Published by Arena Stage, Washington, D.C., at the time of their production of Quartermaine’s Terms in 1984
We would like to know a little about how you began writing for the theater; how you came to write your first play; and, why a play?
I began writing novels, then short stories. One of my short stories was bought for television and they were going to adapt it for a half an hour slot. I asked how much the person who adapted the short story would get and I discovered it would be more than I would get for having written the story in the first place. So I asked if I could adapt it and they said I could. It was terribly easy actually. The story was written mainly in dialogue and I simply shifted the names to the left hand margin and there was the play. The story editor
Anyway, I did that play and it won an award as the best television play of the year. So then I was asked to write another television play for BBC, but they refused to put it on, on the grounds that it was obscene. My agent then showed it to Michael Codron, who is a well-known London producer, who then commissioned it as a stage play. It was a very peculiar play, actually. One of the characters is in drag most of the evening – it was called Wise Child, and was done in London with Alec Guinness. It was successful over here and it was done in New York some years later with Donald Pleasance and was a disaster. It got very good reviews except from Clive Barnes – that was the disaster. It played for three nights, I think.
And that’s how I started in the theatre – it was a series of accidents, really. Once I had started I thought it was quite clearly the place I most wanted to be. Once I found it, so to speak, I felt much more at home writing for the theatre than novels or stories.
So, you might say that by accident you found your voice in the theatre?
I didn’t actually think I’d found a voice, what I thought – what I liked – was I thought I had lost a voice, which was the voice of the novelist. The thing about a novelist is he has to write prose in between the dialogue, which is in his own voice, which I absolutely hated. I hated the sound of my own voice. The great thing about the theatre is that it is other peoples’ voices you hear all the time.
Can you tell us what the chief influences have been on you as a writer or dramatist?
My chief influence when I started with Wise Child was Charles Dickens. In fact, Wise Child began with a character in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. But, I think I began to write my own sort of plays with Butley and I don’t feel I have been influenced by anyone else since.
Harold Pinter has directed a number of your plays. Would you comment on the importance of that collaboration?
Well, we are very close friends. We have known each other since Butley. We are just doing a new play of mine, actually. So this is the sixth play we have worked on together (we’ve also done a couple of television films). The great thing about him is that he has a writer’s concerns for text. We find it very easy to talk to each other. We have got along very well from the very first. I can’t say very much more than that – there is nothing mystical about it.
Is there something about the style of your plays that makes him particularly appropriate to direct them?
When we first started with Butley he said we were different sorts of writers and I think that is probably true. I think he might well enjoy directing a very different sort of writer from himself.
In the programme notes to the New York production you say that you are a teacher first and a playwright second.
Who said that? Me?
Yes
I said that? I can’t believe it! It might have been true for a time, but I finally think of myself as mainly… I don’t know… I have always been a teacher. I was a teacher before I wrote novels, before I wrote plays, and I went on being a teacher until this year. I’m giving up my permanent job. But I shall go on doing some part-time teaching.
It is often asked of playwrights, how they get their ideas for their plays – how they go about writing a play. In answer to this question, you have been quoted as saying, “I’ve no ideas ever, scarcely ever in my life and certainly not in my plays. I write people: characters who begin eventually to establish their own claims and talk to each other on my typewriter. A play usually starts with somebody saying something in a room. Then somebody else says something else and it grows from there into the most hopeless mess. But if it is a living mess then I can go on with it until something finally comes out that is a shape which is recognizable as approximately what I wanted which I began the play years back.”
Yes, that’s true. That’s how it goes. There’s nothing to add to that, really.
When you write a play, what effect do you hope it will have on you audience? Or, do you care?
Of course I care.
Not all playwrights do. Some claim not to care at all.
Don’t believe them. It isn’t true. No playwright ever lived who didn’t care what effect he had on the audience. Of course I care. I want them to find it touching, funny, sad, whatever. But I want them always to be interested. I don’t want people to be sitting shifting about restlessly and wishing they were somewhere else.
Does your teaching instinct figure into this?
No, no. I would like them to see that there are different sorts of lives going on, that’s all, but I – no, no. I wouldn’t dream of teaching anyone anything, except in the classroom.
Many of you plays are set in an academic environment, or the characters are teachers or publishers or other literate types, and all the plays show a control of language. Does this reveal an aesthetic or anything else?
If you exclude Dutch Uncle and Wise Child, all my plays have been about educated people. Because those are the people I mainly know. And it doesn’t strike me that they are in any way, in their emotions, different from any other people. But they tend inevitably to express themselves in the language of their education, as we all do.
Can you look objectively at your work, and if so, upon reflection do you see recurrent ideas and themes hidden in the whole body of your work that either have not been apparent to you before of that you were not conscious of when you wrote the plays in the first place?
