Writing | Out of Joint

Category: Writing

Corbyn & May in the spotlight: read short satirical plays by top writers

Filed Under: A View From Islington North, education, Uncategorized, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

27th July 2016

Exclusive: read short new plays by Alistair Beaton, Stella Feehily and David Hare.

Sarah Alexander in The Accidental Leader. Photo by Robert Workman

“Oh, I do love your centre ground. Sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? The centre ground. But does the centre ground stay in the same place? I don’t think so.”
– The Accidental Leader

READ THE PLAYS:

Alistair Beaton: The Accidental Leader
Stella Feehily: How To Get Ahead In Politics
David Hare: Ayn Rand Takes A Stand

In May we opened a show called A View From Islington North*, comprising short political satires. Here we publish three of the scripts in full, with the kind permission of writers Alistair Beaton, Stella Feehily and David Hare. We think they make for a funny, exasperating and illuminating read.

One proved uncannily prescient: Alistair Beaton’s The Accidental Leader imagined a Labour MP orchestrating a mass resignation of shadow cabinet members in protest at the party’s Corbyn-like leader. We could barely believe it when in late June, towards the end of our run, this happened in real life almost exactly as Alistair had written it, to the extent that people who saw the play subsequently got in touch to ask if it had been hastily rewritten. We hadn’t changed a word. Alistair’s play brilliantly articulates the debate in the Labour Party today: the arguments over its soul, its mission, its achievements and the compromises it must make to gain power.

In the highly imaginative Ayn Rand Takes A Stand, David Hare puts the then home secretary Theresa May on stage in a searing piece that found a deep contradiction in her political philosophy. It’s well worth a read now she’s the boss.

And Stella Feehily’s gloriously cynical How To Get Ahead In Politics was inspired by accusations of bullying and sexual harassment within the Conservative Party and sees a Chief Whip practising his dark arts to contain a scandal.

READ THE PLAYS:

Alistair Beaton: The Accidental Leader
Stella Feehily: How To Get Ahead In Politics
David Hare: Ayn Rand Takes A Stand

*Islington North is Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency – and it’s also where Out of Joint is based!

If you’ve enjoyed reading (or seeing) these plays, please consider making a small gift to Out of Joint.

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The Accidental Leader & Corbyn – how fiction became reality

Filed Under: A View From Islington North, News, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

28th June 2016

A middle aged man in suit and tie using a mobile phone and holding a piece of paper

Bruce Alexander in The Accidental Leader by Alistair Beaton. Photo by Robert Workman.

The Chambers English Dictionary defines ‘plot’ variously as a conspiracy: a stratagem or secret contrivance and: the story or scheme of connected events running through a play, novel etc.

Imagine my astonishment to find those two definitions of ‘plot’ suddenly merging. The dust had scarcely settled from David Cameron’s successful attempt to blow up Britain, when I started receiving puzzled enquiries from theatre-goers attending my short play THE ACCIDENTAL LEADER currently running at the Arts Theatre in London’s West End. People couldn’t understand how the play could have been written in 24 hours.

It wasn’t, of course.

Written several months ago, THE ACCIDENTAL LEADER tells the tale of a plot to oust a bearded, left-wing allotment-loving politician whose parliamentary party have lost all faith in his ability to win the next election. I wrote the play because I felt the election of Jeremy Corbyn was both a moment of hope (the end of politics as merely a version of management) and a moment of high anxiety (can a decent old leftie backbencher hack it as a modern leader?) and, like many people, was unsure about the outcome.

In the play, the plotters meet secretly to arrange the coup. Their strategy is simple. In order to make the event appear spontaneous (yes, they are perhaps a bit naïve) they plan to resign one by one over the space of a single day. Two of the plotters talk:

JIM: It’s been one of the great weaknesses of our party, Eleanor.

ELEANOR: What has?

JIM: We’re too sentimental. We should be as ruthless as the other lot. They know a loser when they see one. Anyway, tomorrow you say whatever you want. That’s up to you. The main thing is – you resign. By 8pm tomorrow, we’ll have had eleven resignations from the shadow cabinet. He’ll be gone by midnight.

Alistair Beaton

But the leader fights back. His heavies twist arms to breaking point. What happens next I don’t want to say. There are still tickets left for this, the last week of the run, and I’d like to suggest you go along and find out how it ends.

