Development

I’m just heading back from a week in Manchester, working on a new play, Whistleblower. It’s been a great writing week for a number of reasons, some of them public, some personal.

The public positives are that I arrived on Sunday with two thirds of a draft written. By Thursday morning I had finished a substantial second draft. This was given a public rehearsed (slightly staged) reading today (Friday) and, as far as I can tell, held the audience. No, fuck it, gripped the audience. We had a full house and the reading was met with  explosive laughs and deep silences. One of the weird things I find about writing a play is the way that you can write a line because you know it’ll break the tension with a laugh - then, as your attention changes to different aspects of the play - you can forget that little effect was there, and you only remember when you hear the laughter, which is why audiences always always always teach you so much about your own play.

And silence: there’s about a dozen decent laughs in the play, which unsettles me. I can be a bit of a laugh-whore; sitting in a laughing audience is very reassuring because you know they’re enjoying it. They may not be loving it or admiring it or thinking it’s a great play but if they’re laughing then at least you know the jokes are going over. In this play, there are only a dozen decent laughs (and I’d say two of them are laughs of anxious release, several others half-laughs about incongruity). So it’s a good opportunity to learn about silence. There’s a central sequence in the play where an army officer looks at a series of photographs on a phone. It probably takes two minutes and the silence is interrupted by barely more than half a dozen short low-key lines. It’s something I’ve experience a lot as an audience member, less often in one of my plays: the intensity that comes from an audience listening in silence, each person’s silence amplified by everyone else’s. It’s very exciting, even in a fairly informal reading, to have created the conditions for that kind of silence.

The play’s a two-hander, one location, in real time, so there’s not a lot of visual interest and variety to keep people’s attention. This is the challenge, making essentially a conversation between two people into something consistently engaging for 75 minutes, because if you lose the audience, it’s very hard to get them back. There’s no scene-change, new character, or time jump to restart their interest. You need to lock them in to a battle of wits between two characters.

The form of the play was absolutely key for me. I’m rather interested in the duologue form and I find it - when it works - extraordinarily thrilling: think of Blackbird, Stitching, Tender Napalm, A Number, Contractions, Yard Gal, Jonah and Otto, Disco Pigs, Midsummer and Oleanna. What strikes me about these plays  very often is the way that they pit two views of the world or one event against each other. The lack of a third person turns the play into a ferocious battle for the meaning of the world. And out of that you get a very intense sense of debate and dissensus. So, while the play is on one level a psychological thriller, a battle of wits between two characters, in doing so it opens up big questions about the ethics of war, liberal interventionism, humanitarian law, and how far you can compromise with immorality for moral ends.

This play came about when, at the end of last year, I got fed up with being so responsive in my writing. Waiting for commissions, working to deadlines. I envy friends who work regularly with particular theatre companies. I wanted to originate my own project, get my own team together, place it myself, make the work on my own terms. That may seem odd to say about a piece that is far from being outlandishly experimental. But it felt to me that this was in some ways a rather personal play, both in its dramaturgical challenge and in some of its ideas. I worked with Lucy Kerbel on a short play last year and, apart from simply getting on well with her,  I was immediately struck by her seriousness and rigour. I asked if she’s be interested in working on this project. I asked around a few theatres and companies. It was a terrible time to ask, with the then-unknown results of the National Portfolio decisions hanging over everyone’s heads. But Sarah Frankcom, at the Royal Exchange, did bite. She agreed to pay for a week of R&D with me and Lucy, then a week working on a draft with two actors and a public showing. That was today.

The personal successes for the week were twofold. One was simply about re-writing. Like a lot of lazy people, I hate rewrites. I just wish the first draft of something were perfect and I didn’t have to do anything else. Rewriting is always a trial, when I have to undo all my hard work, discard things I’m fond of, come up with new solutions. I used to think my plays couldn’t be rewritten, that writing a play is like drilling through rock, that you can’t tinker with the channel produced, and all you can do is start from a different angle and drill again. This week, the rewriting process, difficult though it was, seemed liberating. I would even say I enjoyed it. The play immeasurably improved in the redrafting. And that’s because of the second thing.

