Optional Supplemental/Background Information

The following information gives some contextual information about the play including details about the playwright and the history of the story and the original production. It is intended for you to use as much or as little as interests you and is in no way required for you to be familiar with it in regards to our discussions.

SCOTT’S TAKE

I knew next to nothing about Steve Waters before I read THE CONTINGENCY PLAN back in 2009. There was significant buzz around the play(s) as they were considered to be the first serious pieces of drama about climate change. I read the plays when they were published and found them to be not only enlightening on the subject, but also worked quite well as political thrillers. Third Rail was producing at the World Trade Center back then and that space felt too big for the plays. I also got little to no buy in from the company as they thought the plays were too British and that no one would want to come to a pair of downer plays about the environment. The company members were often a wall that it was best not to push against too hard when there was a consensus. So I stowed the plays away for another day.

Come to find out many years later, Steve Waters had completed the Master’s in Playwriting program at the University of Birmingham which was taught by THE foremost political playwright of the modern theatre, David Edgar. While Edgar is primarily known for his 2-part adaptation of Dicken’s NICHOLAS NICKLEBY that was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late-70’s, he has written many, many plays about politics and often the processes involved in politics. Steve Waters later took over the Birmingham playwriting program when David Edgar stepped down. There are definitely similarities in the approaches that Waters takes in THE CONTINGENCY PLAN and that Edgar utilizes in his writing.

While Waters continues to write for the theatre, he is mostly recognized for THE CONTINGENCY PLAN. One of the reasons that there have been so few plays written about climate change is because THE CONTINGENCY PLAN is considered to be the definitive works on climate change for the theatre. The plays were scheduled to be revived at the Donmar Warehouse in 2020, before Covid hit. Unfortunately, they have not been reprogrammed by the Donmar in its current season. I think it’s a shame that the plays are so rarely produced, particularly here in the States. I think they stand up, not only as a fascinating education in climate science and climate politics, but also as terrific drama that emanates from human, as well as environmental, conflict.

Interview with Steve Waters about The Contingency Plan

AD: When did you first think you might write a play about climate change?

SW: About 2006. I was invited to do a project with Hampstead Theatre, where I was matched with a younger writer, George Gotts. We were doing something called 'Daring Pairings'. The idea was that you would write a play together very quickly. We both decided we wanted to write something about James Lovelock. Revenge of Gaia had just come out, so we both read it, and then we wrote very, very swiftly in response a series of scenes. It was titled ‘A Plague of People’ and it got a reading and went down very well.
I got very interested in what had surfaced in that. There was this older couple, Robin and Jenny, who feature in The Contingency Plan. They’re the parents, and there was Will, who’s a young scientist, a glaciologist, and he was going into government. There’s a scene where Will goes to meet with a civil servant and she is blindly unaware of any of the things he wants to tell her, all the bad news if you like, and it was quite a funny scene.
I was keen to write something about climate change. It seemed in 2006, there was a step-change in the public discussion about it. Lovelock seemed to crystallise that because the book was so scary and so full of drama. There’s something wonderfully lurid about that book and something really quite repellent as well.

AD: Were you thinking of Lovelock as a Cassandra figure?

SW: I think so. Lovelock interests me because firstly he was such a visible figure. Secondly he was such a contradictory figure. He was railing against urban greens and was very critical of certain mainstream environmental politics. On the other hand, like no one before, he was saying it may already be too late. We may have already passed various tipping points. That’s the sort of person that interests me. Somebody who in a way embodies some of the fault lines within green politics. There’s something really misanthropic about some of that book.

AD: So he would be a much more interesting dramatic figure than say Jonathan Porritt because there are so many contradictions?

SW: Absolutely. In the original, fragmentary play I wrote for the Hampstead, there was one scene with Robin and Jenny, and they were walking in the Peak District and suddenly he turned to Jenny, who he’s been married to for many, many years, and said he couldn’t be in a relationship with her anymore. This profound negativity and pessimism that he was expressing was something I wanted to pursue further really.
In that scene there was a lot of allusions back to Rachel Carson’s work and his own early environmentalism and a sense of a lost opportunity, and a genuine, profound pessimism for the future. There was something that had totally eroded his belief in relationships and human beings. That psychology really interested me.

AD: What did you learn from presenting that earlier play at the reading?

SW: One of the things is how you think you’re in a great community of talk and debate about climate change, and actually you’re not. You’re in a little bubble of concern about climate change. I was quite staggered by how many people, in the liberal arts scene in London of all places, didn’t even seem to have the first inkling of what I was talking about. It was just a dim presence on their radar. They didn’t even know whether they believed it at that point. Even though it seemed to me a burning issue, the thing I just had to get out of my head, for other people they hadn’t even begun to get it into their head, and that was pretty scary.

AD: A very important event, which you must have come across quite early in your research for The Contingency Plan, was the 1953 flood.

SW: I wanted to make sure that everything in the play had a precedent in some respect. This 1953 flood was a very particular event, in the sense of the devastating impact it had on eastern England, and on the Netherlands. It was largely to do with early warning systems not working, with a series of very contingent factors to do with tidal surges, to do with the fact that it was a spring tide, to do with weather conditions, the direction of the wind, and so on.
So a number of things combined to make an ordinary event an extraordinarily devastating event. I think 300 people died in England, thousands of people died in the Netherlands. It almost happened again very recently in 2007. There was an event in the autumn where Lowestoft and places on the eastern coast were subject to very similar conditions. Gordon Brown called a Cobra meeting. They’re all in the bunker there just like they were when the banks failed.

AD: So your basic premise was that - with the ice from the Antarctic melting - if 1953 happened again, it would be massive?

SW: That’s right. Obviously the play indicates it’s probably Greenland that’s culpable. But the character at the centre of the play, Will Paxton, the glaciologist, is bringing even worse news. He’s saying, look, this is an intimation of an even more scary scenario. He works on the biggest ice sheets in the world and even they are not utterly impregnable. That’s his argument.
I suppose the thing that made the play plausible to me was the way in which every time you hear the IPCC report, everything’s at least 10 or 20 years ahead of what they imagined five years previously. That sense of the non-linear aspect of climate change was the conceit that drives the play.

AD: In the plays, the father and son are both glaciologists. The father worked on Pine Island in Antarctica back in the 1970’s, and he discovers information that makes him think that actually the ice sheet is not that indestructible and he goes to the Thatcher government. The government doesn’t listen to him and this precipitates his resignation. The work of the father is carried on by the son. He goes into government, in Whitehall in the present day. Is all this fictional?

SW: The kernel of the story came when I was talking to John King at the British Antarctic Survey. He was in Eastern Antarctic on the peninsula about 10 – 12 years ago, and there was much more warming than he had been anticipating. It was apparent that an ice sheet was about to break off from the landmass. Greenpeace contacted him at the time and asked should we mobilise around this. He said he couldn’t make a political gesture at that time. His ethics as a scientist obviously mitigated against his making that leap into politics. And then 10 years later, the science had lined up. The warming could be explained by anthropogenic climate change.
What intrigued me was the idea that somebody might be working in the Antarctic in the 1970’s, but they weren’t interested in climate change. What would happen if somebody at that time had started to see evidence of something but they didn’t have a paradigm to explain it as climate change? It was developing in certain areas of science but there wasn’t a common consensus.
I imagined this man finding this out, and getting a pretty dim audience from everybody around him including his colleague, the character Colin Jenks, and being destroyed by that premature knowledge. Then turning in on himself and being very destructive as a consequence.
There is something genuinely tragic about the whole question of climate change. Whilst we know there are political ramifications, we know people are responsible, we know there’s culpability and all of that, at the same time it is a genuine tragedy to me in the sense that it’s something that we’ve all inherited, it’s something that we didn’t necessarily set into motion knowingly and it’s disproportionate in its impact. I wanted that feeling in the play. This sense of there being this long secret waiting to be discovered under the ice or in the atmosphere and it then was discovered too late and responded to too late.
It’s a sort of Ibsen play in the way the past impacts on the present and it’s too late to address that particular aspect of the past.
I was particularly interested with Will. He’d grown up sensing this darkness in his father and how that manifests in misanthropy. Again, thinking of Lovelock who was marvellously robust after being disbelieved for so long, who carried on speaking to people, meeting with Margaret Thatcher, keeping his thesis afloat about Gaia even in the most arduous of circumstances. But Robin doesn’t. He’s not robust. He turns in on himself and as a consequence he sets this poison chalice for Will about disengaging altogether from public life.
I met with a lot of scientists who generally speaking, were uncomfortable about politics, sceptical about the way government works, anarchist in their instincts in some respects. All they respect is other scientists and the very particular work that they do. The thing that interested me in the play was how do such people speak to government and how does government speak to them. It’s very easy for government to decide to dispense with people who are telling the truth.

