How To Be Difficult

I’m reading Simon Gray’s early diaries. I should have read them before. In fact my friend Billy has, I think, bought me copies and waged a ten-year campaign to get me to like Simon Gray’s work. I didn’t read the diaries because I didn’t like the plays. I kind of liked The Rear Column, to be fair, and had some respect for Quartermaine’s Terms and The Common Pursuit but I also hated Life Support and Japes and Cell Mates and a couple of others. The truth is I don’t get him, mingled with a confused snootiness about his West End ambitions.

Mea culpa mea maxima culpa because the diaries are sensational and now I’m thirsting to read more of the plays. They are extremely funny and while Gray is bilious about most people he works with, the real contempt is for himself; his biliousness to others is deep down just further evidence of his appalling behaviour. And that’s where the joy lies; his ruthlessly honest presentation of his motives, his misanthropy, his behaviour.

For the playwright, there’s an additional pleasure which is that Simon Gray always seems to do and say the things that many of us think but don’t do and say. Because to do and say those things, you are being a ‘difficult writer’. There’s a long tradition of difficult writers in this country. Ben Jonson was pretty bloody difficult. But more recently, John Osborne was thrown out of rehearsals of his own play; Edward Bond’s entire career seems to have nose-dived because he has a reputation of being difficult to work with; Samuel Beckett, through the medium of his Estate, continues to be difficult even after his death.

The thing is that Being a Difficult Playwright is a product of a writercentric theatre culture. Not that actually I think we have one - writers don’t run buildings or theatre companies on the whole, nor do they own theatres or review plays for the paper, hardly any of us act in our own plays - we have a culture that centres on the play, but then so does most of Eastern and Western Europe and North America and Australia and New Zealand and parts of Africa and so on. But we have a specific strand of the culture called ‘New Writing’ which has a particular cachet and centrality and in that culture the writer has a peculiarly magnificent authority. I’m in that at the moment, working on Chekhov in Hell. At one point my director, Simon Stokes, who made his name as a director working at the fully writercentric Bush Theatre, told me ‘I see you as the primary creative artist’. And that, I guess, is as good a definition of the New Writing culture in its most writercentric form; it’s theatre where the writer is the primary creative artist.*

I was momentarily embarrassed by Simon’s declaration, I should say. Partly because I’m not used to that (pretty much all of my theatre writing for a decade has been developed with companies and often to a brief that preceded me) but partly because of the self-negation it implies on my director’s behalf. The fact of the matter is that Simon decided to commission me, decided which play I pitched that he wanted, decided whether he wanted to programme it, decided to direct it and took the lead on all decisions since then. I have been absolutely listened to and certainly Simon has taken pains to understand what I wanted from the production, but it is laughably far from the case that I am a puppetmaster or that I consider actors to be paint.

Also, it is absurd for any writer to claim that their ‘vision’ for the play is what everyone should realise. The imagination doesn’t work at that level of resolution; writers may flatter themselves - and be flattered to believe - that they have a crisp and clear sense of how it should be done but that’s rubbish. Writers are sometimes directors and good directors;  sometimes they’re decent actors. But actually not often: Pinter was not a great actor by any means, nor was Osborne. Both fine, both serviceable and employable but nothing particularly special. I imagine the speeches, I think I know how they should be said (often) but I don’t flatter myself I could say them or even give a line reading since I’m not an actor. I’m also not a designer, or director, etc., which is why I try to follow David Mamet’s imperious instruction to put no stage directions in at all (well, as few stage directions as possible).

What is certainly true is that I am, like many writers, impatient. Having got to a certain point with a play, it’s frustrating to wait for an actor to get to that point and the temptation is to just give them the punchline (‘Oh, stop trying all these different things, I can tell you now: he’s lying’) but I have always to remind myself that an actor’s process over the weeks is important; they need to build up not just a bank of decisions but also a hinterland of discarded ideas that will, in some shadowy way, inform the performance, make it more solid, realized, puts it strongly into relief.

Behind all this? The published play. In the case of Static, I was disappointed because we revamped the ending (cutting one scene) just as here between Scotland and London, and I much preferred the revamped version; sadly the text was printed before the changes so it retains the ‘wrong’ ending. In this case, I am pretty well delighted with the published version and know that if this production needs cuts then at least people can read the ‘original’ version.

