We talk about the plays that are due for delivery, most of them overdue. In prospect, they’re all masterpieces. When they arrive, some are bound to disappoint, and we’ll have to decide whether to push for further drafts, or tell the playwright that we don’t want to produce a play we’ve been responsible for commissioning. This is always painful, particularly for the playwright, but it’s never a good idea to try to force a play into being something it doesn’t want to be.
But every Wednesday morning, we beat each other up about the new plays that we want to see, but nobody wants to write. In 2011, we decided that global warming could be ignored no longer. Seized by the project’s self-evident necessity, we titled it Greenland and scheduled it before we even knew who’d write it. We decided the best way to force it onto the stage would be to persuade several writers to take part in a series of workshops, and divide the work up between them. Four playwrights were hustled into the Studio. Some exciting ideas emerged: all of them might have made good plays if the individual playwrights had been given time to write them. A mother fought her daughter over her decision to become an eco-warrior; a policy wonk and climate scientist had a stormy affair at the 2009 Copenhagen conference; a geographer fumed through a patronising Oxbridge interview; a naturalist communed with his younger self on an Arctic island, and was visited by a polar bear. The fifteen actors were excellent, and the polar bear was amazing—really amazing, easily the best thing about the show. The four writers all delivered interesting stuff but we chopped it up into small pieces, and delivered a reconstituted turkey. “Couldn’t we take it off and bring Hamlet back instead?” asked Alex Bayley from Marketing at the planning meeting a few days after it opened, paling at the thought of all the seats he wouldn’t be able to sell. We quietly pulled it and chalked one up for Shakespeare.
Greenland opened at the same time as Richard Bean’s play The Heretic opened at the Royal Court. Greenland failed to make drama out of climate science, while Richard’s play was concerned with what it was like to be someone who rejected current orthodoxy about global warming, and he’d written it because he fancied writing it, not because anybody had told him to. He was less interested in the science itself, which is scarcely disputable and may for that reason be beyond the reach of drama, than he was in the predicament of the scientific heretic. He enjoyed enraging the rest of us. I enjoyed being enraged, and wished the play had been at the National.
David Hare is one of the few established playwrights who is happy to write to order if the order strikes him as stimulating. The Permanent Way started with a group of actors, who helped gather the interviews on which it was based. It consisted entirely of verbatim transcripts of those interviews, but it was assembled by a strong-willed writer who knew how and why to tell a story. “Britain, yeah, beautiful country, shame we can’t run a railway,” was its first line, Passenger 1 announcing that the play was going to be about what had happened to the country as well as what had happened to the railways since their privatisation in 1991. During two wrenching hours David slowly allowed the focus to switch from the causes of the four rail disasters that followed privatisation to the people caught up in them.
The final speech belonged to a character called Bereaved Widow. She wasn’t identified, but she was herself a writer. “I’ve coined a phrase for what we feel,” she said. “Those of us who’ve been through these ordeals. I call it hysterical friendship.” Looking outward at the world, The Permanent Way travelled inwards, and became as much as anything a play about grief.
David planned next to write a play about the United Nations. I was still looking for a big, new Olivier play, and the failure of the UN to prevent the war in Iraq felt like a good subject. But as the post-war catastrophe in Iraq started to unfold, I said to David that a National Theatre worth its name would surely produce a play about how we got ourselves there in the first place, and that I’d like to direct it. He took no persuading. A few weeks later he gave me a title, Stuff Happens, after Donald Rumsfeld’s insouciant response to the looting of Baghdad: “Stuff happens…And it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” David said he’d mentioned it to his friend and fellow playwright Howard Brenton, who told him that the title was so perfect there was no need to write the play.
Ignoring this advice, he started to assemble verbatim transcripts both from the public record, like Rumsfeld’s press conference, and from participants in the events that led to the war. He interviewed several major players, who were prepared to talk more openly to a playwright than to a journalist. By the time we spent a week at the Studio with a group of actors he already had some startling material. And it played well. Few playwrights take as much delight in what actors can do with their dialogue as David does. For some playwrights, actors are only good to the extent that they fulfil their preconceptions, but most are astonished by what happens when actors complete their plays for them. They know that their text is only the starting point: a show is as much the property of its actors as its writer. David is no pushover, but he always gives the impression that he can’t believe his luck to have escaped Bexhill-on-Sea and run away to the circus. He went back to his study and wrote a history play, much as Henry V is a history play. “What happened, happened,” he wrote in his programme note. “Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue. Scenes of direct address quote people verbatim. When the doors close on the world’s leaders and their entourages, then I have used my imagination.”
