Great Panjandrum with the little button at top

sharing the pain, sharing the glory

Tiggi is home for the holidays.  It's wonderful. Someone to talk to endlessly about creative projects, who understands completely what it's like to be bursting with ideas. Someone who knows from first hand experience how hard it is to seem modest when you have a healthy respect for your own talent.

The downside is that I am bursting with pride over my "Playing Faustus", which has been extraordinarily well received, and Tiggi who normally shares these triumphs with me is unable to manage crowds and enclosed spaces. So I have to content myself with raving to her about a play she hasn't seen or read. It's even beginning to bore me.

The truth is that, as is the classic way of the artist, as soon as one work is completed, you move on to the next one. The previous work is quite uninteresting; only its flaws stay in your memory. The good parts have simply become part of one's oeuvre.

I made this pretty little speech at the cast party (the first part was all the thank yous that last night speeches contain de rigeur):

...For me the last two months have been among the most rewarding and exhilarating episodes of my life, and that’s saying something. I have delighted in every moment of seeing and hearing my literary creation become a living thing in your hands. I have loved watching you making the characters your own and running with my text. And that’s a mixed metaphor.   As director, I’ve also enjoyed every single minute of rehearsal, as Jeremy will affirm, and have loved working with such a great group of actors. No-one ever complained about the great weight of words I laid on you in those long long speeches.

I have promised David that in the next part I write for him, he will only have to grunt and not kiss anyone.

 

Theatre is catharsis. And this piece of theatre is specifically cathartic for me. You – without necessarily realising it – have taken  my thoughts, feelings, the inner workings of my head and heart, and embodied them. You have made them your own, and in doing that you have let the light in under the door. To change the metaphor, you have been the instruments and collaborators of  this birth, and now it is born, it is no longer inside me. Shit, why can’t we express ourselves without metaphors…

 

Last night I watched David intently, as I always do – for all the right reasons -  saying my lines, expressing my thoughts, and suddenly I realised that they were no longer mine.  They had gone into the play, been transformed by art, and left me.  

This doesn’t make the play any better or worse -  it could be cathartic and still be crap literature - but I wanted to share it with you, and thank you all from the bottom of my now rather less tortured soul. And now it’s time for the power of hug....

That last remark is a reference to a great line added by Kieran, who plays Brian. After the most brilliant, soapy and soppy rendition of "The Power of Love", he tells the audience to experience "the power of hug". Wish I'd written that line.

Glory days

Reading the profile of my publisher in the Guardian made me very sad.

Dan Franklin profile

I think I can still call him my publisher, since he personally published my three novels, and loved them. There were a good number of excellent lunches and great conversations in his office with its fine view of the Battersea Power Station, and the wonderful party he and Lucy threw for the launch of Palliser.

It all seemed so promising then. I thought, and everyone thought, when Dan picked me up, and loved my work so much, that I was made as a novelist. But the second and third books didn't sell well, didn't get good reviews, and were not short-listed for any prizes, so I guess my star just quietly faded away. He is seduced by success, and who can blame him, when surrounded by so much of it?

But while he has probably forgotten all about me, the gift and the craft,  the ideas and the prose style that enabled me to write the books he loved so much has not faded. Is it lodged in me useless?  I have to believe not.

The new play is good - very good  in parts - it has its flaws. I am getting excited about the next play. But even the exquisite pleasure of watching excellent actors bring my words to life doesn't compensate for the loss of the glory days - being treated to champagne and gossip and praise by the most revered published in Britain.

I guess I shall just have to write about it.

To backstory or not to backstory

Last night I was observing a movement workshop with the two actors (David & Faith) who play two of the leads in "Playing Faustus". David had muttered about being a bit stiff to do the rolling about the floor I had asked for., so we brought in Jenny Ayres, who is a professional movement coach (www.jennyayres.co.uk )quite delightful, very kind and remarkably effective. Watching David transform from alpha male in control, to quivering jelly in an hour was quite a revelation.

In the course of this exercise, however, David & Faith were required to explore their characters in my play, and it transpired that neither of them knew their surnames.

David's character, Stephen, had a surname in the original novel - the working title of which was "The Martyrdom of Fr Stephen Knightly" but I hadn't transferred his surname into the play, for a brace of reasons, one of which was the unfortunate co-incidence with "Emma" and the other the unfortunate co-incidence with the lead singer of "Show of Hands".  Most women's adoration of the former, coupled with my adulation of the latter, made it a poor choice.

So Stephen was surnameless. As is every other character in the play. We do, however, know what most of them do for a living and  where they live. We also know a great deal of Stephen and his wife Margaret's history, because they are both great confiders.

But the question is - how much should I know about them that I have not put into the text? Should I know their surnames, birthdays, sexual and employment history, which University they went to, how many siblings they have, whether their parents are alive or dead?

One school of novel writing claims you should know all that detail and more, before you commit a character to paper, but that you do not (obviously) need to share it all with the reader - whose fascination with the minutiae of educational attainments and birthdays, is - let's face it - limited.

But does the same rule apply to plays? Chekhov seemed to know everything about his people, which is why actors love playing them, but Pinter sketches them in, which is why actors love playing him. Shakespeare can hardly have had the time to do full biogs of Horatio and Osric, and we do not even know how many children had Lady Macbeth.

After all, something very different happens when an actor takes on a role. If the character is anything  other than Second Lord  (and I would argue that even Second Lord ought to have a fully fledged character in the actor's mind)  the actor will and indeed, must, explore the person they are playing, and make them for him or herself.  They will inevitably invent all kinds of back story that is not the same back story as in the author's mind.  I sat silent while the actors last night tried to work out how their characters would behave in given circumstances - knowing exactly how they would behave, and then realising that by embodying them in actors, I had lost control. They were no longer my creations, but theirs.