I’ve always been a bit suspicious of dramaturgy. I teach it, how to take a play apart, how to understand its underlying architecture, how to build out that architecture through actions. But I’ve been suspicious; I always worry that it normalises a play, turns it into something expected, ordinary, conventional. This week, with Lucy’s help and prompting, I found a clean and clear way through the play, breaking it down into units and actions, and then rewriting. It’s a kind of Stanislaskian discipline which separates structure from dialogue, and allows you to see clearly the shape you’re going for. Far from taking the fun out of writing (which I occasionally feel with planning) you can trust in your ability to write dialogue and the architecture does all the work. And rewriting becomes enjoyable. You feel the play improving, toughening up, under your fingers. And in this instance, becoming stranger, more unsettling, more surprising, more unconventional. So, thank you Lucy.

There are some things to do: (this is a list for me not you)

1. The ending needs to become hypothetical, not necessarily a confession. It’s asking the moral question: what if I were a monster?
   

2. More Greek. There’s a structure of gods and beliefs, a mythology to draw on. This is potentially funny but also could unify the moral questions (fate etc.) and the poetic language (where’s that going? The moon, white shadow, etc.). It needs a good joke about that early on to really establish it.
   

3. The characters can be more individualised, not so exhausted by their public roles. The Greek thing tends to generalisation. More personal, his anxieties in the camp, her frustrations in the job.
   

The cast, Joe Ransom and Diane Beck, were very strong. Patient, thoughtful, great and generous improvisers. The play crackled in the Royal Exchange Studio this afternoon and I’m immensely proud of it.

Decade

‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ wrote Theodor Adorno in his 1949 essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. He wrote those words, of course, in the immediate aftermath of the moment those camps revealed their nightmarish secrets to the world.  What did he mean by that? For Adorno, I think, Auschwitz seemed to be an absolute event, a moment when the processes of inhumane rationalisation slipped their bounds and took their leave of humanity absolutely. It was an event of terrible finality and totality. There was no gap in it, no edge, nothing that poetry could use to question it, open it up, make it strange again. To write poetry would simply be, therefore, to duplicate and repeat the event; it risks, as Adorno said of Schoenberg’s Survivors of Warsaw, making ‘the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of its horror removed’. And to do that, of course, is barbaric.

There’s been a wave of Adornoism in British theatre. David Hare writes in one of his lectures of feeling a sense of embarrassment and disappointment at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem finding that the photographs of the camps were much more powerful than artworks inspired by them. All the artworks did, thought Hare, was ‘to insert an artist’s presence gratuitously between people’s unbearable suffering and our own reaction to it’. While Hare’s objection is to artistic interpretation rather than finding anything uniquely unrepresentable about the Holocaust, he reflects a widespread sense that fiction, poetry, art cannot or should not represent the world. One theatrical response is David Hare’s own: in work like Berlin, Wall and Via Dolorosa he presents his experiences in his own voice, performing these monologues himself. Another might be some forms of verbatim theatre which try very hard not to ‘insert an artist’s presence’ between the audience and the subject matter.

The events of 9/11 were not comparable in scale to those of the Holocaust, but they was an act of grotesque, spectacular murder and the sudden simultaneous deaths of so many pose related ethical problems. A day or two after the day, Channel 4 News opened with a fast-cut compilation of footage showing the second plane hitting the South tower. It was an horrific sequence, powerful but misjudged; it seemed as if the editor had wanted to emphasise the dramatic nature of the events, as if these events needed such emphasis, and so had inserted him or herself into the material. A few days later, images of the attacks disappeared from our screens. There was a tacit agreement among broadcasters to step back from disaster porn, not to force the bereaved and the affected to relive these events before their eyes. The ethics of this are complicated by the spectacular politics of the acts, in a way that takes us back to Adorno: one aim of the terrorists was to create terrible iconic images, to shock visually, so to repeat these images is to be complicit in the terrorism. To show images of the falling towers is, in a sense, barbaric.

9/11 then has two prohibitions against it. The distaste for fiction as a response to suffering and the distaste for documentary. Headlong’s Decade responds to this double-taboo in a new piece that may be considered an attempt to pick a path through the ethical minefield of representing 9/11. Director Rupert Goold wanted to create a large-scale theatre piece that would look at 9/11 the years on and reflect on the decade that those events so decisively shaped. Sensing perhaps that those events could or should not be directly represented - quite apart from the ethical prohibitions I’ve discussed, the theatre’s means of representation would be inadequate to any kind of literal representation of these literally enormous attacks - Goold asked twenty writers to give him short pieces which he would stitch together into a theatrical tapestry. The idea was, I guess, that the tumult of styles, modes, genres and languages would create a kind of kaleidoscope, refracting the event multiply and not privileging any one viewpoint or make any definitive claim to how to represent 9/11. In addition, the profusion of scenes suggest the complexity of the events, its many international dimensions, layers, meanings and experiences. Perhaps in an additionally anti-theatrical gesture, the performance took place in an office block near Tower Bridge. The audience entered through a mock-up of US Customs and then took their seats in what I think was intended to be a replica of Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. We watched scenes performed on a large circular central table, sometimes at or on the tables around the space; other scenes took place above us, behind glass, in a disused corridor space. At moment we seemed to catch glimpses of helpless figures trapped in the towers, staring uncomprehendingly down from the windows.