As to how the real-life drama ends, well, at the time of writing, the man’s still in post. Though not, I suspect, for much longer. The lesson? Integrity is not enough. Authenticity is not enough. As we watch our politicians lie about the lies they told during the campaign, Labour needs a leader who can fight and win an election later this year. Otherwise it’s goodbye Britain, hello Borisland. I shudder.

Alistair Beaton. 27 June 2016

THE ACCIDENTAL LEADER is part of a five-play production entitled A VIEW FROM ISLINGTON NORTH, running at the Arts Theatre London. Ends Saturday.

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My first Beckett

Filed Under: All That Fall, Backstage, News, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

9th February 2016

Ciaran McIntyre in Endgame, Liverpool Playhouse 2008

Out of Joint is presenting a rare live production of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall, in which theatre-goers will be blindfolded, the actors moving about the auditorium. One of Beckett’s most naturalistic plays, it is inspired by his native Foxrock in Ireland.

We asked cast members about their first experience of Beckett.

BRÍD BRENNAN

“Waiting for Godot was my template for a great play”

I studied “En attendant Godot as part of my French degree course at Queen’s University. It was revelatory! For years, waiting for Godot was my template for a great play and since the beginning of my adventures in acting I’d hoped to be part of a Beckett production. I am delighted now to find myself in that world which was first revealed to me all those years ago in Belfast.

KILLIAN BURKE

“I realised I didn’t need to ‘get’ it. In watching his plays you have all you need”

If I’m being honest, my initial feeling toward Beckett was trepidation. A deeply lined, stern face floating in the darkness, staring out at you. My first encounters with his works was through reading it, and this lead to a feeling of needing to ‘get it’. ‘What does it mean?’. Undoubtedly a hangover from an education where poetry and drama is dissected into its component parts, each weighed and measured, then shoved back together, more often than not leaving one with a feeling of ‘I didn’t like that’.

Then in my first year of university I went to see a production of Waiting for Godot at The Gate Theatre in Dublin. I left the theatre, making my way down O’Connell Street toward my bus, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say my world was shattered or anything, but it was ever so slightly tilted on its axis. I was confused and satisfied, and realised I didn’t need to ‘get’ a thing. In watching (or listening to) his plays you have all you need. You may of course dissect it if you wish but I think it’s more enjoyable to walk along with the world at an ever so slightly strange angle.

TARA FLYNN

“I’d love to have gone for a drink with him”

I studied English and French at university, so Beckett and his influence began to creep into my consciousness then. I read Waiting for Godot during that time and wished desperately to see it in a theatre. To this day, I haven’t managed it yet. I can’t wait.

Once I became an actor, I’d bump into Beckett periodically. Not in real life, of course – although I’d love to have gone for a drink with him, who wouldn’t? – but it’s impossible to live and work in Ireland and not be aware of his reach, even outside the theatre. I’d read him sometimes and read about him more. His life is as fascinating as his work.

As much of my own work has centred on comedy and satire, one of my favourite aspects of Beckett, and All That Fall in particular, is the humour. He can be so darkly funny. The world in All That Fall sits not too far from the world of one of Ireland’s greatest satirists, Flann O’Brien – which might surprise some. I’ve never performed in Beckett before and I couldn’t be more thrilled for this to be my first.

GARY LILBURN

“Leaving three actors in charge seemed a recipe for disaster”

My first opportunity to perform in a Beckett play came in 1994 when I was cast as Estragon in a New Victoria Theatre production of Waiting For Godot. Other New Vic regulars Paul McCleary and Lennox Greaves were to play Vladimir and Pozzo respectively. When we arrived for the first read through our director Peter Cheeseman announced that he didn’t believe we would have much need of his services and handed over the direction of the production to us three .

The play is difficult, dense and multi layered enough for any experienced director, but to have not one but three actors, inexperienced at directing, who were also in the production, in charge, seemed a sure recipe for disaster.

Thankfully we were saved by a Birmingham University professor and Beckett expert who took pity on us, gave us a crash course on the play and playing Beckett, and we managed to pull it off.

CIARAN MCINTYRE

“I find him hilariously funny”

As a theatre-goer I first encountered Beckett when I was a student in Dublin. I saw Waiting For Godot at a student drama festival and loved it immediately. My first Beckett on the other side of the footlights was a few years ago at Liverpool Playhouse, wedged in a dustbin with my feet poking out the back hidden under rubble, playing Nagg in Endgame, which starred Matthew Kelly and his son.

