Pretend You Have Big Buildings

hitting the big time

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:15:30 +0200

You can catch me, Duncan Macmillan, Sarah Frankcom and Jo Combes on this edition of Channel M's 'City Life' - the whole of which is devoted to the Bruntwood Prize - and contains some extracts of my play, as well as an interview (I'm on in the second half of the show). I think it might disappear off the website soon...

And also an account of BIG BUILDINGS on JMC's blog.

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A few more...

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:24:07 +0200

A few more reviews out, now. A couple came through on saturday, when I was having a bad day for other reasons, and I can't say they cheered me up much:

Here's the Guardian:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/reviews/story/0,,2131619,00.html

And the Times:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article2106274.ece

And a nice enough one in the Stage:
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/17434/pretend-you-have-big-buildings

I haven't seen any shows this week, but I'm eager to see how the play's evolved during the run, and will be up on thursday, when there's also a post-show discussion.

I moved to a flat in Brixton on Friday. It's on the fourth floor. The views are quite something. Lots of big buildings.

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writhing and mouthing

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:17:15 +0200

So that’s it. The play is up and running.

Press night has been and gone.

The actors and the audience put in a fine fine performance – committed, flavoursme,and engaged with the rhythms of the play. It all fell into place.

I sat there (without, as I’d expected, writhing and mouthing the words under my breath) and thought:

Yes, this is my play, it has been realised on stage.

I like it. It’s to my taste.

I would want to see it.

So I feel reasonably sanguine about anything anyone has to say about the play.

We’ve had some excellent reviews, so far. In the Telegraph, in the Manchester evening news, and in various places online.

And it’s been good to read posts from other audience members – both here (thank you) and on other websites.

The only thing I’ve found really maddening so far was a rather indifferent account of the play on Front Row, where Charlotte Keatly and Kirstly Lang had at the centre of their solemn analysis the objection that I wasn’t a female playwright writing about teenage girls.

After the press night, we had a very worrying couple of days following an injury to one of the actors, which led to the cancellation of the matinee and evening shows. I don’t think it’s appropriate to more specific than that, but the main thing is that he’s recovering, and bravely took to the stage again last night deliver, I’m told, a ‘cracking performance’.

And once again I’m going to plug my beautifully produced playtext, which you can buy on the usual places online, and at the usual bookshops around the country. If you do buy online, it’s better to buy from Nick Hern Books directly rather than from somewhere like Amazon.

My thanks to everyone who’s come to see the play (especially from long distances) – it’s been really appreciated.

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Rehearsals

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:15:42 +0200

There was the first week of rehearsals.I meant to post something then, but got rather caught up in things.

Then there was the fourth week of rehearsals and I meant to write during that, but got rather caught up in things and so it’s difficult now to know where to start. But as I write the technical rehearsal is (hopefully) drawing to a close, ready for the dress rehearsal (and then the first and only preview) tomorrow. I’m in London now, but to Manchester tomorrow…

But, first – some scraps about rehearsals over the last month:

The first week
I had come up on the Sunday to talk with Jo about some changes to the script. Some cuts to clarify stuff but it’s fascinating how it was at this stage in the play’s life, (and much less the Romantic unconscious early stage), that you can be quite carefully tactical about THEME, IMAGERY and MESSAGE – how it’s only now that you begin to see symmetries and meanings you can pick at and pull out. How – if a play’s at all textured in terms of its imagery, that comes from getting to a certain point with a draft, getting some distance, and then perceiving the threads, and finding or adding other wisps to knot to. Just as characters go on journeys, so do ideas and sounds and voices and jokes.

Anyway, these were the nature of the changes during the early weeks of rehearsals - small additions or subtractions which make a difference because an idea/image/sound/phrase recycled throughout a play might resound louder than it’s momentary volume. I’ve been thinking a bit about a phrase that Richard Eyre uses a lot in his Diaries – of a play being ‘more than the sum of its parts’, and as we moved into rehearsal, Jo and Sarah were working on this mathematics with me. Once we started the actors too began to find things I didn’t even know were there, having hunches about specific sounds or words or objects. A battered little tin of tobacco was a throwaway prop in SCENE 6. But it was picked up and held onto, and by the time it emerged in Shobna’s hands in SCENE 8 it had already started collecting associations...

The first couple of days were exhilarating and traumatic and inspiring and reassuring. On the first day everyone in the building came to the meet and greet, and Jo talked about the play, and Jaimie talked about the model box, and as its succession of surprises dropped into sight I was already grinning like a simpleton – partly because Jo had been very lovely about the play, partly because of the ingenuity of the mechanism– partly because BIG BUILDINGS is now over two years old and finally it’s happening in such a grand way.

