made to suffer, while the financial markets stand to one side lecturing us all on financial responsibility and waste.

All of this ideological extremism is being sold to us as simple good financial sense. Which is, of course, how ideology works. It’s a filthy time.

How To Adapt a Novel

I’d never be so presumptuous as actually to tell people how to adapt a novel, but I was asked by a student for some advice today and so I wrote this. It’s in the form of rules, but it’s really just what I do. I’ve adapted The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Dead Souls by Nikolaj Gogol, and Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland.

1. Choose a novel you love. This should be obvious but sometimes I’ve watched adaptations where I get no sense of personal investment from the adapter. Choose a book that excites you. I’ve always chosen books with great set piece moments that I was excited by and looked forward to finding ways of conveying that excitement in the adaptation.
2. Don’t choose a novel you revere. If you are in awe of the novel, you may find it hard to adapt. Adaptation means tearing the book apart, cutting stuff, changing it, eliminating or merging characters, writing new things, bypassing your favourite bits. If you revere the novel you won’t want to do these things - and ultimately you won’t serving the novel.
3. Be faithful to the novel. People will go to see or listen to your adaptation because they like the book more than because they like you. They will come with their own expectations, their favourite bits. You need to be secure and comfortable with what the novel itself is doing so that you can serve the audience. This doesn’t mean you have to satisfy them - you should have your own particular take on what the novel is doing which they might disagree with. But if they sense you haven’t got a clue what the novel’s about, they can turn nasty.
4. Be faithful to your form. Novels are not plays. Novels have many more words; they are designed to be read over an extended period, at the reader’s own convenience; the reader can flick back, flick forward, skip bits, re-read things, turn over the page, write notes in the margin, interpolate the reading of other books, Google references, chat with friends about it and in a million otherwise interpose their life between the lines of the book. A play unfolds in an unbroken - or only briefly broken - period of time; the audience is likely to experience their attendance to the play as a break in their life. You have to turn one sort of experience into another experience. And that might mean doing very violent things to the novel. That’s alright, that’s good, that’s the job you were sent here to do.
5. Don’t read the book. Do read the book obviously; specifically to check that you really want to adapt it. Then - if you have the time - don’t read it for a year. (I’ve done three adaptations for BBC Radio and usually have an eighteen-month lead-in to recording so I have this luxury. If you don’t have this luxury, carve out as long a period without reading it as possible.) Then, don’t touch the book; instead sit and type out the plot as you remember it. I find that my memory does a remarkable sifting job; it ignores unnecessary byways to the story; it ties up loose ends; it helpfully conflates characters and events; it always remembers the good bits; and, when the plot doesn’t make sense, it remembers the links or invents good ones. Your memory is already doing the work of adaptation for you. The start roughing out your structure, the shape of the overall design. And only then, re-read the book. And even then, do it at extraordinary speed, skimming where necessary, lingering on your favourite bits, not allowing the detail to bog you down.
6. Don’t have the book beside you as you adapt. Put it in another room; that way, you’ll only consult it when you absolutely have to, because you won’t want to get up and interrupt the flow of writing to look at it. Trust, again, to your memory. When you know you want to use an exact wording, make a note in the text to pop it in later. Keep pushing forward.
7. Help the book out. No book is perfect. If there are eggy moments, make them better. If you think of a better joke than the author, stick it in. If you can see a simpler plot solution, do it. In particular, remember that the novelist is a novelist because she or he can write novels; they don’t necessarily know the first thing about writing plays. You’re the expert in this particular room. 

You love the book (No. 1) but you don’t revere it (No. 2); you want to serve it (No. 3) but you won’t serve it if it’s still a novel and not a play (No. 4); you need a bit of creative amnesia (No. 5) and creative laziness (No. 6) if you’re going to be generous to the book you want other people to enjoy (No. 7).

