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.