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?