As autumn drizzles in, these are the things I want to remember:
tramping
through Wales
making
ice-lollies with mashed-up strawberries
paddling
in icy rivers
the
best day ever in Brighton: fish and chips and rock pools and giggles
on the pier
being
held on a quiet morning in the Traverse when it all spilled out
those
moments, on my own at the computer, when everything felt right with
the world.
Not
the falling apart or the shouting or the frustration. Summer holidays
with two energetic, demanding, crotchety, wilful, imaginative
children are an endurance test; this was my first and I pretty much
failed. The last two weeks, writing saved me. And nearly broke me:
too many deadlines, too many late nights. One of the things I wrote
was for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, my third (I hope not too repetitive) piece about
Nature Theater of Oklahoma: if I spend the rest of my life coming
back to this company, I'll be perfectly happy.
The
Walker's website, by the way, is AMAZING. Honestly, it puts most
British institutions horribly to shame. The performance work they
programme is mostly experimental, upstream, challenging,
unconventional – you get the idea – and instead of just putting
up a few promotional sentences about each show, they commission
writers to interview and/or write about the makers, to begin opening
up debate around the work, to inform and, to whatever extent feels
appropriate, critique. The brief I was given by the editor there was
wide open: I could take my essay in any direction I chose. But it was
an essay they wanted, with a decent number of words. And – this is
the incredible part – they actually paid, a proper sum of money.
Where are the theatre organisations with websites in the UK
supporting writers in this way? OK, they commission programme essays
– but those only reach people who are watching the shows. Or am I
missing something?
The
other thing I stayed up late to write was the interview with Dennis
Kelly for the Guardian. For a multitude of reasons, most of them
classified, I enjoyed writing it more than anything else
I've written for the paper this year. So much so that I
overshot my word limit and got my comeuppance: about 300 words had to
be cut. So this is the original version, published here mostly because I
liked the way he responded to me suggesting that lies are central to
most of his work, and because it amuses me how abashed he was about
posting a comment on the Guardian website.
*
Playwright Dennis Kelly is sitting in
an office at the Royal Court in London, looking pleased as punch.
He's just noticed a stack of flyers for his new play, The Ritual
Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas - “George,” he corrects; “I don't
know why I haven't put an 'e' in, it's definitely an affectation” -
which opens in the downstairs theatre a few days later. “I can't
lie, being here is the thing I've probably wanted more than anything
else in my professional career. If you're a playwright like me, this
is where you want to be.”
Some people might have encountered
Kelly as the writer of the musical Matilda, for which he won a Tony
award earlier this year. Some people might know him for his TV
series, Pulling and Utopia. But in his own mind Kelly is first and
foremost a playwright, with a number of jagged, acerbic, political
and often violent works to his name. His 2003 debut, Debris, began
with a father crucifying himself in the family home; Osama the Hero
showed how a climate of terror can lead neighbours to torture; The
Gods Weep recast King Lear as the chief executive of a rapacious
multinational. Prime Royal Court material – except his plays have
been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange in
Manchester, the touring company Paines Plough, anywhere but here.
To be fair, the Court's previous
artistic director, Dominic Cooke, did commission him, but Kelly
failed to deliver. His explanation says a lot about the 42-year-old.
It's cheerful, garrulous, a touch self-deprecating, and reflects a
manifesto he's adhered to since he became a writer 12 years ago: if
you're not writing with passion, don't write at all. “I was going
to write a play about assisted suicide, and started researching,
which isn't what I usually do. I tend to use research to back up the
lies I've made up after I've finished writing a play. I'm not really
a researchy writer, not because I'm lazy – I am lazy, definitely –
but also because if I do research, I stick it all into the play and
it becomes dry and crusty. Also, I interviewed a lot of really
interesting people, but then realised I had nothing to say. You can't
just do it because it's something you think you should have an
opinion on.”
Gorge Mastromas is the first full
production from the Court's new artistic director, Vicky
Featherstone, someone Kelly admits he found terrifying when he first
met her nine years ago. The play traces the life, from conception to
old age, of a man born in 1974: a man who, in his 20s, is told by a
businesswoman that life is unfair, and if he takes advantage of that,
wealth and power can be his. So Mastromas decides to dedicate his
life to lying, manipulation and acquisition. Watching rehearsals has
shifted the play for Kelly. When he first wrote it, he says, “I
thought it was about how capitalism had fucked things up. Then I
realised it wasn't about that, it was more about corruption. Then I
thought, it's not about that, it's about this bloke that learns how
to lie. Now I don't think it's about any of those things. I'm not
really sure what it's about, if I'm honest.