Publication is perhaps the single most important thing that distinguishes the playwright from all other theatre workers. My work, unlike the actor’s, director’s designer’s, continues to circulate after the show is finished. You can reuse a piece of set, but it’s not the same design. Directors can reuse ideas, but then so can everyone else. Only the writer’s work stays kind of permanent, in all its inadequacy, its gaps, its indeterminacy and partiality. My work has a wider circulation that anyone else’s; everyone who’s seen the show has encountered my script, but not everyone whose encountered my script has seen the show.

And then, with perhaps a Derridean hat on, I should say that this is true even if the script is not published. Because it’s structurally possible, there is a certain semi-detached quality to the writer’s engagement in the theatrical matrix of production. I wrote this for you, but not you alone. Whereas the actor really is giving this performance for this show alone.

Thing is that Simon Gray is actually the difficult writer that he is because he believes he is the primary creative artist. In a particularly petulant moment he is raging at being cut out of the rehearsal photographs in the programme and he is aghast that ‘the person responsible for the whole evening, i.e. the author, who had been present at every day of rehearsal, could simply be cut out of the pictures’ (p. 108). And here’s the problem: Gray’s been flattered by everyone - including the director who’s really a writer - that he is the primary creative artist’, but he’s not solely ‘responsible for the whole evening’, how could he be? What crazed disrespect is that for everyone else? And then, too, he’s attended every day of rehearsal. While it is right that writers should be allowed into any rehearsal, you need to give the company space to make the play their own. Gray’s position, at the back of the room, chain smoking and often drunk, must just send out a constant signal of anxiety and disquiet, which can’t help the rehearsal room.

I absolutely believe in the value of writers in the theatre and if physical theatre or devised work were really the way to go, then surely it would be dominating. The problem is that writers are flattered and lied to about what they do and when this contradicts the truth of the situation they try to hold to the lie. That’s what Being Difficult is.

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* In fact, it’s not clear whether the primacy referred to here is hierarchical (I am the key creative artist in whose work all others‘ work nestles) or merely chronological (I did my bit before anybody else).  

Red Bud

The Court’s latest opening is Red Bud by Brett Neveu. Well, actually, it hasn’t opened; I saw the first preview.

Red Bud is a Motocross rally in Southern Michigan to which four friends have been coming since high school. They drink, they build fires, they eat, they smoke weed, they listen to loud music, they generally hang out like teenagers do. Except they’re not teenagers any more. Greg’s wife, Jen, is pregnant; Bill’s got a very young new girlfriend, Jana; everyone is older, slower, more receding. As the group assembles, perhaps pushed to it by the foxy presence of the young and irresponsible Jana, they becomes drunker, stupider and more stoned than before. Their games becomes violent and competitive. Greg and Jen have an almighty, humiliating falling-out and the boys really start to harm each other, let by the wild aggression of Greg. Eventually, the latter reveals a death wish, reporting in fond terms a near-fatal accident at work. He produces a knife but somehow doesn’t cut his own throat. Jana flees in horror.

It’s a Lord of the Flies play (vaguely similar are the more English and middle-class examples, Neville’s Island and Way Upstream), in which a group of people go away from the urban world and ‘revert’ to savagery. In that sense, it’s not a very original play. In the first half, the fun of the guys assembling, the amiable idiocy of some of them, the subtle and not-so-subtle competing to look good in front of Jana, this is all quite well observed.

The second half is a problem for me, because the descent into savagery is so quick and pretty unmotivated. It’s a play in real time, taking around 70 minutes to go from setting up tents to the brink of murder and suicide. Obviously the constant drinking helps, but even so, it felt to me that Greg’s death wish, which remains mysterious in its source, wasn’t enough. I filled in something about his anxiety about his marriage or the imminent birth of his child (there are some spiteful words aimed at the unborn kid), but I also had the nagging feeling that things were being thrown wildly and randomly at the play to force it up a gear.

Great production though. Real turf, a big pick-up truck in the corner (which provided the lighting for the last third), and a terrific ensemble.

Enlightenment

Shelagh Stephenson’s play at Hampstead Theatre, which also saw her Experiment with an Air Pump and Memory of Water, has just opened and I saw it last night. I like Shelagh’s work; she’s ambitious, serious, thoughtful and daring. She thinks big; she thinks about the world we’re in and tries to tell new stories. This play had its first (?) showing at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin five years ago and London’s only getting it now.

In Enlightenment, a young man, travelling on his gap year, has gone missing and his parents have endured six painful months with no idea what has happened to him. Horrifyingly, he disappeared around the time of a terrorist attack on a tourist bar. When, out of the blue, they received a phonecall from a British consulate in the far East, they rush to meet him from the airport. But that boy who greets them as mum and dad is unknown to them. Who is this amnesiac boy? They uncertainly take him into their lives but it seems he is playing games with them, cruelly toying with their feelings, while working out his own self-destructive pathology. Through the final violent confrontation between this boy and the mother, the couple seem finally to begin to move on.

