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Conor McPherson: A flash, an image, a feeling – the mysterious art of playwriting

23 Apr

McPhersonAs his modern classic The Weir receives its first major UK revival at London’s Donmar Warehouse, playwright Conor McPherson reflects on the creative process, and how hard it all seems to explain.

The best plays come in a flash. An image, a feeling, and that’s it. You know these ideas because they are the undeniable ones that won’t let go. They pull you in and compel you to start scribbling notes. If you are a playwright and you have one of these on the go, you know you have a responsibility. To what? Something that doesn’t exist? But the good ideas feel like they do exist. They’re just beyond view, and you’re trying to capture them with glimpses that may or may not be accurate.

So many things can go wrong along the way between the vision and its presentation on stage – missed beats in the writing (or too many beats), the wrong cast, wrong director, wrong theatre or just the wrong time. Any and all of these may consign your hard work to the ‘Who Cares?’ file. And you know you are playing Russian roulette – it all comes down to those couple of hours on opening night. But you keep the faith and you pull the trigger. What else can you do?

The Weir 2013-2A.indd

The Weir is now on at the Donmar Warehouse, London

You start scribbling. Worry, issues of control, and even, ironically, a sense of longing to be free of the process, all propel you to write your first draft. Subsequent drafts can never quite fix all the problems, yet neither can they prompt the same exhilaration. Many playwrights I’ve talked with agree that the best moments are often those tentative notes when the ghosts first present themselves in your mind. They are so insubstantial, yet bear their complete mysterious history within. This is when playwriting is at its most private and, paradoxically, when the play is at its most beautiful. The more real you make it, the less magic it retains. You are aware of this but what can you do? You keep going. Always writing at the very edge of your limitations. And your limitations are not necessarily a bad thing. Your limitations are in fact what give you your unique voice. But it’s hard to view your limitations in a warm light when you’ve just read over your work and it makes you embarrassed.

The truth is nobody really knows how to write a good play. You just do your best to avoid writing a bad one. The rest falls to fate. Joe Penhall once said to me, ‘Who knows if the magic is there and – even if it is – will the bastards see it?’, which I think sums up the car crash of hope, despair and paranoia that accompanies artistic creation.

And the enemy of art is not the pram in the hallway, it is self-consciousness. When you are young you know nothing, least of all yourself. You write plays quickly, perhaps in a matter of days. As you grow older – and if you’ve managed to survive some decades of playwriting – you may gain a little wisdom. But you lose your recklessness. Why? Because, like the ageing stuntman, you know exactly what’s at stake each time you do it. Further, you are no longer new. Everyone knows what you can do and they have certain expectations. So you go the long way round, trying to surprise everyone. But going the long way round kills spontaneity.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, Neil Young’s late producer, David Briggs, said that the best way to record music is the simplest way. You get the mic as close to the sound as you possibly can and just record it as it is. ‘The more you think, the more you stink’ was his mantra. Neil Young’s albums are full of first takes – often the very first time the band have ever played the song – because that’s where the magic is. Neil Young calls it, ‘the spook’. In other words, you’ve got to be careful not to perfect what you are doing to the extent it has no soul left. Perfect is not best. Okay, so he’s talking about rock ’n’ roll, but there’s something in that for playwriting too.

McPhersonPlays3.indd

McPherson Plays: Three, £14.99

So if there’s anything I can see that’s worth passing on, it’s this: it’s as important to forget what you’ve learned as it is to learn.

This piece is an extract from the Foreword to Conor McPherson Plays: Three, a new collection covering a decade of playwriting, which is available now. It includes acclaimed plays such as The Seafarer as well as two previously unpublished works: The Birds and The Dance of Death. To order your copy at a special 25% discount – no voucher code required – just click here.

The Weir is playing at the Donmar Warehouse, London until 8 June (a tie-in edition is available here). It will be followed by a new Conor McPherson play, The Night Alive, which will also be published by Nick Hern Books.

Janice Okoh: Three Birds in rehearsal – the evolution of a Bruntwood Prize winner

25 Feb

Janice Okoh photoJanice Okoh’s Three Birds – her startling and darkly comic play that won the 2011 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting - premieres at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester later this month. In this piece, the playwright talks about how the script has continued to evolve throughout pre-production, and the importance of the relationship between collaborators.

When I sent Three Birds in to the competition, I was on my third draft. Although I was happy with it, I felt that it was still far from whole. What’s attractive about the Bruntwood Prize is the fact that it offers a year developing the winning plays, so it was really exciting when I actually won one of the prizes.

I met Suzanne Bell, my dramaturg, and Sarah Frankcom, the director, several times over the year and each time we discussed how we should go about improving the play. We decided that I needed to write an additional scene in order to develop one of my characters, work out a suitable time frame for the play and bring some of the drama that happened offstage on. Suzanne and Sarah also encouraged me to experiment and ‘go bonkers’ with the play so a lot of my drafting involved taking things out in one draft only to find that I would put them back into a later draft or conversely binning stuff that took the play in a completely different direction.

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (photo)

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

I really enjoyed the process. Sarah and Suzanne were able to climb right inside my head and voice the thoughts that I would be thinking. It really felt like they got the play. However, it was still really hard work trying to make sure everything fitted together in order to create something I was happy with and, ultimately, proud of. But it’s been wonderful having a dramaturg and director working hard at making the process work for me. They organised a reading when I wanted one, moved deadlines to accommodate my other writing commitments, and, most importantly, reassured me when I voiced my fears at the thought of Three Birds going into production before it was ready. But the thing is, and I guess a lot of writers would concur, I don’t think my play will ever be ready and, as I prepare to send Three Birds to the publishers Nick Hern Books, I’m tweaking and adjusting, always trying to make it just that bit better. But there has to be a cut-off point which is probably when the actors need to start learning their lines!

Listen to a conversation between playwright Janice Okoh and Three Birds director Sarah Frankcom, discussing the writer-director relationship:

Three Birds (jacket)

Three Birds, £9.99

Nick Hern Books are proud to publish Janice Okoh’s new play Three Birds. To order your copy, click here.

Three Birds premieres at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 27 February, before transferring to the Bush Theatre, London in March. For more information, and to book tickets, click here.

The 2013 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is now open. To help you get inspired for your own entry, we’re offering free UK P&P on all NHB-published, Bruntwood Prize-winning plays – including Three Birds - bought through our website, on top of our standard 25% anniversary discount. Just enter the code BRUNT13 at checkout. The offer is valid until 3 June. For more information, including details of the plays included, click here.

[This piece has been reproduced from the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting blog, published on their website. Many thanks to all at the Prize for their kind permission.]

