Fin, you’ve just won the John Whiting Award for your play, How to Disappear and Never Be Found, what does winning the award mean to you?
It’s absolutely invaluable. There’s the prize money obviously, not that I view money as an end it itself (although its always nice) but because it translates into time. For me, that part of the prize translates into 6-8 months full-time writing, which is just a godsend. I’ve finished one script already and have plans for another two. But for me it’s much more than the money because the award brings official recognition to a play that I went to hell and back trying to write. It took up a year of my life and at times made me very depressed. It’s a very tragic play and it took me to some very dark places, but it also then failed to get picked up by a company, which added to the misery. It felt for a long time like I’d poured my heart and soul into a play in a way that I’d never done before, and I wasn’t going to have anything to show for it.
The play was given the JW award because of it’s theatricality and relevance to current society, can you tell me a bit about the play and what’s behind it?
It’s about Charlie, a young brand manager working for an advertising agency in London , who for a number of reasons decides to jack in his old life and change his identity – rebrand himself. But quite early on you discover that he’s already dead, his body having been retrieved from the Thames virtually naked and with no ID. He is haunted by visitations from Sophie, a pathologist who is working on his body trying to discover who he is. The play splits into two realities and inhabits a sort of netherworld somewhere between life and death – a lot like missing persons do. Part of the world but not part of it.
The play was inspired by a number of things, first of all by Albert Camus’ famous existential parable L’Etranger (in the play Charlie’s mother has just died which is the hair-trigger that sets him off on his journey). But I also became captivated by the stories of missing persons and I went to visit the National Missing Person’s Helpline (NMPH) and the Met Police Missing Person’s unit as part of my research. I asked them if there was a ‘type’ of case that they see time and again and they said ‘Yes, white male, late twenties/early thirties, good job in the private sector, probably overworked, maybe a bit of depression, suffers a personal crisis and vanishes’.
The NMPH told me that around 10,000 adults go missing in the UK alone every year. Of those that are traced, two-thirds say they did it deliberately as a conscious choice. The Met Police told me tat 80 bodies a year are retrieved from the Thames – 80! You hardly ever hear about them. Most of them are young men. That fascinated me, and that’s when Charlie was born. The fact that hundreds of these people were literally walking out of their offices leaving their wallet and keys on their desks and never being seen again just caught my imagination. How do they do it? How do they survive? I began looking into it and found that actually it’s fairly straightforward to become someone else, its just about knowing how to exploit the loopholes in the various systems of bureaucracy that surround us. That seemed a great way in to look at the nature of identity in the modern world.
The play’s not been produced, which is unusual for a JW award winner, do you have hopes for a production in the future?
It’s been doing the rounds of London literary departments for over a year and nowhere seemed interested. A few places are re-reading it now, but I still have no idea where it’ll end up. I’m in the middle of applying to the Arts Council for a Grants for The Arts bursary to work as writer-in-residence at the Arcola Theatre for a year, and so it may end up being my opening show there this Autumn. Mehmet at the Arcola has been a real ally and did some workshops on the play at the NT studio when nowhere else was interested. The Arcola keeps getting awards and is a very exciting place at the moment, plus its an amazing atmospheric space, perfect for a play like this.
How have you developed the play? How did you research it?
Apart from talking to the NMPH and the Met Police, I read a lot of books too about people looking for missing relatives. I tried to get to meet some returned disappearees but none were forthcoming. I suppose unlike Protection there wasn’t the same motivation for people to speak to me (ie. so that I could fight their corner like I did social workers). Why should disappearees bother to tell me their stories? So I read a lot about them instead, there’s quite a bit online and I ordered a few obscure books from America.
But most of it was imaginative exercises. I went to Southend and Gravesend a few times, the places where Charlie ends up. I stood on the end of Southend pier where Charlie ends up falling in and stared at the greyness and tried to put myself in his place. It was all pretty depressing, but it worked.
What is your background as a writer? How did you start?
I wrote my first play at Macnhester Uni and it got a tiny runners-up prize in a Royal Court comp, but that was enough to set me on the path. I worked in pretty much every department of a few different theatres and then for a literary agents and then as assistant to the director at Half Moon Theatre. I got to know the business like that from the inside. I did a semi-professional show for the RSC Newcastle Fringe Festival where I got a Peggy Ramsay Foundation grant, and I read scripts for lots of different places – that’s a food way to learn about how not to write plays. Then I managed to get an AHRC bursary to do an MA in Playwriting at Goldsmiths and Protection was my final project for that. It got produced by Soho Theatre in 2003 where I was also Pearson writer-in-residence (the literary manager at the time applied for this on my behalf).
What learning experiences have meant the most to you?