When I read The Midwich Cuckoos for the first time I was immediately excited because it’s a great idea, thrilling story, and also I had a particular take on it, a particular interpretation: I felt I was reading it better than it had been read before. I also noted that it had flaws dramatically - Wyndham’s dialogue is fine on the page, but you couldn’t say it out loud. The ending was weirdly abrupt but interestingly so in a novel; less so in a play. Dead Souls I loved because of the humour. I read a rather stiff translation and yet thought I glimpsed a very (for want of a better word) pythonesque strain to the humour which I knew I could bring out. Fortunately, the second volume is incomplete so I had to do some major imaginative reconstruction, reordering and reconceptualising. Girlfriend in a Coma is probably the nearest I got to adapting a book I revered; when I read it in 2000, I just thought it was the most important extraordinary book I’d ever read. For that reason, while I am very proud with the adaptation, I think I was inhibited from really reimagining the book the way I might have done. In fact, I think it’s at its best when I depart from the original.

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.

Ingredient X

Nick Grosso’s new play upstairs at the Court is, as always, an intriguing bit of writing. His plays are always different, there’s always a sense that something new is being tried. Peaches was unlike Real Classy Affair which was very different from Kosher Harry which has not much to do with Ingredient X. This is a very exciting thing in any playwright and it’s why I always look forward to Nick’s plays - even if I’m not completely satisfied by them.

This one features four fortysomethings spending an evening together half-watching The X Factor on TV, but mainly reflecting - in some cases increasingly drunkenly - on the corrosive role that addiction has played in their lives. Frank is a recovering drug addict; Katie seems to be drawn compulsively to addictive personalities; Deanne is an alcoholic on the border of admitting it; Rosanna seems to be addicted to confronting people with the truth of their lives, as she sees it, like a downmarket Gregers Werle.

The formula is, I guess, familiar; thrown together in a room, a group of friends uncover secrets about each other and themselves. What sparkles here is the dialogue. Nick Grosso always does interesting stuff with dialogue: Real Classy Affair was a somewhat heightened realist dialogue play, with Pinteresque edges, into which strange rhymes and rhythms would erupt. Here the dialogue is heavily patterned, and the speed of the interchanges between people suggests that rhythm more than psychology is the driving force. There are a couple of formal motifs: in the first half of the play, whatever the arguments raging between the character, whenever they mention Katie’s baby, the three women all coo over her, using exactly the same sentimental formulations. Rosanna, too, has a strange habit of beginning a stock phrase or epigram but letting it peter out, as if she’s lost confidence in it, or maybe just forgotten it.

There’s more story to it than I’m making out. A lot of tension in the first half derives from Frank leaving to get ice from next door and being gone a while. Rosanna and Deanne tease Katie with visions of him backsliding into drug abuse. In the second half, four of the characters make discoveries or reveal secrets: Deanne’s son, just out of prison, has been arrested; her other son has been diagnosed with diabetes; Katie reveals that her former partner cheated on her; Rosanna discovers that her estranged husband has been videoed fucking a 20-year-old; and Frank discovers that a fellow addict has died suddenly of a heart attack.

This is where I began to lose confidence in the play. Partly, it felt that these revelations were a bit bloody weird - the unluckiest Saturday night in history. It almost felt like the play was injecting incident into it, to keep momentum, like having another coffee to keep awake in an all-night writing session. The interesting tension around Frank’s lengthy disappearance was dissipated when he turned out not to have slid back into addiction at all. This is part of the point: addiction is a serious illness and people need to be actively committed to working to free themselves from it, rather than trusting fatalistically to character or the inevitable.

And here’s the thing. The play reminded me of Doug Lucie’s Love You Too, another play by a really interesting, restless, challenging writer; but like that play this seemed like some personal issues and obsessions had taken the place of really writing a play conceived as a public experience. Nick Grosso seems to have become very interested in addiction - I don’t know whether that’s from personal experience or what - and the last third of the play emerges as a rather hectoring thesis about the role it plays in all our lives. I’m sure the point is sound, but wasn’t sure the play was.

I noted that where the script deviated most from the performed text was in the last ten minutes where the ending has been radically cut back. That suggests to me that they found the play difficult to land. Maybe Nick overwrote trying to find the ending; maybe the rhythms of the theatre didn’t allow for the gentle descent that he wanted. I need to read the original ending.