Steve Waters: Stepping back from the end-game – the story of Ignorance/Jahiliyyah

20 Nov

Steve Waters author photo

As the Middle East seemingly teeters once more on the precipice of war and the excitement of the Arab Spring gives way to a new, uncertain reality, playwright Steve Waters explains the process behind Ignorance/Jahiliyyah, his timely new drama for Hampstead Theatre which delves into the life and legacy of the influential author, thinker and Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb.

Contemporary political reality can fill you with despair.  Israeli rockets slaughtering children in Gaza, the ongoing bloody impasse in Syria, the intractable agonies of the Eurozone, our own ignorant little coalition/junta dismantling the things that make life in this country tolerable – such a list, however glib, seems to give the lie to the idea that any form of politicised art can offer any insight or relief from the world’s dreadful in-tray.  Into such a world comes my new play Ignorance/Jahiliyyah, which just opened at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.

The play concerns the experiences of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) in America during the late 1940s and the ways in which his subsequent writings have shaped the tenor of relations between the West and radical Islamist politics.  Such a summary hints that you are not in for an easy night at the theatre, or the ‘laugh hit of two continents’, as Waiting for Godot was once described.  Some might also argue in a reality of political violence, in the form of war, torture and economic meltdown, a play of ideas, of debate, of words, is a somewhat depleted form of engagement.

Nasir/Qutb (Jude Akuwudike) in rehearsal
Courtesy of Hampstead Theatre

Yet what drew me to this haunting tale of a stranger in a strange land was that it might offer a way to step back from the current end-game of political reality, the sickening predictability of regimes in bloody retrenchment.  Hamas, who are on the receiving end of so much Israeli ferocity, and of course who have dealt out mayhem of their own, have a long heritage, a history that can be traced to the very Muslim Brotherhood that Qutb was so influential towards in the 1960s; indeed even Bashar al Assad’s paranoid violence in Syria bears the ancestral traces of his father’s ferocious repression of the Brotherhood in Hama back in the early 1980s.  Violence may be the outcome, but ideas and words fuel and inform that violence.  When I started my play the Brotherhood were an outlawed and repressed force in Egyptian politics; now, in the form of the Freedom and Justice Party, they make up the dominant bloc.  A play that started out as an attempt to excavate the ideological roots of Terror has become about the pre-history of one of the key mobilising ideas of our time.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression.  At its worst, political theatre is often little more than an index of the passions that inform it; my job is to find and illuminate people, characters, to find a story that is not a mechanism for smuggling in messages but a moving entity in its own right.  In fact I bring little polemical intent to this play; rather I wanted to bear witness to the tragic encounter between the culture of Islam and the West (wherever that is).  Most of all I wanted to examine the pertinence of the challenge of radical Islam.  What were my credentials?  Other than some patchy travel in Israel/Palestine and Egypt, very little.  But I felt there was something in this I could imagine; and something I couldn’t let go of.

Photo of Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Qutb in prison, 1965

My first encounter with the historical figure of Qutb was in Paul Berman’s incendiary yet eloquent tract ‘Terror and Liberalism’, wherein the New York Times journalist, attempting to locate an intellectual heritage for al-Qaeda, turned to Qutb, painting him as a prophet of a fascist Islamic utopia.  For all the hyperbole of Berman’s account (a doomed attempt to justify the War on Terror from the left), he insightfully identified Qutb as a kind of Islamic Existentialist who offers an acute analysis of the alienation of modern life, which, in Berman’s words, ‘pulls us this way and that’.

So I looked closer at the now almost mythical details of Qutb’s time in the America of 1948-49;  time spent travelling, staying in New York and Washington, auditing courses in obscure universities such as that in Greeley, Colorado, where in part my play is set. When I looked closer, the truth of Berman’s observation became apparent.  Qutb’s visceral reaction against American life – the centrality of technology, the violence, the hollowness of its values, most of all the sexualisation – was a potent mixture of the sort of cultural critique that also came from European émigrés in the US of the time, be they Brecht, Adorno or even Evelyn Waugh, coupled with the insights of a post-colonial outsider.  Yet Qutb’s observations are also marked by a strange paranoia that seems hard to take at face value. Was he really visited by women in the night sent to recruit him?  Did New Yorkers really laugh and shout for joy in the street at the assassination of Hassan al Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood?  What was myth and what was truth?  This was an America bedevilled by McCarthyism and Jim Crow racism, and Qutb, in his suit and with his scholarly demeanour, was surely on the receiving end of that. But who was the woman he mentions at Greeley who brags of the ‘biological nature of sex’? What did he make of the Kinsey Reports into Human Sexuality? And what led him to publish an obscure allegory called ‘The World is an Undutiful Boy’ in the college journal?  Such questions seem impossible to answer beyond fiction.

This may all seem a long way from Gaza and the Arab Spring. Qutb’s animus against the West was not widely shared in the Muslim Brotherhood of the day; after all America was then deemed out of the colonial debacle.  And in no way do I attempt to suggest that what happened during that lost year was more fundamental in shaping Qutb’s ideas, as expressed in Milestones and other incendiary works, than what followed: ten years on and off in Nasser’s gaols, torture, and ultimately execution.  Yet those American experiences surely promoted Qutb’s notion that the way forward for the Islamic world was to extirpate any traces of western corruption, expressed in his blanket critique of the contemporary state of ‘jahiliyyah’, or ignorance of true Godly values, that he claimed prevailed everywhere in the world and which he suggested necessitated ‘jihad’ – a duty to struggle, possibly violently.  That dangerously accommodating word certainly went on to inform some of the frenzied violence in Algeria in the 1990s and then across the world thereafter.  But what do the man and his ideas mean now in a world poised between deep change and the fall-out of the disastrous response to 9/11?

Layla Ahmad (Laila Alj) in rehearsal
Courtesy of Hampstead Theatre

Hence the final element of the play – the encounter between Philip Mitchell, an English academic writing on Qutb, and his student Layla Ahmad, who accounts herself the guardian of the memory of a man who died decades before her birth. I wanted to examine the fall-out of Qutb’s ideas as they manifest themselves in the grassroots Islamisation of Egyptian society, a process that the January uprisings seemed only to have accelerated.  Visiting Cairo in 2010, the sense of a world on the brink of massive change, slipping into a non-violent but nevertheless pervasive form of Islamicised institutions, was unmistakeable and for me discomforting.  But what was it that was so unsettling – what was under threat?  What sort of appeal might these changes have for a moral, intelligent, passionate young woman?