In the first week, rehearsals tended to have two parts – sitting down, and standing up. When sat down we worked through the text and explored its moments, defined its units, clarified confusions and speculated about mysteries. When stood up, the play took its first steps, becoming for the first time three-dimensional…

SITTING DOWN: every time I’m asked a question I get slightly stressed because it’s possible that I won’t know the answer and that this will lead to a terrible unravelling of the whole play until it’s just a mess of fabric on the floor. Eventually I realise the world of the play does make sense. It does hold up. The history of this world can be discovered, as can its future.

STANDING UP: I find the first couple of days of standing the play up very difficult to handle. I remember feeling shocked when I first saw the publicity image for the play, and shocked when I first saw the model box – not because I disapproved of what was before me, but simply because my play (which existed for me until on the page, and in its most extreme realisation only read out loud) was being interpreted in another medium. So to see the play stood up, and asked to work in three dimensions was unexpectedly turbulent. I felt almost indignant: ‘What’s going on? My play doesn’t have movement in it.’

But by the third day, I begin to let go, and when Sacha suddenly sprints across the stage, unstoppably, he eloquently expresses physically the feeling of something I was trying to find in the writing…

We have an excellent, lovely cast. I don’t want to be specific about their special qualities, at this stage, because at some level that might sound like a note…

Then I had two weeks trying not to think too much about the play. I did other things. I failed my driving test. I did other things. Then there was...

The Fourth Week
On Monday I get off the train and sneak into the space to find LEON (Jonathan Bailey) and DANNY (Sacha Dhawan), being, to my amazement, Leon and Danny, almost fully formed. In the light, in this amazing auditorium, I can see how the play is going to work. In the two weeks since I was here the production has made remarkable leaps forward…

Changes to the script in fourth week have been largely to do with finding the play’s optimum shape, with adjusting the tension in the joins. On the one hand, in many instances, this has been about CUTS. Cuts to make the play less ponderous, cuts to load up the beginnings and ends of scenes with a bolder spring. Cuts to make verbal actions clearer, cleaner, more decisive.

It’s funny how cuts can have an effect on STYLE. Parts of the play, when allowed to settle for a while, can relax into a naturalistic register which, if allowed to wallow, can make the play feel a little heavy, a little sodden. Meanwhile, some of the wilder theatrical fancies of the play have become vulnerable and exposed by the process of production, and have got to a point where they really need to justify their inclusion in the play. Sometimes they do need to stay, sometimes they don’t. But every change affects the style. Cutting a very playful bit can suddenly leave a scene feeling like Eastenders, while cutting the beginning of a scene (pitching straight in even before the last scene ends) can, of a sudden, produce a fluidity and narrative urgency redolent of Oliver! The latter being preferable, I think – we’ve sometimes talked about the play as being a bit like a ‘musical without music’…

I very much enjoyed Duncan Macmillan’s excellent Monster, in the Studio on Monday evening– the action is gripping, while the world of the play is beguiling, stylish, frightening and complex,. To boot, the play has one of the most brilliantly suspenseful scenes I’ve come across…

I meant to see more of the Manchester International Festival this week, but found myself so focused on rehearsals that thinking about anything other than the play was simply unthinkable…

There have been various nice bits and pieces in various media this week. On Tuesday an interview with the Manchester Evening News. On Friday, on Radio Manchester, on Saturday, in the Independent and the Guardian. Also, I did an interview for Artsphere, where I go on at some length… (it’s funny, isn’t it, how strange actual speech reads when it’s transcribed…)

By the end of the week I’ve seen several runthroughs – each one better than the last. Each one generating more and more presence, each time finding the feel of the play a little more surely. I think it’s going to be fine.Small changes are still being made to the play – I’m amazed at the way the cast have been able to absorb them almost without blinking. Indeed, in the course of rehearsals the play has gone through a proper redraft. Nevertheless, the Nick Hern playtext edition that will be available from tomorrow remains my ‘writer’s cut’ – I read somewhere recently that JB Priestly always brought a deliberately baggy version of a play into rehearsals - in full knowledge that the play would be cut according to the needs of the production. If the play is ever produced again it could quite feasibly be re-figured in an entirely different way.

The first preview tomorrow.
Press night on Thursday.
I hope to see some of you there.
I hope it’s alright.

