My writing habits: an interview with THESP

Hello,

I spoke recently to THESP about my writing room and writing habits, Ibsen, the significance of London’s Bush Theatre and Kiln Theatre, and my new play The Ballad of Hattie and James.

The interview is reproduced with permission below. Learn about THESP here, and visit their Players page for lots of other interviews with theatre/film people including Akram Khan, Mark Gatiss, Chloe Lamford and Priyanga Burford.

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THE PROMPT

Samuel Adamson answers THESP’s quick-fire questions series, The Prompt.

THESP: Set the scene: where are you?

Samuel Adamson: In my study at home in Bermondsey, South East London.

Why did you become a writer?

I don’t think I knew what else to do.

What was your first encounter with theatre?

I think I was a shepherd in a nativity play at kindergarten, and I remember my grandmother playing Charley’s aunt in an amateur production of Charley’s Aunt.

What spurs your creativity?

Life: its sorrows and challenges and impossibly poignant and agonizing coincidences and paradoxes. Also, novels. I try to always have a novel on the go.

What stories interest you?

This has changed over time, but I still love coming-of-age tales.

A thought you commonly have ...

I worry about everything, so I constantly think I should stop worrying.

A play, book, song, or piece of art that altered you …

There are so many. As for many gay men of my generation, Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming-Pool Library was seminal. This is captured brilliantly in Philip Hensher’s novel The Emperor Waltz where a character starts reading a proof copy and hopes it will last all evening. If it doesn’t, he thinks he’ll just have to start reading it all over again.

What was the last show you saw?

Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in the West End. It was terrific. Just when I thought I knew what they were doing, they surprised me.

Are you superstitious?

I’m superstitious in life but less so in the theatre. You just have to work hard and do your very best and stay true to yourself, and I’ve learned that magical thinking is inevitable but has no bearing on reality, so it doesn’t lessen anxiety.

One performance you wish you had attended ...

The original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies.

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THESP: Who was the first person who told you that you were good at writing?

Samuel Adamson: An English teacher who set a scene-writing exercise, during which I realized I understood instinctively something about dialogue: that is, that characters can say one thing and mean something completely different, and that an audience will understand this. Subtext. The dramatic power of lies and of self-delusions. At 16 it was exciting to me to realize: ‘She just said “yes” but she means “NO” and the audience gets it!’ My teacher wrote ‘YOU CAN WRITE’ on the assignment. I met her again recently after nearly forty years, and I’m pretty sure she had absolutely no clue who I was – which is the kind of poignant and agonizing life event I was talking about before. A good start to a play.

T: You were Writer in Residence at the Bush Theatre in 1997-8. What impact did that experience have on your early career?

SA: The Bush was where I started my career. My first play was there. Then, it was above the pub. It was so magical. This tiny little room, the audience cheek by jowl on ridiculously uncomfortable benches, these rich and funny stories. I remember being blown away by David Harrower’s Knives in Hens around that time. The importance of the place to me was that here was a group of people who thought new writing was important. I realised for the first time that theatre was a creative industry, an actual way to live. Prior to this it had seemed like a fantasy. I think there was a lot of respect for artists at the Bush – I’m sure there still is – and having spent so long in the privacy of my bedroom trying to write a play, it was really galvanising to feel that I and my work were respected.

T: Where do you write? Do you need quiet or some noise around you?

SA: I have a book-lined study. I need quiet, and I should turn the internet off more. I order lots of second-hand books. This takes up lots of delicious writing time, finding the book, convincing myself I need it for research purposes, ordering it, unwrapping it when it arrives, putting it on some to-be-read pile. All the best kind of procrastination.

T: How long, on average, does it take you to write a play, and do you let others read drafts of your work?

SA: This is going to sound glib, but it takes the time it takes. There’s such a benefit in putting drafts aside for as long as possible – I mean months – and then coming back to them. I have a Chekhov quote on my desk: ‘day to day, softly-softly.’ I’m not sure I can explain this in words, but the play must grow so that it can speak to itself. The only way that can happen is if you have the courage to take your time. Yes, I have some trusted people who read drafts of the work. Indhu Rubasingham calls it ‘getting air around things’ and I like that. In my experience readings are good and workshops can be destructive. You learn everything you need to learn from a one-day reading – if you’re prepared to really face the truth in the weeks afterwards.

T: Perhaps we could explore some of your past works, starting with The Light Princess, for which you wrote the book and lyrics. What about that musical did people most connect with do you think?

SA: It was an unusual and exciting project in that it brought with it a group of people to whom the composer, Tori Amos, is very important – by which I mean life-changing. Everything she does speaks to them. It was a coming-of-age fairy story and I think people of all ages can be very moved by that kind of thing, as long as they’re open to it. It also had the most extraordinary design by Rae Smith which I think people found very enchanting. I’m still disappointed that the production was never filmed properly for National Theatre Live, as Rae’s work on that show was so inventive and mischievous and clever.

T: All About My Mother opened at the Old Vic, 2007. The stage adaptation follows Pedro Almodóvar’s much-loved film by the same name. How do you strike a balance between putting your own stamp on a project while maintaining loyalty to the original?

