An interview with playwright Simon Stephens

 

Simon Stephens

 

 

Who do you write for?

Janice Galloway once compared writing to waving. She said that people wave in the hope that somebody will wave back. So they write in the hope that somebody will recognize what they have to say. I like this as an idea. I like the duality of it. It implies that at one and the same time one has to write for oneself and one’s audience. It means it is very important that I distill in my writing my fundamental ideas. In this way I’m writing for myself. I’m writing to clarify and articulate. But I write for others, for all others, regardless I think of class, age, gender, sexuality, in the hope that something I say might make sense to them. That they might recognize themselves in something I write.

 

Current project?

I’m writing a play which is co-commissioned by a Theatre in Essen, north Germany and another in Amsterdam that will imagine King Ubu of Jarry’s plays on trial in the ICC at the Hague.

 

What inspired you to write On the Shore of the Wide World?

A hundred different things coming together at once. The key moment came after being told by my agent that male playwrights write about the death of children as a metaphorical means of exploring their fears of the death of their own talents. I remember thinking I’d happily survive the death of my own talent. There were some things more important. And came to wonder about the nature of recovery. And how people recover from things. I was also keen to celebrate
fathering. My own Dad died eighteen months after my eldest child was born. I lost and became a father within a very short space of time. I came to understand the failings of my own father and forgive them more readily after having become a father myself. I wanted to dramatise that understanding.

 

How did you come to choose the title?

The play was originally called HELSINKI. I intended this as a tribute to Finnish film director Aki Kaurismaki. His bleak alcohol soaked films reminded me of my teenage years in Stockport. But the artistic director of the National Theatre said nobody would come to watch a play called Helsinki and asked me to find a new title. I scoured the play for a new title, aping an approach of Raymond Carver in the titling of his short stories. The line from the Keats sonnet was in the play. It leapt out at me.

 

Any advice for the director?

The key thing in my plays is not what people say but what they do to one another, psychologically. Find and stage the psychological action not the emotion.

 

Fond memories of York??

There were many. Off the top of my head I loved Dj-ing at an indie club night called The Sheep Club which was held at a nightclub at the bottom of Heslingston Road. And I loved Red Rhino Records. I spent a f**king fortune there. I got into huge debt and established my identity there. And working at The Drama Bar at the University. I lost my virginity in York. I wrote my first plays there. I met my best mates there. I first heard Einsturzene Neubauten there. Its an important town for me.

 

Three things that sum you up?

A professor at York once said in an end of term report that he enjoyed working with me. He thought I was bright. And enquiring. But he couldn’t help feeling that sometimes in our tutorials he was in the presence of a large, over-friendly dog. Enquiring, large, over-friendly. That’s three, eh?

Death of a Salesman – Director’s Notes

Short Video Trailer

Damian Cruden, Artistic Director of York Theatre Royal talks about his latest production, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

Patient No.1 – Five Questions for Donald Freed (Metro)

Five questions for…Donald Freed

 

York Theatre Royal is staging the world premiere of Patient No.1, written by acclaimed American political playwright Donald Freed. Set in 2009, it places George W Bush in a psychiatric unit and questions his and the audience’s role in the war on terror.

 

Did you try to get Patient No.1 produced in America?

 

I knew straight away it would be too politically sensitive. It’s in the vein of other work I’ve written that had to come to England before it could be staged in the States.Does portraying Bush as a psychiatric patient make audiences feel sympathy for him? When I wrote [1984 film] Secret Honour, someone was angry with me because he thought I’d made him feel sympathy for Richard Nixon. What that man felt was pity, not sympathy. I want people to see that Nixon and Bush are only human, and that what their opponents hate are the ideas and power for which these men are the servomechanism.

 

Do you think Bush is used as a scapegoat?

 

Once you accept him as human, your political stance is no longer based on your loathing of a figurehead. People are happy to laugh at leaders, but they’re not prepared to do anything about them. It’s as though cracking a joke negates real political responsibility.

 

Will the impending election make any difference?