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I've been away

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:25:55 +0200

Yes so if you're a regular reader you'll probably have noticed I've been away for ages. No terrible calamity befell me, I just got very very busy all of a sudden - a collection of things including the FIRST WEEK OF REHEARSALS (more another time), READING THE PROOFS of the playtext, LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO LIVE (which finally seems to have sorted itself out with a surprising Royal Exchange-related connection), MY DRIVING TEST (which is tomorrow), MY OTHER PLAY (more another time), DOING LOADS OF SCRIPT REPORTS (for the Rep's 'Write Live' attachment scheme), SEEING LOADS OF PLAYS (including 7 brilliant hours of Angels in America on tuesday), and LIFE, GENERALLY seemed to take priority.
The fourth week of rehearsal begins on monday, so hopefully I'll have a chance to catch up more fully before then.
But thanks for sticking with me.

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Pendolino

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:33:56 +0200

A quick one as I’m off to Manchester tomorrow for the first week of rehearsals. I’m really looking forward to it – and especially to meeting the actors properly and meeting the city properly – as I haven’t yet been up for longer than a day at a time. But also – inevitably – anxious to know that the play will withstand and support the pressure of reading and rehearsal.

Since, until recently, I was working in literary departments (most recently at the Birmingham Rep), I’ve felt like I’ve been reasonably aware of what would be expected of me as a writer in the early stages of producing the play. In the past I’ve been to script development sessions and rehearsed readings, I’ve been to design meetings and liased with marketing departments. But I do not have much experience of seeing writers operate in a rehearsal room, and I’m a little unsure about my role, and how I should behave there. My feeling is that it’s best to be as silent as possible and channel any thoughts I have about through the directors rather than blurting something out.

I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on this one (writers, directors, actors). Thanks, by the way, to those who’ve left comments on the blog already – it’s nice to know that people are reading it.

Despite the excitement of the trip, I’m not especially looking forward to the journey itself, which, in the wake of engineering work, is going to take FOUR HOURS on one of those stupid Virgin ‘Pendolino’ trains. The designers of the Pendolino clearly working on the assumption that since people find FLYING exciting they will find TRAINS exciting if they reproduce the discomfort and claustrophobia of the in-flight cabin.

In OTHER NEWS The play went off to my publisher, Nick Hern Books, this week. The publication of the playtext will coincide with the first night of the production…

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More Architect's models

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:03:36 +0200

So the rehearsal draft of BIG BUILDINGS is now trundling towards the doormats of the actors, and I'm quite pleased with the way the play has moved on in the past few weeks. Spurred on by the meeting with Jo and Sarah a few weeks ago, there has been an intermediate draft (which was quite a significant rewrite), and then a 'final' draft of the play (which tidied things up and tried to solve a few problems). The aim of these drafts - to put it esoterically - was to rethink the energy-points of the play - to let the story flow without being stressed and blocked by dense exposition. At the same time I think there's now a lot more between RUKHSANA and DANNY.

There are also a few completely new scenes, which seemed to emerge naturally enough from scene-sized holes... I was worried that the sudden appearance of these (both of which are quite WEIRD) might have quite been alarming so close to rehearsals - which start next week. But talking to Jo and Sarah, it seems that the play has turned a corner now - that it has found something that it had lost in previous drafts. It's been a sign of the brilliance of their stewardship of the development process that a) they've never appeared to be worried about the play's future; that b) they've asked questions rather than issue statements about what 'needs to happen', so I've always come to my own conclusions; and c) that they've encouraged me to be inventive right down to the wire.

I should mention - as I haven't yet - that the play is now fully, and wonderfully, cast (and has been for a while I just never got round to mentioning it). Here's a list of the cast, and the very very accomplished production team:

DANNY: Sacha Dhawan
LEON: Jonathan Bailey
RUKHSANA: Shobna Gulati
ROB: Steve North
KAREN: Tanya Franks
STEVEN: Billy Seymour
ANNIE: Susan Twist

DIRECTORS: Sarah Frankcom and Jo Combes
DESIGNER: Jaimie Todd
LIGHTING: David Holmes
SOUND: Ian Dickinson

COMPANY MANAGER: Nick Chesterfield
STAGE MANAGER: Lee Drinkwater
DEPUTY STAGE MANAGER: Tamara Albachari
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER: Julie Davis.

On Thursday I went to see Steve King's brilliant play Yellow Lines, a play which 'tackles head on the risks we take the dreams we nurture and panic on London's crowded streets'. The play is also about Urban Planning. The hero, COLIN, has a brilliant, if manipulative idea for the management of individuals in public space, and takes it to FRANK, the CEO of BayesBernstein, a company that sells peace of mind (from networked burglar alarms to high-concept software that determines the location of emergency exits in shopping centres). Together, they struggle with the implications and challenges of taking Colin's frighteningly 'Total' application onto the market.