Seeing a play go from the tiniest kernel of an idea to full production. There’s no substitute, even if it’s a little show on the fringe. The MA was pretty amazing too, really thorough. But most of my learning about the business was done in part-time or student jobs in theatres and arts centres – I did everything from box office to marketing to stage management.
What other plays do you have in the bag at the moment?
I’m doing a play for Half Moon Theatre. It’s a political hip hop drama written mostly in rhyme about a pirate radio studio in the East End of London. The MC is from a Caribbean Christian background and the DJ is a Bangladeshi Muslim so its kind of a microcosm of the conflict between faiths in the wider world. It’s on tour this autumn.
I’ve just finished another play called South Of The River which is hard to describe – it sort of starts as a black comedy but then gets so horrible its not funny any more. Its kind of about the festering prejudices of trendy young white Londoners – the Time Out generation - and what happens when they spill over on a hot summer night, coked out of their heads.
I’m also waiting to hear about an ACE application to embark on a development process with Liquid Theatre using Jacobean drama as a stimulus for developing a modern theatrical language with a similar visceral quality. I’ve never worked like that before, but I’m excited by the idea of everyone being involved right from the start.
I’m also trying to get people interested in a play about the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 war. Lots of the stolen artefacts turned up in London and New York auction houses and even on eBay, so there’s a bit of a story there.
What would your dream development process be?
To have as much money available for research and development as for the writing of the actual play, because for me research lasts about twice as long writing. I’ve been constantly scuppered by wanting to do big ambitious plays about subjects I’m fascinated by but know relatively little about, but not being able to pay the rent while I research the world. I know that that’s impossible though given the current amounts of funding in theatre, but there are other ways of doing it – for example, a lot of the education work I’ve done over the past couple of years has involved being ‘embedded’ with a particular group, say teenage mums in Finsbury Park, or kids in care in Hampshire.
They’ve all been play or film making projects of one sort or another but I think that sort of process that a lot of smaller companies or education departments use offers a real model of working for the mainstream. Writers are only going to be able to write about subjects bigger than themselves if they get to go out into the world and take an active part in it. Theatres need to find ways to help writers do this but writers need to be proactive too in suggesting these ideas and helping source funding for them in collaboration with theatres.
Who’s your favourite playwright other than yourself?
I have favourite plays rather than playwrights, as playwrights aren’t always consistently good. I admire Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life for its innovative form. I admire Mamet’s Edmond for its energy and awful grinding inevitability. I like McDonagh’s Pillowman for its allegory and atmosphere. I admired Steve Waters World Music for its breadth and ambition. I love Penahll’s Blue/Orange for proving that you can write a truly massive play for three characters. I loved Roy Williams’ Fallout for its engagement with current affairs and for bringing an inner city world to life that you don’t see on stage very often – I love Kwame Kwai-Amah’s (spelling?) work for the same reason. But things other than plays inspire me too. I thought Lemn Sissay’s autobiographical performance poem Something Dark was the joint best thing I saw in 2005 (its touring again at the moment) along with the Red Room’s Hoxton Story which just blew me away and showed me things about community-led performance that I never knew were possible. I can't even begin to describe it, but go and look it up, it’s an example to us all.
How do you research your plays?
My process is a bit tortuous, which accounts for a lot of the problems I’ve experienced in not getting as many commissions as I’d like. I’m getting faster but I often just take ages. Usually I start with a lot of googling and looking at the Guardian archive. The I order a load of books from secondhand book websites and read everything I can on the subject. Then if there is an organisation I can approach (eg. NMPH, social services dept, mental health charity etc) I’ll drop them a line and ask for an interview. Most people are only too happy to talk about their work, and often they can put you in touch with all sorts of other people, including those who’ve had first hand experience of whatever you’re writing about (teenage mums etc.)
Everyone I meet during this process I record on tape and then transcribe the interviews word for word – this is absolutely essential for me. It locks a person’s way of speaking into my subconscious and I find I can draw on it at will when writing the characters later. Obviously if its sensitive info you don’t reproduce what was said, just the way of saying it. Its invaluable.
Then I write down everything I can think of that might work as part of a story (in no particular order, just a huge blast of stuff) and type it up and print it out in largeish font. Then I cut up all the ideas ive had and rearrange them into something resembling a sensible order on my bedroom wall using blu-tak so I can see everything all at once in an overview. That’ll be on the wall, annoying the hell out of my girlfriend, for anything from a month to 6 months, during which time I am rearranging it and adding to it using post–it notes. Then when its in a fit state I type it up into a prose treatment (description of the story) and show it to some trusted people and get their thoughts.
