I came back to a play last week for the first time, after a couple of accidental months off.
Quite by accident – although I’m a big believer in everything happening for a reason, and the crappier times especially gifting you learning experiences – incidents through the last ten weeks or so that had diverted me completely from writing, have now led me back there with renewed focus.
Time and space away from a script is something I’m always suggesting to writers, but both these resources now seem to be in short and ever-dwindling supply in my own life.
Covid running through the family, the full-on nature of the summer break, my youngest child without a school place, living in a house where we support disability and mental ill-health on a daily basis, and dealing with a disappointing end to a long-term professional project at a major venue had all taken their toll.
I was exhausted. I couldn’t think clearly let alone creatively.
The play in question, based on the history of Fawley Power Station, was meant to have been a first draft in mid-July; but for some of the same reasons above, had only reached the stage of a research treatment.
The research treatment is an interim stage in my process that I invented in an earlier project called Hefted – it’s not yet a scene-by-scene story treatment, but a document which celebrates the findings of the research, consolidates the commonalities and starts to bridge those findings towards possibilities for a play.
It translates the dynamics I’ve found in the research into broader choices about world, structure, form, time, location, character and metaphor.
It attempts to distil abstract research themes and discoveries into concrete dramaturgical choices, leading to a suggestion of a coherent stage vision.
I always think big and broad at this stage, going for broke.
I try and imagine the boldest and most adventurous things I can, in the knowledge that it’s very likely they’ll boil down again into something more precise and elegant.
Again, this is about distilling and reducing – not removing ideas as you journey through, but finding ways to make the simplest choices sing with more than the sum of their parts.
I can’t remember who told me this, or where I picked it up, but it’s a phrase I’ve been passing on to writers for over a decade and which also sums up how I like to work:
Great plays are like Dr Who’s Tardis.
On the outside, the Tardis looks just like a phone box.
On the inside, it subverts notions of time and space and opens up the possibilities of the whole universe.
This research treatment was where it had been left. Covid rudely interrupted the next stage, and with just a day or so to go before the meeting with the director, designer and producer to discuss it all, I was housebound and knackered: so we agreed they should still meet without me, and send on an audio recording of their conversation.
This in turn was something I didn’t get round to listening to for a few weeks, then when I did I wrote some responses, and intended to send them straight back.
I didn’t, and another month passed.
Eventually, last week I finally cleared 4 hours in the diary (right now a monumental feat), switched off email and phone and everything and went back to all of this material in one go – the treatment, the audio recording, my notes – then immediately afterwards, met online with the director and producer again.
This was two months since I’d created the original document.
The interruptions that I’d cursed and berated across the last ten weeks had become blessings in disguise.
The gap of time between the document-writing and this re-visiting now renewed my focus, emphasising my need to focus on a human story, a narrative spine running through the centre, empathy around one single point of focus – a new character – into which I could pour those larger conceptual ideas (and myself) wholly and truly.
It was also necessarily selfish. I’m searching for ways to write more from the heart.
I’ve always been a head writer. The heart comes along later, and I’ve trusted my process to kind of court it all the way until the relationship sparks, and then I know why I’m writing something beyond just being curious about it.
I get there in the end, but I’ve always taken the long and circuitous route, trying to find the heart of the characters in my rear-view mirror or peripheral vision.
I love big conceptual and thematic and formal and structural idea. I’m less good at falling in love with my characters, with humans, with the precision of choice and situation and stakes that make audiences really lean in and care and empathise.
But the last ten weeks have been hard: the hardest yet in both my professional and family life. Life is stressful. There’s no empathy left for fictional beings.
It’s often impossible to effectively manage my care for myself, my work and my family all at the same time. The state of the world feels regularly against us. One of my university friends died from cancer. Those in the greatest need – children, the disabled, those with long-term mental health problems – are so often dumped upon from the greatest heights by the services that should be supporting them.
When you not only perceive yourself as struggling for support, but then actually experience it first and second-hand from the organisations that are meant to help you and those in your family – you feel alone.
Your isolation builds and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you convince yourself nobody is listening, or has the time to, and you just get on with clinging for survival to those activities or elements of your life that give you hope.
I felt all this when I was revisiting the treatment for the Fawley Power Station play.
My wife is constantly turning to me in the harder times and morbidly joking ‘don’t worry, this will all be great material for a play one day – or it’d better be!’.
She’s right. All those feelings and experiences above, and the break of time, gave me the character who’s now at the centre, and the context of their life journey between the ages of 8 and 92 – the timeframe across which the play will sit.
I’m writing myself into them, I suppose, in a much more conscious way than usual.
They’re not me, but through them, I’m finding a vessel to explore experiences – ones which I know full well haven’t quite found their outlet in reality yet.
This is an exciting thing to know and discover. I’ve had it on some previous plays, and they’re the ones that have been written more from personal experience and less from research.
I’m finally marrying a known and practiced aspect of my playwriting – managing research and translating it into form, shape and world – into the unknown: digging down deep and early to find the empathy, the personal connection, the care, the passion.
So writers – hang on in there. Everything can become useful. Failure and diversion can become your ally.
Just give it time.