I find Beckett funny – hilariously funny. Very dark, but so, so funny.

Hear All That Fall at Bristol Old Vic (8-12 Mar 2016) and Wilton’s Music Hall in London (22 Mar – 8 Apr 2016).

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Beckett Beginnings

Filed Under: All That Fall, Backstage, education, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

13th July 2015

Ciaran McIntyre in Endgame, Liverpool Playhouse 2008

Out of Joint is presenting a rare live production of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall, in collaboration with the Enniskillen Happy Days Festival. We asked some of the cast about their first encounters with Beckett.

GARY LILBURN

“Leaving three actors in charge seemed a recipe for disaster”

Thankfully we were saved by a Birmingham University professor and Beckett expert who took pity on us, gave us a crash course on the play and playing Beckett, and we managed to pull it off.

GARETT KEOGH

“High flung philosophy from low lying mouths”

I knew Beckett from schooldays – well, knew of him. The sort of person you were supposed to know about. The obscure and difficult artist that for a teenager to know was cool.

But I first really met him in a tiny hall off Sherriff Street in the centre of Dublin when some school pals were arguing, fighting more like, over what lines to include or cut from their adaptation of his novels for a one-man show. Jim Sheridan and his brother Peter, armed with well-worn A4 pages and biros, Vinnie McCabe the actor voicing the results of their latest joust. So this is who Beckett was? A master of words, and rhythms I knew. Hilarious. Speaking the thoughts inside Vinnie’s mind.

These three and Mister Sheridan had done a famous production of Godot that shocked the amateur circuit. They were baptised in Beckett. They bit the nose off each other fighting for sense, non-sense, for continuity, and laughter.

Then in a dark and dingy basement on Abbey Street which was the original incarnation of the Project Arts Centre I saw my first theatre apart from school Gilbert and Sullivans. Vinnie as Krapp, and how he sat into the part, or the part seemed to sit into him.

One night I was lucky to wander into the Gaiety and see Jack McGowran do his one-man Beginning to End. Funny, seemingly effortless, the native Dublin cadences that Beckett had knitted into something profound, poetic, provocative, and funny. Here was high flung philosophy from low lying mouths. Here were dilemmas of birth, death, and the in-between, condensed, crystallised, and comic. Here were us humans tying ourselves in knots with words.

And here was silence. And the man who dared to ask, what happens when your questions are left hanging in the void?

GINA MOXLEY

“There’s no end to the learning”

By the time I moved from Cork to Dublin, after I graduated from Art School, I can only remember having seen two plays – The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds with a student Fiona Shaw, and a stultifying production of Joyce’s Embers that almost doused my budding interest in theatre.

Without any knowledge, experience and precious little talent I managed to be cast by an education theatre company touring to schools. In Sligo we crossed paths with the Irish Theatre Company on their final tour with a production of Waiting for Godot. It was the first Beckett I’d seen and I was of course blown away – but also I realised just how little I knew and how much there was to learn.

And here I am hundreds of years later performing in my first Beckett and realising there’s no end to the learning.

CIARAN MCINTYRE

“I find him hilariously funny”

I find Beckett funny – hilariously funny. Very dark, but so, so funny.

See All That Fall at the Enniskillen Happy Days Festival, 22 July – 2 August 2015

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Love and a Bottle – the making of a restoration comedy

Filed Under: Backstage, education, Rehearsing, Uncategorized, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

2nd July 2014

See this show for £6. Use the code OOJ when booking. Performances at Greenwich Theatre on 9, 12 or 14 July Book tickets.

Max Stafford-Clark and writer Stella Feehily are working with students from LAMDA drama school on their final year show – a major rewriting of the “lost” restoration comedy Love and a Bottle by George Farquhar. Here we talk to Max and Stella, and below you can read the experience of one of the young actors, Joseph Prowen.

LAMDA_LongProject040713_imageRichardHubertSmith-3020 (1)

“We sent one of the students, who plays a beggar, to Finsbury Park station to beg – he wasn’t allowed to come back until he got at least 50p! It took him about three quarters of an hour and he said it was a mortifying experience. But when he came back, he played the scene completely differently”

Max Stafford-Clark and Stella Feehily talk to us about the process of creating Love and a Bottle and working with LAMDA students

What was it about the play made you want to rework it?