I think the only idea, or theme, that I have ever had is that life is a slightly surprising matter. It’s like Butley discovering that this chap he thinks he can dominate has actually been having an affair, which is going to take the chap away from him. Or Simon Hench suddenly discovering his wife is pregnant and his whole life is going to be disrupted. That’s really all. You never know when you put your foot down whether the earth is going to open under it.
As I read your plays, there is an aspect of human behaviour – a side of the human character – that is exposed time and again. There is, if I may say, cannibalism, a willingness to wound and then revel in the wounding. Some of the characters do it consciously, some with intent, some indirectly without intention, and some do it just with indifference and lack of consciousness. And this brutality seems to be in all the plays, including Quartermaine’s Terms, and obviously in Butley and The Rear Column.
It doesn’t seem to me that the people in my plays behave any differently from people knocking about the world altogether. We all wound – sometimes we mean to and sometimes we don’t. We all receive wounds and we don’t wish to receive them and we sometimes try to protect ourselves from them but it goes on. It’s what happens in life.
Would you say that’s incidental to your work, then?
No. I think it’s very much about that sort of thing. That’s to say that it seems to me to be about life.
Does this have anything to do with “the plight of the Englishman” and his way of living in the ‘80s, or with the so-called “decline of the British Empire?”
I don’t think most English people are concerned with the decline of the British Empire. That’s the foreign view of Englishness. I think most of us don’t give a thought to our Empire, past or present. What we give a thought to is the decline in standards of civilization, manners, gentleness, that kind of thing. Most people don’t want to have anything to do with politics at all, do they? They simply want to get on with their lives. And I think the people in my plays are the same way. There are two plays in which the question of the British Empire might be raised: The Rear Column which is explicitly so, and Quartermaine’s Terms, which is indirectly so. But really what one is concerned with are standards of morality and behaviour. I have never met an Englishman who cared that we lost India or had to get out of Africa, and were shifted out of the Middle East. I don’t think that the average English person of my age or generation – I’m 47 – really gives those places a second thought. We do care about, say, large throughways suddenly being built across our countryside and our ponds being alprazolam 2mg despoiled by commercial interests. That sort of thing matters far more to us than the Empire. Also, the decline in standards of education, I might say.
Quartermaine’s Terms has, at least superficially, a little less biting and violent ensemble of characters than almost any of your other plays. Would you agree that this is a change of mood if not style for you?
I think it is, yes. I think it’s certainly written in a different mood. But they are all written in different moods. Butley is quite different fromOtherwise Engaged. Both of those are quite different from Rear Column. And all four are different from Quartermaine’s Terms, and so on.
For instance, up until Quartermaine’s Terms, your central characters have been decidedly charismatic. It seems very risky to make a decidedly non-charismatic figure as Quartermaine the center of a play. Would you comment on the difficulties you might have encountered trying to make a play work around such a seemingly gentle and feeble hero?
I think on the stage in a good production, Quartermaine is a very strong personality actually. What he is not is vocally, verbally aggressive; but he is always present, in some peculiar way. All my plays have come to me with some difficulty so I cant’t really comment on the second part of that question. I am actually very fond of Quartermaine’s Terms. I suppose it’s the play of mine that I am most attached to.
Why is that?
Because I find its mood appeals to me a bit. We get older, you know. I mean, the sort of energy of a Butley belongs to my early thirties – and I’m now 47 – so, it’s quite a time on. I am quite sure that the tone and feeling of my plays are likely to change as I get older.
Quartermaine himself is not that old, is he?
No. Oh, no, no, the point is that he is not. I think he is old in spirit. He belongs to a different sort of tradition and generation. The point must be that at the end he must still have quite a bit of his life to live but not live in the place that he most wants to live it in.
In all of your plays there is a full complement of characters and life outside the confines of the onstage characters and actions. Other writers tend to throw out the outside life and characters by the time it gets to the stage. You, decidedly, do not. What are you going for?
I’m not going for anything except a sort of reality. I find I am obviously very literal-minded: When somebody comes into a room at a party, you know very well he might have a wife or something in his life apart from what he presents to you in the room.
It’s an aesthetic choice, then?
It’s a choice having to do with the kind of reality that seems to me to be the proper reality of the stage and life. I actually can’t stand plays in which I don’t believe characters have an off-stage life. I mean, most of my life is actually lived off-stage. When I am talking to you now, I’ve got a host of relationships and, no doubt, you’ve got a host of relationships as well. This conversation could be the least interesting part of your life, you see.
Your writing, at least of Quartermaine’s, has been compared to that of Chekhov. Was this a conscious choice on you part in this particular play?