Sometimes I try and get a commission at this stage but it never works. Then I write the first draft. If I’ve done all of that preparatory work properly then a first draft can sometimes take only two weeks. Its 90% structuring and planning for me.
What’s it like in the National Theatre Studio?
It’s fun, very informal, but very focussed and everyone gets paid which is brilliant. The quality of actors and directors you get are superb and the amount of ground you can cover on developing new ideas for a play when everyone’s so good at what they do is staggering.
What sorts of contexts have you written for in your career as a writer? What have been the challenges in these different contexts? How have they influenced your approach to writing?
I’ve done a lot of really great but not very visible work in what would broadly be called ‘community contexts’. Because commissions from the mainstream weren’t forthcoming for so long then I had to be very resourceful and proactive in initiating my own work. So I’ve done things like making short films with teenage mums in Finsbury Park (with All Change Arts), running bespoke playmaking projects for groups with quite specific needs, such as kids in the care system for Hampshire Social Services, or Bangladeshi girls in the East End (for Half Moon YPT).
Each time we’d start from scratch and devise various creative exercises to get them generating ideas for a story, sometimes with pen and paper but more usually through carefully structured impros (usually led by a co-tutor who does all that stuff a lot better than me). Then I’d help show them how those raw ideas can translate into passages of script – sometimes naturalistic but more often quite stylised multi-voice direct address storytelling. We’d all work together on a script which would be largely my work but their voices and if any budding writers emerge then I’ll take them off in a separate group and coach them doing their own sections. Then they’d all have to put it on in a proper theatre space, light it, design the set, sound etc. It was like treating them as a mini-theatre company over 6 weeks or so. It’s great but you have to be quite confident about thinking on your feet and moulding their suggestions into storylines. Stimuli like local papers, or random photos of strangers as potential characters are good for getting things going.
I developed a very distinct style working in this way – it looks like poetry on the page because there aren’t any character names, its just a new speaker for every line. That way, you can have two kids performing it or 20 kids. It started as a way of getting around attendance problems – if someone doesn’t show you’re not a character down you just give their lines to another narrator for that session. But it evolved into quite a distinct style, which then formed the basis of my hip hop drama for Half Moon, which is a full commission almost entirely written in rhyme.
What do you think is the most important issue for new writers today?
Not being able to afford a research and development process. As long as payment and commissioning of dramatic writers remains so piecemeal then we’ll have unambitious often domestic plays about the writer’s own experience, because they can’t afford to research anything else with just £6,000 – that only just about covers the writing process. It’s not usually the theatre’s fault, they’re doing an impossible job with very scant resources, but I don’t like it when writers are blamed for being unambitious. They can't afford to be otherwise in the current system.
But writers can and should do more to initiate their own projects and drum up their own funding. Most companies are crying out for plays about subjects bigger than those within most writers' own personal experience, but can't afford to develop them. If you get friendly with a theatre company, however small, most of them would be delighted to back you in a bid to Grants for The Arts to research and develop an unusual new idea – so long as you as the writer lead on it. That means you have to fill in all the forms and talk about why it’s a great idea, but then as the writer you’re best placed to do that anyway. The theatre will put their name to it and offer staff and space if you get the grant. Remember – most theatre’s hearts are in the right place they’re just busy and skint. The easier you can make it for them to work with you the more likely they are to do so.
What advice would you give someone starting out on their career?
Get qualified in something else first. It can be related, like journalism or arts admin, or teaching. But no matter how confident you are, you will never ever make a living out of playwriting alone and you will need some other way to support yourself. Sorry, but that’s the reality.
Also, get to know the industry you want to be part of. If you’re reading Writernet you’re on the right track but it’s amazing how many writers don’t even get on the mailing lists of theatres they want to work for, or get the Arts Council newsletter. It doesn’t cost a thing and you’ll be impressively up to date when that literary manager does finally call you in. If you can, get experience in the industry, even if its just ushering. Just being in a theatre building regularly gets you in a loop where you get to hear about all sorts of opportunities that would otherwise pass you by.
And don’t sit back and wait. I don’t mean hassle literary managers every day because that usually annoys them, but don’t be afraid to initiate your own projects. If you have an idea to do something in a school or community centre where you live, ring up your local council to see what they can do for you – there are pots of money available for things like this. Research trusts and foundation on the internet, they give away private money to the arts – seriously! Even if you don’t have contact with a theatre company just ring up the Arts Council and ask to speak to a Theatre Officer about what funding is available for you to go it alone – that’s what they’re there for. It’ll cost you a phone call and you get expert advice from people whose job it is to give away the government’s money to people like you. What are you waiting for?
This interview first appeared at writernet.co.uk in March 2006