SF I’d read Love and a Bottle and loved it. It seemed like the perfect project to work with LAMDA students on. It’s young and full of spirit. The females in it are also resourceful, strong and very, very funny – that’s the other reason I wanted to do it. It’s quite sassy. Max had asked me to do it and I said the only way I would is if I could do it with LAMDA.

MSC Farquhar gives identities to his characters and he also gives them an emotional existence. Stella has done just this through workshopping the piece, especially with a character called Mrs Trudge, who she has since renamed Mistress Endwright. She’s gone from a fifteen line part to having one of the biggest parts in the play. By doing this, Stella has really released a whole emotional strand of the play.

What does the process involve? How do you begin?

SF Well Max has actually worked with LAMDA students before on a verbatim play called Mixed Up North, which was written by Robin Soans. Max and Robin went up north and interviewed locals and that formed the basis of the play. Whereas this project was quite different – I had this ancient text which I had to try and make sense of to begin with. Then I had an idea that because there were so many different characters, it would be best to conflate them all – I cut the character of a playwright named Lyrick and instead gave that role to Roebuck – which meant that we actually brought the play much closer to the autobiographical account of Farquhar’s first visit to London. So by the time we had our first proper rehearsal I already had a draft of this new version. From there, we started to cut the play – it needed to be a lot leaner. Once we’d done the cutting, we went through the process of casting, and once we knew who was playing who, I started to write each character to match the students’ personalities. So the creative process really sprung from the students’ differing personalities and writing each character to suit them. Joseph, for example, is a talented musician, so I have adapted his character Roebuck to play the violin.

How has it been working with LAMDA students?

SF Having the opportunity to knock the piece around with enthusiastic, talented drama students was essential in helping me write this play. I would ask them to do silly things to help me which I perhaps wouldn’t ask professional actors to do; they would run around the room and try out different accents, which really helped me envisage where the energy should be in the scene. Coming from an improvisational background myself, that is exactly what I wanted – for people to say yes, let’s go, let’s try that. They’re such a warm bunch of actors, and we loved seeing them develop so much from the initial readings to seeing them create these gorgeous, hilarious characters and speak the language so fluently and with ease.

We sent one of the students, who plays a beggar, to Finsbury Park station to beg – he wasn’t allowed to come back until he got at least 50p! It took him about three quarters of an hour and he said it was a mortifying experience. But when he came back, he played the scene completely differently; the humility that he brought to it was just extraordinary.

What are the differences between working with student actors and working actors?

MSC I would say it’s very similar. The first job you have as a director is to create a company – and the majority of that has been done for you because you’re presented with a company when coming to LAMDA. The second thing is to be able to harness the actors’ enthusiasm for the project, which has to be led by my own enthusiasm and the ability to turn the energy of discovery into the energy of performance. Immersing the students in the historical background was fun for both of us, and it was a learning curve for me as well as for them.

How important are drama schools in the role of new writing?

MSC Well the facilities are marvellous. Having the opportunity to unearth a hidden gem means we’re also restoring it to the canon and saying this play is worth considering, which will be a considerable service to the whole theatre community that LAMDA has expedited.

“Stella’s created a more well-rounded play, with clearer resolutions and she’s fleshed out the characters”

LAMDA_LongProject040713_imageRichardHubertSmith-2908

Joseph Prowen, a graduating BA (Hons) Professional Acting student at LAMDA, tells us about his time working with Stella Feehily and Max Stafford-Clark on a new version of George Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle, showing at Greenwich Theatre on 9, 12 & 14 July.

We began the LAMDA Long Project – an opportunity for students to work with a professional writer and director to produce the first draft of a new play – in our second year. The process essentially involves research, readings, actioning and improvisation. We had a couple of sessions back in January last year, purely to talk about the play and do a read-through with Max and Stella. From there, everybody had the opportunity to read for each part – Max would say ‘tomorrow this will be the cast’, and then it would change every day. You’d then go home, look at the scene you were going to read, think about the character you were going to be reading for and do any relevant research that needed to be done. It’s really lovely to think that the end product of this play will have been made by us, and that Stella took inspiration from improvisations we did in rehearsals. Everyone had a chance to contribute something to each character.