AD: In the play, you didn’t have anyone who was a green advocate. Why did you keep out that strain of the debate?

SW: One could already imagine what that character would be like. They are very hard to engage with theatrically and very uninteresting in some respects. They’re too smart, they’re too clever, too knowing and they would articulate the subconscious of the play. I just don’t like that sort of play and I’m interested in finding voices which are a very long way away from my own, in terms of the language they deploy and their morality.
The character Jenny is an interesting example. She’s involved in mitigation activities and carbon reduction and community things. It’s laughed at merrily in the play, but I’m totally behind that. That’s what I do. That’s the activism I can understand and engage with. But I can also see how a scientist such as Will who knows the scale of the problem might it hard to find any value in it.

AD: Did you think you had to explain climate change to an audience

SW: I tried to side-step explaining climate change. The play says ‘it’s a given.’ What it tries to explain instead is local manifestations of climate change so there are a couple of ‘lantern lectures’ moments. In the first play, there is this hilarious but also grotesque moment when Robin, with a fish tank and a model and a scale map, shows his family what will happen to his land in Norfolk with climate change.
They’re all thinking this is a manifestation of his breakdown. It’s a horrible scene in some respects but it’s quite funny, too. The audience were looking at the model in the interval. You feel so fraudulent, because of course, it’s not unrealistic, but it is an act of fiction.
In the second play, Robin’s nemesis is the scientist Colin Jenks who’s the government advisor. He does a demonstration about resilience. Everyone holds a piece of string, like a cat’s cradle. Then, he says, let’s take away the trees, let’s take away the worms, and he starts cutting it. I took that from the Transition Town Handbook, It’s a common workshop but it seemed like a delicious thing to do with government ministers standing there pretending to be oak trees or jays or worms. It was in a sense didactic but it is a comic moment, and I think as long as those things are grounded in a character or a theatrical moment then you can smuggle them through.

AD: When I saw the plays, I was sitting next to the Daily Telegraph’s critic and at the end of the first play he turned to me and said ‘Tell me this isn’t true’. Did you get some feedback from any scientific or government advisers?

SW: I think some people from the Department of Energy and Climate Change came. They didn’t send me an angry email, but in the play, they came off lightly.

AD: It’s set in a Tory government and the Conservative minister is always saying ‘Ahh what am I going to tell David?’

SW: I have a strong, queasy feeling about the Conservatives in power. That’s a bit tribal of me.
I just wanted a new government who in the very first week of their tenure have this disastrous flood in Bristol. And before they’ve read the papers and been briefed properly - what are they going to do about it? Because it isn’t going to happen at a convenient time let’s face it.

AD: The government advisors and ministers are around a table in Whitehall, wondering whether to evacuate towns along the east coast. The country is watching Strictly Come Dancing. If they make the wrong call, ‘David’ is going to be angry.

SW: The best analogy was the build-up to Y2K, to the Millenium Eve, when everyone looked foolish afterwards. It’s a very difficult position for the government, but it struck me that a Tory government might have said, ‘Well, the state would make it worse. People should make their own arrangements to evacuate’. The ‘invisible hand’ would evacuate Lowestoft.

AD: I’d like to talk about how your other plays have prepared you for this one. First of all, you went on the playwrighting course at Birmingham University in 1992.

SW: I read English at Oxford in the 1980’s and I became a teacher in schools. I came from the Midlands, a theatre-poor bit of Britain. I don’t know why I was interested in the theatre, but I was for some strange reason. So I started writing plays for kids and putting them on at schools. Then this course appeared at Birmingham. David Edgar founded it twenty years ago this year.
It was a very exciting thing for me to do. What was so great about the course is that it’s for writers by writers. I met Trevor Griffiths and Arnold Wesker. And suddenly theatre felt much more easy to understand. Because theatre is a cliquey kind of world. It’s quite hard to penetrate, especially if you have no connection to it.
There’s a certain positive superficiality about theatre writing, if I can put it nicely, in the sense that it’s very active. It’s very quick. You might labour over a play for a long time in the thinking but you write it quickly. It should be staged quickly. It’s about a certain energy, and I think that’s how I write.
David Edgar is part of a generation of playwrights from the late sixties - Howard Brenton, David Hare, Caryl Churchill - who defined an idea of theatre in this country that was socialist and public and epic and post-Brecht. That’s the theatre that interests me. It doesn’t exist anymore in the same way. How to respond to that theatre now in very changed conditions intrigues me. I think that’s a real challenge.

AD: Two things that strike me when reading your plays are that they are about people at work. And that you bring different parts of the world together on often small stages, as in World Music, set in the EU in Brussels and in a fictional Central African country.

SW: Yes, I am interested in people at work. I’m interested in people under pressure, people in situations where they make moral choices. I wouldn’t really describe myself as a political writer in the straightforward sense, but the EU is the politics that interests me because there’s something curiously vacant about it. There’s something haunting about the EU and sort of Swiftian. It floats over Europe. There’s something about the folly of the EU, although I believe it should exist, that makes me want to write about it. Whereas, it was hard to write about Westminster because it’s very colonised with so many TV series and jokes and political lobbyists. The way we write about politics in the newspapers bores me to tears - these quiet briefings by insiders. I didn’t want any of that in the play but I knew I had to draw upon that tradition, the Whitehall farce - trousers down and peccadilloes.

AD: Work also defines character and people’s points of view. In After the Gods, which is about academics, structuralists, a real crisis happens, but they all seem to react to it in terms of what papers they written, what their position is on reality.

SW: There’s this fascinating thing in theatre about representative character - somebody who stands for something, somebody who manifests a tendency or an idea. One’s always trying to work against that but I do think people are like that. There’s a degree to which people define themselves ideologically and then they behave accordingly. I am interested in the way people manifest their convictions, but also the way they get lost in them.
Someone said to me that I’m really interested in people who are wrong. I thought that sums it up very neatly. I am very interested in people who are wrong. I feel I’m wrong a lot of the time. I’m ignorant. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. There’s a lot of time when I feel like I have no right to say this. I think those characters who are in that position really interest me. People who haven’t quite got the authority or speak beyond their brief or who transgress some kind of social code. And they’re wrong but they’re right.

AD: In Fast Labour, which is about economic migrants in Britain, a Ukrainian, arrives in Britain with nothing and he ends up making money and setting up a business bringing other people from Europe to work here. Do you like to bring the news to the theatre?

SW: That’s the political energy. There’s something in theatre that’s inherently topical.
One of the things that’s happened to political theatre recently is that it’s got reduced to the idea of verbatim theatre or works that leap right over the active imagination into recorded fact. I respect that, But as a writer, that doesn’t interest me. The stories that interest me are the ones where you realise that the recorded fact doesn’t even begin to tell that story. That there’s a whole layer of story underneath that’s just not accessible. I suppose a lot of the plays are about those secret worlds, hidden worlds. I want to take a step back from the mainstream way questions are being aired and ask what are the larger questions behind it. I’m interested in the tendencies.
Think of those traditions of documentary makers like Fred Wiseman in the United States. He would spend a lot of time filming hidden worlds and he felt that was his duty in a democratic society. I think that’s a real spur for me because I find it fascinating to ask ‘how does this thing work?’ How do people make decisions about this? The plays are not telling the news in the sense of scandal or exposé but there’s a degree to which they try to take a step back from the kind of ideology of news to locate more troubling stories, the kind that are hard to tell in a 300 word article.

AD: Is there an education going on, in the best sense of education?

SW: To me, research is a very exciting thing. It’s a physical thing. It’s like going on a journey and I want that feeling in the play, I want the audience to go on that journey as well.
So yes, in a sense it’s educational, but that sounds too pat doesn’t it? There’s a degree to which I don’t know what I think, but I know the play helps me think aloud and I hope it helps other people think aloud, too. That’s the way it seems to me to work rather than imparting a content or a body of knowledge.
What kind of knowledge serves politics? How can any mind contain all the things that one needs to know to make a decision about most of the things that politics pertains to? Resilience is a satire. The huge challenge to politics of climate change is out of the knowledge of politicians.

AD: One wants a lot more plays now, not necessarily climate change plays but plays that are dealing with capitalism or consumerism or the idea of the individual against the group and our responsibilities. These touch on themes that are very pertinent to climate change but don’t necessarily have to go under the banner of climate change.