The play is generous in its thought and feeling. It’s about grief, but it’s also about global travel, the ‘clash of civilisations’, the way people exploit one another, reason vs. superstition, private lives lived in the public eye, the complex motives that lay hidden in the slightest transaction. The end of the first act is a nicely plotted twist and the complications of the second pull you into the story.

For all that, I found it oddly hard to engage with. I think the main thing is that the ideas were right on the surface of the play. When people thought things, they said them. This meant that the scenes and characters didn’t seem to have much depth or complexity; there was no subtext to keep us tugging along. True, there’s a bit more in the second half where we’re kept guessing about the boy’s motives, but actually I sensed - correctly as it turned out - that we weren’t ever going to know quite why the boy was acting the way he was, so even then I wasn’t prepared to get stuck into the mystery. (The boy says a number of horrible things to them - none of which appeared particularly true: when he claims to have fucked their son, they flinch and he goes into a rant about their liberalism not allowing them to picture the homosexual act. I don’t particularly relish thinking about my parents having sex; doesn’t mean I am secretly disgusted with heterosexuality. He also cuts himself, which felt, if I’m honest, more about a strong visual image than anything lucid about the kid’s problems or motives.) At one point, Joyce says ‘It’s an English thing. Never say what you mean’ and I found myself wishing that was more of that English thing here.

In addition, the language was rather dry in places; written, rather than spoken. Symptomatic of this was the vocabulary of the characters that suggested to me the lexicon of an academic more than the kind of words that people ordinarily use - perceptible, conjecture, hypothetical, surrepetitious are just some examples - and they came out at moments where I wanted more of a sense of their pain than their nuanced reading of the situation.

The partner of that dryness was the play’s stasis. In Act I, the characters are, naturally enough, stuck and unmoving. But their eloquence somehow undermined that. The first scene has the family - she enthusiastically, he reluctantly - consulting a psychic (sorry ‘sensitive’) to find her son. Curiously, when you might have expected a sense of expectation, tension, the mother daring to hope for a breakthrough but also steeled for disappointment, caught between belief and scepticism, and so on, all of that potential is squandered in words. The mother doesn’t even shut up when Joyce is trying to listen to the voices.

There are other odd moments like this, characters seeming to drift away from the urgency of the situation to reflect on the world. Most bizarrely this happens in the last scene; there’s a boy with a hospitalisable injury on the floor and while the scene begins with an ambulance being called and some anxiety for his wellbeing, the couple start chatting away almost forgetting the bleeding youth on their floor. Explanations could be given for that, though I was quite baffled by the choreography of the end of Act I. They’re waiting in a private room for Adam. The boy’s grandfather has asked his girlfriend (maybe) to meet the boy off the plane and bring him to them. Apparently this is because they don’t want to be reunited on camera (but why the girlfriend? We’ve already established that the mother hates her). Then it gets weirder. The girlfriend has a sign with his name on and leaves. Then a few minutes later, she has apparently met him but rushes in alone, saying he’s coming. What happened? She said hello, pointed at the door then ran off ahead of him? Didn’t make sense to me, nor could I see what dramaturgical convenience it served.

Finally, it’s a class thing. The characters were very wealthy, very bourgeois. Now I have no problem with the upper-middle classes being shown on stage and I guess there’s an image here of the guilty rich looking fearfully at the rest of the world, wondering if they are admired or envied, aspired to or hated; but this production certainly made them seem like a right pair of cunts, insufferable, snooty, pleased with themselves, self-involved. There’s something that annoys me about wine on stage; it’s often a sign of something, always a class indicator, suggesting a bit of bohemianism, especially if it’s red, especially if somebody mentions the grape. Wine on stage seems to be stuck in 1972. I suppose I felt that this play, which is asking about the kind of world we live in, wondering about the permanence and relevance of western values, the continuation of the Enlightenment Project perhaps, seemed myopically trapped within its own class bubble, really not seeing anything beyond it. Fine if that were just the couple, less good when it feels like the play too.

I haven’t read the play and it may be that I’ve been led astray by a curiously unsympathetic production - the set rather sterile, the acting rather disengaged I felt - and the play’s better than it could be. Certainly there were some aberrant line readings. I like Shelagh’s plays; this one didn’t do it for me.

The Aliens

Just back from seeing Annie Baker’s The Aliens at the Bush.