Working with Max and Stella isn’t just an interesting dramatic process; a lot of the preparation was in the historical research. On our first day, Max did a quiz with us – what happened this year? When did this happen? When was this battle? We’d be asked to carry out some research around the period, or about different parts of Ireland – we might be asked to do a presentation on the Battle of the Boyne one week or John Dryden the next. You’ve really got to turn up having done your research, which is great as it encourages you to work hard.

Unlike a lot of new writing that happens, we had a leg up in that we took a play that already existed, Love and a Bottle, which was George Farquhar’s first play. The play is about a young Irishman named George Roebuck, who I play, and is based on Farquhar. When we got it, Love and a Bottle was great – youthful and exciting – but it felt like it needed some work. So what Stella did with us was to rework it and what you will see when the show opens is an amalgamation of Farquhar and Feehily. Stella’s created a more well-rounded play, with clearer resolutions and she’s fleshed out the characters, making them three-dimensional and much more human.

When we perform Love and a Bottle, there will only be a handful of us playing the same part as we were last year in rehearsals. So going into it again this summer has been like entering into a completely different play: workshopping a piece really is an ever-changing process, which I love. It’s such a rare opportunity for an actor to be able to completely immerse yourself in a process like this – especially with funding cuts. This is also our first major collaboration of this scale, which is great as the training at LAMDA is very much geared towards working as an ensemble, so this is something that’s perfect to do. We really felt like a company this year.

Love and a Bottle opens at Greenwich Theatre on Wednesday 9 July in collaboration with Out of Joint. To book tickets please call 020 8858 7755 or book online at www.greenwichtheatre.org.uk

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How To Sort Your Stuff – making a play about museums

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4th September 2013

The Pitt Rivers Museum

Recently we hosted a 5-day workshop, giving writers an opportunity to learn new techniques for devising theatre. Isabel Quinzaños reports:

Over a few days in August, a group of budding writers, performers and directors got together at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to produce a script about both the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums. Out of Joint had set out to organise an education workshop that would focus on a devising and writing technique called “verbatim theatre”, which means creating a play out of people’s words. (You’ll find some examples of this kind of play at the bottom of this article.) The process of writing verbatim plays typically involves conducting a series of interviews with people who are somehow involved with the topic or “world” you have chosen to investigate; and recording their words in order to use them later on in a play. It is like theatre’s version of documentary film.

Our group of ten participants included both mature and fledgling performers; a budding director; a professional writer; and an academics in the course of PhDs in Architecture and Literature. Led by Naomi Jones – who has directed for Out of Joint and Eastern Angles and who has taught extensively at Oxford School of Drama – they set off to interview the staff and punters of the museums to find out what goes on behind the scenes.

It involved them finding and approaching people who would be interesting to interview, recording their exact words and then transcribing them. Then, the whole material was put together, and decisions had to be made about what story they could tell. Naomi did the first edit, but all participants had an input about what they felt should be in or not. On the final day, they rehearsed the play and put on a viewing of it for museum staff and invited guests.

The result was a moving and quirky piece of theatre that gave a real insight into how museum staff create the environment that we, the visitors, experience, let alone their perspective on their favourite pieces, the ones they hate the most and what they think of their work.

Here’s a snippet:

Enter brother and sister.SISTER Well I came to see the shrunken heads

MAYA Everyone knows the Pitt Rivers for the shrunken heads. In fact they often know that, before the name of the museum ‘Is that the place with the shrunken heads?’ Yep, and 80,000 other objects!

BROTHER I wouldn’t have come today but we came to see the shrunken heads; it’s a big attraction

MAYA I definitely don’t like them. I really…I avoid that case. Obviously if I have to show – actually, we don’t tend to take the public to them because, because the media for instance, whenever they talk about the Pitt Rivers will just focus on the shrunken heads.

SISTER I don’t know why but…

BROTHER …er it’s more of a macabre thing/ it’s the most macabre thing in here

SISTER Yeah it’s very macabre…..it’s fascinating. Not just the shrunken heads, it’s everything.

BROTHER Yeah…but it’s mainly the shrunken heads with/ my sister

SISTER No it isn’t, it’s the textiles, I like the textiles.