Did it work? Not for me. There were some strong pieces from Sam Adamson, Ella Hickson, Alecky Blythe and DC Moore. The variety of scenes seemed awkward as we lurched from one thought to another. The lack of any overall coherence meant that each scene stood on its own, intellectually, emotionally, and didn’t benefit from any kind of cumulative development. Some of the scenes were sentimental (The Sentinels, for example) and rubbed up against scenes that were abrasively funky (The Enemy). Some ideas really needed to be given space to work on their own terms and got smothered by the stuff around it (Trio with Accompaniment, My Name is Tania Head). Some ideas were rather earnest (The Odds) or rather assumed the emotional contents that they were striving to convey (Black Girl Gone). In most cases, the writing is fine, even good, but the effect of the writing has been disturbed, worsened by the unsympathetic dramaturgy.

What do I mean by that? Well, the published playtext reveals that several of the scenes were completely cut (Abi Morgan’s scene, a rather good, punchy, funny piece about journalism, called Superman; Adam Brace’s Electric Things, imagines a view of 9/11 from the other side of the world, for example). Other scenes have been cut very brutally with considerable damage to their integrity. Take one of the most successful pieces, Sam Adamson’s Recollections of Scott Forbes. It’s a verbatim - I think - piece about someone who worked in the South Tower and it follows his recollections of the event, his near-miss in having swapped his shifts, his speculation about the event, and his drift into conspiracy theory. This has survived, as far as I remember, uncut, but Goold has divided the piece in two and placed the two sections separately. What this does is to place much more emphasis on Forbes’s conspiracy theories. In one long rush we can connect his desperate seeking for explanation in the trauma of the initial revelations; separated out, the conspiracy material feels cooler and more reasoned; it seems endorsed by the production, where Adamson’s text is much more ambivalent.

I’m afraid I think the fault lies squarely with Rupert Goold. There is something intellectually rigorous and ethically sophisticated about proliferating the story, splintering it into a number of different strands. In this instance, though, it seems to be a way of disempowering the writer and installing Goold as the author-God, deciding who lives and dies. There’s a fair amount of this around - Theatre503 specialises in a form of theatrical evening where a group of writers write very short pieces which are collaged together. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but what they tend to mean is that the writers don’t get paid. This is not an anti-director rant. There’s nothing wrong with a piece of work where the director radically intervenes in a text and, as my first few paragraphs should make clear, I think there are plausible political and ethical arguments for the form in which this show was put together. It is demanding on a director, requiring the very highest creative, intellectual, emotional sensitivity. To make this work you need to have terrific artistic taste.

But, from the evidence of this, Goold doesn’t have good enough taste to make a project like this work. First, there is, as I’ve suggested, no real sense of the whole thing so everything is diminished: Decade seems to me less than the sum of its parts. Second, the idea that we can’t show 9/11 is compromised with a flurry of airplane noises and other representations, which seemed to be tacky and sensationalist. Third, there are moments in the show that seem to me in breathtakingly bad taste. I don’t mind being offended in the theatre and actually rather enjoy my sensitivities being tested and taken to the edge. But the ‘flight safety demonstration’ dance that opened the second half seemed to me offensive not because it broke a taboo but because it did so thoughtlessly, smugly, and appeared to believe it was doing something clever and edgy. Fourth, there were half a dozen redundant, half-hearted, malformed ideas in the show. Why did we have to go through customs to get in? What was that saying? You didn’t have to go through customs to get into the WTC. And when the actors ask these searching questions, we didn’t have to answer, so it all felt like we were letting them pretend to be intimidating; I was embarrassed on their behalf. Fifth, lots of the scenes came off badly because Goold seemed more interested in distracting the audience with some wacky staging idea than in working with the actors to find a clear path through the truth of the material. There were loads of different acting styles in this show - and not in some interesting, clashy, cabaret style: it just looked like no one had thought it important to unify the show artistically in any way. Worse still, the overall effect was to imply that the show was extremely pleased with itself. Goold, the artist, has removed the writer’s artistic control, only to more forcefully insert himself between the audience and the material.