 

I think both Clinton and Obama will be important, if small, cogs in the wheels of change. Unfortunately,

the geopolitics that rule the world are grounded in such horrific fantasies that there can be no quick and easy solution.

 

Can theatre bring about change?

 

If a play is seriously done, you can open up a space where people can think about it. Antonin Artaud put it perfectly: ‘We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all.’ 

Patient No.1 – The Big Issue

Over a long and distinguished career, Chicago born writer Donald Freed has become one of the most astute political commentators of our times, variously as a journalist, novelist, scriptwriter and playwright. He’s been the recipient of a whole host of awards and, for the past two years, he’s been a guest on these shores.

 

“I had a small grant to look for a place to teach so I approached the University of Leeds,” Freed says. “I was appointed as an artist in residence at the workshop theatre there, and that’s when I met Damian Cruden, who’s the artistic director at York Theatre Royal. He was interested in working together. He’s got tremendous talent and generosity and vision, and it’s a great theatre. You could go around the world and not have a better experience than this has been. And so I made these very deep and dynamic relationships at York Theatre Royal, and the culmination of it is this.” What Freed’s referring to is his latest play, Patient No 1, which makes its world premiere at the Theatre Royal next month. In the piece, set in the very near future, a certain George W Bush is admitted to an isolated psychiatric clinic and begins to unravel under a course of intensive therapy. It’s been widely described as a satire, but as the author, Freed fights shy of pigeonholing the play. “These labels – satire, parody, lampoon, cartoon, cabaret, political theatre – they’re all critical labels. I suppose you would call this a tragi-farce. But then again, what is a tragifarce? The situation we’re in is tragic and farcical: you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Surely it’s a challenge for any sane artist to put himself in the mind of Bush. “At first blush it would seem that these are mortal enemies politically,” agrees Freed. “But think of the great examples: think of Macbeth, Iago, the Greek tragedies. It’s all beyond good and evil. If you’re a critic then you can simply pick and choose the vices and virtues and add them up to get any sum you like. But if you’re a serious creative writer, what choice have you but to see the point of view of the character?” Freed’s play, then, uses theatre to examine the ultimate legacy of our present-day leaders. “Bush and Blair  never tire of saying that history will judge them, but history is not supposed to be the judge in a democracy. If you conduct yourself so that history is going to judge you rather than your contemporaries, it means that no one is left to judge you except the artist, except the playwright, and except the theatre. So this play is meant to demystify the cartoon version of George Bush and to show him in all his terror and pity.”

 

With the Bush era coming to an end and the American elections looming, does Freed believe they offer much hope for real political change? “You could draw a pessimistic conclusion,” he concurs. “On the other hand, even the smallest difference can have enormous impact around the world when you’re a superpower. It’s a corner of the canvas, it’s not the centre ring, but it is of tremendous importance internationally. And yet if you put all your eggs in the basket of elections you have a great problem, because the repetition of magical words like ‘democracy’ can lull you into some sort of hypnotic state. Both the US and the UK are now what you may term ‘war on terror’ democracies. There are nations dealing with tortures and secrecy at a level that means that they could be as dangerous or as transient as the so-called democracy Greece was, or the Republic of Rome.”

 

During the 1970s Freed worked for the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee, and as a journalist he wrote extensively on such highly charged subjects as Nixon, Watergate, the Black Panthers and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Now, at the age of 75, his twoyear British sojourn is about to draw to a close, and he’s set to return to the United States to teach creative writing at the University of Southern California. He’s uniquely placed to comment on the UK’s changing political landscape. “As a visitor over several decades, I do see a difference, and I’m quite struck by it,” he says. ”The Labour Party has been so warped, it seems to me, by power and by vainglorious visions of neo-colonial messianism. Everybody can sense that something’s wrong. One moment it’s banking, another moment it’s something else: there are all these signs.” However, Freed does express his strong approval for this very publication. “I’m a great follower of The Big Issue,” he says. “I first became aware of it in talking about it with Harold Pinter. It’s an honour!”