The professional language, imagery and paraphernalia of ANY occupation can most likely be intoxicating and transporting, (though lawyers, cops, and doctors seem to get all the airtime), but Steve King finds something incredible in the universe of PLANNING. The characters access an elegant pure world, a world of airport terminals and emergency exits, of carefully angled bollards exerting subliminal control on panicking crowds. I could get lost here for hours. I've seen and read the play at various stages of its development, and I always get a fix from it. Partly, it's the pleasure of enjoying the furniture and diction of a detailed universe. The image of a white architect's model glowing like a platonic idea.

As I mentioned in another post, there's something unnerving and poignant about architect's models - these objects that reduce humanity to anonymous plastic figures facelessly describing a functional (if idealized) trajectory. What's fascinating in Yellow Lines is the way the human position is found, the human negotiations (struggle, love, power) as humans navigate the cold-compassed, contemporary grid.

I want to see more drama about PLANNERS - there being as much at stake for humanity in an engagement with the built environment (in terms of politics, identity, sex) as in an engagement with the Law, or the Underworld or with the failings of the Human Body.

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J Evans Pritchard

Mon, 28 May 2007 12:45:36 +0200

In Lancaster last week for the Launch of The Skeleton Key, an anthology of writings to do with New Writing for, by and with Young People. The book came out of the The Lockpickers’ Ball, a conference/festival held in Liverpool in 2006 organised by the excellent Action Transport theatre company. I attended the conference while I was still Literary Assistant at the Birmingham Rep, and the experience was so overwhelming I came away knowing that at some stage I REALLY wanted to work in this field, whether as writer or dramaturg. The work performed was outstanding and various, but the thing that struck hard was the strength and the passion and the fierceness of the assembled practitioners – there was this incredible flavour of the salty kind of inspiration that comes out of early mornings and miraculous transformations in cold school halls (and indeed ‘proper’ venues around the country).

The ‘lockpickers’ part of the conference was to do with sharing secrets of practice. This was intriguing for me because talking about writing can so often reduce to platitudes about ‘just having confidence’, or ‘being true to yourself’ whereas what I like is provocative specifics.

I like facts – percentages, measurements and graphs. I like it when someone says ‘perhaps if you made that speech perhaps 25% less introspective – maybe 10% more inclusive of the audience. In The Skeleton Key, Joe Sumsion, director/dramaturg of Kevin Dyer’s The Bomb, tells us that ‘60%’ of that play’s first draft worked. As I am currently in the process of producing a first draft of a new play, this figure has been haunting me recently. What happens if only 50% of my play works?

I like drunken-heroic theories of drama – manifestos, ‘laws’, aphorisms, confident proclamations. One day I read this by Arthur Miller in his introduction to his Collected Plays: One: ‘It is necessary, if one is to reflect reality, not only to depict why a man does what he does, or why he nearly didn’t do it, but why he cannot simply walk away and say to hell with it’. It’s bold, useful, and slightly off the beaten track; it’s also an entire theory of tragedy. In The Skeleton Key, John Retallack, the writer of Virgins advises that in work for young people, ‘the choice of music is all important.’ Bold, useful, and slightly off the beaten track.

I like hearing about health & lifestyle tips from other writers. Tips about waking up in the morning at 5am and writing stream-of-consciousness pages in the dark (see The Artist’s Way). Tips about what pen to use (I once even paid a visit to the Pen Museum in Birmingham). Tips about diet (both literary and nutritional). I have been collecting the series on ‘Writers Rooms’ in the Saturday Guardian’s Review section. Both Ian Rankin And Hanif Kureishi always have music playing while they are working, whereas Edna O’Brien ‘cannot bear noise of any description’. Hanif Kureishi has above his desk ‘a very sexy picture of Kate Moss’, and thinks that ‘every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss in their room as an inspiration’. This is exactly what I mean by a provocative specific. My own tip: never eat onions before a writing session as they will fill you with a gnashing sense of restlessness and perhaps make you want to smoke.

I don’t mean for a moment that writers should ever get dogmatic about any of this stuff. I don’t mean playwriting’s a real science, I’m not asking anyone to obey Aristotle, or, when Aristotle is found to be WRONG, then obey Robert Mckee. If playwriting was a proper science (of accumulating, self-refining knowledge), then by now even Ibsen would have been PROVED WRONG and left in the attic with all those eugenic studies of deviant physiognomy.

It’s just that it can be constructive and wonderful when some crazy authoritarian instruction (‘it is necessary to…’), or piquant statistic, drops into your life one day and for five minutes it makes sense of, and indeed catalyses, everything you’re doing.