Of course, what I haven’t mentioned is that the play is fucking funny. Nick Grosso is one of the surest hands at constructing jokes, at generating enormous comic momentum and there were lots of laugh-out-loud moments. I had a very good time watching it.

One final quibble: they claimed to be obsessed with X Factor but they barely watched it... okay #nerdalert

Marxism

Very smart review of G A Cohen’s last book, Why Not Socialism?, in London Review of Books by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In it, she raises to issues that gave me pause for thought.

First, she revisits Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History. This is probably the single book that most influenced my interpretation of Marx, with its elegant and (as they say) ‘no-bullshit’ version of Marx’s theory of history. It is austere Marxism in its most sternly technological, offering a view of history as developing systemically and inevitably through technological development; each form of technology (the forces of production) eventually outgrows the form of society put in place to support it (the relations of production), hence the succession of slave societies, feudalism, capitalism and then, no doubt, communism. In this version, characteristic of the late Marx, morality, politics, culture and so on are mere epiphenomena, produced by the happenstance of historical development but with no more power to affect the  course of history than flotsam and jetsam have to command the waves to rise and fall.

What Wood smartly observes is that Cohen’s argument - and possibly Marx’s too - has a residual ahistoricism in its belief in technological development. It had struck me that this amount to a theory of human nature: we are creative people who keep finding better ways of doing things. What Wood points out is that this determination to develop technologically is characteristic of capitalism but of other forms of society... not so much. It may be that Cohen/Marx is illegitimately extending the conditions of capitalism to a theory of history altogether. Now, this is not to tear up the whole Marxian project, but rather to ask a revision of the historical scheme to take this observation into account - and perhaps also to allow that some ahistorical forces may exist within a Marxist analysis. For me, with my Kantian leanings, I am persuaded that there is an intrinsic rational mechanism that produces ethical judgment and even if that always has to play out in particular historical situations and therefore can be wildly variable this is not something produced, at bottom, by historical processes.

Marx seems to have also believed that at certain points. His early writing is full of moral condemnation. The later Marx liked to say that moral condemnation of capitalism was idle though it’s hard to believe, even there, that he really believed. To think it is neutral to describe capital as ‘dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Capital, I.10.1) suggests Marx had unusual views of vampires.

Where Wood’s piece gets its fire is trying to arbitrate between the earlier and later Cohen. The later Cohen abandoned the strict Marxism - indeed abandoned Marxism as such - in favour of a more general socialism that talked much more freely about justice and equality. In this new book, Cohen notes that capitalism employs base motives (greed, selfishness, will to power, etc.) for socially good ends: general prosperity, diversity of products, etc. Of course, the problem is that it also has a series of dreadful social outcomes some of which I outlined in my book Theatre & Globalization (pp. 30-39), but Wood takes him to task in a different way. Is it right to say that it is driven by base motives? Or are base motives the product of the system?

This is an important issue of course. The New Right in the eighties tried to claim that capitalism was natural because we are naturally competitive, greedy creatures. But if greed were produced in us by a system, because otherwise we couldn’t survive, that would suggest that if the mode of production changed, so would our apparent nature. This is pertinent for Cohen because, in his abandonment of thoroughgoing Marxism, he has also abandoned this vision and so imagines a ‘market socialism’ in which base motives still drive the system but they are contained by new features of the system. Wood asks whether any substantial change to the system might lead to a change in our experience of ourselves.

What do I think? I suppose, with the Kantian side of me to the fore, I think that we are in battle with somewhat atavistic parts of ourselves and we struggle to master that. So we have tendencies towards selfishness but equally we have tendencies towards altruism and, with the Marxist side to the fore, in certain historical circumstances it is easier or more difficult to master these base motives. In that sense, it does seem to me that a change in society will change the nature of our fundamental behaviour and attitudes. And so, as Wood remarks towards the end, we must not purely personalise our critique of the system - in talk of greedy bankers and so on - but always observe what there is in the system that has generated and permitted such behaviours.