It’s a commonplace now that the West’s repressions have conjured Islamism into life, and Egypt’s ex-Brotherhood leader President Morsi walks a delicate line between mobilising such forces (and the even more extreme forms they might take in Salafi groups) while at the same time keeping Egypt in dialogue with the West. Yet every time Israel humiliates Gaza, every time the West makes the wrong call in the fight for democracy in the region, that attempt to achieve dialogue becomes more endangered. I think in a modest way my play tries to weigh the risks and appeal of political Islam and audit why liberalism seems so tainted to those to whom we fondly imagine it appeals.

Cover for Ignorance/Jahiliyyah

Ignorance/Jahiliyyah (£9.99)

Nick Hern Books are proud to publish Steve Waters’ new play Ignorance/Jahiliyyah. To order your copy with 20% off – no voucher code required – click here.

Ignorance/Jahiliyyah is currently premiering at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, in association with the Peter Wolff Trust. For more information, and to book tickets, click here.

Howard Brenton: A forgotten revolution – the historical context to 55 Days

25 Oct

As his fascinating new play 55 Days opens at Hampstead Theatre, starring Mark Gatiss as King Charles I and Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell, playwright Howard Brenton provides an insight into the pivotal, tumultuous historical background to the drama, and the men who embodied it…

A LOST HISTORY

Recently I met a Frenchman in London and we fell to talking about the high drama of the climax of the French Revolution: the struggle between Danton and Robespierre.  ‘In this country you don’t remember you also had a revolution,’ he said, adding, rather waspishly, ‘and you don’t realise you still live with the consequences’.

He was right.  The heroic, horrific story of our revolution, the Civil War that began in 1642 and resulted in the execution of King Charles I in 1649, is not part of our national consciousness.  Only a vague impression of flamboyant Royalists in frilly costumes (goodies) and grim Puritans in round helmets (baddies) persists.

But the struggle between Parliament and Charles I founded this country.  Although we were a republic – of a kind – for only eleven years, when the monarchy was restored in 1660 its authoritarian, medieval power was broken forever.  Nearly all the demands of the Parliamentary rebels became the democratic furniture we now take for granted.  Mind you, it took time: Doug Henshall, who plays Oliver Cromwell, pointed out in rehearsal that universal male suffrage, one of the principle demands of John Lilburne and the Levellers, only became law in 1918.

PARLIAMENT VERSUS KING

The cause of the war was a lethal cocktail of money and religion.  It was a long time being stirred.  Traditionally it was Parliament’s duty to impose taxes and grant the money to the King.  But, from the time of Henry VIII’s break with Rome by marrying Anne Boleyn in 1533, MPs were entering Parliament from a new middle class.  They were non-conformist, virulently hostile to Catholicism and suspicious of the bells and smells of the Church of England, of which, of course, the Monarch was head.

Parliament began to realise its one great power: the threat to withhold money.  A dangerous question began to be whispered in Westminster corridors: which was sovereign, Monarchy or Parliament?

Elizabeth I, a brilliant political obfuscator, papered over the problem by flattering MPs and calling herself  ‘sovereign in Parliament’.  But her successor, James I, had none of it.  He believed in the Divine Right of Kings, anointed by God to rule.  MPs should do what they were told, particularly when God’s anointed was broke.  In 1611 he finally lost his temper and closed his fractious Parliament down, ruling for ten years by scraping money together selling privileges and Dukedoms to his friends.

In 1621 he recalled MPs to give approval to a future marriage between his son, Charles, and a Spanish, and therefore Catholic, Princess.  The non-conformists were outraged.  The marriage never took place but the suspicion that the Stuarts were secret Catholics was fatally lodged in Parliamentary minds.

Mark Gatiss as King Charles I – Photograph by Catherine Ashmore

Charles I came to the throne in 1625.  He repeated his father’s political follies but on a grander scale.  He married a devout Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France.  In 1629 he locked MPs out of Westminster.  The Eleven Years’ Tyranny began.  Rich men were forced to buy titles; if they refused they were heavily fined by the Court of Star Chamber.  In 1635 he imposed a universal tax: ‘Ship money’.  An ex-MP, John Hampden, refused to pay and was convicted but many followed his example.

Then in 1639 he imposed a new, high Anglican prayer book on Calvinist, Presbyterian Scotland.  The Scots rebelled.  Charles was forced to recall Parliament to ask for money.  They granted it but on two conditions: the closing down of the Star Chamber and the arrest of the Earl of Stafford, the King’s hated advisor.  Stafford was executed.

For Charles it was the last straw.  In 1642 he went to the House of Commons with three hundred soldiers to arrest five MPs.  They were warned beforehand and fled.  Six days later Charles left London to gather an Army to fight Parliament for control of England.  He raised the Royalist standard at Nottingham on August 22nd.

THE WAR

It was a terrible conflict. Cities, towns, villages, families divided all across the country.  The economy was ruined.  It is estimated that 190,000 people were killed out of a population of five million.

The first major battle was at Edge Hill, near Stratford-upon-Avon.  It was a ferocious stalemate; so many died or were wounded that both sides felt there was no going back.

Many inconclusive engagements followed in 1643.  But the MP for Cambridge and previously for Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell, was proving himself a military leader of genius and he had a plan for radically retraining and re-equipping Parliament’s forces.

In 1644 Charles lost control of the North of England when he was defeated at the battle of Marston Moor by combined Parliamentary and Scottish forces.

Then, in June 1645, Cromwell’s ‘New Model Army’ defeated him decisively at the battle of Naseby.  The Royalist cause was lost.

But Charles was slippery.  In 1646 he surrendered to the Scots rather than to Parliament, hoping the always unstable alliance between them would collapse.  It didn’t work out: the Scots sold him to Parliament in January 1647 for £400,000.

At first Parliament did not know what to do with the King.  But, typically, he engineered his own downfall.  He entered into secret negotiations with Scottish Presbyterians promising them religious reforms in England if they invaded.  He then escaped to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

The Scots invaded in 1648, joining with Royalist forces in the brief ‘Second Civil War’.  Cromwell defeated them at the Battle of Preston.  Parliament turned Carisbrooke into Charles’s prison.

55 Days (£9.99)

THE ARMY TURNS ON PARLIAMENT

Parliament had created an Army to defend it.  But now the Army had its own mind, the years of fighting had radicalised it.  On December 6th 1648 Presbyterians in Parliament voted down a motion calling for the King’s trial. The Army moved against the institution that gave it birth.  It was the first, and only, military purge of Parliament in our history.

It is at this moment 55 Days begins.

TWO RELIGIOUS MEN

Oliver Cromwell and Charles Stuart were very different men but both were complex and difficult, with strange inner lives.  Cromwell was trying to bring a new kind of England into existence which he could not easily describe (we call it a ‘constitutional monarchy’).  Charles, by his lights, was defending a traditional England centuries old.  One was fighting for a future he struggled to imagine, the other for a past that was a fantasy.  You could say both lost but the country won.