I suppose, with statistics, it can be difficult to plot matters of blood and death and passion onto a graph because it’s difficult to measure dramaturgical values objectively. But there’s no point getting sentimental. Recently I tried to analyse BIG BUILDINGS by feeding statistics about each scene into a spreadsheet, mainly as a way of establishing, scene-by-scene, which parts of the play were boring. First of all I calculated the density of each scene, dividing the word count of the scene by the number of pages. So a very dense scene might be one with maybe a big prose speech, which weighs in with a high word count, but without taking up much paper. Whereas a very free-flowing scene of stichomythia would be much less dense, and probably easier to stomach. The idea being that the play probably can’t get away with too many long speeches, whereas there may be a specific kind of energy to be found in a scene of zippy one-liners. But on the other hand the latter scene could become tiring where its energy comes, for example, out of sustained aggression (nothing more awful than a load of shouty scenes strung together). So I then went on to rate (out of ten) how FUNNY each scene was, its LEVEL OF AGGRESSION, its LEVEL OF VULGARITY and so on… Obviously this required some subjective judgments.

The spreadsheet crunched these numbers into a number of different kinds of illuminating graphs and pie-charts. And in processing the play in a different way you notice different things about the way a play works. Laid out on a chart, it was easy for me to see that a) the character of LEON brings lightness and humour to the scenes he is in, and b) that the relative soddenness of some of the middle of the play may be due to fact that LEON is not in four scenes in a row.

This isn’t a very ROMANTIC way of going about it, but I’ve always felt sorry for poor old J Evans Pritchard in The Dead Poets' Society, mercilessly set up by Robin Williams:

Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans

Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand

poetry, we must first be fluent with

its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech.

Then ask two questions: One, how artfully

has the objective of the poem been

rendered, and two, how important is that

objective. Question one rates the poem's

perfection, question two rates its

importance. And once these questions have

been answered, determining a poem's

greatest becomes a relatively simple

matter…

If the poem's score for perfection is

plotted along the horizontal of a graph,

and its importance is plotted on the

vertical, then calculating the total

area of the poem yields the measure of

its greatness…

A sonnet by Byron may score high on the

vertical, but only average on the

horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on

the other hand, would score high both

horizontally and vertically, yielding a

massive total area, thereby revealing the

poem to be truly great. As you proceed

through the poetry in this book, practice

this rating method. As your ability to

evaluate poems in this matter grows, so

will - so will your enjoyment and

understanding of poetry.

Well I think it might be worth a try, but Mr Keating doesn’t.

KEATING

Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J.

Evans Pritchard. We're not laying pipe,

we're talking about poetry.

Comments

Castle Grayskull

Sat, 12 May 2007 14:05:19 +0200

I had a thrilling day last week in Manchester looking at the model box for the play at the Final Design Meeting. This was the moment when all the different production departments of the theatre (Lighting, Sound, Stage Management, Workshop, Wardrobe, Wigs and Make-Up, Props, etc) gather round the model box and look at how in practise they are going to realise Jaimie Todd’s design on stage.

It was like being given membership of the magic circle - solutions for the staging of: Canary Wharf; a drainable ditch; heavy rainfall; a rain of underwear; flying aeroplane seats; LEON pissing himself, were discussed - not in the contorted, mixed-metaphorical language of dramaturgy - but with pragmatism and calm. Refreshing for once not to think about why LEON’s pissed himself, but how he’ll manage the quick costume change afterwards with such a wet crotch.

Jaimie’s set is quite brilliant, and contains some spectacular surprises. I won’t spoil them by showing the model box in its fully unfurled state, but here’s a partial view of the state of the stage towards the end of the first scene:

The set has loads of things that fly down from the gigantic metal web at the top of the auditorium. On Jaimie’s box, these objects ascend and descend on pieces of thread. Coupled with several other concealed interactive features, these lend the model box the pre-adolescent appeal of a multi-featured Castle Grayskull, on which to play with He-men.

Despite the sanity with which the team discussed the design, I get the impression that this is going to be one of the more spectacular productions the theatre has mounted. I’ve been proudly telling people that we’d run out of flylines, though I think I may have slightly misunderstood: I can’t write in anything more now that flies. Indeed, it’s getting very late to add anything drastically new to the script, certainly in design terms.

Though redrafting certainly isn't over - there’s another draft due in two weeks time. On Tuesday I met Jo and Sarah at the NT (where Sarah is directing Matt Charman's Five Wives of Maurice Pinder), and I came away with lots and lots to think about. The big thing about the last draft was about being clear with myself about the characters – their backstories; the details of their quotidian engagement with the world; the staging posts on their journey. The effect of this was to turn parts of the play into an 18^th century novel – with characters explaining themselves with uncharacteristic verbosity. Lots of discoveries were made by doing this, but the job now is to find a way of wading in, cutting the big messy river-nests of exposition out, yet releasing the emotional ripples of this background into play’s directional flow (to use a very very contorted metaphor).

