Arvon

Just finished co-teaching Radio Drama for the Arvon Foundation at their base in Totleigh Barton, North Dorset. It’s been a hard-working week with fifteen extremely enthusiastic would-be radio dramatists.

The group is mainly women, age ranging from early 20s to late 50s, from across the country. There’s a range of experience too; some have written novels, others poetry, some stage plays. I don’t think anyone has had anything published though one woman has had a play performed by an amateur company, and another has written lots of sketches for comedy theatre groups to perform, and there’s lots of writing going on. There is a terrific sense of earnest determination to write which is very rewarding and there are some real moments of thoughtful invention and passion.

In some ways, the most tiring thing is not the teaching and responding, the long days and the intense one-to-one discussions; it’s the nervous energy involved in the transaction of showing work and commenting on it. The students are unsure, full of hope and a bit of ambition, needing feedback and recognition but fearful of a damning judgment. As a tutor, you’re having to both be completely honest but also respect people’s hopes and the precariousness of their confidence in talent. So each person is slightly second-guessing the other and, while it works, it creates an exhausting set of emotional dynamics.

That said, there are some really interesting plays coming out of this. One in particular that caught my ear and imagination concerns a 16-year-old boy in the West Yorkshire of the 1920s who falls in love with a Jewish girl. Written with great heart, observation and lyricism, but hugely evocative of place. Another tells a great yarn about the first panel doctor in Wisbeech who is resisted by the town doctors, accused of libel, and commits suicide, leading to an eruption from the townsfolk against the vested interests of the private doctors. A third has a troubled woman, eight months pregnant, visited by an eighteen-century lighthouse keeper. Oh and there’s an interesting one that explores the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. And more... and more...

The Arvon centre at Totleigh Barton is an old set of farm buildings. The farmhouse is where some students live, where the food is cooked and eaten, and where some of the tutorials and a modest library are located. The barn is a good space for large-group meetings and classes. The other students live in a converted pigsty. The place is an hour from the nearest train station, has no wi-fi, no TV, and a couple of tiny pockets of precarious mobile phone signal. When else have I been an hour from a train station? True, I’m not particularly well-travelled, but still it felt like real isolation. A few of the students (and both the tutors) walked around on Monday night, eyes wide with perplexity, saying things like ‘are you getting a signal?’ ‘I don’t even have a bar’. It imposes a kind of intensity on things, a determination to write and to take the task seriously.

Arvon’s been going around 40 years. It’s a brilliant formula and a real honour to be part of it.

Green-Eyed Monster

‘Do you have anything lined up after this run is over?’ I ask one of the actors in Chekhov in Hell.

‘Well, I’ve got a couple of weeks off, then I start rehearsals for a show at Hampstead,’ she replies.

I’m amazed to feel a stab of outrage and jealousy. Another show? How is that possible? You’re MY actor. Does this mean so little to you? What, you just toss this aside like an old tissue?

It’s the weirdest feeling and completely unreasonable, obviously. Of course, it’s all about the intense promiscuity of theatre. We work together for short periods, shutting everything else out, it’s emotional, physical, sensual, we promise the world to each other, we meet in the evenings, we go to unusual places, confidences are exchanges over drinks, and then we move on. It’s like an affair. But actors are used to it. I don’t imagine they all feel the deep bluesy heaviness I feel the day after a show closes. It’s one of the uncanny things about actors. Their ability to access that well of feeling with sincerity and accuracy and then to leave it behind. I’m sure writers have an equivalent but damned if I can think what it is now.

I think the problem is seeing making theatre is falling in love. I need to think of it as just sex.

On Being Loved

Simon Stokes came back to see Chekhov in Hell last night, after a few days away from it. His view is that the performances have softened slightly. One of the hazards that actors have to navigate round is wanting to be loved by the audience. There is a complex negotiation at work because you have to communicate with them and there are many skills that we all have to ensure the quality of that communication; some of these skills are ‘charm’ and ‘likeability’ and various personal qualities that make sure the channel of communication is open. In this play, only Chekhov can really be liked by the audience; if we bond ourselves to him then we see the play through his eyes and we experience his dislocating horror at the quality of the contemporary world. All of the characters have their clear good intentions but they have become twisted out of shape in their actions. And if the actors start trying to persuade the audience of their characters’ essential sweetness, the play becomes noisy and confused.

Simon’s talk was uncompromising. ‘We don’t need to re-rehearse unless you really want to. It’s basically all working but it’s got soft. What you have to remember is that these characters are cunts. You. You’re a cunt. You? You’re a cunt too. You two, you’re both cunts. That Alan Sugar? He’s a complete cunt. Everyone’s a cunt. And you have to remember that; don’t make them like you because you’re all cunts.’

