A Warm Fire

I saw the advertisement for the OFS playwrighting course with Mike Bartlett and just thought, ‘huh, I'm not good enough for that.’ And then I thought, ‘come on, get yourself together and just apply.’ You had to submit a piece of writing and talk about a favourite play. Normally, if I had been keen to do something, I would be a bit of a perfectionist, but I didn’t think there was much chance. I used a piece of writing that I’d done a few years earlier. And there is one play that I really loved – People, Places, and Things by Headlong Theatre. 

It’s strange, because I work as an actor, but I don’t much like watching plays. I came up more through performance art and fringe, and I find straight plays a bit dull sometimes. Anyway, lo and behold, I got a place, which I felt ambivalent about because I thought, do I really deserve this? And I thought, oh gosh, Mike Bartlett, these are straight plays. I was excited, but also thinking, will I be able to keep up? Am I a fraud? Am I taking someone else’s place who is more deserving?  

I was a bit surprised at how many people were in the room. It felt like too many. A big circle of people on chairs with notebooks. I reflected on that and thought, of course, they need high numbers because there will be drop out. And they want to be open to as many people as possible and so on. I got over it as the weeks went on, and various people didn’t turn up, which made it easier.  

There were people who’d published books, people who’d written plays that had been performed, people who’d never written a play. Only a couple of actors, which is interesting. Mike explained that it would be a lot of him talking and us listening. There was a lot to get across. But we did exercises every week too. It was a good balance, actually.  

Mike was brutally honest about how he works, which was very generous of him. He showed us, for instance, a first draft of something, just a bunch of scribbles in his notebook, and said, ‘right, mark that up’. You know, mark up where it’s wrong, or where it jars. So we had a go at editing his first draft, which was great! We had guest speakers as well, other playwrights, and that was interesting – some of them had different opinions to him.  

The course has been a sort of quiet teacher in the background of my life, since I finished. I keep finding bits from it that make me think, oh yeah! For instance, I dislike what you might call issue-based theatre. Well, why don't I like it? Because it's so obvious, because it's thin, because I don't like being preached at blardy blardy blar. Mike talked about dialectic. I didn’t even know what the word meant when we started. It means as a writer, you’ve got to be able to give both sides of an argument convincingly. That makes an interesting play. And then you get people thinking and talking. That's surely one of the purposes of theatre.  

I wish I could do it again having gone away and absorbed it. I didn’t necessarily connect with it at the time.  As I was doing the course, I got a sense of, ‘I don’t think I'll ever write a play. I’m learning a lot about the tools and techniques, but I’m not inspired to write my own play.’ I kept thinking, ‘why is this?’ The penny dropped for me in the penultimate week, when Mike said, ‘I always start from story, or something that’s going on in the world that I care about. Some writers start from character’. And I thought, ‘ah, I always start from character.’ I’m very interested in people and communication. I thought, ‘okay, perhaps that’s why I haven’t been burning to write my own play. I’ve been learning the rules, the techniques, the structure.’  

I found that slightly dry. I come to work with a lot of passion, a lot of feelings that are perhaps a bit wild. Mike is quite structured. He said, ‘I’m going to tell you the rules, and of course, rules can be broken, but you need to know them first.’ Before, I was coming just with the passion, and now I have the rules as well. So I feel I’ve got a really good balance to my creative work by doing this course.  

One of the best things about the course, apart from Mike’s teaching, was the podcast that he and Alex did. It reached out very wide – you had all these people writing in and responding. It was very well edited. I would listen to it a few days before a class, and I’ve been listening to it again since. That’s the wonderful thing, it’s still there. I think that was a very, very good thing to come out of this whole enterprise.  

Towards the end, we did a lot of work on how to get your play on, which is quite a depressing subject. My theatre life started in the late seventies, and there were lots of opportunities. There was an administrator booking venues, dealing with accommodation, giving you a paycheck. You just turned up and worked. It was great. That isn’t the case anymore. You’ve got to create something, market it, sell it, pay for it. It’s very, very hard. We did a big chart of all the theatres we could think of that actually accept plays, and where else you could do them. In your living room, in the street, in the marketplace? Maybe it’ll go right back to the beginning, you know, street plays, mummers plays. As Mike says in one of the podcast episodes, theatre now is expensive, there’s a lot of barriers.  

It’s very difficult being a freelance creative person. Nobody cares if you get out of bed in the morning. The financial side is another whole ballgame. You’re meant to do a whole load of social media, and personally, I’m not on it, never have been. It’s very easy to be knocked off your creative centre by all of this. But it’s a life that, if you’re passionate about it, you can’t easily ignore. You can try getting a normal job, but you’ve then become depressed as a result. It’s very cold out there and having a course like this is like a fire burning inside, keeping you warm.  

Mike’s enthusiasm, knowledge, experience – it was a real privilege to be able to ask him questions. He’s very self-effacing. Humble. Amusing. It was also local - I didn’t have to go up to London. There was a payment structure, which was very kind and generous and inclusive. Alex was there putting chairs out and making notes and getting pens. There were fantastic refreshments, which was very welcome because, you know, you cycle there at the end of the day, and you’re pretty tired, and then suddenly there’s all these nice treats.  

The place is very welcoming. The Old Fire Station has such a good ethos. You weren’t going to some dusty village hall that was freezing cold, you were coming to an arts centre. You were sort of coming home in a lonely world – a place that appreciates art, that supports artists and that appreciates difference. Alex’s enthusiasm is just so welcoming. It’s this building. Where we come to rehearse, to watch shows, to have meetings, it’s a welcoming place for artists in this lonely world.  

The end of the course was very well handled. The group voted to submit a piece to Mike for feedback. There wasn’t a hard and fast date. It was very gently handled. Since then, a group of us have continued to meet. A couple of people have got quite far with writing a play. Others, it’s still in idea form, but we all talk about it. That feels very good.  

I feel I have better foundations for the work that I may do in the future. And that’s a great feeling. I suddenly have a knowledge of why things work or don’t work, which I didn’t have before. I had an instinct, but I couldn’t intellectualise it. I couldn’t say, oh, it’s because they haven’t got enough dialectic, that’s why issue-based theatre is so dull. And what's very interesting now is I'm still learning from it. And to me, that's a sign of a good training. It's not something that I did, and then wrapped up and then that's finished. My kids say, ‘Mum, you talk about it nearly every day.’ It’s a slow burner, and it’s still with me, still growing, which is fantastic.