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Little Boxes

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:31:52 +0200

The Paines Plough LATER went down a treat. People seemed to enjoy it anyway, and laughed all the way through. All five of us - David Eldridge, JMC , Dave Hill and Pauline Hannah, brought different flavours to the Romford tapas. JMC has given a neater precis than I can of the show, but despite the distinct approaches, there was much that resonated between the pieces.

And having gone on last week about writers not ACTING, it was the performing I enjoyed the most. I'd forgotten about the buzz and the adrenaline and the energy you get from an audience responding warmly.

It was also great to meet the other writers and to feel part of a club. A big thank you to David Eldridge for bringing us all together.

Tomorrow morning I'm up to Manchester for the final BIG BUILDINGS design meeting. I'm not quite sure what this is going to involve but Jo has assured me that I'm going to be able to see the model box.

This will be the third occasion on which I have seen the play imagined in a medium other than the written word. The first time was when I came across the publicity image, and the second time when I heard the play read. Now I'm going to see what the stage will look like in three dimensions.

Until recently I was under the impression that my professed fascination with architectural images and models was largely fraudulent - as it didn't appear to be grounded in any actual knowledge of (or sustained interest in) buildings. But I was reminded the other week that when on family holidays we ever went to a castle with a gift shop, I always hankered after those cut-out-and-glue build-your-own cardboard medieval villages you could buy. Then spent ages cutting them out and trying to get the little tabs into the right slits.

There's something poignant about people and objects dramatically reduced in scale - just take a look at Tom Merillion's photographs of Birmingham, as if the real buildings and people depicted were part of a planner's models.

And BIG BUILDINGS actually features two architect's models itself - one a proposed planners model of the docklands, another of an office building. So I'm hoping that hiding somewhere on the model box will be two tiny architect's models, their detail almost indiscernable.

Comments

Romford again, Redrafting, Trains

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 20:59:07 +0200

If you were interested in doing some homework prior to watching my play, you could do worse than take the last overground train from Liverpool Street to Romford on a Friday night.

As the doors close, all the seats are full. 80% of those on the train are drunk, 65% are resolutely cheerful, 20% are unhappy because for whatever reason their evening has ended at 00.55 instead 6am, and 95% are carrying greasy paper bags, having just sprinted from the McDonalds at the top of the station.

This Friday I am not in the mood. I have turned the lapels of my coat up. I have a serious expression on my face, to say ‘I have had a hard, grave day at work. I am not tired and emotional. I am tired and professional’. Despite this, it is almost inevitable that some chirpy reveller is going to reassure me that ‘it might never happen’.

A tanned, richly dressed young woman next to me, on her own, is trying to gather attention and chicken nuggets from surrounding passengers. She has missed the last central line train east to Chigwell, and needs to know which of the upcoming stations she would be best to take a cab from – Ilford, Seven Kings, Goodmayes or Chadwell Heath? I suspect she already knows what she will do, but wants to keep the conversation rolling so she can legitimately help herself to the chicken nuggets of other passengers. On two occasions, she polishes off a passenger’s last chicken nugget. But this only heightens the sense of community spirit, as it is (on both occasions) a golden opportunity for the bereft passengers to proclaim:
‘Took my last nugget – that’s like taking your last Rolo!’

Luckily, I do not have any chicken nuggets.

‘So what do you lads do?’ she asks the two guys opposite. One is a carpenter, and one is in insurance. The guy in the little single priority seat is an accountant, and the drunkest of everyone. His persistence in attempting to secure her scattergun attention suggests to me that he believes his evening may not be over after all. She turns to me, but graciously decides that ‘he looks like he doesn’t want to be picked on!’ My plan is working.

The drunk accountant asks the woman what she does for a living. There is a silence, and I infer that a woman dressed like this no more earns money than buys her own McDonalds. She has houses in Chigwell and cars and clothes and McDonalds bought for her.

‘I’ve got a son,’ she says. Another silence. I think I have been proved wrong.
‘Oh yeah?’ says the accountant, sensitively.
‘He’s nine months old,’ she says, after another silence.
The accountant nods his head, before asking:
‘He work, does he?’

And if you don’t fancy taking the last train, you could always come along to LATER, at 9.45 pm this Monday at Trafalgar Studios, which is being curated by David Eldridge, and features short plays about Romford by James Martin Charlton, Pauline Hannah, David Hill, David Eldridge, and myself. We’re all connected to Romford in some way or other, and will be reading the plays ourselves.

