Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat - Paines Plough @ Hampstead Theatre

[First draft - mine, not Ravenhill’s]

Paines Plough’s Ravenhill for Breakfast was one of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was a major event. From Tuesday to Sunday, at 9.30am, audiences could see the world premiere of a new 20 minute play by leading British playwright Mark Ravenhill every day - 17 new plays across the whole festival. Such was the demand that the show transferred almost immediately from the studio space of Traverse 2 into the main 256-seat* auditorium. The original plan had been for Ravenhill to write 17 entirely discrete plays - each with the title of a pre-existing novel, poem, song, film or play - with no linking structure, but during the writing process themes began to emerge, characters from one play turned up in another creating a cycle, which has been called Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. There is a growing possibility that the plays will at some stage be staged together, hopefully culminating in a full-on 17x20minute marathon.

Yesterday Paines Plough staged six of the plays at the Hampstead theatre as a one off, again in rehearsed reading format, allowing an audience to experience for the first time the extent to which the plays had created a meaningful, ongoing corpus. At the beginning of the relevant section, I’ve linked the title of each play to the relevant excerpts which appeared daily on the Guardian website throughout the festival.
[Index of excerpts from all 17 plays]

Intolerance - named after DW Griffith’s 1916 response to those who criticised his previous film, Birth of a Nation, for its racist content - the second of the plays to be staged in Edinburgh, is a monologue by Helen, a middle-aged woman discussing her caffeine intolerance. The title cleverly trades on the way that intolerance can mean two of contemporary society’s greatest preoccupations: bigotry and health issues. The play itself is a meandering affair, parts of which could easily have been transposed from a particularly sharp Victoria Wood sketch. Many of the laughs come from a similar trope, ridiculing the middle-class, faith-healing, regression therapy and organic wholefoods lifestyle described. Being Ravenhill it quickly gets a whole lot darker. She talks about her husband Tom and her son Zachary, who draws endless pictures of headless soldiers that his parents duly stick to the fridge anyway. There is a moment when she realises that they have both gone out when a look of sheer misery crosses her face that neither bothered to say goodbye. But at the centre of the story is Helen’s caffeine intolerance. She describes the agony it caused and how it prevented her from even working - but it’s all fine now that she’s cut caffeine out of her diet. Except that after embarking on an anti-semitic rant about her Jewish regression therapist she doubles over in pain again. Visibly shaken she takes back what she said.


Next, War and Peace, finds a seven year old boy, Alex, in conversation with the headless soldier that visits him at night. The script is written as a sort of two-part bedtime story, so despite essentially playing Alex and the soldier, the two actors intersperse their dialogue with “Alex said”s and “he said” - so the whole looks like a kind of parlour game in which each character must narrate himself. It’s a nice device that works superbly with the material. As the scene unfolds, it becomes apparent that the soldier wants to steal the child’s head. It plays like a multi-lateral Grimms’ fairytale, initially playing on fears of child abuse, moving through some potential innuendo-laden discussion - where the boy wants to feel the soldier’s gun (nudge-nudge) in exchange for letting the soldier feel his head (wink-wink) - to a point where all the potential for metaphor gathers into a very fine reveal where the soldier talks (don’t ask me how a headless soldier talks) about The War on Terror. The way that this simple phase resonates when uttered by the headless soldier from a child’s nightmare beautifully highlights how “terror” is a basic, fundamental part of human experience and suggests the idea of a war against it to be palpably absurd. As a debunking of this Orwellian phrase, it is more effective than any number of “Not in my name” marches.


