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Interview with Paul
Allen
Paul presented BBC Radio 4 arts magazine "Kaleidoscope" for almost twenty years and now regularly hosts "Night Waves," the nightly cultural debate program on Radio 3. As a playwright, he most recently adapted Mark Herman’s screenplay Brassed Off for the Crucible Theatre in his home city, Sheffield. How did you get your start as a writer? I trained as a journalist on a daily newspaper, covered many arts stories including theatre reviews, formed relationships with people in theatre who encouraged me to write plays and then got a commission for a specific idea: a play in which Herod was confronted by the mother of a baby boy killed in the slaughter of the innocents. I have combined journalism, mostly for radio arts programs, and creative writing ever since. What interested you about Alan Aykbourn? The fact that he is very private and my intuition that this privacy shielded the place the plays come from. Although his reputation is for comedy he simply labels his work 'plays.' And his kind of serious comedy is only tragedy in which nobody actually dies. We've improved the material world out of all recognition, but in matters of human happiness and sanity we don't seem much further forward: this is what his plays deal with and I wanted to know if this was reflected in his own life. It was. Considering that he's a very private man, how did you get his permission to write this biography? I had been interviewing him on and off for 20 years. We had never been close
but I had never let him down and we laughed at many of the same things. I think
he felt somebody was bound to write his story sooner or later and - in his
ambivalent phrase - he couldn't think of anybody he would rather did it. We do
have some things in common - the private boarding school education, for example
- and he knows my interest in arts journalism comes from a commitment to the
arts rather than muck-raking. He was very generous with his time in interviews: that was my prime source. I wrote to as many actors who had worked with him over a period of time as I could contact, and they mostly cooperated. His mother had given unpublished interviews about his childhood and I managed to locate and gain access to these. However, they were full of unreliable material and much had to be cross-checked, including some very elementary facts which were available in the registers of births, marriages and deaths. Also, I was myself present at some of the events, including first nights and official meetings. What surprised you the most while working on this book? Since around 1970, when he settled into what was to be the main personal relationship of his life, he has lived to a quite extraordinary extent within his work. He even has a rehearsal room built at his house to which he can bring his actors to work. He seems not to read newspapers or watch television or go out much. And yet he knows everything that goes on, from the tiniest personal detail among friends to the broadest world affairs. How? I don't know. He's not interested in politics - doesn't vote - but he observes... What do you think drew Aykbourn to playwriting? He was first an actor and then a director. He is still a director who writes as much as the other way about. My psychological explanation is that he was a lonely, sometimes unhappy child who devised games in which he could order the world to his own taste and that the theatre is an adult way of doing much the same. What kinds of setbacks and "false dawns" did he experience before becoming a comic hitmaker in the 1970s? His first plays to be produced, although they had modest success, were limited to short runs in a tiny theatre. He now regards them as unfit for production and has withdrawn them from circulation. Some, indeed, were outright failures, and the first to transfer to London was so roundly abused that he cried and gave up writing and theatre for a couple of years. Now he is one of the few people to emphasize the playwright's need to be given room to fail as part of the process of developing his/her own voice. I understand you're a playwright also. You recently adapted Mark Herman's screenplay Brassed Off for the stage; how did you get permission for this? I'm not sure, in that the rights were applied for not by me but by the theatre who wanted to produce the play. I suspect that the subject matter of this story - the collapse of whole communities when Britain's mines were closed down - led the film's producers and Mark himself top the view that letting us do it in Sheffield (at the heart of the old industrial region of South Yorkshire) would be a way of putting something back. What are some of the unique challenges of playwriting? Telling your narrative through collective witnesses who disagree about what's going on; making things happen dramatically without endlessly spelling them out in dialogue; structuring the play so that the shape is satisfying and helps the watcher without being mechanical and obvious; creating characters and dialogue that have 'life' in them as well as being convincing; having a visual imagination work alongside the verbal narrative. Do playwrights need agents? I have certainly found it very helpful to have an agent, not simply to get
work (and make sure you're paid) but to have real discussions not colored by any
other kind of relationship, personal or professional; it's better if you like
each other, though. Watch and write ... the hardest thing is securing the second good idea to the first. Anything else you'd like to add? When plays are performed they exist in a fifth dimension: the three physical ones plus time plus the shared consciousness of performers and audience. This is never entirely predictable and is presumably completely different at different eras and on different continents. And yet, from Shakespeare to Ayckbourn, from Japan to Africa to new York, plays work. Let's hope they never stop or I'm out of business in all the areas I work in. ORDER THE BOOK BY CLICKING HERE. |
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Paul is the
author of ALAN AYCKBOURN: Grinning at the Edge. Alan Ayckbourn is
Britain’s most popular playwright and its most private.
He has won numerous awards for his plays―including Absurd Person
Singular, The Norman Conquests, Just Between Ourselves, A Chorus of Disapproval,
and Communicating Doors―and has worked with
some of theater’s most celebrated names―Jane Asher, Richard
Briers, Michael Gambon, Julia McKenzie, Penelope Keith, and Peter Hall. Feted
from London to New York to Tokyo, he was knighted in 1997 for his services to
the theater. Yet he spends most of his time away from the limelight in a
Yorkshire seaside town, not writing at all, but running a small repertory
theater.