“I don't have a problem with that,”
he continues. “There has been a tendency for plays to be theses, to
make statements and answer questions. But a play can ask a question
and not know the answer. For me as a writer, it's much more
interesting, a bit more dangerous, to say something and not really
know if I agree with it.” There is one such moment in Gorge
Mastromas, when it's suggested that goodness and cowardice are
actually the same thing. “That's really difficult, isn't it? The
first time I saw that in rehearsal, I thought: fuck me, that is a
shit thing to say. I don't know if I believe it, but I'm scared that
it might be true.”
Lies are a driving force in almost all
of his work. “Oh, really?” he responds to this suggestion,
genuinely surprised. Well, yes: in DNA, a gang of teenagers lie to
cover up a murder. In After the End, an office worker kidnaps a
colleague, pretending he has saved her from a bomb. In Orphans, a
blood-stained man appears at his sister's house, claiming to have
seen off a knife-attack. “And I suppose Taking Care of Baby was all
about lies – that was a fake verbatim play,” Kelly contributes.
“What's all that about then? I think what I find really interesting
about people is we're sort of liars. It's one of the things we learn
really early; it's important in our culture that we can lie. The
question isn't why we lie, but why we force other people to lie,
because we can't accept that someone else believes something bad
about us.”
“The quest for truth”, meanwhile,
was central to a speech Kelly made at the Stuckemarkt theatre
festival in Berlin earlier this year. It caused some controversy on
its publication online, not least because of its tongue-in-cheek
provocation of a title: “Why political theatre is a complete
fucking waste of time.” Kelly is slightly embarrassed that he was
moved to post a comment on the Guardian theatre blog for the first
time to explain himself. All he was trying to say, he emphasises now,
is that: “What's more important than being political is being true
to yourself. That sounds so hippy, but you've got to write the thing
you believe in. If you want to write a play about relationships,
write it: don't write a play about Syria, because the play about
Syria needs to be written by the person who cares about that.”
However, he also believes that overtly
political theatre risks disengaging its audiences, simply by
reminding them how powerless they are. “Very often you see plays
about subjects that you agree with but you can do nothing about. But
you can do something about your life and how you choose to live it.”
This is experience talking. Kelly
didn't start writing in earnest until he was 31; he had spent the
years after leaving school at 16 working in a market, then in
Sainsbury's, packing vegetables, then packing art prints, and
steadily succumbing to alcoholism. “I was always a drinker: it was
the only thing I felt I had to offer people,” he says of his
younger self, whom he'd now like to punch. “No matter what state I
got in, I would always go for another drink.” He was in his
late-20s when he noticed himself lying about the alcohol, hiding
bottles and sneaking whisky into glasses of wine. Letting go of it
allowed him also to let go of “fear and insecurity – which always
comes out as arrogance, the need to prove yourself constantly. That
was a good thing to do, you can actually start living your life
then.”
In his early 20s, the one bright spot
of the week was the night he spent with an amateur theatre group in
Barnet, the north-London suburb where he grew up. Through acting, he
discovered writing, “but it was a long time before I felt I had
anything to say, other than putting characters together and seeing
what they did”. When he got started, he made a rule for himself: “I
wasn't going to write for money, because I was only going to write
the things I wanted to write. By and large, I've stuck to that.”
Does the success of Matilda, in the West End and on Broadway, mean he
no longer has to worry about money? He laughs: “Not yet. If it
closed tomorrow, I would still have to work. If it continues for the
next 10 or 15 years, I may never have to work.”
Not that he wants to stop – however
hard he finds it to buckle down to writing these days. Even when the
interview ends, he continues chatting, trying to stall the inevitable
moment when he has to get back to the scripts for the second series
of Utopia. This is his cult Channel 4 series in which an unlikely
gang of sci-fi fans find themselves caught up in a conspiracy to
sterilise swathes of the global population, a storyline that was
morally taxing, brutally violent, but also human and full of
surprises.
The second series starts shooting in a
few weeks and Kelly is finding the writing impossible: “I'm just at
that moment where I feel like it's all fucked and I don't know what
I'm doing.” Part of the problem is that he doesn't like to plan
things out in advance: “I like the characters to tell you a bit
about who they are.” The downside to this, he admits, can be a lack
of clarity – he definitely thinks this was the case with the first
series. “But I'd rather it was engaging than that it all made
perfect logical sense.”
Whatever Utopia's faults, he says, he
feels proud of its Britishness. “It wasn't like a British version
of something the Americans have done, or someone else has done. You
need to make original work, don't you?” Of all the maxims he lives
by, this one might well be the key to his success.
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