For the participants the best thing was meeting the fascinating personalities we never meet on our regular museum visits. Learning about the thought process behind the placement of each object in the museum. What is written about those objects, to tell us a story. In the end, the work the museum staff do is as much about us as visitors as it is about the objects they safeguard. The script is now in the Pitt Rivers archive – maybe they’ll let you have a read if you ask nicely.

Verbatim theatre – some examples

Look Left Look Right’s “The Caravan” – in its own venue parked outside the Royal Court.

YESTERDAY’S NEWS
Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill’s Joint Stock Theatre Group produced this piece because, as Gaskill tells it, they were at a loss for what to do next and decided to look through the newspapers for a story. The play was written from the company’s subsequent interviews with Angolan mercenaries.

THE LARAMIE PROJECT
by Tectonic Theater Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard and the media storm that followed it.

LONDON ROAD
by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork – the National Theatre’s verbatim musical about the impact on the community of the Ipswich prostitute murders.

THE PERMANENT WAY
by David Hare – about the privatisation of Britain’s railways and the four train crashes that happened shortly afterwards.

TALKING TO TERRORISTS
by Robin Soans

JUSTIFYING WAR
The Tricycle Theatre condensed the Hutton Inquiry into the Iraq war into 2 hours of theatre

WAITING ROOM GERMANY
Commissioned from Klaus Pohl by Der Spiegel to test the mood of Germany after reunification.

THE EXONERATED
Stories of six innocent survivors of death row.

THE CARAVAN
Look Left Look Right’s play told the stories of those worst affected by the 2007 floods.

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The spy in the bag – video

Filed Under: Backstage, Ciphers, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

2nd August 2013

Dawn King was first inspired to write Ciphers by the death of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ-employee who was found dead locked inside a bag in a Pimlico flat. Here she discusses the thoughts – and the play – that the case inspired; and some of her favourite writers.

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Forgotten People

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10th January 2013

a man wearing a white vest and jeans is lying on a sofa which has a checkered sheet over it, resting his head on his arms. A woman wearing a skirt and blouse is sat next to him also on the sofa looking down at him whilst holding his hand. In front of them is a wooden table with a tea towel and a piece of paper which has writing on it.

Barney Norris in a production of Through The Leaves

Fear of Music writer Barney Norris on rewrites, the army, and the strange fame of Andover.

In 2008 I was in a play called Through the Leaves by the German writer Franz Xaver Kroetz, in a production directed by Alice Hamilton, the director of Fear Of Music. I hadn’t previously encountered Kroetz, Germany’s most frequently performed living playwright, and his work fascinated me. I thought Through The Leaves was incredible: a portrait of a failed affair between a butcher and a roaming drunk (that was me) that put life on stage and demanded we pay it attention. I thought, I want to write a play like that. I’d just written my first short play, a piece called At First Sight about the memory of a failed affair, which was very romantic, and wanted to try something different. This uncompromising portrait of real life, not commenting, just showing, struck me as an exciting model.

The story of Fear Of Music started with two ideas. Firstly, I thought I could write about the experience of sharing a bedroom with your brother; secondly, I wanted to explore an image Alice’s mother Jane had put in my head. Jane told me that on the day she had moved out of her childhood home, the last time she looked into the kitchen, she had seen herself and her family five years earlier in the room – not remembered it, but seen the memory taking place in front of her eyes. I thought that was an amazing trigger for a play, so I wrote about two brothers refracted through the lens of memory. Alice didn’t think it was very good. I did a workshop and a reading and discovered she was right. The play went on the back burner, a story without impetus I put in a drawer.

Then, in 2010, I walked past an army recruitment poster that said ‘this is my life: I want to do more with it than flip burgers’, and knew at once that I had to go home and get back to writing. The slogan struck me as an incredibly offensive piece of bullying – a targeted belittling by the state. The idea that the Army marketing department might play on the insecurities of ordinary people suffering from a lack of opportunity in order to put them in the line of fire seemed abhorrent: so I went home and wrote another layer into my story. I organised another reading, and Alice and I began to plan a production.

a street advert sign, surrounded by buildings, cars and people walking down the street, which says "bored of the same routine?"

