A couple of the platforms that I've chaired at the National Theatre have been made available as podcasts. You can subscribe to them via iTunes or you can listen to them on Soundcloud. Direct links below.
Blink and you miss it. My playlet, We, Margaret, was performed last night at Theatre503, as part of Thatcherwrite, an evening of pieces about Margaret Thatcher and her legacy. My play was for the whole cast and involved them performing like a socialist choir from the 1930s a text made up verbatim from comments by Margaret Thatcher on the importance of the individual. The piece has proved technically too difficult to pull off properly, so we're not continuing with it right through the run, so if you didn't see it last night, tough cookies, you missed it. But, then, so did I.
More information about it, including the script, here.
I'm chairing a platform on Wednesday 29 May 2013, after the Headlong production of The Seagull at the Richmond Theatre. It's free to ticket holders. On the panel will be the writer John Donnelly, director Blanche McIntyre, and Professor Cynthia Marsh who was a brilliant interviewee in my panel on Gorky's Children of the Sun back in April. Should be good; see you there. Wave.
This is an interesting one. This week, I'm chairing a post-show panel at the National, following Tanya Ronder's powerful new play Table. The play follows a family history centred on a table that has been in the family's possession for over 100 years. The table is eaten at, pissed on, fucked on, hidden under, cut, dismembered and transported across the world.
The panel I'm chairing looks at tables and the role they play in family life. The guests are Nick Humphrey, a curator in the V&A’s furniture department, and Jonathan Pratt, and auctioneer, often seen on programmes like Bargain Hunt and Antiques Road Trip. We'll be discussing the play and subject of furniture in the form of a table, reflecting on its changing role in our daily lives, and the social history that can be traced in everyday objects.
The panel is on 9 May at 10.25pm, straight after the performance of Table. It's free to ticket holders, £1 for everyone else. Tickets bookable here.
Theatre503 is producing an evening of theatrical responses to Margaret Thatcher and her legacy. I'm one of the writers; others who have been invited include Fraser Grace, Judy Upton, Dominic Cavendish, Maxine Quintyne-Kolaru, Brad Birch, Jon Brittain, Omar El-Khairy, and Gemma Langford. The evening will comprise a whole series of short plays and performance pieces. Steve Harper is the literary manager of 503 and his aim is to create a spread of views rather than just a straightforward and predictable anti-Thatcher event.
Steve says the following:
'No other figure in living memory has been the catalyst for such divisive expressions of emotion - honoured by the pomp and regalia of a ceremonial funeral whilst mocked as a burning effigy on makeshift funeral pyres. Love her or hate her, her unique achievements were many, her personality etched onto the history of this country, for good and for bad. She was a game changer, leaving the country and the political landscape she inherited irreparably altered.'
I don't know all of these other writers so I can't say if he's going to be successful in finding playwrights who love her, but it's an interesting idea.
My plans involve a revival of an old socialist theatre form and a lot of Margaret Thatchers. There was a preview of the show in The Independent.
The show will run 11-15 June at Theatre503. Performances begin at 7.45pm.
A couple of years ago Jake Urry, a student at the University of Central Lancashire, conducted an interview around the time that Chekhov in Hell was on. He's now set up a theatre company, Just Some Theatre, with fellow student Peter Stone (both pictured) and they're touring Coward, a play by James Martin Charlton.
To help add interest to the company website, they've asked to put up interviews with me, James and Gregory Burke. Here's the interview with me.
This morning, Maria Miller gave her first speech on the arts after seven months in post as Culture Secretary. She's come out good and clear as seeing the arts in almost exclusively econometric terms. The piece tries to think through the limits of that.
Our Press Office at Royal Holloway suggested I write something about it that they'd try to place. To be honest, I thought they'd just send it round a few press agencies and it might end up being quoted in a couple of places. Instead it's been published on the Guardian website and is getting some good traction with retweets and links.
You can read it here. I should also say, I have no idea what the Culture Professionals Network is. If anyone know, do email or tweet me at the usual addresses.
Forest Fringe are today launching their curated season at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. Last year, they had a series of posters in the foyer by the wonderful Tim Etchells. This year, they've decided to do the same again but source their posters from various artists and writers they know. Andy Field asked me to do one, so I have. You can see them all in the foyer of the Gate Theatre. I don't think you have to see a show to see them, but, since you're there, it wouldn't hurt. The season runs until 4 May.
The excellent playwright Fin Kennedy, together with researcher Helen Campbell Pickford, has put together a piece of research, entitled In Battalions ('When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions.' Hamlet 4.5).
The report challenges the current Arts Minister Ed Vaizey who has asserted that the cuts in arts subsidy is having "no effect" on British theatre. In Battalions suggests that they are already having a very significant effect, particularly on the development of new plays but, in fact, on new work generally. The report finds significant cutbacks in productions, commissions, residencies, development time, cast sizes, touring, and more.