CROMWELL

Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell – Photograph by Catherine Ashmore

…suffered episodes of depression.  He would prevaricate, delay, wracked with self-doubt.  Then he would act decisively in a whirlwind of politicking.  He had no formal position as leader of the rebels.  He was an MP but his faction, the Independents, was just one of many.  He was second-in-command of the Army, not its commander.

But all, from the radical Lilburne to the moderate Lord Fairfax, deferred to the ‘chief amongst men’.  This personal power, that mesmerized people around him, came first from his brilliance and courage in combat.  But it also came from his belief that Parliament’s rebellion was God’s ‘providence’, a divine intervention in humanity’s activity.  His inner torment was a continuous self-questioning: how could he be certain that he was acting by that providence?

But when he was certain his ferocious conviction would carry people with him.   And, indeed, many did believe that Oliver Cromwell had direct contact with the divine will.

Actually he was improvising.  For all his public ferocity he was a moderate, a knocker-together of heads, forever seeking agreement between the various factions amongst the rebels.  Until the last moment he sought an accommodation with the King.  Deep down he wanted to return to his farm, to sit by the hearth and let his mind at last be still.  Whereas  …

CHARLES

…had no sense of moderation.  He was sickly as a child and hero-worshipped his elder brother, Henry, the heir apparent.  But Henry died when Charles was 12 and the formidable training of a future monarch fell upon a neurotic boy.

There is something ‘encased’ about his psychology.  In modern terms he was aware that he was in a gigantic, unique existential predicament: that of a king appointed by God.  I see him as having a bright inner mirror, with an image of himself that he was forever trying to live up to, that of a king alone.  ‘Kings are not bound to give accounts of their actions but to God alone.’  This made him impossible to negotiate with.  He had no compunction about lying or breaking agreements, he guarded himself against any emotion when confronted with the deaths of so many of his subjects.  He had to be cold, for God.  He knew he must never cry.

Photograph by Catherine Ashmore

He was not, despite his marriage, a Roman Catholic.  He believed that the Church of England maintained the true catholic tradition.  He saw himself as a protector of the vision of a sunlit ‘merrie England’ at peace with its monarch, a past to which he would return the country.

Charles and Oliver did not meet during the trial, as they do in the play.

But they did meet once, before the Civil War.  Cromwell was in a Parliamentary group that went to Charles with a petition.  Charles gave them short shrift and did not remember the occasion.  Cromwell did, bitterly.

A note: I wrote this for the programme of the Hampstead Theatre production of 55 Days, which plays until November 24. 

NHB are delighted to publish Howard Brenton’s play 55 Days. To order your copy with 20% off – no voucher code required – just click here.

55 Days is currently premiering at Hampstead Theatre, starring Mark Gatiss as King Charles I and Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell. For more information, and to book tickets, click here.

Here’s a few words from NHB’s Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

Tamara von Werthern

“This is a great costume drama (although it can also be staged in a mix of period and contemporary costumes, as with the production at Hampstead Theatre, or in modern dress) from the author of Anne Boleyn, for a cast of thirteen men and two women, requiring two strong male actors for the lead roles. It is a vivid and deft debate play that truly evokes the past and brings a human scale to cataclysmic events. Anne Boleyn has rapidly joined the ranks of our Top Ten most performed plays – Howard Brenton is definitely a playwright to keep an eye on if you are interested in large-scale historical plays.”

Sandi Toksvig: Why I Wrote Bully Boy

20 Sep

As her play, Bully Boy, opens at the all-new St. James Theatre in London, Sandi Toksvig explains how her own sense of rage led her to write about the impact of a contemporary military occupation on the mental health of serving soldiers…

For someone who thinks of themselves as a pacifist I have written a lot about war lately. Perhaps it is not so surprising. We are all subjected to images of conflict every day as one faction or another shoots it out in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or any number of other distant places which come home to us through the television. At first my interest was mostly academic. I was working on my new novel, Valentine Grey. It concerns a young Victorian woman who, in 1899, decides to escape the confines of the drawing room by disguising herself as a man and going to serve in the second Anglo-Boer War. The war is interesting on many fronts, not least the fact that it was one of the first where the average soldier was literate. As a consequence, there are many contemporary diaries and I found I was able to march with the men as they battled across the veld. The stories were personal as some began to question what they were doing so many miles from home. As I studied the conflict, I realised that the war was not about morals or freedom but about money and influence, and it made me think how little has changed.

Photograph by Mike Eddowes

The Honourable Artillery Company in London provided many Boer War volunteers and my research there led to my being invited to a regimental dinner. As I sat chatting with soldiers serving today, my thinking turned from whole regiments in battle to individuals. Meanwhile, my partner, a psychotherapist, was dealing with a number of returned veterans in a private mental-health facility. She was enraged by their treatment and came home each day in a state of distress.

I began to read about the effect of war on the individual. In particular, Dave Grossman’s book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, which had a huge effect on me. Some of the facts were astonishing. In Vietnam, it took an average of 50,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one enemy soldier. The truth is if the Americans had really wanted to be efficient on the battlefield, they would have been better off with bows and arrows. The US troops, it seems, were reluctant to kill anyone, and when they returned home anywhere between 400,000 and 1.5 million veterans of that war suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. I read about every war’s legacy amongst combatants of all nations – divorce, marital problems, tranquiliser use, alcoholism, joblessness, heart disease, high blood pressure, ulcers and of course, tragically, suicide.

Photograph by Mike Eddowes

I was already appalled by the Bush/Cheney strategy of ‘All-them-ragheads-look-alike-to-me’ which conflated 9/11 and Iraq; of the average member of the public’s inability to distinguish between Afghanistan and Iraq, and my rage grew. I thought about the young men I had met who had been sent to do an incomprehensibly difficult job by their nation and who, in many instances, had not been cared for properly when they returned home, broken inside. I wondered where the movies might be which celebrate the returning veteran and yet explain his vulnerable emotional state? I had so many questions. How is it possible that one in ten prisoners in England and Wales once served in the armed forces? What has gone wrong that half of all GPs are unaware of official guidelines on how to diagnose mental-health trauma because of battle scars from the front line?

When Patrick Sandford, artistic director of the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton, said he wanted to commission a play from me it was as if Bully Boy poured out of my head. Part of the problem with an issue as complex and distressing as soldiers’ mental health is getting people to engage with it. I have always believed that the theatre is a wonderful forum for confronting difficult subjects. ‘Theatre’ comes from the Greek word ‘theatron’ meaning ‘place for seeing’. It is a communal place where we come together for an exchange of ideas; where we can explore experiences which may have nothing to do with our daily lives but which touch our humanity.