What perhaps starts as an evasion of the risk of become implicit in the horror of 9/11 ends, it seems to me, in self-congratulatory directorial smugness, which is in itself crasser than any of the mistakes that might have been made otherwise. Because, what’s less often remembered is that Adorno didn’t stick to his principled opposition to art after Auschwitz. In 1962, in his essay ‘Commitment’ he reaffirmed his view but, with dialectical fastidiousness, also affirmed the opposite: ‘suffering [...] demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids’. By the time he published Negative Dialectics in 1966 in he had moved even further to the latter position: ‘perennial suffering has as much right to express itself as the martyr has to scream; this is why it may have been wrong to say that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz’.

And this must be right. I am appalled by the failure of nerve that considers certain events too serious for theatrical representation, too serious for art. Nothing is too serious or too difficult for art. It may be too difficult for certain artists and we may baulk at the challenge represented by some world-historical atrocity, but if art isn’t prepared to take on the most difficult and thorny of subjects, what is? To make bad theatre after Auschwitz is grotesque. Not to make art at all is barbaric.

The Theatre Machine

On the stage of the Olivier on Friday, I interviewed Bijan Sheibani, the director of the National’s revival of Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, a play which famously places a working restaurant kitchen on stage for two services, the stage a blaze of sweat, steam, and sizzle. Bijan’s a very interesting, thoughtful interviewee and I was very struck by one of his comments. And somewhere in that conversation, Bijan said he had been interested in whether “the theatre machine had something to say to the kitchen machine”.

The pairing - both of the phrases and within the phrases - is very provocative. Wesker’s play is very ambivalent about his kitchen. Much of the play is directed at the thought that the kitchen is a kind of brutalising, dehumanising factory: a production line for food, in which the staff are exhausted, their imaginations starved, their share of life’s goodness reduced to a wage. On the other hand, the play seems to marvel at the persistent unity and community of these people, the way we can and do work together, despite the pressures, forming friendships, alliances, partnerships of all kinds. ‘This is the United Nations’ says one character, and this must be one of the first plays to reflect what we would now call multicultural Britain: Greeks, Germans, French, Jews, Blacks, Irish are in the 30-strong cast of characters.

And the theatre has a similar ambivalence. At times you can shudder at the way it sucks in actors and spits them out, the near-identical nightly performances, the movements in their way as rigidly enforced as anything in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s manuals of scientific management. But at other times, say in the hours before a dress rehearsal - with one person adjusting a light up a ladder, actors in the stalls going over lines, director in intense conversation, carpenters adjusting the set - it can feel like the most kind of utopian socialism: a huge number of disparate individuals melded into a collective by complementary responsibilities and a sense of common endeavour.

But machine is an ambivalent word isn’t it? Think of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, where Richard Roma calls Shelley Levene ‘The Machine’. He’s meaning someone of power and effect but, applied actually to the work-broken, exhausted and desperate Shelley, it emphasises only his soullessness of his worn-out routine. Machine also implies the mechanistic and will-less. To call the theatre a machine is to throw into question its liveness, its responsiveness to the here and now, those things we often prize.

The Kitchen tests this. The final sequence of the first act is the lunchtime service which is a blur of waitresses spiralling into the kitchen with orders, chefs at their stations serving up food, words and food and plates flying, the supply and the demand pushed to breaking point. To perform this exhilarating (and also, of course, horrifying) scene requires a level of mechanical repetition - like someone performing a high-speed patter song in a musical (you don’t have time to recall the words to ‘Ya Got Trouble’ or ‘Not Getting Married’, you just repeat them) - and the whole scene must be staged like a military operation.

Does this impinge upon those things we value about theatre, as I’ve suggested? I remember when drum machines came in big time in the 1980s and were much criticised by music fans of a certain stamp because the rhythm was too regular, too predictable. As if you want a drummer to suddenly vary the rhythm without warning, to change time signature on whim. The point of a drummer is to be predictable, just as you want a kitchen to produce food of precisely the same high standard and of the same kind each time. And perhaps, just like a kitchen, when you go to the theatre you expect the same thing up the the same standard served up for you.