KJ and Jasper are two wasters who hang out in the private backyard of a coffee shop. Jasper is writing a novel; KJ writes songs and drinks shroom tea. Evan, a seventeen-year-old who works in the coffee shop, befriends them. Jasper dies in a drug overdose (at least, so says KJ) and Evan inherits his guitar.

Yes, that’s about all there is to it. It’s not a plotty play; it’s a play about stagnation, and two guys reaching the age when dreams start to disappear. It’s about Evan’s coming of age and it’s perhaps, once again, about a mythical America of Going West and finding oneself.

The dialogue is really great and very sparky, well observed and prettilessly elegant. It’s an extremely funny play too. Their songs are ridiculous prog-rock nonsense but the moment where they sing ‘The Frogmen’ at the end of Act One was rather adorable.

For me it never quite took off as a play. In the second half - maybe this was just me - I spent so long wondering if KJ was telling the truth about Jasper’s death that I didn’t really tune in to any real sense of grief or loss. The scene at the end where Evan plays ‘If I Had a Hammer’ very badly on Jasper’s guitar was cute but I felt I wanted a bigger outburst by that point.

The star of the evening is the acting. Mackenzie Crook is wonderful as the brooding, grimly serious Jasper; Ralf Little is surprisingly convincing as the psychotropic slacker KJ; Ollie Alexander seemed mannered at first but his perfectly-pitched awkwardness melts your heart. It’s a typically well-judged production from Peter Gill. It was a superb performance of an inessential play, I thought.

Signifiying Nothing

End of the first week of rehearsals. I’m very happy. There are hints already of extraordinary things and it’s still pretty funny. That will drain away through rehearsal until the first night when I hope the shape will be strong enough that it’ll suddenly be funny again. Chekhov’s journey through the play, which is only given through hints and implications, the tiniest of reactions and responses, is emerging very strongly in Simon Gregor’s work. The individual somewhat-satirical scenes are finding their shape and focus slowly and surely. I’m very pleased. Yesterday, we had the director Noah Birksted-Breen, a fluent Russian speaker, come in to teach Ruth Everett how to speak her brief history of the twentieth century.

The thing that’s continuing to torture and torment Simon (the director) and Bob (the designer) is costume. My note on production suggests that the stage should have an arbitrary visual relationship to the fictional world. Men could play women, old play young, black play white, but not systematically. In fact, Simon’s not doing that very much and thinks it will simply ‘baffle’ the audience. I’m not convinced, but hey. More important is the design. We do have a design that suggests a skeletal world, Chekhov seeing through the lavish opulence of an advanced consumer-capitalist world to something sparer, more desperate. So if the actors are being cast to type (sort of), and the setting is not, what of the costume?

My principle for the set was ‘a design, but no set’, in other words you can still do something but it shouldn’t represent an actual place (and shouldn’t, I think, be anything too intricate or built). How does that apply to costume? I had imagined actors wearing their own clothes. At least, you’d need them to wear clothes that are definitely not what the character is wearing. How would that work?

The Prague structuralists in the 1930s had a central principle of theatre semiotics: ‘everything on stage is a sign’.  In other words, by placing anything on stage, before an audience, under the lights, it starts signifying. A plain wooden chair suggests a home, age, comfort, decay, anything. You can’t stop things signifying.

I don’t think that’s true. If an actor stumbles over a line, or even takes a prompt, it doesn’t signify - at least, it doesn’t signify as part of the semiotic project that the show is building. If the actor dries completely, and has to be prompted through the whole show, it might well disrupt or destroy that semiotic project altogether, but it wouldn’t form part of it, because we know what is part of the show and what isn’t. I can, to some extent, discount aspects of the stage picture if I don’t think I’m supposed to be seeing it: the filigree plasterwork on the Lyric Hammersmith’s proscenium for example. I’ve seen it before, I know what it is, if the story being told on stage pays no attention to it, then nor do I. Sometimes it’s there - it was there in Neil Bartlett’s Camille for example as a sign of a doomy nineteenth-century French cultural world - and sometimes it’s not - the set for Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock drew the eye away from it.

The question, can you do something like that for costume? And would you want to? I suppose I don’t want the clothes to be ignored, which would seem odd (pretending the clothes aren’t there? Oo missus), but I don’t want the clothes to signify. They shouldn’t mean anything. They shouldn’t editorialise. It’s going to be an interesting test of the play (and also some of the ideas in my essay ‘When We Talk of Horses’). The structuralist question should be: ‘everything on stage is a sign, but do they have to signify?’