No. It’s not Chekhov. The play begins by referring to Strindberg, then goes on to Ibsen and then to Chekhov. And it’s a joke, that’s all. These characters in the play actually can’t remember what play is currently playing at the theatre in Cambridge, that’s all. I’ve been told that I was nudging people towards considering myself in terms of Chekhov, but it’s not true. I happen to think that Chekhov, apart from Shakespeare, seems to me the greatest writer for the theatre in the English language, actually, even in translation. But that’s not the point. That was never the point. It’s simply an observation about how we don’t know what is really going on in the world around us – even in the theatre that we think we are going to visit that night.
Can you think of any American writer with whom you can identify a kindred spirit or whom you find provocative in any particular way?
I very much enjoy David Mamet’s plays. I’ve always liked them enormously. I can’t think of a writer with whom I might have less in common, except that I think that his feeling for the American-ness of America in some way corresponds to my feeling for the English-ness of England. His new play, Glengarry Glen Ross, is currently playing at the National Theatre. It is a marvelous play and I feel very much in sympathy with it.
You say your plays reveal your feeling for the ‘Englishness of England’. Do you think the response to your plays in America might be different from the response in England?
No. People either like them or dislike them. Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is about four salesmen working in a real estate office and nothing could be more alien in a way to English attitudes than that play. But I enjoyed it enormously, as did most of the audience. I know everyone I’ve spoken to enjoyed it. So I don’t think foreign-ness matters very much. Americans on the whole like to be introduced to a different world. In America there’s a kind of established English world through films and plays over many, many decades so that it is both foreign and familiar. And I think it is true – and it ought to be true – of American plays, although less so, for some reason or other. People are always going to find one’s plays boring, silly, trivial, interesting – I don’t know – inspirational, God knows what. But I think the national constituency of the audience matters not in the slightest. I suspect that the percentage of people who find the plays boring and those who don’t fin the play boring are approximately the same in both countries.
Are you very familiar with current American theatre?
No. One of the anomalies of the present situation is that there are very few American plays performed in London and far more ought to be. And quite a lot of English ones are performed in New York, probably more than ought to be. So I only see American plays which I go to New York.
Do you perceive any problems or diagnose any illnesses that may exist in our American theatre?
I think the main problem with the American theatre is that there is an idea that Broadway is mainstream American theatre and that it is almost impossible for a play – a new play – to be produced on Broadway because it costs so much money. The success of the English theatre on Broadway seems to be the consequence of theatre being more economical in England. The producers take plays over from London to new York when they have established their success in London. The feel that this is some form of guarantee for success in new York. It is amazing, for example, that Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross should have been produced first at the National Theatre in Britain. It shouldn’t have been. It should have been produced in New York. I suspect the reason is that he was more likely to get a thorough production with a longer rehearsal period in London than in New York because the producers wouldn’t be prepared to put the money up. I think it’s a scandal, actually. Your scandal, actually.
The same thing doesn’t exist, that kind of prejudice, in the English ‘mainstream’ theatre?
Sure it does. But, still, everything is cheaper. Your two big successes at the moment in New York are Noises Off and The Real Thing, am I right? And those were already substantial successes in London. But they were both done initially with not a great deal of money in American terms. The American theatre audience has to pay so much for a ticket – the price of a ticket in New York is staggering! – therefore they want an event, don’t they? I suspect.
They certainly want their money’s worth.
Or they want what everyone else tells them is their money’s worth, which is not always the same thing.
Do you know about the theatre that is getting done outside of New York today, like at The Long Wharf and here at the Arena Stage?
I know Long Wharf. But, no, I don’t really. I believe that there are quite a few productions of plays of mine in different towns, but I have never been to see them, alas. I would like to see them. I love working in New York. I love the Off-Broadway. The Manhattan Theatre Club and the Long Wharf have been the two favourtite theatrical experiences for me in the State.
We’ve gone through certain stages in theatre in the past decades: the political theatre of the ‘60s, the introspective, biting plays of the ‘70s, and, now, at this point, in the middle of this decade and with the world in the precarious state it is in politically and in all ways, must playwriting change again? Will yet another new style have to appear for a while? What does the playwright look forward to?
A full house, I should hope.
Is playwriting going to have to change?
No, you can’t change. You write your own plays. I think the only dead plays are political plays. The play that was revolutionary – about revolution and the revolutionary way, as in the ‘60s – is already a deeply buried play. It has been cremated, in fact. I do believe in structure in plays. I think they must have a shape, a form, and an abiding interest in the loves of fellow human beings. Angry plays, or plays about politics, etc., seem to me to be doomed. They are like newspapers; they are dead the day after. That is the statement of an old man, but I believe it is true.
Thanks you for talking with us today. Would you like to say anything in conclusion?
I just hope that Quartermaine’s Terms is enjoyed there and I hope it is a good production. I can’t, in all humility, hope for anything else, can I? Would you send the actors a message for me? I would be very grateful if you give them all my regards and I hope that they will enjoy rehearsal and enjoy doing it in fact.