(♪ PERCUSSIVE JAZZ OVER SPEECH)
Where does the germ of a play tend to come from?
Quite random places,
and often when I'm researching something else.
This particular play, I was researching a film project,
which actually I've never written,
but I was looking at the 18th century
and I discovered the concept of a jury of matrons.
It sort of immediately captivated me
and I thought there might be a play there.
Oh, any excuse to have 13 women on stage together.
That's where that one came from,
but they come from all over the place.
Once you've identified the grit in the oyster,
where do you start?
I always find it quite hard to recall
the genesis and the beginning.
I know that I do a lot of what I call sketching,
but there will be aspects of it that come quite quickly
and things will start getting down on paper.
But with a play like this, I've gone on quite a long
research process because I didn't know the period well.
To some extent, I tried to hold the research
in tension with the writing,
so that it wouldn't become a sort of piece of homework,
demonstrating all the things I'd read.
A lot of the research I did was nothing to do with the period,
it was sitting on Mumsnet for hours and hours
and reading about women who...
You know, their birth experiences and those things.
I tend to enjoy dabbling around
and just finding things for six months to a year.
Then at that point, I need to know what the structure is.
And if the structure hasn't come by then,
I think, historically for me, it's quite a bad sign!
But this one I sort of knew by the end of that first year
kind of what the structure was.
But I think they're all happening in tandem, really.
The character is invented to tell a particular story,
and story is invented to explore a particular theme,
and all of those things
have to happen in a ballet with each other.
How do you know when your bit's ready?
Well, I'm quite a slow writer.
I've written things in secret for the last couple of years.
People very rarely even see them
before I've done at least two or three drafts.
(CHUCKLES) It will be at the moment that my need to...
..share it and my hunch it might not be completely dreadful
outweighs my never-ending sense of shame...
(LAUGHING) ..and I hope I've got it right!
To some extent, once you're in the production schedule,
the play is ready when you run out of time, isn't it?
Yeah.
My worst nightmare is going into a rehearsal process
not feeling the play is structurally sound.
And there will always be infinite small changes
you're making all the way through.
But for me, when the architecture of the play
is no longer creaking or unsound in any way,
that's the time it's ready for rehearsal.
So, James, when you get sent a play,
how do you read that play for the first time?
Do you see it when you read it?
Yeah, I think you're always trying to see plays, aren't you,
cos they're going to become three-dimensional things.
Slowly, because it's never easy reading plays.
In my experience, now, having been reading plays
for, like, 40 years or something alarming like that,
you know quite quickly how you feel about it.
You know within pages,
you know as a director you're going to have sign up
to living with it for, you know,
three months, six months, even longer sometimes.
Is that a world you want to completely immerse yourself in?
Because that's the thing you're going to have to do.
You do know pretty quickly if it's something special
that suits your...taste, I suppose it is.
Have you had the experience of picking something up
and thinking, "This is brilliant, it's a masterpiece,
"but I can't direct it"?
I like being challenged
by things that I don't know how to do,
plays that are doing something new,
in terms of form and content.
If a play is in a form that I recognise too much,
I'm probably less interested in it.
James, a question for you about workshops
and what purpose they serve for you, as a director.
How does an average workshop run for you?
My thing with workshops
is to do them when you're committed to doing a play
and you want to solve some aspect of the language,
to really explore with actors how the play works mechanically.
– We did a little one... – Yeah, on our window.
..on The Welkin, to decide
whether we needed windows on the set or not.
So, it was just to solve a specific concrete question.
I don't agree with the idea
that you make a play better by doing a workshop.
I think you make a play better by knowing the play really well
and having a cup of tea with the writer.
If there is a problem with a play, indeed,
which makes me think of Sarah Kane's old joke.
Which is?
How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
"There's absolutely nothing wrong with the lightbulb."
(LAUGHING)
When do you know that a production's ready?
From a director's point of view,
the longer you have the thing in your head for, the better,
because it just does percolate just by sitting in there,
fully imagining the thing and getting all the people on board
who will help it be realised in the best way it can be.
I think that's so true,
and I think that's really true of writing as well.
You can't legislate
for when those things are going to arrive.
You can't say, "I'm going to have my two weeks on this now
"and all the ideas I need to have will have come to me."
With rehearsals, there is always a very precise clock ticking.
That's a no-brainer, really.
You know you've got four weeks or six weeks or whatever it is.
Do you have any tips for young directors?
Keep going is the main thing, if you can afford to,
cos a lot of people give up.
(BOTH LAUGH) That's my experience!
Learn like a mad thing
and go towards the things that interest you.
Don't be scared to write to people
and to ask the people you admire, your gods or whatever,
to talk to you.
People in our industry
are always willing to share knowledge.
And keep on reading crazily,
cos that refines your taste all the time.
What would you offer a young writer now?
Probably a version of what you've just said,
which is you do just have to keep going
in the face of probably a fair amount of rejection.
You're your work's biggest defender,
even when you yourself feel humiliated
or depressed or rejected.
You have to write
because you need to write the things you need to write.
If you've got any ideas beyond
just needing to write the thing that you need to write,
then I would question whether it's the right path for you.
I think what I've found really wonderful and comforting is
how little in competition other playwrights are with each other
and how supportive a community there is.
There's no playwright who can write the play you can write,
and you can't write the plays they can write.
Make friends with those people and share with them
and, you know, talk to them and share your work with each other.
Writers understand writing better than anyone else,
so finding your comrades is a really good tip.
We have a union at last,
in which you can get other directors to mentor you
and there's a community.
I mean, directors are appalling lone wolves,
but you're so right that finding ways of sharing
is a way of keeping going, actually, yeah.
(♪ PERCUSSIVE JAZZ OVER SPEECH)