SW: Absolutely. Most playwrights are urbane folk. They live in cities and they sit in theatres and they’re in a particular place where nature doesn’t feature. There’s a strand that is very absent from English theatre but not from Russian theatre or Norwegian theatre. In Australian theatre, it is interestingly present.
It intrigues me, why is there not a play by David Hare about climate change? Why isn’t there a play by David Edgar? There’s a real generational thing there. They don’t know how to talk about it, so the traditional left is in trouble. Caryl Churchill is the only one who’s made steps towards it, because of her background in feminism and her connection to environmentalism.
The only hope I’d derive from climate change is it has generated a completely different sort of politics, which is now proving to be really robust. It doesn’t need government in the same way and it does reach over to government, like 10:10. I’m not saying it’s the solution but my goodness it does get people talking very quickly and that gives me an enormous amount of hope.

• from The Ashden Directory

Interview with Steve Waters about playwriting

PC: What led you to become a playwright?

SW: It was quite a slow process. I didn’t grow up in a particularly theatrical culture. I grew up in the Midlands and there was very little theatre in Rugby, Coventry. I was from a working class family, I didn’t make much theatre, there was one school play a year and the year I was in it the school hall burnt down so that didn’t happen. In some respects it is the very last thing that I should have ended up doing. I was very interested, from a young age, in films, I watched a lot of films, I watched a lot of television: Plays for the Day and the like.

PC: Did you start writing at University?

SW: Yes. Things really started when I went to University. I went to Oxford and I read English in the eighties and the very first week, almost by default, I was brought into a group in my college to write a play, they wanted me to write, I don’t know why they wanted me to write, why they even thought I could do it but somehow that task fell on to me. It was during the miners’ strike, I wrote a play about a miners’ strike set in Anglo-Saxon England, it was a comedy. It was in this competition called Cuppers and on the board was Katie Mitchell, Patrick Marber, I mean, these are the networks aren’t they, and it did really well. It didn’t actually win but it almost won. Everybody then said, “You should write some more plays.” And I did, I tried to and I stopped, I didn’t write anything for years.

PC: What did you do instead?

SW: After university I became a teacher and I ended up teaching drama, as well as English. All of a sudden I found myself in a comprehensive school in Oxfordshire and I was teaching a load of kids, wanting to put on a production and I thought I’d better write it because it has got to have lots of young people in it – thirty, forty kids, so I wrote a play about the Victorian era. That was okay, that went down well. Then I directed loads of other stuff and I wrote something else. I learnt a lot from my colleagues actually; I had some amazing colleagues at that school who had come from that background. I was teaching theatre studies so I really thought I’ve got to know lots about Stanislavski, Brecht, Artaud. This was all new to me really and so I really got into that.

PC: Did you study playwriting as well?

SW: Yes. I went to Birmingham University in the early nineties. The second or third year of the MA in playwriting that was set up by David Edgar there, the only course of its kind at the time. I couldn’t have made a better decision. I went to Birmingham, one of my colleagues was Sarah Kane, I was a very good friend with her. David Edgar was teaching so every week we had different tutors: Trevor Griffths, Arnold Wesker, Howard Brenton. An unbelievable bunch of people just coming in to chat to us about scenes. It was chaotic but it was fantastic, it was an incredible year – 92/93.

PC: What do you feel that course gave you?

SW: That got a lot of stuff out of my system that I think that I had an overintellectuallised idea of what playwriting was, I think I thought it was very theoretical. I didn’t seem to take seriously things like Chekhov and all these writers that I have come to love because I just didn’t know enough about the theatre. I started to pay attention to things that I would have traduced before: naturalism. Trevor Griffiths was one of the people that I found most exciting during that year because he was a very intelligent man, a very underestimated writer, we only had him for an afternoon but he talked about Chekhov, he translated The Cherry Orchard and it was an incredibly exciting three hours. And Sarah Kane, meanwhile, talking about why you do things, I mean, I was 27, she was 22 and she was so alive and so exciting as a person that in a way just brought me back to first principles. I need to think more clearly about the excitement of theatre and the immediacy of it and so on.

PC: You seem to have had lots of different experiences to prepare you for writing plays.

SW: It was a long journey, I think it is worth saying. I think that that has been a big influence on me: that it took me so long. I am a slow learner in a way. It might sound surprising to you but I feel like it takes me a long time to really get things. I can sort of make it seem like I have understood them quite quickly but actually to really understand it, it takes longer. It took a while to work out that theatre was for me and partially that was about making theatre, teaching theatre, which is why those things have been so closely linked for me.

PC: What were your first steps to get work on after the Birmingham course?

SW: I sent out my work to the main new writing theatres and if they don’t get back to me I’m barking up the wrong tree. I’ve either got it or I haven’t, I’m not going to send it to everybody. I’m sent it to the Royal Court, the Bush, Hampstead Theatre and that was about it. And they all got back in one form or another. Whilst they weren’t saying, “You are amazing!” They were saying things that that seemed to register, I seemed to have something to offer.

PC: What did those contacts lead to?

SW: I was too old for the young playwriting schemes and all that kind of stuff but Hampstead were the first theatre that said come and meet. Actually I owe a lot to them, particularly under Jenny Topper as they were then. A brilliant literary manager they had called Ben Jancovich, who became a very good friend of mine, without him I wouldn’t be talking to you today. Many things flowed from that for me: getting to know Hampstead, becoming their resident writer, seeing your work fail but also seeing people’s excitement about working on certain aspects of it, working with actors.

PC: How old were you at the point you started working with a theatre?

SW: I’m starting to do that in my early thirties so a lot of other writers would have been doing it ten years before that possibly, part of that learning curve. We’re talking late nineties, early noughties, when the theatre scene is changing very rapidly, there was a big burst of energy of In-Yer-Face, which is when I was starting to write. I wasn’t part of that world. It was people a little bit younger than me, taking more drugs, lived slightly more apparently outré lives. I was coming out of a very different context and in some ways my reference points were a bit earlier. I was still interested in the previous generation: the Hares, the Brentons, the Edgars and the Churchills, the Barkers. I have often thought I’m slightly out of kilter with what is happening but I suppose everybody feels that frankly.

PC: What were your early experiences with Sarah Kane on that course?

SW: I can tell you exactly how it began: I was late for my first seminar I had gone for a walk into Birmingham thinking that I was nearer to the campus than I actually was. Unfortunately, it is an all too common experience for me. I walked into the room and David Edgar was sitting across the room in his usual black jacket looking like a Marxist from the 1970s. And a young woman in a leather jacket with short blonde hair and a piercing was sitting by the door. Very beautiful, she was an extremely beautiful person Sarah, ‘Saz’ as we knew her and I just thought, “You’re a really nice person.” She was very friendly; I think that she found it quite a traumatic year.

PC: Why was it traumatic?

SW: She’d been this incredibly successful, very bright student at Bristol University, I think she did a year doing other stuff possibly. Then came to Birmingham, the only game in town at that point. It felt, I think, for her, quite male, quite middle aged. There were only three women on that course that year. She just wouldn’t take, you know, Sarah’s gay, she was a woman and she was angry about that kind of stuff. She also didn’t want to be identified with certain things too. She was an extremely political person but in a much more immediate way than me. It was different to anything I’d experienced as “politics” before.

PC: What was the different kind of politics?

SW: It was about confrontation. There was an amazing weekend for instance, where Terry Johnson came along and led a workshop. He workshopped one of Sarah’s monologues and he just said, “This isn’t really working.” He gave an action in the monologue, perfectly valid things but he did it in a rather unfortunately arrogant fashion, it must be said, she was seething. We all went to a party and he was there. Sarah just let loose. She wasn’t prepared to just take that in a way that we often do in pedagogical situations, thinking: “I’m the problem, not them.” She didn’t think that. Not in an arrogant way but in a way that was about politics I think. Next thing, she wrote a play, which I think is the genesis of Blasted, a short play with a woman, with a gun to a man’s head. A young woman and a middle aged man I think and made them workshop that. It followed everything he wanted: action and objectives and so on, but it was obviously an attack on him and he didn’t like that as you can imagine. The next day we did a workshop with a very nice guy called Richard Pinner and he did one of those things: “Let’s all do an image of how we feel after this workshop weekend.” Sarah got into the middle of the room, sat on a chair, picked up a piece of script, hawked and gobbed a huge greeny on to this script, put it on the chair and walked out of the space. He just went, “Thank you Sarah.”

PC: It must have been fascinating to see those moments of inspiration. Were there other notable inspirations for her work?