SA: In some ways it’s straightforward because what you’re doing is saying: this was a film or a novel or whatever, and now it needs to become a play, and plays have their own language and all of us must speak it. The theatre can’t do close-ups, for example. So I need to find ways to dramatize the film’s close-ups, in fact to find alternatives for them, find theatrical means to reimagine a close-up’s magic. You can’t go slavishly recreating moments from the film, you have to explore how they can be reimagined theatrically. And if they can’t be reimagined in exciting new ways then they should probably be cut. And if the entire thing resists theatricalization, then find another project. If the owners of the source material aren’t open to this kind of process, you won’t get anywhere. Happily Pedro Almodóvar was open to it, I think because All About My Mother is in part about the theatre. In a sense, it was a coming home for the story and for him.

T: Tell us about your upcoming project The Ballad of Hattie and James, which opens at the Kiln Theatre on 11 April. You’re currently in rehearsals ...

SA: Yes, we’re in rehearsals now. I’m lucky to have a marvellous cast: Sophie Thompson as Hattie, Charles Edwards as James, and Suzette Llewellyn as all the other women in the play. I’m loving working with them and the director Richard Twyman, who is the most unflustered man I’ve ever met. It’s a love story, really – one set over the lifetime of the two title characters. It’s about music and betrayal and artistic identity, it’s about the tricks of time and memory, it’s about Fanny Mendelssohn, Benjamin Britten and Kate Bush, it’s about love and loss, it’s about the 1970s and the 1990s and now and the future, it’s about being a teenager and how your desires and successes and disappointments at that intense time set the path for the rest of your life.

T: How would you describe Hattie and James? Who are they?

SA: They’re both musicians. One is liberated, self-assured, enviably free from doubts. The other has a harder time of it. They find consolation in each other against the world. But of course the world works against them, and they can’t help working against each other. There’s a kind of A Star is Born or Mozart and Salieri aspect to their relationship as we swing back and forth through the years. They’re both extremely talented people, and they’re both decent and good-hearted people who get caught up in human silliness and human pettiness, as we all do. Ultimately, I think it’s a play about forgiveness. We’re not inclined to forgive each other or ourselves these days. It’s a world of finger-pointing and blame and cancellation and branding. But we’re all complex, and we all have our terrible troubles, every one of us. The play explores that.

T: The Ballad of Hattie and James has been billed as a ‘life-spanning tale’. In your opinion, how does a story change when told over an extended period? What about writing an epic most appeals to you?

SA: I love epic tales across time. There’s something about the manipulation of time in the theatre that can be so affecting, and dramatically effective. It works in novels as well, and I’m curious about how possible it is in the theatre to create something that feels novelistic. For some reason that I don’t quite understand, you can’t make people ask questions about the passage of time in film and television nearly as effectively as you can on stage. Perhaps because in the theatre the audience accepts that it’s required to make imaginative leaps. Here’s a 50-year-old actor, but if I tell you she’s 16, you make the leap to believe it, in the same way you’ve made the effort to believe the empty space of the stage is a living-room in South London or mountain in Norway. A film audience has no truck with that.

T: The show is part of Indhu Rubasingham’s final season as the Kiln Theatre’s Artistic Director. What’s your relationship with the Kiln Theatre and what do you admire most about Rubasingham as a theatre maker?

SA: I’ve seen many plays at Kiln over the years. What I love about it is you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get there. It’s a genuinely pluralistic place in terms of its personnel and its programming. It was exceptionally well-run by Indhu, and now under Amit Sharma the staff are the most passionate people when it comes to supporting whatever it is they’re working on. What I most admire about Indhu is her commitment to new writing. Her track record in it is so impressive. New plays give her life. I can’t wait to see what she does at the National Theatre.

T: Your 2019 play Wife, which played at the Kiln, is an homage to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. What about Ibsen’s work do you find so inspiring? You’ve also written Mrs Affleck (from Ibsen’s Little Eyolf) and worked on a version of Pillars of the Community ...

SA: If I had to take one play to a desert island, it wouldn’t be an Ibsen, it’d be a Chekhov. But Ibsen is always relevant, politically relevant. The starting point for Wife was when I saw Nora from A Doll’s House as an emblem of freedom not just for women but for other marginalized groups. His work has immense and timeless metaphoric power. He was a modernist, and his plays call for social change, but I love that they are usually about ordinary people, the tragedies of day-to-day life. I love his characters’ neediness, and the way their pasts bears down on them. I love his unsparing attacks on conventionality and humbug. His hypocrites are so vivid; he doesn’t have Dickens’s humour, but he knows as much about human corruptibility as Dickens. I love how rigorously he explores the cancer of secrets (though he had secrets himself). I love his ambiguity – things are rarely a question of moral rightness or wrongness. I love his unorthodox women, who are so often the agents of change in the plays.

T: What would you like to work on next? An adaptation? Another original work?

SA: I like writing adaptations and have been lucky to write several, and my next play is an adaptation of Peter Carey’s brilliant novel Jack Maggs for State Theatre Company South Australia. But there’s nothing like building something from the ground upwards. I think there are fewer opportunities for playwrights now than when I started, but I’m working on two new original plays. I can’t help it. I’ll see you in a few years.

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The Ballad of Hattie and James is a Kiln Theatre and English Touring Theatre co-production, and runs at Kiln Theatre, London, 11 April – 18 May 2024.

Published by THESP, 7 March 2024