But but but. The same thing? It must depend. Those people who go to see Les Miserables hundreds of times are presumably a bit like those people who watch Star Wars hundreds of times; up to a point you can keep noticing new things, but ultimately it’s going back to have the same experience. And you can with a production-line production like a megamusical. But when I’ve returned to a production - certainly when I’ve gone to see a new production of a play - I’m going to find new things and to see how different it can be. Yeah, there are limits; if the actors get together backstage and decide, just for one night, that they’ll do a completely different play altogether, I might be a bit startled. On the whole, it’s finding the differences in the same that I want.

Here is one of the ways that the theatre thinks philosophically. Because in that fine balance between difference and the same, mechanical repetition and live spontaneity, there seems to me a dialogue unfolding between a mechanistic universe and a world where free will is possible. The Kitchen is a play haunted by this question: can the world be other than it is? At the end of the play the restaurant owner, Marengo, declares: ‘I give work, I pay well, yes?’ and demands ‘what is there more? What is there more?’ It’s one of the classic lines of the period, similar to its contemporary, The Entertainer, which asks ‘why should I care?’ and similarly hopes we can infer an answer that the speaker cannot. And yet, The Kitchen shows us a lot of people who can’t imagine beyond the limits of the world that they are in. The beginning of the second half has a few of the cooks erecting an improvised arch and Peter asks them to tell him their ultimate dreams. Strikingly most of them find it hard to answer the question and one of them tells only a nightmare of blood and butchery. While the final stage direction of the play answers Marengo’s question with the po-faced answer: ‘we have seen that there must be something more’ the play actually seems haunted by the thought that there isn’t. Is this it? Is this the world?

Bijan puts the theatre machine at the service of this question. The end of the first act trips lightly into absurdism and surrealism, with waitresses flying above the action, suggesting that we are sitting only on a rational shell which might split open and yield quite different worlds of imagination and fancy. And yet the stage design repeatedly reminded me of an orrery - pictured below - a mechanical, clockwork model of the universe that emphasises regularity, predictability, the remorseless execution of physical laws.

This image itself looks a bit like the Olivier, which, based on a Greek amphitheatre, is perhaps an attempt to create a stage that models the universe. Philosophically - and The Kitchen pushes this to the edge - is the theatre machine a model of a mechanical or a free universe?

An orrery made by Benjamin Martin in London in 1767, currently on display at the Putnam Gallery in the Harvard Science Centre

Top Girls

There can be few plays so precisely designed to surprise. Dramaturgically, Top Girls piles surprise on surprise. Imagine seeing it for the first time in 1982. The first scene appears to show us a contemporary power-dressing woman, but then who on earth are these guests? And why are they talking over each other? Why can’t we hear their stories? Why are they so upset? Then, after 45 crazy minutes, the scene is swept away and now we are watching two teenage girls in a garden in East Anglia. Nothing they say seems linked to the first scene (how could it be?) until one says that her aunt gets people jobs - wasn’t the scene-one power-dresser working in recruitment? Things begin to settle down in the next scenes, which show us a series of brilliant vignettes of office life, but then finally we are back in East Anglia and we seem to be in a flashback, but a flashback from which we never emerge. It must have been devastating and extraordinary.

The problem for the play now is that some of its celebrated disruptions are now iconic and celebrated. Overlapping dialogue is widespread, albeit never used to the punishing and brilliant extent that Churchill works it here. The opening restaurant scene bringing together women from across history is perhaps as instantly recognisable as Jimmy Porter’s ironing board, Edward Bond’s pram, or Sarah Kane’s Ian, head sticking sightlessly from the floorboards. It’s very famous and so, if the audience or the actors anticipate the accumulation of historical top girls, the effect is blunted.