SW: She was a very bright person: she was reading Jane Austen and Hardy. I was thinking, “Wow, she’ll be reading all this kind of Pynchon and Derrida.” But she just wasn’t interested with that. Both of us went to see a Forced Entertainment show, I was really into them, I thought they were really important, but she hated their guts. She really hated them with a loathing, whereas Howard Barker for her was a total hero. That visceralness, is what I’m talking about. We’ve all got different characters, that’s not my character. That visceralness came out of something that wasn’t always about equilibrium outside her and obviously, ultimately led to disastrous mental illness and suicide, which is an incredible loss. I still think now, “Where would she be now?” She died in ’99 and I think it was a long time ago. She’d be in her forties. What sort of plays would she be writing now? I don’t buy all that bullshit, burn in hell, rock ‘n’ roll sort of stuff but I do think the energy was incredible. The care for dialogue, the care for each line, she was a poet of the theatre.

PC: And her energy didn’t always fit with the course?

SW: Yes, she was going against the grain of the course. The course was much more structure and objective and narrative. Actually it was much more open than that, David is very good at that sort of thing but he also has a broad church. But that course was just the opposite of where she was coming from. Indeed, she got into quite a lot of conflict with the course and she wrote the first act of Blasted, that was her graduation piece. It is an incredible privilege to have been in the room when that is first performed. I can’t tell you the tension that led up to it. There was something about the uncensored quality of it, the racist jokes, the use of the word ‘cunt’ all the way through it. That word was almost taboo within left wing circles because of a certain type of propriety that came out of feminism and the like. She was a feminist but she didn’t want any of that, she believed in total freedom of expression and that was quite scary at that point.

PC: Why was it so scary?

SW: In a way, the left had created this coy, gentle version of how we handle these transformations, how we respond to feminism and so on and she was having none of that, which made a lot of people that were coming from that eighties period hostile to her: she was not respecting that debate. I think she was, I think she was very aware of it. That hostility led her increasingly to non-naturalism altogether, whereas, at that time, if you think about Blasted it was the purest expression of naturalism imaginable. For me the jury is out on the quality of some of those plays, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t acknowledge an incredible force that they had: the power of her personality comes out of her work in a very interesting way.

PC: You get the sense that, like Brecht, every one of Sarah’s plays was an experiment: testing her idea of theatre. The plays are as much for the writer as the audience. Perhaps that is why the jury is out on the quality of the plays. More and more experimental work is created collectively. This can lead to dialogue being overlooked. How do you teach dialogue?

SW: I think it is a bit of a weak spot in teaching, perhaps coming out of my own slight sense that dialogue is something that is intrinsic to a person, that you channel in the act of playwriting. I think the things that we tend to talk about when teaching playwriting are the things that are perhaps more easy to identify and more separable from the personality of the given writer: structure and things like that. You’re right to pick up on dialogue which is perhaps the dividing line between a body of work that identifies itself as devising in the theatre and a body of work that identifies itself as writing in the theatre. I think that is where the most unhelpful term here is ‘play’ writing, perhaps if we talked about writing for the theatre we could be more inclusive in our account of that and as you say trying to be a little bit like that.

PC: In The Secret Life of Plays you describe Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment and Simon McBurney as playwrights. They would usually be considered devisers leading a collective. Why did you want to refer to them as playwrights?

SW: The Secret Life of Plays is quite belligerent because it is a defence of playwriting at a point when I thought, and I think a lot of playwrights felt, that we need to argue for ourselves. There is always a risk that the specific value of the task of playwriting and the role of the playwright is always in question in the theatre. Theatre, whether it is in the UK or elsewhere can imagine that it would get along without writers: “Oh well, we’ll sort that bit out later.” Or: “We’ll create it by other means and we’ll knock a bit of dialogue up.” Okay do that, that’s absolutely fine, I’m not going to stop you. Sometimes I have enjoyed that work but don’t tell me that it is writing because I think writing is a responsibility. Sarah is a classic example: somebody who won’t compromise, maybe that is too strongly placed but a playwright is somebody who is not going to seek to compromise. What you want from writing is a very clear vision of the world which is expressed in dialogue. The dialogue is not just about, “I like the feel of that dialogue.” It is something to do with what is happening with the dialogue; the way that it shows you how people behave; the way it shows you about how life is. If you think about the really characteristic voices, whether they be Pinter or Caryl Churchill or, I’ve just been reading again Annie Baker’s wonderful play, The Flick, it is all in there, in the interactions. That is what dialogue is, it is not necessarily line by line it is something about the space between the lines, the rhythms. I always fly a flag for dialogue because I think it is strangely undervalued.

PC: Why do you think it is undervalued and why is it so important?

SW: There is a whole discourse in screenwriting: “Dialogue’s not important. Dialogue’s the last thing you do.” This idea that writers, who aren’t ‘real’ writers, sort of pootle around with words when they should be structurally engineering their stories. I despise that approach to writing because really good writers like Martin Crimp would say until they can hear the play, they haven’t got anything. The idea of sitting down and working it all out and then fitting the dialogue in is a lot of nonsense because dialogue is about action, it is about the energy in the play. If I want to write in television, God knows I’ve tried, we have to play that game, I’ll write a beat sheet, I’ll write an outline but I don’t believe a word of it. How can I understand the next scene unless I have written the first scene. It seems to me that it has to be so specific what you’re writing. When you’re writing a play, unless it is exactly like that, the next scene won’t exist. The idea that you could hammer it all out in the abstract with any degree of confidence is false. That is just the production talking, that is somebody who wants to control the story rather than a writer who has to get through it minute-by-minute, second-by-second, word-by-word to get to the next word.

PC: How do you evangelise about it in your teaching?

SW: I look at different ideas of dialogue: I often use a bit of Mamet’s play The Old Neighbourhood, which has an extremely brilliant two page scene between brother and sister and you just know everything about them through that scene and yet nothing is told you directly. There is barely a stage direction; there is no visual thing mentioned. It is all in the drifting offs and the rhythms and the subtle communications and the pauses and the who is speaking most and who is not. That is where you get to the heart of it. People who care about that will be good playwrights.

PC: How can teachers encourage ambitious young playwrights and theatre makers to care?

SW: Actually, if schools could look more at plays and how their students can find ways of creating wholly original pieces of storytelling, that would be really great and sometimes it does happen. My son is doing GCSE Drama at the moment and I’d like to see more of it but I can definitely see that impulse more there than when I was a classroom teacher, it was almost like, “Don’t even bring a play into the classroom, it is going to really frighten people. It’s not about words!” There is all this crap about: “It is not about words.” Why not?

PC: I think time can be a massive constraint and the way that more passive English lessons have taken ownership of play texts and the written word. The time it takes to be persuasive and win over a group to the practical exploration of texts doesn’t necessarily fit with the exam factory model. Exam boards are really emphasising practical exploration of play texts in Drama and Theatre now. However texts are still linked with written exams. To bring us back to your process: how do you make a start if it is not an emphasis on structure?

SW: The process begins when I can start to imagine a scene, which is often about somebody wanting to do something but also I’m excited by the language of that scene, I’m excited by the energy. Everything is about energy in the theatre. That is what you are seeking as a writer. What is exciting to you? What is exciting to me? What excites the body of the actor? What excites the audience’s body? It is about this circuit of energy that you are trying to create so even the way in which you start to write something should come out of excitement I think.

PC: Do you begin a research phase after that initial excitement about what you have imagined?

SW: So with research, often what I am doing, I think my USP sometimes is turn boring things into exciting things and some people might say boring things stay boring things in my hands. I think at my best that has been the journey for me because I am looking for where drama isn’t necessarily located which I find dramatic. Areas which I think are latently dramatic but I need to ignite them for the audience and the actors and so on. An In-Yer-Face cliché play is most people jacking up in a flat and shagging each other. All very exciting stuff, or is it? There is a bit of me that’s thinking, “Why is that exciting? Is that just about you trafficking, clichéd popular culture images of lifestyle which somehow offer a grungy glamour for the audience?” There is no such play, so that is okay, I am not slagging anybody off! My direction has always been the other direction it has always been, “Okay if you think that is exciting, I want to find something else which is not exciting to you, which I am going to make exciting.”

PC: Is it just through a thorough research process that you discover the excitement?

SW: It is about going into the whole thing so much that you start to find the points of excitement. Getting so immersed in something that you care about it completely as those involved with it also cared and then you can locate the energy in it. As soon as I can imagine something I am ready to write it. I think that is the point isn’t it? You’re priming your imagination to find that little aperture that you can see.

PC: Is that something that you have been through with your new play at the Donmar?