It seems to have done the trick.

You're Having a Laugh

​Johnny Broadbent and Ruth Everett in Chekhov in Hell

Laughing in the theatre is a funny thing. I’ve realised doing this play that quite a few people don’t like doing it. And other people only like doing it. Generally, the play gets a tremendous response and one of the key ways you know it’s getting a tremendous response is that the audience laugh and laugh a lot. On the first night, I began to wonder if the audience would ever stop laughing; some of the younger audiences have actually laughed to distracting lengths and at distracting volumes. Ultimately, that’s the least of an audience’s vices but I have sometimes wondered if the laughter isn’t prompted by some determination not to let the play move into the somewhat darker areas that it finds in the final quarter.

And then there are the laughter-haters. Not often but occasionally, we’ve had the response ‘well I suppose it’s very funny...’ as if this is the least of all virtues, something cheaply won. Actually making an audience laugh is very hard; making a whole audience laugh requires skill and precision and all of the virtues of good theatre - a sense of pace, volume, situation, character, language, feeling... But some audiences distrust laughter, think it’s unworthy of them and of art.

My feeling with this play is that of course it’s funny. The basic conceit - Anton Chekhov awaking from his hospital bed after a 100-year coma - is funny; it’s absurd; it’s silly. If I tried to stack on top of it a deep psychological tragedy, the audience’s response, quite rightl, would be ‘oh come on’. The play works through laughter, through satire, through sensing the absurd in ordinary situations. It reframes the everyday and finds the insanity of it. And that’s funny.

The problem for some audiences is that they don’t like to laugh if they don’t know why they’re laughing. And it’s not always immediately clear why something is funny; fundamentally the play does not advertise its world view, its improving message, so where is the laughter? What’s it for? This seems to unsettle some audiences and stop them laughing.

Some have wondered where the positivity is in the play. It’s there. It’s in the funny. Because if we can laugh at the horrors of the world, we are a step on the way to imagining a different world, with different priorities, different ways of being with each other.

Of course, I say all this because I’m a bit of a laughter whore. I love the sound of laughter in an audience of one of my plays. I sit in the audience mentally flicking forward to when the next big laugh is due. I get tense before a big joke, hoping it’ll be delivered smoothly and smartly, wanting that big shout of laughter, that convulsion that suggests an audience caught unawares by the joke, giving themselves to it. I do have to remind myself that laughter isn’t the only response I wrote the play for. There are some rich jokes and some dislocatingly odd jokes and a few deliberately silly jokes (there’s a scene quite near the end, ‘The Search for Chemical Weapons’, which has some of the dumbest jokes, but it’s there to flush out the laughter, to give people some fun before the laughter starts getting hurting and painful). The shape of the play is firm and takes us through laughter to something sadder and bleaker.

The persistence of laughter, to me, is a moment of the comic sublime. For Kant and others the sublime is that odd experience of simultaneous or almost simultaneous horror and pleasure at seeing something like a vast and raging sea, or contemplating the enormity of the universe. Kant says the displeasure comes from the vast disparity of scale or power between us and the thing we’re experiencing. We feel crushed, negligible, infinitesimally insignificant, wholly powerless. But this is only the failure of our imaginations to take in the experience as an experience. Then our rational mind comes in to affirm that even though the site may appear infinite, all objects must be  the movement through pain to affirm our ability to see it as something other than it sees itself. To say, this hurts but still, even so, I won’t be beaten by it.

So laughter is part of the play not some kind of decoration or distraction. It’s also part of the play’s idea structure. Laughter is part of its argument (if it has, as such, an argument). The funny is at least part of the point.

On the Couch

The show is bedding in and the strong sense overtakes me that I’m really a spare part. As John Bird, channelling Denis Thatcher, put it, ‘about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party’. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, as long as you feel you’ve done your work and it’s taxiing nicely to take-off. But it’s also a thing about where you put yourself.

I think of Alan Bennett’s diary entry from last year in the London Review of Books which makes the point very well:

7 November 2009: It’s at this point, a couple of days into previews, that the author begins to take his or her leave of the play. It’s nothing to do with a sense of work completed, which I seldom have anyway, or now the play is up and running a desire to get on with something else. Fat chance. No. While it’s psychologically healthy (no sense in hanging around after all), it’s because at this point the cast have been allotted their dressing-rooms. Previously the rehearsal room has been the meeting place where besides work you gossip and have coffee and, if you’re like me and are used to working on your own, have a nice, gregarious time. Now everyone escept the playwright has a room to go to and a couch to lie on, the real meeting place henceforth the stage on which every night the actors rendez-vous to do the play. For the author it’s over.