Stuff Happens was structured like Henry V too. There was an A plot—the Americans; and a B plot—the British. The tragic hero of the A plot was Colin Powell. Why, the play asked, did Powell not use his considerable power to get the war either not to happen, or to happen the way he wanted it to happen, with a full buy-in from the UN? The barons and warlords who outmanoeuvred Powell would have worked just as well in armour and chain mail: Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz were as ruthless and crafty as any of the dukes of Suffolk, Somerset or York. Maybe the play reinforced a widely held suspicion that Powell was as much a victim of the rush to war as an instigator; but George Bush was given a radical reinterpretation. Sure, he had a problem with language, but in Alex Jennings’s lethal performance there was a core of cunning that constantly threw off balance those who treated him as a fool. A speech lifted directly from the public record can seem stupid on the page, but behind Alex’s apparent opacity was steel:
I’m the commander—see, I don’t explain. I don’t need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something. But I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.
When the A plot and the B plot intersected, Bush quietly wiped the floor with Blair. Paul O’Neill, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, described their meetings as “me talking and the president just listening.” David’s Bush used silence as a weapon, Alex timing every pause just to the point where his interlocutor started to sweat, then offering a platitude. The British never knew where they were with him. Blair, played with desperate anxiety to please by Nicholas Farrell, chattered on, driven by the success of his humane interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, wilfully blind to the fact that humane intervention wasn’t even on Bush’s radar.
Opponents of the war, expecting an orgy of self-affirmation, were wrong-footed by interventions in the action by unidentified chorus members. One of them rounded on the Olivier audience:
How obscene it is, how decadent, to give your attention not to the now, not to the liberation, not to the people freed, but to the relentless archaic discussion of the manner of the liberation. Was it lawful? Was it not? How was it done?…
Imagine if you will, if you are able, a dictator in Europe, murdering his own people, attacking his neighbours, killing half a million people for no other offence but proximity. Do you really then imagine, hand on heart, that the finer feelings of the international community, the exact procedures of the United Nations would ne
ed to be tested, would the finer points of sovereignty detain us, before we rose, as a single force, to overthrow the offender?
But David has a showman’s sureness of touch. He was telling a story the audience thought it knew, much as the Globe audience thought it knew the story of Agincourt in 1599, and he played like a cat with its expectations. Where was Dick Cheney, the wicked Uncle Abanazar? Why did Desmond Barrit sit behind the Cabinet table, oozing contempt for Powell, the UN and the British, but saying so little? Because David waited until halfway through the second half for Cheney to explode. If Stuff Happens were a musical, Dick would have the eleven o’clock number.
Tony Blair? I’ve read his stuff. I’ve heard him talk…
He knows what he wants: he wants to build some new world order out of the ruins of the World Trade Center. He wants the right to go into any country anywhere and bring relief from suffering and pain anywhere he finds it. And I don’t…
We don’t need him. And as of this moment he’s bringing us nothing but trouble…It’s a good rule, when the cat shit gets bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat.
Des Barrit brought the house down with a scene behind closed doors, and therefore imaginary, but to the audience it had the reek of unvarnished truth.
Twelve years and tens of millions of pounds later, on 6 July 2016, the Chilcot Report into the Iraq War was finally published. David convened a rehearsed reading at the National Theatre on the night of its publication. The only line in the report that I wished we’d had twelve years earlier was Blair’s in a letter to Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” But the reading confirmed that Stuff Happens got it right, and that getting it right was only part of its achievement.
David rose to the occasion again in 2009, when I asked him if he could make sense on stage of the 2008 financial crisis. “Can we explain to a theatre audience a financial system so complex that the people who were supposed to be running it didn’t understand it?” I asked him. Again he went out and talked to the major players—bankers, investors, bond traders, politicians, regulators and journalists—and wrote The Power of Yes. One of its performances coincided with a visit to the National of a group of theatre directors from the rest of Europe, who would in normal circumstances have been dismissive of the British theatre’s aesthetic conservatism. But they were impressed and perplexed that there was such a hunger for a play that performed a straightforward public service by helping audiences to understand something they didn’t understand before they came to see it.
In the hands of dramatists less expert than David, verbatim theatre quickly palls: the theatrical and narrative structure of a verbatim play needs no less cunning than a thriller, and I’ve sat through too many that simply roll out the transcripts. But the director Nadia Fall wanted to give a theatrical voice to the marginalised young people who had taken to the streets of London in the summer of 2011, looting shops, and setting them ablaze in a spasm of unfocused rage. During the next two years, she got to know the inhabitants and staff of a high-rise hostel for vulnerable young people in east London. They told her their stories, she recorded them, and shaped a play out of them called Home. The inhabitants and staff came to a midweek matinee. Most of them had allowed Nadia to record them without fully grasping why she was so interested, and they were elated that they had not only been listened to, but had been turned into something other people bought tickets to see. They cheered each other on as their alter egos appeared: Nadia had persuaded them to tell her what was too painful to tell their fellow residents. No audience emerged knowing themselves and each other better than the hostel residents. We had tapped into one of the theatre’s primal functions: to give dignity to the stories of our lives by performing them for each other.