The last peace of the first half is stranger still. Paradise Lost - recalling the description of the fall of Lucifer from Intolerance - opens with an air-hostess remonstrating with the woman from the flat downstairs about her continually screaming in the middle of every night. The piece draws much of its power from the sheer strangeness of the scenario. As a staged reading, with only the title projected onto the blank wall at the back of the stage and four plain chairs set out, the audience tries to place the action with only the script as clues. There is a sense of freedom about the whole project that allows us to imagine that this action could be set anywhere. As a result the piece teems with possibilities. The action could be taking place in a kind of Beckett-y no-man’s land; the sort of metaphorical space where Not I or Play are located. The air hostess from the flat upstairs, dressed in a faintly diaphanous bright yellow dress could be an angel visiting hell. This possibility is deliberately played on, it seems, when it transpires the silent, clearly terrified inhabitant of the downstairs flat reveals that she is covered in burns; that the flat stinks of burning human flesh. The air hostess character, inside this ambiguity, reacts in a continually naturalistic way, talking about self-harm, domestic violence and women’s refuges. Then two men enter, and the play lurches into a darker, more Pinteresque mode. Ambiguities fade to be replaced by a miasma of shifting sympathies. The piece starts to look at ideas of torture, and liberal objections to it. It is a mark of Ravenhill’s excellence as a writer, combined with director Roxana Silbert’s acute direction that the first use of the word “extraordinary” - totally out of context - hangs in the air automatically conjuring “rendition” out of the air in the minds of the audience. Still, this is no liberal out-an-out condemnation of torture. It asks far harder questions about the role of ordinary members of society and their reactions to it, flatly refusing to offer anything even approaching an easy answer.
_______________________________________________

Following the interval we return to Love (But I Won’t Do That) - a negotiation between a middle-aged woman and a young soldier who has been billeted to protect her house. This had incidental similarities to the Eighth instalment, which was the one I caught in Edinburgh (Crime and Punishment). It rapidly becomes clear that in this version of the world - it is unclear whether the soldier is part of an occupying invading force or of allies such as GIs were in WWII - the billeting includes “benefits” for the soldier, courtesy of the housewife. What follows is a fairly straight-forward dialogue wherein the soldier pleads, wheedles and threatens as the woman demur, protests then submits. There is once again that sense of intellectual free-fall as possible reading after possible reading of the situation becomes clear. The sexualised politics of incursion and occupation as a language to imagine a real invasion work well here, as they have in other plays (notably a passage from Peter Morris’s Guardians). While the graphically lewd language deployed keeps the piece as a whole fairly funny, it is an uncomfortable sort of laughter since its objects are both the sexual subjugation of women and the suppression of whole countries. That said, for my money Crime and Punishment went further with a similar theme, and - given the non-naturalism of the previous two pieces, may have sat more comfortably in this particular run of six.


The Mother (cf. Hanif Kureshi) is the most straightforwardly naturalistic piece of the evening. It depicts two soldiers attempting to inform a slovenly, long-term-unemployed mother that her son has been killed (in Iraq or Afghanistan, one assumes). It is as linguistically inventive as it is straightforward. Describing it as naturalism doesn’t quite do justice to the sheer explosive power of the mother’s speech - brilliant delivered in one of the evening’s (many) outstanding performances by Lesley Sharp. As a part of the set, standing alone as a piece of reasonably straight realism, it seems somewhat stranded - it will be interesting to see what else from the full set of seventeen crops up to put it in a more comfortable context.


The final piece - also the final piece from Edinburgh - written during the festival itself and, like the evening’s first, named after a DW Griffith film, Birth of a Nation - is the most riotous of the evening. It pictures an (or “the” - perhaps there is only one common to all the scenes) invaded country (all the terms used here suggest Iraq) after the occupying forces have left. The action is an address from the stage by four speakers direct to the audience. For a while it is pure Crimp - the use of his characteristic overlapping speakers, all helping each other out as they try to describe the same thing or tell the same story. It rapidly becomes clear that the speakers are artists from four disciplines (painting, dance, writing and “Art performance installation bonkers thing”) who have arrived in this war shattered country to bring art-therapy and devised pieces to help heal the population. Of course it is risible, and then, it is increasingly sinister. One can almost hear the Festival fatigue in the apparently savage contempt for the idea that art is going to be any use whatsoever in a war zone. But then it’s never as simple as that with Ravenhill. There is an excellent passage in which the dancer describes his upbringing in a Yorkshire mining town destroyed in the eighties and in a moment of unplanned candour (“I’ve never said this before, but...”) confesses to thinking that on the whole it was probably better that the mines had been closed down, and that over time Yorkshire has been reborn with a reputation for great shopping and arts facilities - mining, after all, gives you cancer and 16-hour-days working in the dark in a hole in the ground. It is almost shocking to see such a sacred cow of the left taken out and unceremoniously shot on stage in front of you.