SW: Yes, it’s about the SDP which were a sort of sect within the Labour Party in the eighties, who broke free of the Labour Party, the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ 1981, January 25th. The play is set on the day that they jump. Partially it is exciting because the Labour Party is in an enormous fix right now. There are various people that are possibly having those thoughts but are not able to make that change. There is a unparalleled conflict at the heart of the party. We’re in a position where the left is so badly needed but is everywhere absent. It is an absolute bottom point, it seems to me, in politics. I have never been in such a bleak place. I wanted to write into that.

PC: How do you channel that bleakness into a play?

SW: You question your own existential feelings about the world? What are you feeling scared about, desperate to know more about? If I am feeling that, I suspect the audience might go with me. So I suddenly started thinking, “I don’t want to write about Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t want to write about the Labour Party now.” I think, “Okay, what about then? Is that the same vibe or is that something different?”

PC: What resources do you draw upon when developing your ideas?

SW: I can meet people, which I have done. Also I have got all their books, their autobiographies, all these dusty big books. Nothing could be less exciting than those books and initially I picked them up with a heavy heart thinking, “What the fuck have I done? This is dead. This is done with.” But slowly and incrementally, you read and you read and you read again and you read again, you don’t actually read the whole book, you read the bit that really matters to you and you read it and read it and read it, think about it and think about it. The very first scene in the play, which is David Owen in the middle of the night talking about an operation he undertook with a child. I thought, “That is the image.” This man who stuck a needle into a two year old boy’s spine; that is the sort of man that is going to seek to destroy the Labour Party or at least to transform it into something new, who knows how urgent it is. I could write that. Then I think, “Right, what is happening the next morning?” So one scene breeds another.

PC: What other questions do you ask of the research material to guide your early choices?

SW: What is the situation where people cannot help but act? So much of life is like today, after Trump won last night people are waffling around thinking, “What should I do?” And that is the boring bit. But then there is the next day and you think, “I’m going to do this. What is in the way?” And who is in the way? Suddenly you are in the presence of the story. I think it is keeping that liveness. The worst thing for a play is to approach it like an academic. Colleagues of mine, academics, who are friends, would suggest to me that my research process is not dissimilar from their’s. I accept that but my feeling is that I reserve the right not to do well, that my research process is not about knowing things, it is about finding things. It is a very single minded thing that you are tunnelling down into something until you find something that excites you. Hopefully it then connects with the audience. I mean Limehouse happens to be a fact based piece. The last couple of plays have been but I won’t always write those plays and I haven’t always written those plays. I just happen to think that right now, what is exciting me is finding the fiction in fact. Finding the imaginative density of that. It is not my intention to keep doing that.

PC: When you say you imagine your work, how do you does it look in your imagination? Do you imagine it quite cinematically? Do you imagine it quite realistically? Or do you imagine it on a stage?

SW: That is very interesting. It obviously depends on what I am writing. I think that theatre is about imagining constraint and imagining within that. I don’t imagine being in the audience sitting watching it but it does seem to me really important to get the boundaries in your mind clear, the constraints to action. I think there is a degree to which that lovely line from Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

 The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination compact.

And he goes on to talk about imagination needing a local habitation and a name. Which is a lovely quote and I think that that is absolutely bang on. As soon as you can say, “They exit here; they come on there; it is this time in the morning; there are these people on the stage and not others.” The scene starts to come to you. It might not start that way, I definitely think you probably start with something that is a little bit more boundary-less but you run aground quite quickly. As soon as you start adding in those boundaries which are, of course, the obstacles. They’re are the things where the limits of the character’s world, the story grows, I mean it just grows. It is going to bed at night and running through the play. But it is very interesting if I can imagine it clearly, I know I am on to something. As soon as I start to find it really difficult to remember everything in my plays as I imagine it, it is actually because I haven’t quite thought it through enough yet. I know actors find that well-written lines go into the memory quicker. I certainly think that a well-structured play will be easier to remember too. I have got into the habit, when I go and see a films or plays, to try and think through that structure very quickly afterwards: how did I get from one point to another? I saw I, Daniel Blake at the weekend and I think I could go through every moment of that film. I think that that is a good sign. If you know that this bit definitely comes before that bit, it has clearly all worked.

PC: Is there anything else that supports your imagination of a play in development?

SW: The process of casting is very helpful to me. If I am lucky enough to be in that situation I can start to move that actor around, Simon Russell Beale or whoever, if I am so fortunate to have him again. Generally, I don’t start with that, I think the imagination in the theatre is both open and closed, it is quite a mixture of quite specified things and quite open things and that is perhaps the way it differs from screenwriting. On the one hand you have got to still be open because everything will change but you’ve got to map it in the first instance quite precisely. I’m not a novelist, I don’t write what clothes people are wearing and stuff like that, whereas, I suppose when you are writing a novel you need that level of texture to even get anywhere. That shows you the level that you imagine something else, but when you imagine a play, you are imagining something else, you are imagining atmospheres and pressures and stuff that people do to each other.

PC: Imagining the play must lead you to stage directions. How do you decide what stage directions to include so as not to interfere with the director?

SW: Going back to the general question of stage directions, there was a school of thought amongst directors and some people I have worked with where they claimed they crossed out all the stage directions that a writer put in and then add in their own as it were. I think that is quite unforgivable. Sarah Kane is interesting with this because she was extremely assiduous with her stage directions. When you look at some of her plays you realise that fifty percent of the play might be stage directions. Annie Baker, again, has extraordinarily sustained stage directions without which there is nothing. In The Flick there is an amazing scene where one of the characters puts on a bit of Jay Z and starts dancing around as if, in an abandoned cinema. It is a pain, the stage directions are incredibly specific and I remember it very vividly from the production but it is a pleasure to read as a stage direction because it is not superfluous.

PC: And how about the actor?

SW: I think the boundaries are that you don’t give notes. I never say “angrily”, “poignantly”, I try to be light with the emotional colouring of my stage directions particularly when it refers to the actor’s performance of a line or action. I’m trying to be quite objective. Other people aren’t, so there are different economies of stage writers but I know that I probably have more than some but less than others. One of the things that was a joy in Temple as a production and which I’m really seeking in my writing was moments where somebody’s alone, largely the Dean on stage, moments where he is literally in that room and we are with him and nothing is necessarily happening and yet something is and that needs to be written in. There is a scene, which I am very pleased with, she gives him some flapjack and he drinks his coffee. It is a very interesting moment because, my mother-in-law, she is a very wise person, she said that was a scene of communion. That is kind of deliberate, those kind of metaphors, which are lightly done, hopefully, but nevertheless have a point where you imaginatively engage with it in the audience. How could you write that without writing the stage directions?

PC: I think it is a delicate balance for the writer and one that is not always achieved by aspiring writers.

SW: The problem with stage directions is, yes, one of commentary, we are not here to add our frustrated directorial commentary, we not here to perform the role of the designer. We have to remember that these are, yes for the reader, but more for our theatrical collaborators and sometimes we are saying to them that this is a long wordless moment and we need to see it. You can deliver it any which way you want, I’m not going to say, “Step. Stop. Pause. Move.” There is a certain type of hyper-controlling stage direction, although, I do love those Beckett plays. But at the same time respect my senses as a writer, that is part of my theatrical vocabulary. I am a very dialogue driven writer and probably a very wordy writer. I am conscious that that’s what I need to fight in my plays. Those moments of stage directions is where I do that.

PC: One of your stage directions stood out for me. It is in Temple: the Dean goes to tidy up, but doesn’t. It is a fascinating unfinished action.

SW: There you have his whole character. Hopefully not laid on with a trowel but just in these little moments of faltering action or attempts at good will, a lot is expressed. I think the task is to keep everything in view at the same time. That is the really difficult thing of playwriting. You often get a clump of stage directions at the beginning and then a bunch at the end and then they are gone for pages and you think, “What? Are they just standing there?” They’ve still got bodies, they’re still in an environment and they’re still doing stuff.

PC: Are there any examples of effective use of stage directions that you draw upon?

SW: I think that what we can still learn from the Ibsens and the so forths, is the way in which the script is a score of physical and verbal gestures and that they should keep coming. I think that flow of material objects on and off the stage is part of the seduction of the imagination of the audience. Even someone like Brecht, if you look at Mother Courage, he is very precise about that kind of stuff: who is setting up a canteen over here? Who has got a little box of fortune telling cards over here? Kattrin is on the wagon cleaning her boots. There is usually multi-dimensions at work within any given moment in Mother Courage, verbally, non-verbally and so on. I’m sure you can realise them in a million different ways but you need to start from them. The production shouldn’t just dispense with that stuff. It can say, “I am going to honour that in another way.” But it shouldn’t say, “That is just you waffling, I am going to do my own shit there.” Why? Who are you? Have you written the play? No! But, of course, you can always surprise the writer and give them something gorgeous back: some of those stage directions will have evolved in rehearsal. There is no doubt something is in the wrong place or something that you can’t capture in writing that can only be done between you, the actor and the director. There is no doubt that a script is not an entity in itself and we should always remember that.