One reason for coming along may be on the grounds that it’s interesting to hear writers read their work. And also (since all the writers will be reading parts in each other’s plays) that it’s interesting to hear writers read the work of other writers. Sometimes people point out that actors tend to make good writers (Pinter, Sam Shepherd, etc), but there may be a case for turning this formulation on its head. A friend recently suggested to me that since writers are often acutely conscious of the underlying linguistic shapes, patterns and textures of their own work, they’re quite likely to detect and clasp these aspects when reading work by other writers. So their reading may mimic the perceived ‘voice’ of the play – as if they were gently impersonating the playwright. Certainly, when reading work by established writers out loud, I’ve been influenced by my sense of what, say, Martin Crimp sound like, innately. Whereas Actors bring their own alchemy to a text and suddenly the words start operating on all sorts of strange and evocative wavelengths quite unforeseen by the writer. I’ve come into the conversation rather late, but the thing I loved about the recent NT Attempts on her life was the way it didn’t sound like Martin Crimp ‘sounds like’ (apart from the opening and closing scenes). Still, having now promised a puritanical, loyal, efficient reading on Monday, I’ll probable end up missing my cues and mumbling into a glass of water.

But speaking of trains, readings and actors, the last few weeks have been thrilling if occasionally terrifying ones for my play. Last Monday I woke at 5.30am to get the train to Manchester for a closed-door development reading of the new draft at the Exchange. The last time I had been on a train up to Manchester I had been nervously reading through the previous draft, and experiencing sensations close to those occasioned by horror – a cold sweat; a pounding heart-rate; a heady, violent sense of tunnel-vision. I had not read the play since submitting it a month before, and with hindsight I could see that bits of it were messy and embarrassing. Careless flourishes which at the time I had thought nothing of, smacked me about the face. I had written them without thinking too hard, but now people (designers, directors, casting, actors) were going to take them seriously.

The character of DANNY, for example, finds an old pair of motorcycle leathers in his grandmother’s house. Which is all well and good, until the leathers, quite unconcerned with any of the rest of the play, animate, and then start flying… Now, in case this actually sounds quite good, it’s not. In the context it just isn’t…

An embarrassing bit of playwriting is different from say an embarrassing poem. With a poem, it’s generally only you who gets hurt. With a play, there’s a production team mobilised to realise the script on stage. So if you nonchalantly introduce an irrelevant battleship into the script close to the design deadline it’s a serious business, and I have a feeling that my January draft had been somewhat alarming...

Anyway, this time I was more confident about the play – having made a stab at most of the problems of the earlier draft – and as I made my way up to Manchester early on Monday morning I was mainly concerned with drinking as much coffee as possible. By the time I was in the rehearsal room at the Exchange I was hyper-caffeinated and not entirely stable. It was the first time I’d heard the play read through, and the actors did a fantastic job. It was, often, exhilarating. And incredible to witness jokes nearly two years old finally cause laughter, and to see characters going on journeys, and generating heat. But after about 10 minutes the tunnel-vision came back and my heart started pounding – probably mainly because I’d had about 15 cups of coffee by then. The play has moved on a fair bit, but I was painfully aware that there are still some marshlands in the middle that need hardier paths through. I also found myself feeling heady and uncomfortable during the ethically-charged moments in the play – the bits where characters are making big decisions about their lives, or when they’re wearing their emotions on their sleeve. This is I suppose a good sign because it signals that there’s something at stake - both for me and for the characters.

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Redrafting

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:10:49 +0200

So I delivered the new draft of Big Buildings about a week ago. This was the second redraft I’ve done on the play since it was accepted for production.

People keep on asking me about all this rewriting. If this play has been chosen by this Theatre... if they had the chance to stage all these other plays but are staging yours why on earth are you spending all this time changing it?

Well, the play I sent the Royal Exchange about a year ago was not terribly stageable. Act One was fine, and you could see that the play had some promising genes, but the final act had been written in about three days, and several of the characters were doing things I didn’t want anything to do with.

This imbalance was due partly to the way I tend to write – starting at the beginning and endlessly (and needlessly) revising and polishing as I go along – never getting to the end because the beginning is too complex to resolve. The play had started at life at Goldsmiths College, where I was doing an MA in Writing for Performance, and as part of the degree Act One was workshopped and rehearsed for a staged reading at BAC in June 2005. Later, in 2006, Act One was lavished with attention once again when it was performed by students from E15 Acting School as part of their course.

