Festivals, Shelters, and Being Human…

It’s been quite a while since ‘Brightest and Best’, and although I’d intended to write a wrap-up post, the end of a project is never quite the decisive moment I imagine it will be. These days I find I can walk away from such things quite fast, almost not thinking about them at all in their immediate aftermath. Very different to the come-down I used to feel after finishing plays when I was younger. A shame not to miss things in the way I used to; or healthier, maybe, to be able to move on...

In any case, I’ve moved straight on into two new projects which I wanted to write a bit about here. One is a mini-festival  I’m curating in mid June. The other is a writing commission I’ve just begun with Natalie Ibu, working with LAMDA second-year drama students to develop a play. The first of these will have a blog of its own, so I’ll post a link to that soon. But in brief, the festival will mark  40 years since The Soho Poly Theatre (now The Soho Theatre) moved into a tiny basement on Riding House Street and established itself as one of the most famous fringe venues of the 1970s and 80s. It was a home for new writing and the starting point for many actors and directors still working today. For the week beginning 18th June the plan is to bring it back to life  for a series of short plays, readings and discussions about theatre then and now.  More details to follow…

The LAMDA project is in its second week, and is quite a new experience for me. Evolving a play for twelve actors feels like writing in 3D. Rather than spending time thinking, I’m forced to react in the room to scores of questions and suggestion. It’s been pushing me into quick decisions, which is bracing but frightening too. Balancing that with the need to maintain an overarching ‘concept’ for the play is going to be one of the biggest challenges.

The idea we’re all working on grew out of something I read in a book by Matthew Sweet about hotels during WW2. In particular, there’s a story about a group of Communists marching to the Savoy during the Blitz and demanding to be let into the downstairs ballroom, a makeshift shelter for the (rich) guests. This demand was a protest against the inadequate provision of shelters for the desperately poor residents of places like Stepney in the East End. It’s a story which seems to question the Home Front myth that everyone was in it together.

Inevitably, researching these events throws light onto the present. Something that particularly strikes me is the way the current coalition has co-opted that famous phrase ‘in it together’ – partly to justify their reduction in support for the public sector and the championing of charities, volunteer organisations and the Big Society. Of course, there are many lenses through which to view such a comparison, but one of the interesting discoveries for me has been how the crisis of 1940 underscored how necessary government-led action was, and how poorly-funded and poorly-coordinated local provision was often unequal to the task at hand...

Then again, I’ll always look for the left-wing angle - which is a realisation that makes writing a play with political dimensions troubling and problematic. I’m not someone who finds it easy to write something that champions a particular ideology. It’s not that I don’t want to, but more that I  don’t seem to have the tools to do it without becoming reductive or simplistic. Certainly I’m not an historian, and I don’t think it would be legitimate for me to try and change people’s thinking about the Second World War (at least not in such a blunt way). I’m not sure that can ever be a playwright’s primary responsibility. I’ve argued this point before, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of a writer using whatever powers of persuasion they might have to attempt to establish themselves as ‘an expert’ in any field other than writing itself. So, at the moment, I’m wrestling with the question of how to approach historical, and by implication political, material.

Worrying about it all over coffee the other morning, I kept returning  to the question of characters and what they want. In a sense that felt like cowardice: I don’t know what I want my play to say or mean, so I’ll let my characters worry about it all instead. And yet, that’s the choice I always seem to arrive back at. In the end, I found myself reformulating the idea that a play (well, one type of a play) is really just about testing characters’ value systems. I wondered if the most vivid question for each character is simply ‘What are your responsibilities as a human being?’ After all, isn’t that what all of us worry about most, at the crisis moments of our lives? And maybe plays are just one of the forms of art that help us develop a framework to articulate that question.

So, for now at least, I’m not thinking ‘What point do I want the play to make?’ or ‘How can I tie this story in to my own political opinions?’ Instead I’m just asking my characters, via the three-dimensional students who are embodying them, ‘What do you believe are your responsibilities as a human being?’ And then trying to think of how those beliefs might be put under the greatest possible stress…