PC: Status seems particularly important in your plays. The arrival of the students at the end of Little Platoon seems to subvert the status that has been established. How does status inform your early imaginings and the development of actions and obstacles?

SW: That is an interesting question. It is useful to know that I wrote that scene for a two play Education and Schools season at The Bush. The other play was The Knowledge by John Donnelly, which is an excellent play if you don’t know it, which is of course about schools, it would be great to see that in schools because it is an outrageous play. The four young actors that played the teenagers were the centre of that play and there was the idea to use them in Little Platoons. It was great, a sort of hand grenade to throw into this largely middle class play about people setting up a school. I would never normally bring a whole bunch of new characters on in the last twenty minutes of a play.

PC: You mean in terms of practicality and getting your play staged. I think it is a brave decision. The play doesn’t build to a massive climactic moment but I think that the students’ arrival gives a shift in tone that foregrounds the question: “Who are we doing this for?

SW: The equivalent in Temple, which never happens, would be if a bunch of Occupy people suddenly burst through the door. Lizzy is quite distinct from them but she brings some of their energy into the play. It goes back to the thing that I mentioned early on, my interest in closed worlds if you like. I actually think, as we have experienced in this terrible, catastrophic election of Trump today, part of the problem of contemporary life is indeed about the incommunicability of areas of society to each other: the closure that is occurring, the shutting down of connection, connected tissue between people, people and parties, countries, you can see it at every level. On the one hand everything has opened up to this great gale of global change, on the other hand everything gets closed down, things are increasingly inaccessible to us. I think that is fatal for democracy and fatal for politics in general.

PC: So, beyond the make-up of the company, why did you choose to open up that closed world in the second act of Little Platoons?

SW: Little Platoons is an interesting one to pick on because, whilst it is a very specific play about free schools and Britain in the early days of the coalition government, in a way it tells us something else, which is, in a way, a big preoccupation of mine, as somebody who is a latecomer to the middle classes but conscious of: what does it mean to be middle class? I think that very identity is under assault, you might argue. Still there is this notion that there are these people with a bit more power than other people who are making decisions about other peoples lives, be they teachers, people in higher education, politicians and so on, often the people in the audience. That is where my politics comes into the process I suppose, I am interested in being quite forensic about what we think we are doing, ‘we’ of the liberal left. I’m not interested in the bad guys necessarily, I think they are all too clear. I’m more interested in the problem about trying to be good. Little Platoons is a classic example of that because what can be a better idea than a bunch of parents taking it upon themselves in the middle of a very, sort of, divided city, to say we’re going to start again and make up a school? We’ve been given a green light from the government. We’re enraged by the education that we see about ourselves, we’ve got a great bunch of ideas, into our life walks a disenchanted teacher who is recovering from a divorce, she’s got this bug bear about culture being downplayed in schools and so, hey presto, let’s make a school. Great. However, one thing that is a very important corrective about classroom kids is they aren’t going to be what you hope they’re going to be. They’re always going to be ten steps ahead of you. When those kids come in it is a bit like verfremdungseffect in Brecht.

PC: Are there other similar examples outside of Brecht?

SW: A great example is the second act of The Cherry Orchard, everyone is waffling about life, the universe and everything and then along comes this guy who is on his way to a prison colony. Chekhov knew about those people because he went to visit them. He just rocks up and says, “Have you got any money?” Because they’re all outside. It is a brilliant moment. He sings a little song and he walks off and we never see him again. Closed worlds suddenly turned inside out by those people. It throws the whole map of power because you are suddenly looking at everything through a different lens.

PC: Those unexpected shifts in power within a play’s structure seem particular pertinent today. Are you drawn to those closed worlds so that you can create those shifts?

SW: I’m very conscious of the limitations of my world and recognising that, in theatre, you almost want to leave a hole in your stories where the light comes. I’m not a member of the Church of England and I never will be. I’m very interested in it, I became a lot more interested in it when I started writing Temple, but I’m interested in it as a moral lens onto the times. Occupy actually interested me more but I felt to write directly about them was a less interesting decision in a funny sort of way. Plus they are a reaction to something, I know that Occupy was there to create new values but in some respects it was more like a big question mark dropped into the world. Who is under pressure from that question? That drew me into the hands of the Church of England. But that world is incredibly closed, so Lizzy the PA, she is our way in. I hope she’s a person in her own right, she certainly was a great presence in the show. It seems to be important that that world won’t reveal itself without some kind of mechanism.

PC: Temple is a play in real time and Little Platoons has that long single scene second act to contrast the multiple scenes in the first act. They are very exposing of character and action. How do you make those major structural decisions? Are they conscious choices or do they appear more organically during the process?

SW: Time management, to use a banal phrase, is what you do as a playwright. You are very aware of time, it is something that is of course true in a film but it is actually more true in the theatre. The nature of shared time between the audience and the performance. It is intrinsic to why theatre will always be so different. A feeling of being lost in that time, and given over to that time is incredible. I got very interested in real time. It goes back to a play I was writing before that which was called Fast Labour which was about migration. I wanted the first half to be very epic storytelling theatre, in the jumping, episodic mode of Brecht. I then wanted the second half to change the lens to a family crisis drama set in one place as this world falls apart. It was a similar dynamic to Little Platoons. Every section of The Contingency Plan is in real time, particularly in the second play Resilience. I wanted to try that again in Temple and it is just that.

PC: The bells in Temple foregrounds time in a really stark way which is another stage direction and idea for production that is completely rooted in what you’re doing.

SW: Yes. I think partially it is about thinking about who we are now. I think we, as a society, have Attention Deficit Disorder, we find it very difficult to concentrate. We’re not required to, culturally in many cases. Television, which I am a great consumer of, just diverts, diverts, diverts. Even at its best it is flinging stuff at us all the time, like flinging fuel on top of a fire trying to keep us busy. The internet likewise, things within things, within things and you’re lost within seconds. We are all afflicted by that it seems to me. Theatre is one of the last places where we can go deeper together. You can do it with a novel but that is different. The idea of experiencing the properties of time, building up of a situation and then following it through. Other people would say, “No don’t do that because theatre has got to reflect all this new attention deficit.” I think, “No way.” If theatre starts doing that it just becomes part of that same problem that we have with sitting still and thinking and experiencing. I think the other thing that we’re trying to deal with, as writers of theatre and makers of theatre, is to seize peoples imaginations and hold them. People need to be immersed.

PC: That is fascinating in the current trend for large scale ‘immersive’ theatre.

SW: I think this notion of the immersive is taken to be really like a fairground ride almost. I think it is what theatre is anyway when it is well done. You need to sync people into it and then they’re there with the characters in a way that they are never in any other form. Temple, it was fascinating to watch that opening sequence and how the Dean gets his two telephone calls and we could hear the music outside, there are about five minutes before anybody speaks. I think that sense of being in the room with him, breathing in, listening to sound, watching an actor. You can watch the audience settling into it imaginatively, various things hooking into the imagination.

PC: Do you think that real time plays and stage directions take away the director’s autonomy?

SW: No. I actually think it gives autonomy particularly to actors to make a real time sequence work you are handing over power to people on stage every night and that was another reason I wanted to do it. I love watching actors negotiate us through that, they become the editors and the directors in a way. The director just has to make sure that they have the through line really clear. I actually think it foregrounds theatre in a way. You can get totally absorbed in the situation.

PC: What do you mean by absorbed?

SW: Not in a narcotic way, a term Brecht uses to describe an audience totally hoodwinked by naturalism. I actually think that is not our problem now. Naturalism is so alien to us that it is much harder work than it used to be. We don’t just take it for granted: we think, “Oh that’s interesting.” We don’t see stuff like that. I see it in films I admire too. A lot of film is restricting what is done so that people can really feel it. Not just more camera angles and more music. So that is why I got into that mode of working. Funnily enough the new play jumps but it is all one day. I’m not dogmatic about it. This one has a different rhythm. Temple is about, “Oh, shit. Here comes twelve thirty.” Everything building to that head and a man who doesn’t want it to happen. So you’ve got those two currents of time at work in it. My new play is about four people who want to do something and they’re getting in each other’s way and then time is passing, then whoosh, “We’re okay, we’re going to be fine.”