There is much more to say than can be covered in a single play. In the end, I focused on a tale of just two men, but I am not unaware of the stories that remain untold. The truth is most Iraqi children now suffer from psychological symptoms. According to a study of 10,000 primary-school students in the Shaab section of North Baghdad, seventy per cent of children are suffering from trauma-related issues.

Bully Boy (£9.99)

I remain full of rage on behalf of the young men who have been sent to do older men’s political bidding. I am appalled that George Bush and Tony Blair colluded in misinformation to the public. Bush quit drinking – it would have been better if he had quit lying. Meanwhile, Tony Blair ended up fantastically rich and, irony of ironies, a peace envoy.

I am thrilled to have penned this piece for Southampton, and that it has gone on to a new life in Northampton and become the opening production at the new St. James Theatre in London. North, south, I need people to pay attention – not to me but to the men whose voices deserve to be heard.

NHB are very excited to be publishing Sandi Toksvig’s play Bully Boy. To order your copy with 20% off click here – no voucher code required.

Bully Boy is currently playing at the brand new St James Theatre as the opening play in their first ever season. Click here to buy your tickets.

Tamara von Werthern

Here’s a few words from NHB’s Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

“This is a great play for two strong male performers, one in his forties to mid-fifties, and one in his early twenties, who will both be on stage throughout the piece. It’s a moving story about the damage war does to anyone who participates in it, in whatever capacity, and deserves to be seen widely, so please pick it up and put it on, if you can!”

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I Am Shakespeare: by Mark Rylance

17 Jul

Mark Rylance

photo: Simon Annand

As actor Mark Rylance returns to Shakespeare’s Globe to play the title part in Richard III and Olivia in Twelfth Night, he reveals how his interest in the controversial Shakespeare authorship debate – the subject of his first play I Am Shakespeare, published this month by Nick Hern Books – led to the charge that he had betrayed Shakespeare. Nothing could be further from the truth, he argues in an introduction to the play, together with an extract presenting the case for one of the leading contenders.

The Big Secret Live ‘I Am Shakespeare’ Webcam Daytime Chatroom Show was created in the summer of 2007 for the Chichester Festival Theatre. Greg Ripley-Duggan produced the play, and subsequent to our run in Chichester, organised a brief tour to Warwickshire, Oxford and Cambridge University, amongst other places. This was not unlike taking a play that questioned Robert Burns’s identity as a poet, to Scotland. But, for some reason, the Shakespeare authorship controversy pierces deep to the heart of identity for some people, wherever you play. It was the extreme reaction of otherwise reasonable people that inspired this play. Their efforts to repress my curiosity, and frighten others away from the mystery, were funny in retrospect but extremely trying at the time, especially when I was Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London between 1995 and 2005.

I say that the play was ‘created’, as I had only written the first act and some of the second when the cast gathered in the Soho Laundry to begin rehearsals that summer. Under Matthew Warchus’s excellent direction, which included many improvements and developments of the script and idea, we then created the play. All of the original cast, especially Sean Foley who played Barry, improvised lines and situations, which I later included in the text. I am indebted to this spirit of adventure and collaboration, which, by the way, has always been my image of an aspect of the creation of the Shakespeare plays as well.

I Am Shakespeare (jacket)

Needless to say, I love Shakespeare – the work and the author – more than any other human art I have ever encountered. I have made my living, in many more ways than an actor’s pay check, on Shakespeare, since I was sixteen years old (which was thirty years ago at the time I wrote this play). I do not believe, as was charged against me at the Globe, that I am biting the hand that fed me. I am attempting to shake it. The fact that Shakespeare’s work will all disappear from the universe one day is more awe-inspiring to me than my own death.

Extract from I Am Shakespeare…

Act One Scene Three

The First Guest Ever: William Shakespeare

[Frank, a schoolteacher aged around fifty, has just begun the weekly broadcast of his chat-show about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, which goes out live via webcam from his garage in Maidstone.] There are two knocks on the door.

FRANK. Who’s there?

SHAKSPAR. Frank.

FRANK. Who is it?

WILLIAM SHAKSPAR enters.

SHAKSPAR. Hello, Frank.

FRANK. Who are you?

SHAKSPAR. Who do you think I am?

FRANK. Who do you think you are?

SHAKSPAR. No, who do you think I am? And more to the point, why do you think I am anyone other than who I actually am?

FRANK. What?

SHAKSPAR. Why do you do it, Frank?

FRANK. Why do I do what?

SHAKSPAR. Why do you get yourself in such a twist about who I am? Haven’t you got better things to do? You don’t need this to make you special. You should be proud of being just an ordinary good old teacher like your father, Tom.

FRANK. How do you know I’m a teacher? How do you know my father’s name?

SHAKSPAR. So what’s this all about? Books, books, books. Do you know there are more books about my play Hamlet than there are about the Bible? But then, I had a head start. There wasn’t an English Bible until a few years after Hamlet.

FRANK. Have you been sent here by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust?

SHAKSPAR. No.

FRANK. The Shakespeare Institute?

SHAKSPAR. No.

FRANK begins to speak.

No.

FRANK. Is this some sort of joke?

SHAKSPAR. You can’t fathom me, can you? Do you really think people have to be extraordinary themselves to do extraordinary things? I lived a thousand extraordinary lives in my writing – so many kings, lovers, murderers. They tired me out, Frank. But that’s not who I am.

FRANK. You dress up as William Shakespeare, break into my studio, hijack my show and then…

SHAKSPAR. It’s time you stopped, Frank. Please. Let it go. I don’t want to be man of the millennium. I just want a good millennium sleep. Every time you challenge me, some fool starts another penetrating biography: ‘Closer to Shakespeare’, ‘Shakespeare, The Player’, ‘Shakespeare, The Lost Years’, ‘Shakespeare for All Time’. Each one’s like an electric shock in my sleep, waking me up again. If I had known what it’s like to be a ghost, I never would have given them such small parts.

We see BARRY [Frank’s neighbour, age 35-45, a pop star who once had a top-twenty hit entitled ‘I’m a Sputnik Love God’] running round the outside of the garage.

FRANK. You think you can come in here, pretending to be William Shakespeare, sabotage my show…

BARRY rushes in.

Scene Four

The Interruption of the Neighbour’s Musical Genius

SHAKSPAR looks at the books.

BARRY enters, making sure he doesn’t forget a song he’s just composed in his head.

BARRY. I’ve got a song, Frank. After I rang you I went out with the guttering and BAM! I’VE GOT IT! After twenty-two years, my follow-up! ‘Long Green Summer Grass’. It’s got it all. Love in the afternoon. The great flood. It’s like a green love anthem. Sort of Al Gore meets Barry White!