While there are plenty of cheap laughs to be had elsewhere for an audience of - last night - mostly arts professionals (and who wasn’t wondering exactly how close some of these caricatures got to being personal attacks rather than simple stock types?), it is hard to say whether the darkness of the questions asked was fully intended to damn the enterprise out of hand. At the climax of the piece, a terribly injured survivor of the war is pushed on stage - blind and with her tongue cut out - and asked, almost forced, to dance; to paint; to write. In last night’s production this felt like the final nail in the coffin of the protagonists’ enterprise - they had been so warped by their agenda that they would pursue it beyond humane means (shades of Pool- No Water). In Enda Walsh’s Edinburgh production the part was taken by Natalie Best - the slightly built black actress from his own Walworth Farce - and instead of the triumphal strains of Beethoven’s 9th seeping in, the music used was apparently taken from The Lion King - while instead of looking obviously destroyed, Best (I quote) “really went for it” with the result that the ending became far more troubling and ambiguous.

Overall, the way in which just these six pieces interacted with one another was quite astonishingly demanding - pinging off synapses faster than is strictly comfortable. As an evening of theatre it was incredibly exciting. Not least because even in “experimental” writing one rarely gets to see something quite so fractured and abstract presented unashamedly as a whole. Admittedly this had a long enough tail of qualifying factors to mitigate its existence, but nonetheless, whole productions of Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat could very well become a staple of the Fringe and the student repertory in years to come. It joins the ranks of only a tiny handful of plays which offer a totally non-linear experience, while trading in metaphor and uncertainty over research and specifics. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, Barker’s The Possibilities and Crimp’s Attempts... and Fewer Emergencies that do the same sort of thing (although this is doubtless due in part to my thinly-read frame of reference, and all suggestions of similar sorts of thing that I should be looking at will be gratefully received).

*Edit: see 1st comment.

Also: my Chatroom/Citizenship review is now online here.

Coming soon...

The shattering "eyeball-eating scene" from Mark Ravenhill’s one-man Edinburgh version of The Complete Sarah Kane*.


I’m still in Edinburgh detox mode. To this end, I have finished the latest Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel, and played on YouTube. I can’t recommend the Rebus novels highly enough as a mode of de-Festivalisation. They are all set in Edinburgh and almost all of them totally ignore the Festival. It is a good way to reclaim the city as a functioning place rather than a three-week drinking binge. Reading them while actually there is even better. I was very pleased with my morning routine this year, which included buying a newspaper and getting on the bus and reading it on the way into town from Morningside - yes, I know it’s lazy, but it was lovely to keep pricking the Festival bubble every day.

On the bright side, it’s nearly September and thus the new rash of London openings kicks off pretty soon...

The Cut sees an unlikely twin-set of films about cross-dressing adapted for stage with Ma Vie en Rose already running at the Young Vic (already drawing a stinking review from Charles Spencer). A more hopeful bet may come in the form of the Old Vic’s star-studded production of Almodovar’s All About My Mother. I emphasise “may”.

Also recently opened is the Emperor Jones at the National, which also reopens the doors on its enormously popular Enda Walsh/Mark Ravenhill pairing from last year’s NT Connections, Chatroom/Citizenship.

I suppose everyone who has ever cared about theatre should probably try to get excited at the prospect of the new Complicité show A Disappearing Number which opens next week at the Barbican. With original music by Nitin Sawney, we are promised. As if that helps.

Over in Hammersmith, the Lyric chucks on the first of the long march of Edinburgh refugees with the NTS Bacchae and Subway from the Traverse. Similarly, at the Soho, Tam Dean Burn in the adapation of Luke Sutherland's novel Venus as a Boy opens shortly.