Ed Vaizey got the report two months ago. He has not responded. So Fin has got together an open letter to Ed Vaizey, requesting a formal response to the report, and he's managed to get it signed by a fantastically impressive list of writers, directors, managers and actors, including Caryl Churchill, Vicky Featherstone, Michael Frayn, Dennis Kelly, Mike Leigh, Helen Mirren, Mark Ravenhill, Simon Stephens, Tom Stoppard, and, perhaps not quite as impressively, me. The letter has got good coverage from the Guardian, Independent and Equity.
It's a powerful, worrying report and a stirring letter. I'm pleased and proud to be adding my voice right now.
I've been commissioned to write another play. Always good news. It's another one from the Drum in Plymouth. I had an idea for a play last year which I realised I wanted to write rather quickly. I asked Simon Stokes if he would turn my existing commission into one of this new play. Instead he decided he really wanted that other play but wanted to commission this new one as well.
The new play is a response to the horrific revelations around Jimmy Savile's lifetime as a predatory, determined and devious paedophile and also to the complete lack of perspective or proportion in the coverage. It's also likely to be not a comedy, but something that uses comedy to crank open some of the contradictions. It's going to have to tread a very fine line.
Photo: Press Association
My short article on booing has just been published by Contemporary Theatre Review in their special themed issue: Alphabet: A Lexicon of Theatre and Performance. I think it's a fun piece of work, even though short, and manages to say a fair bit about a range of different things. More information here. I should add that, having read the whole issue cover to cover (how often does one do that with a journal?), it's a pretty great read and has some great little pieces by some of the most interesting thinkers in theatre studies (present company excepted).
On Thursday 18 April 2013 and 6.00pm, I’m chairing a Platform on Maxim Gorky to coincide with the new National Theatre production of Children of the Sun. I’ll be interviewing Cynthia Marsh, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. We’ll be discussing Gorky’s distinctive approach to writing for theatre, his politics, and the specific circumstances of the writing of Children of the Sun while in prison for his part in the abortive 1905 Revolution.
Tickets available here.
On 30 April 2013, at the Barbican Centre, I will be interviewing Katie Mitchell about her production of August Strindberg’sMiss Julie (Fräulein Julie) which comes to London from the Schaubühne via the Avignon Festival. Mitchell’s is a radical reworking of the original, seeing the play through the eyes of the servant Kristin rather than the more famous pair of protagonists, Jean and Julie. The production is amplified by the use of live video, showing us a bigger picture around the story, composing and recomposing images around the action. Katie is always a fascinating, precise, thoughtful and candid interviewee, so I’m hugely looking forward to the production and the post-show talk.
The event is free to anyone with tickets for that performance, which are available here.
Negative Signs of Progress is my new trilogy of plays for BBC Radio 4 and they are on this coming week. Each play can stand alone but together they an unfolding story set against the background of the Arab Spring.
Here is set in Britain, where a husband is visited by a police officer who has a few questions about the man’s wife. What begins as a few routine questions builds into an international thriller. Over the course of the interview, the man comes to question everything he thought he knew about his relationship and the woman he loves.
There is set in a NGO in Europe. A group of strategists react to the news that one of their field workers has disappeared and may have been kidnapped. Despite their near-total inexperience, they are forced to role play scenarios in which they negotiate with the unknown kidnapper, struggling to separate truth from fiction, Aleppo from Hollywood.
Somewhere is set somewhere in the Arab World. A frightened western hostage finds herself in a beautiful library, the unwilling guest of a man of impeccable civility. The play asks how far the west and the east can understand each other, whether the Arab Spring is a projection of western liberal wish-fulfillment and – when the work of Debussy can become an act of prisoner abuse – explores how easily civilization can be a vehicle for brutality.
Negative Signs of Progress will be broadcast on 25 February (Here), 26 February (There), and 27 February (Somewhere) at 2.15pm on BBC Radio 4. It is produced by Polly Thomas at BBC Radio Cardiff.
The casts are:
Here: Tony Gardner (The Thick of It, Lead Balloon) and Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, United 93)
There: Fenella Woolgar (Doctor Who, Vera Drake), Joseph Kloska (Made in Dagenham, Jane Eyre), and Steffan Rhodri (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Gavin & Stacey)
Somewhere: Frances Grey (Messiah, Vanity Fair), Mido Hamada (Homeland, 24)
Oberon have just published their second volume of Modern Monologues for Men, edited by Catherine Weate. This volume contains a sort-of monologue from Chekhov in Hell. It’s Max the fashion designer in the scene ‘Yo Soy Un Fashionista’. I say sort of, because actually Chekhov has a few lines in the scenes, but since Max is a bit of a motormouth it’s very close to being monologue anyway. So there’s a chance that poor, horrible Max may start popping up in auditions across the country.