PC: The Secret Life of Plays highlights important debates and discussion that I think are tied in with what we have been talking about. You write that “there is a reality in any play and the writer is the final arbiter.” You mention the actor and the direction but you say the final truth is the writers. What about the audience?

SW: I think that what I was getting at there is responsibility for those kind of questions. The audience will make their own truths of what they experience. It will resonate differently for them, hopefully they share the experience as one. That is one of the responsibilities of a writer: to take the whole audience with you, not just bits that you happen to like. Bits that get you. That was a big journey for me to work out that an audience needs to move together and learning to make that possible for them without feeling that’s a fascistic thing, that it is actually about the clarity of your emotional writing. I think the theatre fails when the audience aren’t all travelling together. Some of them are looking at others and thinking why are they laughing so much.

PC: How is control negotiated through rehearsals and previews?

SW: What you get is: a writer writes a play, the director asks them questions, they have to reckon with those questions and think about them, possibly rewrite the play, the designers ask questions, the actor asks them questions. So the whole process of rehearsal is everybody making sure that they have their own vision of that truth that is being created by that play. You’re right it is a participatory truth that is being created and that makes room for the audience to bring in their own contribution and yes the audience may change the focus very drastically, in a way that is quite alarming, “They think this bit is funny, we didn’t anticipate that.” That goes back to the writer still. It might be that the actor says, “I’m doing it a bit wrong.” But it might be then that there is something in the writing that is encouraging that. It might reveal something that the writer didn’t realise that they were doing.

PC: That is a pretty daunting prospect for a writer!

SW: We are revealed in the way that we had no idea through plays, we are all alert to that. David Hare says it very well in Obedience Struggle and Revolt, he talks about theatre as an act of judgement, you are being judged and you’re there, you might think that you’re sitting at the back of the theatre, but you’re on stage far more than the actors in a funny sort of way, you are naked in front of that audience and they’re seeing into you and all your short-comings. It is very clear and very scary.

PC: You are exposing yourself in the writing.

SW: Yes. You’re saying this is true about the world. It is absolutely possible that you could say that and everybody would think he knows what he’s talking about, it feels right, it feels true to me, let’s do it and then it turns out to be wrong, fundamentally wrong, not just a little bit wrong but that is a complete misreading of how reality is. Who will be blamed for that? The writer. I think rightly so. Unless somebody has disagreed with them and got it and taken it in another direction. I think that is what I am getting at there.

PC: It raises questions of the ethics of theatre.

SW: Yes, if I say something in Little Platoons which is not true about coalition government policy or how you set up a free school or the ethnic composition of west London and the audience knows that all better than me, they have a right to laugh at my play and hold it in contempt. That is not the actors fault and that’s not the director’s fault, they need to have asked better questions but I think that that is where you get into the idea of what really is collaboration in the theatre. Yes you can have a devised show where everybody is taking responsibility for research but I think sometimes my worry there is who is really answerable for that work? Everybody? Nobody? I think the writer, even just legally, they are in the spotlight, you know when my play gets read for the Donmar they increasingly have lawyers reading my script and they’re saying, “Can he stand up to this? Can he defend that?” That is partially because of what I am writing about. That tells us something about responsibility but I by no means mean that I own the truth. I am responsible for what we’re saying together. Particularly the fine level of the story, the lines and the characters and so on. I’m not responsible for how that is ultimately done.

PC: Do you think writers should be involved throughout the production?

SW: Any good production should involve me in the rehearsal process. Writers need to be involved where at all possible so that they can say “No, no, no that is a total misreading.” And if everybody else says, “That is really what you’re saying.” Then I need to think about that.

PC: In The Secret Life of Plays you say playwrights prevent the theatre simply becoming about itself. What is the danger of theatre becoming about itself?

SW: Well, I think that it is back to the context of the book where I am suggesting that there are forces that are, energies in the theatre that tend to sort of shut new-writing out, that it is not a natural thing. There are many cultures where it doesn’t exist actually: I had the pleasure of working in Italy four or five years ago and in both Milan and Bari, the reason that they asked me over was to know, “How do we create the possibility of new-writing for the theatre? We don’t have it.”

PC: Why do you think that is?

SW: It is lots to do with taste and culture and the fact that there is only funding for children’s theatre and there is no budget line for the writers so it is writer/directors, auteurs, devising. It is also the intellectual history of theatre that goes back to Commedia dell’arte. There were all sorts of reasons but one guy said it brilliantly, he said, “We’re running out of stories.” There is only so many times that I want to see King Lear. I may have reached peak King Lear actually as much as I adore it; I think it is the most important play. I have seen two or three in the last year, that is not good for you after a while. There is only a certain number of times I want to see Medea retold. But that is what happens when you start to remove writers from the equation.

PC: Re-interpretations of classic plays attract a particular kind of audience.

SW: Yes, I think theatre will disappear up its own arse if it doesn’t keep admitting new people into the theatre who have got new stories to tell. It is becoming an immensely middle class endeavour in the way that for one brief interval, from Joan Littlewood onwards, actually British theatre opened its doors to completely different constituencies. That was about a challenge to that world which came out of the welfare state and the post-war world. We’re seeing that window close.

PC: I see that in the actors that perform. Would you say they same of writers?

SW: There is no doubt that actors, all sorts of people, the theatre is becoming a really middle class place again, big time. The writers’ backgrounds, often they’re coming from, they’re all graduates; Arnold Wesker wasn’t a graduate, Pinter wasn’t a graduate. These people who are the most exciting writers came from a completely different context from Mike Bartlett, Duncan MacMillan, Steve Waters, I’m putting myself in the same camp. You shouldn’t have to take two courses and spend £9000 to write a good play, I think that is bullshit. If that is the only way to get people’s work on then we’re doing something wrong. There should be people out there who just say enough with this, this is a version of the lives that we’re living, here it is, do something with it, put it on. It should be so exciting and dangerous that theatres can’t resist it.

PC: Why do you think these new voices aren’t being heard?

SW: It is because of the way, when times get hard, theatres stop commissioning plays, they stop having writers in the building. It is happening now. It has happened actually even with the new writing theatres you notice a preponderance of American work. I like American plays but that is to do with the fact that those theatres haven’t paid a penny to develop that play; it is already a hit in America and they bring it over, sometimes they bring the production over. You start to realise they’re not taking responsibility for keeping the language of theatre open to new voices. Many theatres now don’t receive unsolicited scripts so they’re not looking for work from the outside: they groom their own writers. It sounds a bit sinister when put like that, I think that is excellent but at the same time I think there are the people that they won’t be aware of that should be allowed to just throw their work into theatres. Theatres should be able to react to that.

PC: How have they been able to react to that in the past?

SW: If you look at the history of theatre, and it is a trend I explore in The Secret Life of Plays, again and again, that is how it has changed, it is changed because, it could be a director and they think, “Enough with this, you’re doing it all wrong, I’m going to do it this way.” Or a producer too. But often they are doing that with a writer who is saying, “The stories are wrong, the way we tell stories is bullshit, it is lies, it is out of date. And the stories that are told are crap.” I think that we are at that point. I honestly think that there is a lot of really boring work in the theatre these days. I hate to say that because lots of people I love and know are involved in it and some people I have taught.

PC: That must be fascinating to see your students develop as writers.

SW: Yes but I’m very aware that a lot of the strong people I have taught are not on our stages and other writers are. I am one of them. What is that about? Is it the route from the talent to the realisation of that talent? The gap seems to be getting bigger and bigger. It is hard and it is often about staying power. It is about somebody having the wherewithal and the financial backing to somehow stay in the game just long enough to somehow just get noticed and bingo. That is what we need to be alert to.

PC: What else do you think we need to be alert to in contemporary theatre?

SW: I think the other danger is work that appeals to academics. I have to say there is a whole strand of work that is very easy to write about if you’re an academic. Plays aren’t so interesting to write about sometimes: they’re a bit sort of middle brow for some academics. I am intrigued by how certain types of work seem to fit where things are really at right now: “Does it fit the theoretical ideas I want to explore?” There are certain writers who don’t fit that pattern who don’t fit that conference, who don’t fit that approach to how we circulate theatre. Theatre studies is very broad brush, with academics looking for things to illustrate really quite tedious ideas that are constantly recycled: postdramatic theatre, whatever it is. Some of them are useful but often they become terrible, boring clichés that we should be ashamed of propagating. It fascinates me how you can almost make a career out of being that kind of theatre maker that fits campuses rather than the left behind.