Over at Hampstead their inventive and interesting Daring Pairings season kicks off the week after next, with a collected/edited selection from Mark Ravenhill’s excellent series of shorts that comprised this year’s Ravenhill For Breakfast, followed by a selection of works created by collaborations between diverse writers. This is followed by another verbatim play from Robin "Talking To Terrorists" Soans - Life After Scandal - which is based on interviews with Neil and Christine Hamilton, Charles and Diana Ingram, Jonathan Aitken, Edwina Currie and Craig Murray (again).

Probably the most exciting forthcoming London season is the Royal Court’s ambitious international season, kicking off with Martin Crimp’s new translation of Ionesco’s seminal anthropomorphic fascism parable Rhinoceros running in rep with a new version of Max Frisch’s Fire Raisers (here translated as The Arsonists) from Alastair Beaton, while upstairs there is: The Ugly One by Germany’s Marius von Mayenburg, Kebab by Romanian Gianina Carbunariu, Free Outgoing by India’s Anupama Chandrasekhar and in a double bill, The Good Family by Swediah Joakim Pirinen alongside The Khomenko Family Chronicles by Natalia Vorozhbit from the Ukraine.

Another couple of interesting items come in the form of Punchdrunk’s Masque of Red Death at the BAC and the new production of The Country Wife at the Haymarket, which marks the theatre’s new lease of life as a producing house.

Somewhat less inspiring on paper, but no doubt deftly executed are: Awake and Sing! at the Almeida and Flight Path at the Bush (whose entire first season under Josie Rourke lacks the same excitement as the Court under Cooke, but we shall wait and see). Similarly Fragile and (what sounds like a woefully misconceived) Merchant of Venice at the Arcola both sound slightly on the worthy-but-dull end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, for those of you unable to achieve Edinburgh closure just yet, there’s still Hippo World Guest Book - Redux if your afternoon isn’t quite the same without sitting in Brooke’s Bar listening to Chris Goode yelling: "AND I AM NOT A MORON OR I WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO TYPE!" through the wall at tea time.

Alternatively, this mad little song from Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, which I was overjoyed to find on YouTube, might just do the trick.



* not really.

Pining for the Fringe

Still another week before I get to Edinburgh, but there are advantages in this. Not least that I can keep an eye on the early coverage. Which looks like it could be a full-time occupation this year with the broadsheets' online features looking more fulsome than ever before.

The Guardian, as the natural paper of most Fringe performers, has an eviable variety of guest writers and contributors including an ongoing story written an episode at a time by various comics, a blog by Mark Ravenhill on his premiere-a-day show Ravenhill For Breakfast and a daily podcast from critic Brian Logan and comedienne (-ette?) Lucy Porter.

Interestingly, the Telegraph's coverage is easily comparable - and benefits from a slightly more user-friendly design with the features mixed in with the reviews, allowing for a slightly more potted read. Of course, being the Telegraph, it also offers some excellent examples of philistine harrumphing and a picture of Stewart Lee (accompanying a charming interview) labelled "Stewart Lee studied English Literature at Oxford University" like a justification to the paper's normal constituency for its inclusion ("Why's this chap here, eh? Studied at Oxford, did he? Capital fellow, then. Spendid. Carry on...").

The Times online's stuff, once the sodding page has loaded, isn't especially impressive (my own tiny contribution to the NSDF stuff notwithstanding). The news report on the international festival is standard journalism at its press conference-attending best, while the lead article is little more than a collection of half-minute phone interviews based on a handful of flyers and virtually no connection to its initial premise.

The Independent's coverage is a characteristically sloppy mess: badly laid out, uninspiring, and, in the case of a non-story report on Ricky Gervais charging a lot for tickets managing to make the schoolboy error of confusing the Fringe with the International Festival.

And of course the Fringe wouldn't be the Fringe without Ian Shuttleworth from the Financial Times seeing more shows than all the other critics put together in his frankly masochistic, Salo-like efforts to see every damn thing out there.

