Robert Holman

Robert Holman

At this year’s TaPRA conference, in the Directing & Dramaturgy working group that I co-organise, we had a panel of two papers on Robert Holman. We agreed that I might give a slightly longer introduction to this panel, perhaps to situate Holman for delegates unfamiliar with his work and I thought I’d reproduce it here.

---

Robert Holman, who died in December last year, was and is very much the playwright’s playwright. His writing life bears some of conventional marks of success: he was widely performed by two of our national companies, the Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company; there was a retrospective season of his work at the Royal Exchange. But he was never part of a movement and his mercurial work – both flamboyant and subtle, both deeply realistic and wildly, preposterously fantastical – is hard to describe, difficult to align clearly to the strongest currents of British playwriting. As such he was never thrust into the centre ground of British theatre culture.

Holman was born in 1952 and grew up on a farm in the Cleveland Hills near the market town of Guisborough, North Yorkshire. His early work was performed at the Bush, the Cockpit, the Traverse and Theatre Upstairs. In the 1980s, perhaps the peak of his productivity and centrality, he wrote prolifically for the Bush, Royal Court and RSC. Some of the plays he wrote in that decade – Other Worlds(1983), The Overgrown Path (1985), Making Noise Quietly (1987), and Across Oka(1988) – are, I think, among the finest plays written anywhere in the last hundred years. The third of those, Making Noise Quietly, is the only one of those that seems to have a secure position in the repertoire; there were major revivals by the Oxford Stage Company in 1999 and the Donmar in 2012. Meanwhile, its structure has been widely influential – it comprises three apparently separate short plays but with emotional echoes of fleeting encounters, shared pain, moments of understanding between strangers – and can be seen directly influencing 2000’s Under the Blue Sky by David Eldridge and 2011’s Wastwater by Simon Stephens. Both of those writers have acknowledged their admiration for Holman’s work and indeed all three collaborated on the apocalyptic A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky in 2010, the younger two, I thought, showing the most Holmanesque sides of their work in deference to the senior writer.

At a post-show conversation with Nick Hern after a performance of Bad Weather at the RSC in 1999, Robert Holman described his writing process like this. ‘I start writing every morning at 9.30. It can’t be before or after that or the day is ruined. And then I just start writing until one of my characters says something that surprises me’. I’m quoting from memory but I’m confident this is pretty accurate because, first, it resonated very strongly with my own fledgling experience of playwriting and, second, because it resonated very strongly with my experience of Robert Holman. Not least in scene 6 of Bad Weather itself where the young thug Luke suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, declares his sexual feelings for Agnes, the visiting septuagenarian nanny of his friend’s mother.

In Other Worlds, eighteenth-century Yorkshire folk, whipped up in fear of a Napoleonic invasion, find an ape washed ashore and hang it believing it to be a Frenchman. But in a moment of magical surprise, just before the ape is hanged, he turns and delivers a speech to us, giving a whole new life to the play and its world. Watching Rafts and Dreams Upstairs at the Royal Court in 1990 I watched breathless the minutely observed domestic drama of the first half between clumsy Leo and his variously phobic wife Hetty, helped to a new kind of accommodation with the world by their neighbour Neil. He helps them clear the garden and dig up an old tree root, beneath which they find an underground lake, the waters in which, by the second half, have risen and flooded the entire world.

These moments of surprise are breaks in the texture of his work that both exemplify the complexity of his vision of how the domestic and the imaginative entwine each other but also of why he is such an indefinable writer. Is he personal or political? Contemporary or traditional? Are these essentially quiet plays – or do they make noise? If he’s political, what are his politics? He seems very current in many respects, yet there are hints of writers like Rattigan in his work, particularly in the aching sense of emotional disconnect and the restrained hints at queer dissidence, in plays like A Breakfast of Eels from 2015. Holman remains in some ways a mystery; he is a writer that among playwrights, in my experience, inspires something close to awe, though he has attracted much less attention among academics.

But this afternoon, we’re going to change all that! To help us think about this remarkable writer we have two wonderful speakers, Dr Poppy Corbett and Dr Rachel Clements…