Just back from a draining but exhilarating couple of days running a workshop (with Polly Thomas) on developing radio plays that engage with science. The workshop was invitation-only and involved six playwrights, six radio producers, and six scientists. The event was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust who hosted it at their Genome Campus in Cambridge.
The Campus is a wonderful thing. The centrepiece is the Sanger Institute where they sequenced most of the Human Genome in the late 1990s. I wrote a play once which had a genome scientist at its centre; he worked on “Junk DNA” - those portions of DNA that did not appear to code for proteins and therefore were regarded by some people as padding or inert remnants of some lost portions of DNA. That character working on Junk DNA was in some ways a joke about his marginality but he was also quite passionate in his belief that Junk DNA would repay analysis and may have functions that we simply had not seen, so I’m glad to see that his work has recently been bearing fruit. The research I did to write that play meant that I was rather overwhelmed - starstruck in a way - to be in the place where the Genome was sequenced. Architecturally, it’s a gorgeous thing too.
The workshop was rather marvellous. The writers were very impressive, well-established and interesting: Mike Walker, Julian Simpson, Sarah Woods, Alan Pollock, Hattie Naylor, Sebastian Baczkiewicz. All good company, creative, smart who took the two days really seriously. The producers were wonderful, including the delightful Gaynor Macfarlane, whom I hadn’t seen for twenty years.
With no disrespect to those groups, though, the scientists were the stars. Of course, there were anxieties about their role. Would they be impossible to understand? Would they confirm stereotypes of awkwardness, aloofness, cerebral geekiness? None of that was true. They were remarkable. Each one of them was fascinating, warm, funny, with a ferocious commitment to communication. Also, they were creative; when the groups (writer-producer-researcher) worked well, and they often did, the whole group contributed to the creative thinking. And of course the science was fascinating: I learned this week about a 10,000-year-old dog who has lived forever in the DNA of the cancer that killed him; a medical pioneer who may have fathered 1000 children by women who never met him; the cognitive maps that construct the world around us...
Wellcome want to support the development of radio ideas that go beyond the usual dynamics of scientist biopics, patient narratives, or inert expositional dialogue (“Do tell me all about Helium, Professor”). I think we produced six very interesting ideas, which will continue to be developed over the next six months.
Deeivya Meir and Craig Vye preparing for civil war
I'm chairing a post-show discussion with Philip Ridley following his Christmas show Feathers in the Snow at the Southwark on 18 December. The show is a fairytale epic, a slyly political play about war, government, and social division, but also an immensely enjoyable romp, with songs, drag acts, and at least three historians. It's performed by a professional cast alongside Southwark Playhouse's own youth company and has all the vigour that suggests. If you've seen Phil in conversation before, you'll know that he's a candid, witty, generous speaker. If you haven't seen Phil before, now is your chance!
Tomorrow I’m Chris Goode’s guest on the Thompson’s Live podcast, recorded at the jocosely-titled Stoke Newington International Airport. I’m one of three guests, the others being Chris Campbell of the Royal Court and the poet Francesca Lisette. Chris comperes and contributes, the emperor at the feast. We’re chatting about various artistic, theatrical and cultural issues and I will either blether inanely and intermittently for an hour or I will blether insanely for slightly less time. I fully expect to hightail it out of Hackney pursued by an angry mob of hipsters. I’m looking forward to it.
Details, whereabouts, and what you have all here. It all kicks off around 8.30pm.
This Friday I’m chairing a platform at the National Theatre with Lucy Prebble and Rupert Goold, the writer and director of The Effect, which has just opened to excellent reviews and is quickly selling out. If you turn up and wait patiently for my daft questions to finish, you can ask your own. Book here, you devils.
The lucky,
lucky people of Aberystwyth are getting me for the weekend. On Sunday,
2-5pm, I’m giving a workshop on Writing for Radio at the Aberystwyth
Arts Centre. I believe it’s sold out, but you might be able to show up
on the day.
On Monday, I’m doing a couple of things
at the University: a workshop for the MA students also on Writing for
Radio and then I’m doing an informal talk trying to get further with the
issue of Practice as Research. I’ve called it ‘Practice-as-Research:
Some Heretical Thoughts’, which is already annoying me, as a rather
self-regarding and self-important title, striking, in other words, precisely the
wrong note. So do ignore that and come along if you’re around. It’s in
Seminar Room 1 in the Parry-Williams building on Monday.
Looking forward to seeing the sea and old friends.
You may be here because you’ve come across a book, or play, or article of mine and you want to know more. Maybe you’re a student or a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance and you want to find out more about me. Maybe you are gathering ammunition for a vicious ad hominem attack that will expose me for the charlatan that I am.
If so, you’ve come to the right place. Feel free to get in touch.
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