Bringing actors in brought the script on no end. You give your character to an actor to look after, and sometimes they give you privileged glimpses of this person you’ve brought into the world. Like you’re a parent who’s been placed behind a two-way mirror and allowed to watch your teenage kid in a nightclub. And though this kid’s drunk, and doing ironic dancemoves, and smoking roll-ups, and has no chance with that Uni girl, you’re moved that this is how they behave when you’re not watching them. How free they are. The actor playing LEON at E15 once said: ‘At school, Leon draws moonrockets on his trainers’. The world of the play expanded slightly.

So the world expands and becomes more and more detailed, and keeps on getting added to. I realised that in this bit I was exploring something. And in that bit there’s a charge. And while Act one was with these actors I spent a lot of time reworking it and getting excited about new bits. But at the end of it all I realised there were an awful lot of expeditions that needed to get somewhere, and a lot of circuits that needed completing. I’d spent almost no time on the rest of the play.

The play had begun to feel like one of those cartoons where the hero has really built up speed along Act One and his legs are going so fast they look like wheels and then he runs straight off a cliff, and suddenly there’s no earth beneath him.

And when in October 06 I went up to see Jo and Sarah (who are co-directing the play), the play was still half-finished. But we spent two days talking about the play, and making discoveries and thinking about where it was going and thinking about the all the little wires sticking out of Act One. I came home with lots I was excited about, deleted half the play, and, after a break of nearly a year and a half, wrote about 70 pages of new material. I hurriedly sent it off after Christmas, then went off to India for three weeks, fondly imagining the redraft to be one of the great redrafts.

I was especially pleased with the flying motorcyclist.

Anyway it was only when I read the play again, a month later, on the train up to Manchester to talk about the draft, that a strange and horrible panic set in.
(to be continued…)

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Romford

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:55:36 +0200

I should give you a little background first. Pretend You Have Big Buildings is about a place called Romford, where I went to school.

Romford is a town half in and half out of London. It didn’t used to be in London. It had been an Essex town in its own right for hundreds of years. But gradually London spread further east, and eventually the gap between Greater London and Romford got so small that in 1965 the town became part of the London Borough of Havering.

This was controversial, and even today there are separatists who mutter that their council taxes are being spent on glassy projects in central London that have nothing to do with them.

Romford is the only place in Greater London with its own ringroad.

On a clear day, you could see the Canary Wharf tower from my school. Many people had come (from near there) to live in Romford, leaving the cramped, oversubscribed east end for the wider open spaces of the suburbs. It seemed like a sign of something – that in one of the most depressed parts of the country (where so many people around me were from), a surreal glass city was coming up out of the mud and rusting metal. I thought it was amazing. Though probably someone was being messed around somewhere.

Meanwhile, there were no architectural dramas in Romford, where the most distinctive feature of the town centre was a swimming pool called The Dolphin. It had a pyramidal roof that had won design awards. But then the roof panelling started falling in, rendering it unsafe, and, eventually, derelict. Nobody bothered to do anything about it for years. It wasn’t a heartening sight.

There are books with careless names like CRAP TOWNS OF BRITAIN that feature careless accounts of places like Romford. They use phrases like ‘chav central’ all the time. I don’t want to say all that much about the play in one go, but the play doesn’t overstate the case for Romford as a shithole. It’s about seven characters at different times in their life coming to terms with who they can be in this landscape. It’s also about lots more, but I don’t want to say too much.

When the Exchange asked me to do this blog I thought it would be interesting to do, because I’m still working on the play. It’s not finished yet. I’m redrafting right now. I’m still following leads, and exploring things, and discovering things about the characters.

For example I recently discovered about a month ago that one of the characters in the play rides a motorbike (an Enfield). This had led to an outbreak of motorbikes in the play. Very recently, two other characters have revealed a taste for them.

I’ve been doing some research. Riding pillion.

Once in Norfolk, on a Yamaha SR, at a very high speed. We were tailing another motorcyclist. At one stage we went round the same roundabout three times, leaning wildly. I think one reason for going round the roundabout three times was that the motorcyclist in front was trying to make her knee touch the ground and she wanted three goes. This wasn’t good for my nerves.

And, more recently, across North London, on a bigger bike - a BMW 1200. I think a mild obsession is developing.

The other day I just happened to be looking on Ebay for some motorcycle leathers dating from 1977 for one of my characters, and came across this ad:
ARMOURED LEATHER TROUSERS - IN SUPERB CONDITION. I’M ONLY SELLING THEM OFF BECAUSE THEY DON’T FIT ME NOW I’VE PUT ON WEIGHT DUE TO PACKING IN THE FAGS.

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