All the best advocates of verbatim theatre are uncompromising in their adherence to the words their subjects have used, but Alecky Blythe is hardcore. I saw a couple of her shows outside the National where the actors wore visible headphones that relayed an edited tape of the original testimony, so that every inflection, stumble and pause of the recorded witnesses could be accurately conveyed to the audience. Both shows had a weird, compelling authority.
One day in 2010, there was a speed-dating session at the Studio for writers and musicians, to set the ball rolling on some new musical theatre; the two who hit it off most enthusiastically were Alecky and the composer Adam Cork. Adam wanted to write the score for a verbatim musical. “It sounds certifiable, but let me know when you have something worth listening to,” I said. A few months later I heard the first act of London Road, based on testimony from the residents of London Road, Ipswich, and others involved in the fallout from the serial murders of five sex workers in 2006. Adam had worn Alecky’s headphones, and drunk her Kool-Aid. He composed music of startling beauty and complexity that embedded every inflection, repetition, stumble and pause into a beautifully structured whole. He and Alecky found in apparently grim material an unexpected story of resilience and community, as the murders brought together the inhabitants of the road where the murderer lived and the women who walked the kerb. It bowled me over. I thought it would bowl over one of the associate directors, Rufus Norris, too, so I sent Alecky and Adam to play it to him.
The show they delivered in 2011 was one of the very best we ever produced, and though I suspected it would have appeal for the cognoscenti only, we had to transfer it from the Cottesloe to the Olivier to satisfy public demand. When the real residents of London Road came to see themselves, they were as amazed as the residents of the east London hostel, particularly by the way their words had been transformed into song. They were more secure in themselves than the kids in the hostel, so they had notes. There was a cardigan that came in for particular stick: the original of the character who wore it insisted that he wouldn’t have been seen dead in it.
London Road provoked some unwelcome coverage when I foolishly described it before it opened as a musical about the Ipswich murders. The general perception is that musicals get produced in the West End for money: they’re show business, not art. If we’d announced London Road as music-theatre or experimental theatre with music, the response from the local Ipswich press might not have upset the families of the murdered women so much. It looked as if we were going to make something tawdry out of their grief. Alecky, whose integrity matches her creativity, sought out the families and tried to reassure them. Still, it was one of the few occasions when I wished we hadn’t made the news pages.
I was much more robust about the commotion that surrounded Howard Brenton’s Paul in 2005, a play that put us in the vanguard of a national debate about faith. In Paul, Yeshua survives his crucifixion, and is rescued by his followers, who engineer for him a chance encounter outside Damascus with Saul, the zealous persecutor of his followers. Saul believes that Yeshua has risen from the dead. The rest of the play follows a familiar trajectory: Saul changes his name and preaches Christianity with the same zeal he once reserved for its persecution. In the final scene, when he lies with Peter in a Roman jail awaiting execution, Nero visits them. “Death cults always give the state problems,” says the emperor, before offering a sardonic rationalist’s guide to the rise of Christianity.
But Paul is also an awed acknowledgement of the mysterious fruits of religious faith from a playwright who doesn’t share it, but who, as the son of a Methodist minister, understands it. After Nero leaves their cell, Peter confronts Paul with the truth: that the resurrection “was a story.” But Paul chooses to believe in miracles, and so, in the end, does Peter. And the play’s audience, even the convinced non-believers, are asked to accept the direct link between irrational faith and the power of Paul’s teaching, particularly in a spontaneous sermon to the Corinthians.
Though I command language both human and angelic—if I speak without love, I am no more than a gong booming or a cymbal clashing.
The ghostly echo of the King James translation suggests how impoverished humanity would have been without the faith of one of its great spiritual leaders, even if his fait
h was based on an illusion.
To many believers, the play’s refusal to accept that Christ rose from the dead was neither here nor there. Their faith had survived generations of secular scepticism, and they were stirred by the play’s incarnation of the inspirational power of Christian teaching. Most of the offence was taken before the play opened. Its content was described in an anodyne press release about the new season, a couple of the papers picked up on it, and within days I had received literally hundreds of letters, most of them identical and some of them copied laboriously and signed by young children. None of my correspondents had read the play, but all of them were outraged, and they all demanded its cancellation. Some of them were praying strenuously for me.
Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer opened less than a year after Paul. Four drunks hole up in a disgusting house in Dublin to play cards. Through a haze of alcohol emerges a Christmas fable of self-harm and redemption, as steeped in Catholic terror as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but much funnier. One of the drunks brings a friend with him who turns out to be Satan. Another of them ends up playing poker for his soul.
Conor’s plays bring the most sceptical audience face-to-face with the supernatural. In hell, says the Devil,
there truly is no one to love you. Not even Him. (He points to the sky.) He lets you go. Even He’s sick of you. You’re locked in a space that’s smaller than a coffin. And it’s lying a thousand miles down, under the bed of a vast, icy, pitch-black sea. You’re buried alive in there. And it’s so cold that you can feel your angry tears freezing in your eye lashes and your very bones ache with deep perpetual agony and you think, “I must be going to die…” But you never die.
Balancing Acts Page 9