National Impact

For those lucky enough not to have to follow these debates, the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework by which academic departments are tested for the quality of their research, will partly assess us for the Impact of our research activities. And what is impact? It’s the demonstrable effect on people outside academia of activities founded on original research.

This has unleashed a storm of protest from from my national colleagues. The best argument against this proposal is that academic research should have the freedom to be for its own sake, that the utilitarianism of wanting to show that it immediately has an impact on the world is to place an intolerable demand on research and may mean the end of blue skies thinking. Einstein’s special theory of relativity had no direct practical application for forty years, so it is said. He would have crashed and burned in a Research Excellence Framework.

This is not as strong an argument against the current proposals as it seems, mainly because it misunderstandings what the proposals are. We are asked, as departments, to present case studies of impact: one case study per 5-10 members of staff. In other words, not everyone and not every piece of work is required to show impact. The great majority of staff and research can continue to be blue skies work. Also, the definition of Impact is very broad, including cultural impact, quality of life and so on. It has to be beneficial and it has to be demonstrated (not proved or calculated) but these seem to me harmless requirements.

Obviously, I’ve been thinking about this, both as an academic but more specifically as Director of Research. It seems to me that, at Royal Holloway, we are particularly good at impact. We do a lot of theatre and performance making, particularly in the Applied area where we are very strong. But there’s also my playwriting, David Williams’s dramaturgical work with Lone Twin, Ali Hodge’s core training, Matthew Cohen’s puppet work, Karen Fricker’s reviewing, and much more. Also, we have a long tradition of interpretive work, writing articles for the press, giving talks at theatres, programme notes, and publishing books for the general reader. In general, I think we can make an accurate and honourable case that we have always written for the general reader; most of the books and articles coming out of our department are (relatively) free of impenetrable jargon.

It’s been in my mind because I did two Platforms at the National this week. One was with Matthew Dunster and Drew Pautz about Love the Sinner and the other was with Thea Sharrock about After the Dance. Individually, they constitute almost no Impact at all, but alongside all the other things I’ve done of this kind, and gathered together with similar activities by my colleagues, they represent a sustained activity of interpretation and communication.

The question is whether they rely on research, whether anyone could do them. Well, clearly, anyone could do them. Do I bring anything extra to it by being ‘expert’? That’s tricky. The point of the events is to give audiences a chance to hear the theatremakers and other experts talking about their work. It’s not to give them a chance to hear my ideas about the theatre, so the questions typically are pretty soft (what drew you to this play? where did the idea for this show come from?).

However, with Drew and Matthew, their knowing that I’m a playwright meant that I think they trusted the questions and direction of the conversation in a way they might not have done with a critic, say. With Thea, she knew that I’d written about After the Dance, had read that piece, and referred to it, so I think felt comfortable that it was an informed conversation. As such, in both instances, the conversation was more informed, comfortable and revealing that perhaps it might have been.

It’s worth adding that Thea Sharrock’s decision to offer After the Dance came after reading the play in the version I edited. So the production itself - as well as the platform, programme article, and piece in the Guardian - constitute quite some impact.

After the Dance

My God, this is good. It’s a tremendously sure-footed production that, in my view, pushes the play not just to the front rank of Rattigan’s plays but to the front rank of British plays in the twentieth century.

After the Dance, as is well-known, was only a modest success in 1939 and so excluded by Rattigan from his Collected Plays and not reprinted until 1995, the edition that I edited for Nick Hern. It was produced in a televised version in the early nineties and the Oxford Stage Company produced it within the last decade, though the production didn’t come into London. I saw a drama school production of the play in around 2002, but otherwise the play has been neglected in this country until now.

What Thea Sharrock and her superb cast have completely understood is that Rattigan is undoubtedly an upper-middle class voice but this does not equate either to his values or the strangulated cut-glass accents that actors sometimes effect, which preserve the play in aspic, as a fantasy of someone’s nostalgia, and kill it dead as any sort of comment on the present time.

And of course, it is the most remarkably political play he wrote. The play is in many ways a savage assault on the values of a trivial generation who sleepwalked towards a second World War. The third act, in particular, show the clouds of war gathering over the stage and, despite to onset of spring, the play is decidedly wintry.

That said, it is also very funny, much funnier, indeed, than I had ever realised. The star comic turn is the character of John Reid, the wastrel, drunk, self confessed ‘parasite’ and ‘court jester’ to the Scott-Fowlers. He is the most unapologetic embodiment of the bright young generation, in all its failures. He is its most successful advocate, just as Peter, the cuckolded lover, is its bitterest, most nihilistic critic. John is played sensationally by Adrian Scarborough; it’s hard to imagine this being bettered, especially in the superb sequence where he discusses the Scott-Fowlers’ divorce and fantasises about living for six months in London and six months in the South of France.

The production effortlessly makes the sharp transitions that are so striking about the play, from comedy to romantic intrigue, from farce to tragedy, from wisecracking laughter to bitter political commentary. Housed in a gorgeous and typically monumental set by Hildegard Bechtler, the room, with only it seems cosmetic changes transforms in mood very dramatically.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll make a superb central pairing. Carroll plays Joan as larkish, carefree, riv en with frozen feeling, and trapped, utterly trapped, in a misrecognition of her lover’s feelings. Benedict Cumberbatch has a difficult job, dumping two women, driving one to suicide, yet still keeping our sympathies. He is a witty presence at the beginning, by the end a wild and desperate figure, doomed to loneliness, too late aware of the love that passed him by.

I was very struck how much this is a rehearsal for The Deep Blue Sea: the suicidal woman, the lively sense of a world around the room, the central figure ending the play alone, the social fools, condemning themselves out of their own mouths. The Deep Blue Sea is perhaps more perfect, more finely wrought in its single pursuit of a woman’s battle with loss, but it’s clear that it was the failure of this play that meant he would wait over a decade to try anything like it again.

By then, of course, he has stripped the well-made play of its less useful trappings. If After the Dance has faults, it’s that some of the transitions are a bit sharp; David falling for Helen’s advances is a big ask, almost as big as how quickly he is persuaded to give her up. John becomes the raisonneur figure in Act III rather uncomfortably and even this exemplary production couldn’t avoid him becoming a little sententious. In The Deep Blue Sea, he cleverly makes this figure the Eastern European doctor and his advice is more finely poised between triumph and disaster; here, you feel that it’s just a perverse decision of John to announce the truth. In the later play, he is forcing a woman on the point of suicide to confront the truth of her life, knowing that she might draw back or rush forward all the more decidedly.

I am so glad to have seen this play. And what a dream to have seen such a blistering production.

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.