I’m cautious about sounding rabidly anti-army. This November 11^th the company of Fear Of Music went to the Remembrance Day service in Andover, where the play is set. We were struck by the beauty of the idea the army presented of itself at that ceremony, which strikes me as the central ritual of our society (it seems to me that England in the last century has been, above all, a story about the war). My grandfather lost three brothers in the Great War, and still lives a hundred metres from the memorial where their names are inscribed. The sacrifices made by soldiers for my life are woven into my family’s identity, and at that level, the level of the individual soldier, I feel conscious of a tremendous debt to the people who make up the army. But my argument wasn’t with them. The army is an arm of the state – and it’s a failure of our state if, rather than working to improve conditions for those on low incomes or in deprived areas, we exploit their insecurities and aggress them into barracks, a systematic practise documented by Forces Watch: http://www.forceswatch.net/what_why. It’s feudal.

a pair of shoes tied together by their laces, hanging over a wire.

Andover: around the world, shoes over a telegraph wire can mean a drug dealer’s patch, the death of a gang member or, presumably, boredom.

I hadn’t known at first that I wanted to set the play in Andover. But then the Tories got into power and in late 2010, while I was working at the Bush Theatre, announced new benefit caps for families. People I knew on benefits in Shepherds Bush just laughed at these: there was no way a family could live on that in that area. I learned that on the day these caps had been announced, Hammersmith and Fulham council had block-booked B&Bs across Brentford for the weeks following the date the new rates were due to come into effect. They weren’t aloof or disconnected; they had done the maths, and knew families on benefits would have to leave the area. It was planned social cleansing, ideological violence.

I wanted to engage with this, but I didn’t want to write about ‘now’. Seamus Heaney has said that at the height of the Troubles, he and his contemporaries avoided writing about the situation around them because such an attempt tended to produce what he called ‘Troubles trash’. I felt like I read and saw a lot of ‘banking trash’ being made around me too. So I looked for a time when what I wanted to write about – the shuffling of the working class out of city centres, a receding jobs market, a lack of opportunity, a sense of powerlessness, the overpowering shadow of the city on the lives of the people around me – had also been relevant. And I ended up looking at Thatcher.

Andover became the setting because I grew up there and could do the accent; because it’s a military town, a natural setting for this story, and because during the 80s Andover became a battleground for the abnegation of social responsibility. From the 60s, the London Overspill relocations project transformed Andover from a town of 5,000 to one of 50,000. Facing overcrowding in the metropolis, the GLC paid to turn places like Andover into overspill towns, and relocated people in social housing out to the country. In Andover, this wasn’t the end of the story: by the 80s, it was clear the new housing was so badly built it would have to be done again. Andover Council got a lot of coverage when it had to bring a suit against the GLC before they made a settlement to pay for this second draft of the new town. Nowhere was it more painfully clear how unwanted the public were by the state. So that seemed like a good place to write a play about forgotten people.

Watch Fear of Music

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Max, on women in theatre

Filed Under: News, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

12th December 2012

I was interested to read the Guardian’s report of research on women in our top ten subsidised theatres and in particular about female writers.

Out of Joint might not be in the top ten subsidised theatres in this country (though we have collaborated with a number of them). But our record is worth pointing to.

In 20 years, 15 of the 35 plays we have produced have been by women – that’s 43%. And our output from 2011 to 2013 will be exclusively by women writers.

Caryl Churchill once suggested to me that my own life, in terms of education received and other factors, was not fundamentally different to my grandfather’s; whereas hers, in contrast, was enormously different to her grandmother’s. Theatre is a powerful recorder of change, and theatre written by women – now and in the past – offers a particular and valuable perspective on the evolution of our society.

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A Dialogue With One’s Ghosts

Filed Under: Our Country's Good, Writing by Jon — Comments Off

28th June 2012

Our Country’s Good is returning for more performances in 2014. Here is writer Timberlake Wertenbaker on love, death, trash romances and the inspirations behind her play.

Timberlake Wertenbaker Plays have strange and complex ways of getting written, that often only become clear much later. It was interesting for me to go back to the time I wrote Our Country’s Good as Max Stafford-Clark and I were auditioning recently for his new production. I found myself remembering why some things had gone into the play and even into specific lines.

In the autumn of 1987, Max asked me if I would read Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker. He thought it could make an interesting play. I’d had some interest in prisoners – I’d seen and loved an early production by the Clean Break Theatre Company. I’d met with them and written an article for a magazine (which then refused to publish the article because it was “too political.”) I was angry at the time and also felt I owed Clean Break something for their honesty and generosity, so there was some unfinished business there. I also knew something about the 18th century from writing The Grace of Mary Traverse for the Royal Court.