I must say, it certainly seemed blunted last night in Max Stafford-Clark’s production which has come to the Trafalgar Studios from the Minerva. In fairness, it’s less Stafford-Clark’s fault than the Trafalgar’s, or perhaps it’s Stafford-Clark’s refusal to accept the conditions of the Trafalgar stage. The Minerva is a lovely, medium-scale thrust stage, audience on three sides, hugging the action,. The photo above is from the Minerva and shows that restaurant scene as cosy and intimate. Trafalgar Studio One is a wide, deep, tall stage and the auditorium is a barn; there are good democratic things about single raked seating units, but intimacy is not one of them. When you’re at the back of a single rake you really are at the back. The effect of galleries, boxes and circles is to cluster more nearly around the action, which is why Top Girls worked so well twice at the Royal Court and feels drafty here. (a) the restaurant table has been cranked open from its Minerva circle and becomes a cheated-out flat-front table with the diners on one side. It all becomes much more presentational. I’m not at all sure that this has been well thought through; certainly when the waitress takes the orders, she hopped irregularly between the diners. I’m sure the play is written such that people can talk logically to one another and yet the waitress can take orders in sequence. (b) the actors are having to shout to hit the 16th row. This coarsens the detailed naturalism of the writing, and these lines are just a beautifully fresh as ever, but not when shouted as if into a strong wind. (c) There’s wing space but no stage machinery and so the big scene changes that this production wanted necessitate two intervals. While we all schlepped to the bar, bales of hay were brought on and steps were reorganised. Later an open-plan office was stripped and a country kitchen installed as we supped. This stretched the evening to almost two-and-a-half hours and Top Girls is a play that thrives on the harshness of the juxtapositions. One effect of this was that in the actors often gabble their way through scenes: I imagined a first preview that topped the three-hour mark and the that this might have been the solution.

The composite effect of all this is that if you shout, cheat and gabble the scenes, they start looking like people are performing beloved comedy sketches rather than a play. I think of those French actors a few years ago who performed a cabaret of Monty Python sketches on the Edinburgh Fringe. The restaurant scene comes off worst from this treatment, the whole thing seeming like an absurdist skit rather than a historical counterpoint and prefiguring of the whole play. The acts basically got better as they went along; the office scenes, though sometimes knockabout fast, stood up strongly and the final confrontation between Marlene and Joyce in the latter’s kitchen was sharp and powerful (and incidentally did not feel in any sense dated). However, this turned the restaurant scene into a witty curtain-raiser to a basically realistic debate play about Thatcherism, which certainly blunts the strangeness and power of this play.

It comes down to Max Stafford-Clark’s persistent addiction to Bringing On Stuff. If we’d not needed a country kitchen; if we didn’t require real hay, we might have been able to go straight from act to act. The actors could have relaxed and, without all that paraphernalia, the focus might have been rightly on the actors and characters, not the Stuff. The hay, the sink, the in-trays don’t add much to the play in their physical presence. There were some rather well achieved digital projections (particularly good in the final act). More might be made of that.

Churchill’s plays, brilliant though they are, seem to me to have got increasingly restrictive and anally-retentive through the eighties. Plays like Top Girls and Serious Money are extraordinary but their formal concerns are so overdetermined as to make them performable only one way. Perhaps this is why of the four major London productions since 1982, 75% of them have been directed by Max Stafford-Clark. It’s hard to know what a director could do with Top Girls apart from do the play more or less well. That said, I’d love to see what Katie Mitchell could do with this play. The first scene calls out for her truthfulness and precision. (And finally no one could complain they couldn’t hear the actors because you’re not meant to). I have argued elsewhere that personally and politically, Churchill felt at the end of a certain road by the end of the eighties, which is why, suddenly, Mad Forest seemed so sprawling, so generous, so mysterious and why everything since has been politically more ambiguous and liable to so many more kinds of staging. Mad Forest to Seven Jewish Children, all of these plays seem written to cure directors of their addiction to Bringing On Stuff.

I Still Get Excited When I See a Ladybird

I saw Katie McCullough’s new play last week and chaired a post-show discussion about it.

Katie’s play is a series of seven monologues by people who work for a office supplies retailer. Claire, the manager, is looking to adopt a child but is very picky. George, deputy manager, is having an affair with coworker Judith. Will, supervisor, is gay and toying with buying a ring. Stuart’s a sales assistant and his induction tour mainly consists of his reflections on a life as a West Ham fan. His fellow sales assistant, Chloe, has been receiving unwanted attention from an unknown stalker, which seem to both horrify and excite her. Judith is working as a sales assistant to help fund her studies as a forensic scientist and she tells us of her tendency to date older married men. Alex only works weekends and seems fascinated by everything around him, so much so that he fails to call an ambulance for a sick man on the shop floor.

It’s a really accomplished bit of writing. The individual characters are beautifully rendered and the workplace is sufficient to contain the variety and give it shape and purpose. I admired her ability to work with the very delicate and the very extreme ends of emotion and experience, from Will’s guilty joy to Chloe’s pornographic imagination. She handles research very well: Stuart’s life among the Irons was apparently entirely drawn from research, but felt not only authentic but was well balanced between detail and feeling.