SHAKSPAR. Hello, Barry.

BARRY sees SHAKSPAR.

BARRY. What are you doing?

FRANK. What are you doing?

BARRY. Who’s that?

FRANK. Yes. Who’s that?

BARRY. Why?

FRANK. Why what?

BARRY. What?

FRANK. Why?

BARRY. Why do something like this without telling me? Hiring a lookalike. I don’t think that’s very professional, you know, to keep secrets from your musical director. I thought we were working together on this. Oh, fuck it! Fuck it! I’ve forgotten the fucking song! I’ve forgotten the fucking tune! Look what you’ve done. I can’t remember it. It’s gone.

SHAKSPAR (singing).

Come on, baby, come on, baby, don’t say maybe,
When you’re way down, let me lay down –

BARRY. That’s my song!

SHAKSPAR (singing).

Lay down with you in the summer grass,
In the long green summer grass.

BARRY. That’s the song I just made up!

SHAKSPAR (singing).

I’m changing my drains down,
So, baby, when it rains down,
Ain’t no summer hose ban’s gonna turn,
Gonna burn, my long green summer grass to brown.

I thought the repeats helped the rhythm.

BARRY. Who is this guy, Frank?

FRANK. Why don’t you both just stop pretending. Get out. Go on, get out, the both of you.

BARRY. I never met the man before in my life! I swear on Brian May’s plectrum!

Scene Five

The First Interview Ever with William Shakespeare

SHAKSPAR. May I just finish this before I go?

BARRY. Do you know any more of my songs?

SHAKSPAR. Yes, but what I like best is that children’s book you’re working on.

FRANK. You never told me you were working on a children’s book.

BARRY. I never told anyone about Teddy and the Philosopher’s Guitar. What are you, like, a professional mind-reader? Is that your act?

SHAKSPAR. In a way, I suppose I always was, but since I died…

FRANK. Listen, you Shakespeare Kissogram, lookalike fake, bald-headed bladder-faced Midlands Pranny…

BARRY. Hey, Frank, why don’t you give him a chance to explain himself.

SHAKSPAR. Because his mind is closed, Barry. He doesn’t want to know who wrote the plays. He wants to know he’s right. And I think he’s probably got some kind of hang-up about common people creating great works of art.

SHAKSPAR gets up to go.

BARRY. Now you’re talking.

FRANK. No I haven’t.

SHAKSPAR. I’m off now. (Speaking into the camera.) May I just say thank you to everyone, actors and audiences everywhere, for making my plays the big success they are. I never imagined they would last so long.

FRANK (also into the camera). Because he never imagined them in the first place.

SHAKSPAR. I think I might go up to Stratford-upon-Avon and visit the Birthplace Trust. What’s the best way to get there?

BARRY. How did you get here?

SHAKSPAR. I don’t know… something to do with the internet and the weather? Look, I’ve written something for you, Frank. Just to show you there’s no hard feelings. One of your favourite sonnets. You wouldn’t believe the money you can get for any old document connected to me nowadays.

SHAKSPAR puts it on the desk.

FRANK. Oh, very impressive. Phoney Elizabethan writing. You’ve been up all night rehearsing this.

SHAKSPAR. Don’t you want a handwritten sonnet?

FRANK. No, I don’t want your lousy homework.

FRANK tears it up and throws it in his face. Sniffs him.

By the way, I don’t know if your friends have told you, but you have got severe hygiene issues.

SHAKSPAR. I’ll make my own way. Fare thee well, Barry.

BARRY. Fare thee well, Will.

SHAKSPAR. I’m retired; I just want to be left alone, like Prospero. Let your indulgence set me free.

FRANK. If Shakespeare’s so like Prospero, why didn’t he educate his daughters?

SHAKSPAR. They didn’t want to be educated.

FRANK. Why didn’t he write or receive any letters?

SHAKSPAR. I conducted my business in person.

FRANK. Why did Shakespeare never write about his home town, Stratford?

SHAKSPAR. Which would you rather go and hear: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or The Slightly Embarrassing Day in the Life of John, Glove Maker of Stratford?

He goes out and they carry on talking around and out in front of the garage.

FRANK. People in Stratford had no idea he was a playwright?

SHAKSPAR. I kept myself to myself.

FRANK. Then, why was he so litigious?

SHAKSPAR. What’s any of this got to do with my work?

FRANK. That’s exactly my question.

BARRY. Will, you know you can see inside my head, can you see inside Frank’s?

SHAKSPAR. When? In the past, present or future? Once you die, your existence is not bound by time or space.

BARRY. What was Frank doing last Tuesday at, say, 11:37 in the morning?

SHAKSPAR. He was in a classroom, teaching my play, Romeo and Juliet, and he was just about to confiscate a mobile telephone from a young student named James who was texting a friend beneath his desk.

BARRY. What did the text say?

FRANK. It doesn’t matter.

SHAKSPAR. ‘Tosser Charlton is a dickhead.’ In the First Folio collection of my plays, Ben Jonson refers to the author as the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’; there’s a reference to the author’s ‘Stratford Monument’, in Stratford-upon-Avon; and, my fellow actors, Heminges and Condell, also refer to me as the author. How do you explain all that? Why? If I wasn’t the author, why? Until you can answer that, you haven’t got an answer, you haven’t even got a question!

SHAKSPAR goes out into the evening.

NHB are proud to publish Mark Rylance’s debut play, I Am Shakespeare. To order your copy at the special price of £7.99 (rrp £9.99) with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the promo code box at checkout.

Tamara von WerthernA few words from NHB’s Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

“This is a lively and very funny play anchored in the present but exploring the secrets of the past. It’s great for companies who have a number of strong male performers and enjoy performing in costume. It’s a light-hearted piece that asks fundamental questions about identity and the nature of genius, and will be enjoyed by all audiences, particularly those with some knowledge of Shakespeare’s work (though, as the extract above shows, it wears its considerable learning lightly). And those of you who have seen or performed Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem will more than likely want to read a stage play by the actor who was the original Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron.”

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The Hound of the Baskervilles: the Peepolykus version

15 Mar

The Hound of the Baskervilles

You don’t need an actual hellhound or a bucket of phosphorus to stage the Peepolykus version of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles – the rib-tickling spoof, full of the company’s trademark verbal and visual ingenuity, seen on national tour and in the West End. But, as co-adapter, Steven Canny explains, there’s plenty of scope for horses, dogs, elephants and a large plastic lobster…

Our version of The Hound of the Baskervilles started out on its feet and has kept on dashing about ever since. To explain: before we wrote a word we worked with the brilliant company Peepolykus: improvising, trying, messing up, trying again, improvising some more, putting on silly wigs, getting stuck, and debating where the humour lay. Then, as we wrote some words down we tried them out again. The director of the original production, Orla O’Loughlin, likes to do read-throughs by getting the actors to stand or walk around the stage, and that means that you can immediately see the potential for the stage pictures, visual plotting of the action and areas for comic opportunity. This is a great way for John [Nicholson] and I to work as writers because we like action – in the past we’ve tried to write things where people talk about clever things a lot but we soon discovered our limitations. So instead we have our characters doing things. And it became clear that this production of The Hound of the Baskervilles would involve a great deal of dashing about, trying to keep up, not quite changing costumes in time and narrowly missing impact with parts of the set.