In October 1987, not long after I read The Playmaker, my partner, the actor John Price, died. He had a stroke and a week later, he was dead. I didn’t think I could write, and my mind was barely working anyway: I’d gone into shock.

I told Max I loved the book but I didn’t think I could write a play at this time, and I knew too little about Australia. He led me to Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, a detailed history of the country. It was there I found the title for Our Country’s Good.

To mourn someone, one has to internalise their life. I began to feel I wanted to write something that celebrated acting in some way. The theatre had been John’s passion and made him what he was. John loved the very process of acting and felt he was always learning and exploring. (He sometimes joked that if he hadn’t become an actor he might have accepted a career advisor’s suggestion that he become a policeman.) Acting had taken him all over the world and into great emotional depths.

In his last year, John toured with the English Shakespeare Company in Henry IV 1&2. Sometimes I found myself in the men’s dressing room, watching the actors rush in and out to fetch something, or quickly mention an incident that had happened on stage. I used some of that for the last scene of Our Country’s Good. And because John and I had met in rehearsals (with Shared Experience, and with my translations of Marivaux) I wanted to write about the strong emotional undercurrents that can occur during that process when life and a play become enmeshed. I was also by then watching Max’s rehearsals of the Recruiting Officer. All this fed into the play.

It was a difficult time. I was living with memories. The reason that Dabby, in Our Country’s Good, remembers Bigbury Bay and not Cornwall (where the “real” Dabby came from) is because that is where I had spent some very happy times during the ESC tour. I had walked along the estuary and the beach and I felt I knew it well. In such a way, one transforms one’s longing for a time that will never come again into someone’s homesickness and a character based on someone from Cornwall into a character from Devon.

Ian Redford as Harry Brewer and Ashley Miller as Duckling in the 1998 revival of Our Country’s Good (photo: John Haynes)

John died from a stroke. Harry Brewer has a stroke in Keneally’s novel. I had to write about it. And I knew about what it means to try to keep someone alive by talking to them when they’re in a coma: the search for a flicker of response. It’s often dangerous to say “this directly inspired that”: Needless to say, I’m not Duckling, and John (who was very beautiful) wasn’t Harry but that story in the play was influenced by my own experience. I knew that one could be loving and yet very angry with a person who was dying – and I was obsessed with what it meant to have a stroke. “First fear, then a pain at the back of the neck. Then nothing. It’s dark. It’s dark,” says Harry, himself remembering the death of Thomas Barrett. Writing can be a dialogue with one’s ghosts.

The death of a partner has a strange way of annihilating one’s own identity. A planned future is brutally taken away. I felt an empathy with the convicts’ own sense of annihilation as they were transported to a different life. Again, it’s a subterranean pull, a mixing of very different experiences that meet at one point.

It’s not all darkness of course. I remembered recently that my familiarity with criminal slang didn’t come from meticulous research, but because as an adolescent (and even later) I was an avid reader of Georgette Heyer. She wrote quite silly historical romances about handsome Byronic lords and feisty maidens, but she was phenomenally accurate with her 18th century research, including thieves’ cant. In all her stories there were highwaymen or thieves or lords pretending to be highwaymen. Having read almost every book she wrote, I knew the lingo.

The workshops for Our Country’s Good were in April 1988. I could just about function by then although I found it difficult to get to the workshops without getting lost. These workshops would provide masses more information and inspiration as well as emotional support. I’ll never forget Fred Molina, who was in the April workshops, offering me parsley because he thought I looked anaemic.

When I began to write the play in May, everything went in: personal memories, things said and done in the workshops by Max and the actors, research and even current events. We were in the Thatcher era: educational activities for prisoners were being cut, and there was a lot of talk about innate criminality. I think this process is the same for every writer. Personal memories tangle with research and fact in ways that are not immediately clear. But perhaps because it was such a turbulent time for me personally, I find I can now remember it well and for some reason, talk about it for the first time.

See Our Country’s Good in 2014: Croydon, Colchester, Bristol, Minneapolis, Toronto, Richmond, Brighton and Windsor. More here

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Category: Writing

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Love and a Bottle – the making of a restoration comedy

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Verbatim theatre – some examples

The spy in the bag – video

Forgotten People

Max, on women in theatre

A Dialogue With One’s Ghosts

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