What’s formally unusual about the play is the opening stage direction: ‘The order [in] which the monologues are to be performed and/or split up is to be decided by the company and the director’. So Melissa Dunne - who was involved in the development of the play - produced her own assemblage of the play (which was then further worked on in rehearsal). This was, I would say, effective; the monologues in the original are all between four and six pages so if played in sequence would probably create a slightly monotonous rhythm which would have worked against the originality and interest of the characters.

It did make me want to wonder about the significance of this as a working method. It is to abdicate one of the things that playwrights conventionally are responsible for, the dramatic shape of the evening. While the cut still maintained some of the narrative arcs within the monologues - albeit spread out through the evening - different cuts might produce very different juxtapositions, meanings and moods. I think it’s an interesting and - see below - not unprecedented move, but I still wonder what the fun is for the playwright. I can see that it creates more of a bond by opening up to the director; I can see that it makes apparent the malleability of all plays (I’ve sometimes said that Attempts on Her Life is in a way the most unusual and most typical play in the world); and it can be a relief not to be solely responsible for every dramaturgical element.

But I can also see that it could be abused in situations where there’s a less intuitive and mutually respectful working environment than there is between Katie and Melissa. It would be very easy to produce a ridiculous or nonsensical and flatly insensitive cut of Ladybird. But having given up rights over the ordering of the material, how can the playwright assert the hidden landscape of the play and insist on its integrity. It’s as important to insist on what must be kept as what can be changed (Crimp insists that the first scene of Attempts can be omitted, the exception proving the rule that all other scenes must be played). It strikes me, looking both at the unedited and edited scripts, that McCullough’s monologues each have delicate structures that would be ruined if broken in the wrong place; there are delicacies of feeling that could easily be trampled on if juxtaposed with something more brutal. Sure, you might say, you have to work with sensitive people; but we can’t always guarantee that and I wouldn’t suggest that, as writers, we abandon the rights over our plays too easily.

I said that the formal principle is not unprecedented and indeed it isn’t. Simon Stephens’s Pornography comprises seven sections (mostly monologues) which can be played by any number of actors and in any order. Stephens did this because the play was written for German director Sebastian Nübling and, so Stephens thought, he was bound to much about with the text anyway, so why not write a play that explicitly gives permission to be mucked about with. Ironically, in the event, Nübling directed the play as written.

This is not the only affinity with Stephens’s work. McCullough was taught by him on an Arvon course, I believe, and he encouraged her writing; his recommendation is on the publicity for this show. I would also say - and I think Katie would admit this - that he is a big infliuence on the writing style. A character like Alex is a classic Stephens creation, an unusually articulate young man, in love with the world around him, thrilled by the every day. Meanwhile Chloe’s predicament, filled with haunting urban alienation and flashes of pornographic language recalls moments from Pornography, Motortown, Wastwater and others. Also visible is the influence of his deliberately naive writing, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, where the simple, the beautiful, the direct, the sincere is valued over the complex, the bleak, the twisted, the ironic. Look at these examples:

You ever stuck your head in the deep freeze at the supermarket? Do it. Down the aisle where you have to lift open the doors. Open the door and then open your mouth, then breathe in deeply. It feels amazing.

or

These cameras are tiny. Size of a cotton wool tip, or a fingernail. Small enough for you to miss. It’s fascinating how minuscule they are. It’s like stuff you see in spy movies. Must take a certain skill to place them undetected.

or

I don’t think I mentioned it but you’re sitting next to me, on the plane. Your seat’s alright, it’s upright like it should be. When the hostess comes over she doesn’t look at me, not at first, she looks at you. She speaks to you. You look at me, you really look at me and for a few moments you do nothing. Then you try to help me put my seat up, you struggle the most and I just lie there urging you to do something and you are.

The risk of this writing is that it topples into the wildly undramatic or indeed the twee. I don’t suggest that I Still Get Excited When I See a Ladybird falls into these traps at all (though you can see the danger even in that title); the writing is vigorous and thrilling, always very confidently judged. But these have the quality of unironic compulsion that remind me of Stephens and these passages (and others) could have come from a Simon Stephens play. I mean that both as a compliment - Stephens is a really wonderful writer - and to sound a small note of caution: much as I admired this play, I am excited to see what Katie will write when she shrugs off her influences and more fully finds her own voice and style.