In fact, if you’re thinking about doing a production it might be worth asking your actors to run 800m or so before an audition. This will tell you nothing about their acting ability but at least you’ll know if they’re likely to keel over on you on the first day of rehearsals. Alongside this, they’ll also need to be excited by the prospect of conjuring up steamrooms, a train, horses, dogs, elephants and a haunting. They’ll also have to really love lightning quick costume changes. When we made the first production for West Yorkshire Playhouse we rehearsed in the room where they store all the props.  So you can blame them for some of the worst excesses that appear in the script. At one point a large plastic lobster played a large part in one of the key scenes!

Most of all, and this sounds dangerously like an evangelist’s sermon, we hope that you approach any production with the sense of joyfulness that we approached that original production. It was a huge adventure. We spent ages thinking of the silliest things we could and then the actors found ways of playing them on stage. So, alongside the running shoes, please issue a sense of fun and a general willingness to have a go. That should see you through.

Tamara von WerthernA few words from NHB’s Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

“With its cast of three male performers taking on a variety of roles, this is a great play for groups with three talented (and physically fit!) actors looking for a challenge. This play will have your audience rolling in the aisles with laughter. If you would like a copy of the playscript on approval (free for up to 30 days, at the end of which the script can either be bought, or returned to us in mint condition) email me at tamara@nickhernbooks.co.uk.”

The Hound of the Baskervilles is published by Nick Hern Books. To celebrate the launch of NHB’s new website, for a limited period only copies can be purchased with a 20% discount (RRP £9.99). Plus, our blog readers can claim free UK p&p by using the voucher code ‘HOUND’ at checkout. Click here to purchase your copy.

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Helen Edmundson on her stage version of SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS

27 Jan

'Dream' – Akiya Henry and company

'Dream' – Akiya Henry (photo Simon Annand)

Helen Edmundson is a multi-award-winning playwright with a string of stellar hits to her name, including adapting Jamila Gavin’s novel Coram Boy for the National Theatre, and winning the John Whiting Award (Best New Play) for The Clearing. Her latest venture – bringing Arthur Ransome’s classic novel Swallows and Amazons to life for the stage – is a collaboration with songwriter Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy and director Tom Morris (War Horse, Coram Boy). After a flying start at Bristol Old Vic and a critically acclaimed West End run, the ships have set sail once again touring the UK. Helen reveals how this ‘rich and appealing fantasy’ (Evening Standard) all began…

I’d really enjoyed working on Coram Boy, and I was keen to write something else aimed at a younger, family audience, so I was very pleased when director Tom Morris and songwriter Neil Hannon asked me to collaborate on ‘Swallows‘. Beyond being a really engaging adventure story for children, the book is about important things – about giving children freedom and time to play, about encouraging them in their imaginative games and allowing them to learn through them – and the characters are honestly and lovingly drawn. It is very much of its time – it’s set in the 1920s – but there is a charm and nostalgia which comes with that. And we all knew it could be funny.

'Amazons' – Sophie Waller, Greg Barnett, Celia Adams and Jon Trenchard (photo Simon Annand)

'Amazons' – Sophie Waller, Greg Barnett, Celia Adams and Jon Trenchard (photo Simon Annand)

We developed the book and lyrics over a period of eighteen months – working at The National Theatre Studio. Neil lives in Dublin, so we would get together sporadically, often with marvellous actors to help us to try out our ideas, and then go off and work individually for a time. Tom Morris was with us all the way through, so the whole process was properly collaborative and organic. When Tom took over as Artistic Director at Bristol Old Vic, our show went with him, and became his first Christmas show at the theatre in 2010/11. Last year we continued to work on it, and in December The National Theatre and Fiery Angel, and The Children’s Touring Partnership brought the show into the West End. Now it sets sail on a nationwide tour.

'Swallows' – Richard Holt, Katie Moore, Akiya Henry and Stewart Wright (photo Simon Annand)

'Swallows' – Richard Holt, Katie Moore, Akiya Henry and Stewart Wright (photo Simon Annand)

One of the keys to the adaptation was realising that we could use the notion of imaginative play to unlock the story and its staging. We decided early on that we were not going to flood the stage and attempt to have real boats, but that we would allow the characters to create everything they needed, by grabbing whatever might be lying around in an old shed, or attic or garden. Imagination would be the answer to everything. And we would ask the audience to suspend their disbelief right from the start. So the great thing is that the script we now have can be tackled with very few resources. It’s an invitation to be inventive and could be realised in lots of different ways. The children in our production are played by adults, but they could be played equally well by children. The songs are reasonably simple and easy to pick up. I really hope it will be a tempting prospect for schools and amateur groups.

Tickling Trivia: Arthur Ransome, the author of the book “Swallows and Amazons” was married to Trotsky’s secretary.

Swallows and Amazons playscript

Swallows and Amazons (£9.99)

Swallows and Amazons is currently touring the UK until 31st March 2012, click here to book tickets. NHB are proud to publish the playscript. To order your copy at the special price of £8 (normal price £9.99) with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed).

Coming soon on the NHB blog! Helen talks about her next big project, The Heresy of Love, premiering at the RSC’s Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, February 2012.

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Charles Dickens’ THE HAUNTING: I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep!

15 Dec
Hugh Janes , author of The Haunting

Hugh Janes

Hugh Janes’ spine-tingling play The Haunting is adapted from several original ghost stories by Charles Dickens, and toured extensively throughout the UK in 2010/11. Here, the author explains how the play was inspired by Dickens’ long-held fascination with the supernatural…

Whether we believe in them or not, ghosts appear to be everywhere: in churches, cemeteries and a great many theatres. The composer Ivor Novello has frequently been seen sitting in the stalls of London’s Cambridge Theatre. A woman sometimes glides along the catwalk seventy feet above the Shaftesbury’s stage. And the ghost of 19th-century actor and theatre manager John Baldwin Buckstone appears at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, when a play is about to become a big success. Patrick Stewart apparently saw him at recent revival of Waiting for Godot. I wonder if Buckstone gave the same spectral thumbs-up when the play first opened in the fifties?