• from Essential Drama

GLOSSARY: Part I - ON THE BEACH

• Google Earth Map of locations referenced in ON THE BEACH. (Will take a few seconds to load.)

• Salt marsh - Salt marshes are coastal wetlands that are flooded and drained by tides. They grow in marshy soils composed of deep mud and peat. Peat is made of decomposing plant matter in layers several feet thick. Since salt marshes are often submerged by the tides and contain a lot of decomposing material, oxygen levels in the peat can be extremely low. These conditions give salt marshes their reputation for sometimes exuding a rotten-egg odor.

• Although not always pleasing to smell, salt marshes are the “ecological guardians of the coast” that maintain healthy fisheries, coastlines and communities. They provide shelter, food and nursery grounds for more than 75% of coastal fisheries species including shrimp, crab and many finfish. Salt marshes also protect shorelines from erosion by creating a buffer against wave action and by trapping soils. In flood prone areas, salt marshes reduce the flow of flood waters and absorb rainwater. By filtering runoff and excess nutrients, salt marshes also help to maintain water quality in coastal bays, sounds and estuaries. Salt marshes and other coastal wetlands also serve as “carbon sinks,” holding carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

• ON THE BEACH by Neil Young - Audio track.

• Wellies - Wellington’s. Rain boots.

• Verucas - Warts located on the foot.

• WMD - Weapon of Mass Distruction.

• Drumlin - Oval-shaped hills, largely composed of glacial drift, formed beneath a glacier or ice sheet and aligned in the direction of ice flow.

• Bellingshausen Sea - Body of water along the west coast of Antarctica. You can see its location on the left side of the map above.

• HobNob - Brand of cookie made from oats.

• Groins - Long, narrow structures built out into the water from a beach in order to prevent beach erosion or to trap and accumulate sand that would otherwise drift along the beach face.

• ‘53 -The worst flood in England and Scotland of the 20th century. Over 990 miles of coastline was damaged, and sea walls were breached in 1,200 places, inundating 160,000 acres. Flooding forced over 30,000 people from their homes, and 24,000 properties were severely damaged.

• Bittern - A bird in the same family as herons.

• Weaver fish - Weever. Venomous spines along the dorsal fin. The most poisonous fish in the North Sea.

• Salvesen - Brand of antispetic ointments.

• Ambrosia creamed rice - Brand of canned rice pudding.

• WI - Women’s Institute. Community-based women’s organizatino in the UK.

• Ray Mears - Woodsman and TV personality.

• Fulmars - Species of seabird.

• Rothera - Research station in Antarctica.

• Delftware - Dutch pottery characterized by its white and blue designs.

• Brassica - plant in the cabbage and mustard family.

• Intertidal zone - The area above water level at low tide and underwater at high tide. Also refered to as the foreshore or seashore.

• Holocene era - The Holocene is the current geological era. It began approximately 11,650 years before present day, after the last glacial period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat.

• Albedo - Reflection of solar radiation.

• The Rance - Rance Tidal Power Station. Located on the coast of NW France across the English Channel from Wales.

• Bay of Biscay - Large inlet of water from the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of France.

• Nicola - Potato similar to Yukon Gold.

• Ainsley - Ainsley Harriott, chef and TV personality.

• Harrier - Hunting bird about the same size as a hark.

• PCB - Printed circuit board.

• Marram grass - a beach grass that is only found on the first line of coastal sand dunes.

• Blow land - Land subject to wind erosion, according to Webster. Not sure that this definition completely relates to the text.

GLOSSARY: Part II - RESILIENCE - Act I

• Google Earth Map of locations referenced in RESILIENCE - Act I.

• Brompton bike - Brand of folding bicycle.

• Donner kebab - Meat (usually lamb) roasted vertically on a spit then shaved and served in a pita. Similar to schwarma.

• Millbank - upscale residential area of London that also houses many government offices.

• Norfolk punch - Non-alcoholic herbal drink with over 30 berries and spices. Dates back over 700 years when it was made in monasteries.

• Parky - Chilly.

• Morley, Miliband One, Benn, Miliband Two - Ministers of State for Climate Change and the Environment: Elliot Morely, David Miliband, Hilary Benn, and Ed Miliband.

• Home Office - Governmental Ministry that oversees immigration, security, and law and order.

• Minister for Resilience - Fictitious department of government.

• Gummer - John Gummer, longest serving Secretary of the Environment (1993-1997).

• Anthropogenic - The human impact on the Earth’s climate.

• David - David Cameron, Prime Minister from 2010-2016.

• Brasenose and Balliol - Two seperate colleges in Oxford University.

• PPE - Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

• Eton College - Prestigious boarding school often refered to as “the nursery of England’s gentlemen”. Considered a fast-track to success, it has graduated many government Ministers.

• Chancers - Scheming opportunists.

• Snicket - Something very small or inconsequential.

• IPPC - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

• Quisling - Collaborator or traitor.

• Shufty - A look or peep.

• Friends of the Earth - Global climate activist group founded in 1969.

• Stick - Tolerate or abide.

• George Monbiot - British writer known for environmental and political activism.

• Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet - Book by Mark Lynas.

• Lovelock - James Lovelock, scientist, environmentalist, and futurist. Proposed the “Gaia hypothesis” which speculates that the Earth is a self-regulating system.

• Gaian - The theory that living matter on the earth collectively defines and regulates the material conditions necessary for the continuance of life.

• Newsnight - BBC news and current affairs program.

• Worcester Woman - Used pejoratively to describe a woman with consumerist views and a shallow interest in politics, leading her to decide her vote based on issues raised during the election campaign, and therefore likely to vote for whichever political party has the most effective spin.

• Rowan Williams - Former Member of Parliament who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002-2012.

• Dawkins - Richard Dawkins. Evolutionary biologist known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.

• Boffins - Scientists or engineers.

• Thrush - a bird or a professional female singer of pop songs.

• Tidal bore - A tidal phenomenon in which the leading edge of the incoming tide forms a wave of water that travels up a river or narrow bay reversing the direction of the river or bay's current.

• Coast - BBC documentary series which explores the natural and social history of the UK coastline.

• Sluice - A sliding gate for controlling the flow of water.

• Barrier - Thames Barrier. a retractable barrier system completed in 1992 that ws designed to prevent the floodplain of most of Greater London from being flooded by exceptionally high tides and storm surges moving up from the North Sea.

• Maginot Line - A line of concrete fortifications, obstacles and weapon installations built by France in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany and force them to move around the fortifications. The Maginot Line was impervious to most forms of attack. As a result, the Germans invaded through the Low Countries instead, passing it to the north. The line has since become a metaphor for expensive efforts that offer a false sense of security.

• Ted Heath - Prime Minister from 1970-1974. Not sure how this connects to the reference in the play.

• Polders - Low-lying lands reclaimed from the sea or a river and protected by dikes, i.e. the Netherlands.

• Sump - Low space that collects liquids. A sump can also be an infiltration basin used to manage surface runoff water and recharge underground aquifers. Sump can also refer to an area in a cave where an underground flow of water exits the cave into the earth.

GLOSSARY: Part II - RESILIENCE - Act II

• Google Earth Map of locations referenced during RESILIENCE - Act II.

• Millibars - Metric unit of air pressure.

• Gold Command - A gold–silver–bronze command structure is a command hierarchy used for major operations by the emergency services of the UK.

• Kagool - Raincoat.

• Muswell Hill - District in north London. 335 ft above sea level.

• East Anglia - Region of eastern England that includes Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex Counties.

• Chavs - pejorative term used to describe an anti-social lower-class youth “who wear much flashy jewellery, white athletic shoes, baseball caps, and sham designer clothes; the girls expose much midriff.”

• MOD - Ministry of Defence.

• Sister fucking Wendy - Religious sister and art historian who became well known internationally during the 1990s when she presented a series of BBC television documentaries on the history of art.

• Heath Robinson mechanism - Similar to a Rube Golberg machine.

MEDIA: Audio

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THEATRE

• English Journeys (1998)

• After The Gods (2002)

• World Music (2003)

• The Unthinkable (2004)

• Fast Labour (2008)

• The Contingency Plan (2009)

• Little Platoons (2011)

• Ignorance/ Jahiliyyah (2012)

• The Air Gap (2012) - BBC Radio 4.

• Bretton Woods (2014) - BBC Radio 3.

• Scribblers (2015) - BBC Radio 3

• Temple (2015)

• The Play About Calais (2016)

• Limehouse (2017)

• The Fall of the Shah (2019)

• The Last King of Scotland (2019)

• Miriam and Youssef (2020)