Ghosts are a part of ancient culture, as both superstition and belief. They also feature in early literature in works like the Hebrew Bible, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Odyssey and Iliad of Homer who describes a ghost vanishing as ‘a vapour, gibbering and whining into the earth’.

It is the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers who says ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’, and this is the desire of any storyteller entering the world of the supernatural. It is an opportunity to play with the fear that lurks in our imaginations and is conjured from the twilight and shadows. The slightest suggestion of something lurking in the dark can be as powerful as any ghostly sighting.

THE HAUNTING: Charlie Clements (David Filde)

Charlie Clements (David Filde). Photo: Keith Pattison

Charles Dickens always loved ghost stories. His childhood nurse filled his young mind with these tales and he later wrote about his love of her ghoulish tastes. As a teenager he became fascinated by the illustrated horror stories that appeared in the ‘penny dreadful’ magazines. When he grew older, his curiosity about death, spirits and psychic phenomena increased as the same fascination in things spiritual gripped the public interest like a Victorian X Factor. In one of his short stories he wrote ‘There is always life in the night. Listen for it in bed in a darkened room, or look for it even in the comfortable firelight at dead of night, when the warm coals will conjure wild faces and figures… and as the gentle breeze turns into the howls of demons, the crackle of logs the cackle of witches, and then you can fill the house with noises until you have a noise for every nerve in your nervous system.’

His ghost stories appeared either as independent pieces or were included in his novels; there are five in The Pickwick Papers. He may have written them purely for his own pleasure and then published when he needed to meet a deadline. Or he may simply have felt these tales would fascinate his readers and provide them with an unusual diversion from the main plot. He often introduced a character in a book merely to impart a ghostly tale.

THE HAUNTING: Paul Nicholas (Lord Gray)

Paul Nicholas (Lord Gray). Photo: Keith Pattison

Dickens was fascinated by spiritualism and often visited mediums. Even after he learned the nature of their gimmickry he continued to visit. He loved trickery and was a very proficient magician himself. He describes how he and a friend entertained a large gathering of children at Christmas with ‘wonderful conjuring tricks. A plum-pudding was produced from an empty saucepan, held over a blazing fire kindled in Stanfield’s hat without damage to the lining.’

In my play, The Haunting, I have blended five of Dickens’ short ghost stories with a story I was told some years ago. One of my uncles was an antiquarian book dealer in Brighton and he visited an old Sussex manor to value some books. As he was looking at the collection in the cellar a woman appeared. She watched him for a while, apparently interested in what he was doing, and then vanished; he knew she was a ghost. He returned to the manor on several occasions hoping to find out more about her but she never reappeared.The Haunting (£8.99)

Cinema has been fertile ground lately for all things paranormal but there are still very few ghost plays. Yet all that is needed is the dead of night and an isolated, crumbling mansion high on the moors where a storm is gathering. Then a high-pitched scream followed by the sound of fingernails scraping on glass and the scene is set to begin the haunting of our imaginations.

Nick Hern Books publish The Haunting (£8.99) – adapted by Hugh Janes from five short stories by Charles Dickens. To order your copy with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed). Offer available until 31st December 2011.

This play will be great fun to perform, with lots of potential for stage trickery such as books flying off shelves, creepy sound effects and a ghostly apparition. And the good news is – it is immediately available for amateur performance.

Please let me know if you would like to be sent a copy of the playtext on an approval basis (free for up to 30 days, at the end of which the script can either be bought, or returned to us in mint condition), or if you need any more information, by emailing me directly on tamara@nickhernbooks.demon.co.uk.

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Spotlight: TOM WELLS on THE KITCHEN SINK

25 Nov

Tom WellsTalented Yorkshire playwright Tom Wells tells us a little about his hilarious new play The Kitchen Sink – ‘comic, poignant and utterly gripping… outstanding’ Evening Standard – that premiered this week at the new Bush Theatre. A play set entirely in the kitchen of an eccentric Yorkshire family, it’s about big dreams and small changes, and a healthy measure of chaos too!

In six words only, how would you describe your new play, The Kitchen Sink?

A family. A year. A sink.

What attracted you to writing a play about family life?

I think I just find my family quite funny. And lovely. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident. So that’s what started it. And a lot of the comedy I love, things like The Royle Family and Home Time and Gavin and Stacey, really good, compassionate comedy, is centred around families, and it works because you see a bit of your own family in there, hopefully. Mostly though, I’d just moved to London and I was feeling a bit homesick. It all sort of added up.

The play is set in East Yorkshire, as was your first play – Me, As A Penguin – is it important for you to root your plays in a place you are familiar with, having grown up in the region?

It’s helpful to know the world you’re writing about, I think, because then you can make it detailed, and be a bit mischievous with it, and hopefully not make too many mistakes.  But also: I love Withernsea and I love Hull. They both feel like very particular places to me, with their own sets of stories to tell. Withernsea is a sort of fading seaside town, but it’s smaller than the others, the Scarboroughs and the Bridlingtons, sort of a seaside underdog. Once the train stopped going there it got a bit lost, I think. A bit eccentric. And it does sometimes feel like a bit of a dead end. But also, it’s very flat with the sea and this big big sky and it is the sort of place – I think, anyway – where you’ve got space to dream big dreams, and look out at the world and imagine a slightly different life for yourself. So it felt right to set The Kitchen Sink there really. And Hull is a bit like Derby and a bit like Coventry and a bit like Wolverhampton, a bit like a lot of places, sort of scruffy and funny and a bit of an anti-climax. But there’s definitely something special about it too. A ‘Hullness’. Me, As A Penguin felt like a story that could only happen in Hull. It felt like that to me anyway.

The Kitchen Sink jacket

The Kitchen Sink by Tom Wells (£9.99)

How would you describe your approach to writing plays, and where do you draw your inspiration from?

I just try to start writing and sort of go for it. Properly. It’s not much of an approach really. Drink tea. Eat biscuits. Panic. Then, once I’ve got to the end, spend a lot of time trying to make it better. Read it out loud. Do the voices. Show it to people I trust, who are always much better at knowing what to do than I am. Listen to Belle and Sebastian. Weep. That sort of thing.

Inspiration is lots of things: stories people tell you, stuff you hear on buses, letters from my Nan, knitting patterns, photographs by the Caravan Gallery, recipes, the three-minute pop song. Mostly, though, it’s just things that happen to you, or the people you love. You just have to colour it in a bit differently. Change the names.

What are your own ambitions for the future?

I’d like to keep writing plays.

Tom Wells’ new play – The Kitchen Sink – is currently running at the new Bush Theatre until 17th December 2011, click here to book tickets. NHB are proud to publish the playscript. To order your copy with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed).

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