Edinburgh Hit List

Yesterday I had the surreal experience of being a guest on Matthew Wright’s "Weekender" Show, which goes out tonight at ten on Radio 2. I am talking about Merchant of Venice and Othello at the Globe, Playing God at the Soho and offering an Edinburgh must-see round-up.

To this end, I was finally forced to knock together a (necessarily brutally short) Edinburgh "hit list". What I got an opportunity to mention in the recording was sadly far briefer even than this short list, and I haven’t got the faintest idea at the moment how much of that will get transmitted.

Anyway, here is the full text of my Edinburgh picks (written slightly with a mind to pseudo Radio 2-ese):

One of the most exciting things at the International Festival this year is the chance to see the legendary New York performance artists The Wooster Group in a piece called La Didone - this has the most amazing premise - based on the story of Dido and Aeneas, taken from Gian Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone, a baroque opera written in 1641, this version combines that with Mario Bava’s 1965 sci-fi horror Planet of the Vampires. It is billed as "a 21st century retelling of an ancient Greek myth with opera singers in leather spacesuits battling zombies on a distant planet." Brilliant.

Also from the International Festival is The Bacchae - directed by John Tiffany who had the hit of last year’s Fringe with Black Watch in new translation by the Scottish playwright David Grieg. Grieg has a reputation for being one of the most prolific writers working at the moment. This is borne out by the fact that this year the Traverse is producing the premiere of his new play, Damascus, while TAG’s production of his play Yellow Moon, which has been touring Scotland, is also doing a spell at the Traverse.

It’s also a classic year for writers: Tim Crouch - England; Enda Walsh - Walworth Farce; and Rona Monroe - Long Time Dead, all must-see writers, all on at the Traverse. Meanwhile, the never-less-than-indispensible Mark Ravenhill is doing something called Ravenhill for Breakfast - 17 world premieres in 17 days; short 15 to 20 minute plays about “right now” with titles taken from famous films and songs. These are subsequently going to be mashed into a single play, an early draft of which will be seen briefly at the Hampstead in the autumn.

One of the most exciting theatre makers working in Britain today is Chris Goode. He has two shows up at the festival: there’s revival of his brilliant piece Longwave (19th Underbelly Pasture) - the hour long wordless piece about two scientists in a shed - as part of the British Council Showcase, and a new one-man show called Hippo World Guest Book.

Also well worth checking out is Stoopud Fucken Animals by Joel Horwood - Traverse 3 (drill hall) - a new ‘play with songs’ about life in the flatlands which promises to use “live music, thick dialects and pitch black comedy” to drive the myths of British farming into the wall of the modern economy.

Unlimited Theatre have their play about astrophysics and morality The Ethics of Progress at the Underbelly. Following on from Unlimited, founder member Chris Thorpe also appears in Third Angel’s Presumption, a play in which the characters build the set around themselves in a dry, witty look at modern relationships after the magic dies. This is on at Theatre Workshop, starting on Monday 20 and playing for five days at 11.45 in the morning.

In the innovative uses of space camp, Gemma Brockis and Silvia Mercuriali are doing a version of Pinocchio - A performance-based installation for an audience of 3 set in car driving through the city (Aurora Nova based - 18 - 25 Aug 2007). Also at the Aurora Nova is Rotozaza’s Etiquette - a piece for two in which both participants listen to instructions on a headset and effectively make the show for one another. Meanwhile at the Underbelly, new comedy company The Umbrella Birds (featuring the brilliant actresses Kate Donmal and Emily Watson-Howes) are doing a show called WC in the toilets at the Udderbelly Pasture (I think, check) to an audience of eight with blurb proclaiming “A show that’s prepared to sacrifice the capacity to accommodate more than 8 audience members for the joy of staging a spectacle that none of those eight is likely to forget.”

I’m also keen to catch Stewart Lee’s new thing: Johnson and Boswell - Late but Live! which promises more of this intelligent comedian’s dry wit, this time through the medium of Enlightenment wits.

Also likely to be excellent is Pegabovine’s Coat of Arms. Interesting, not least because they must be the only sketch comedy group in Edinburgh who have got an award winning poet on their team - Luke Kennard who has just become the youngest ever nominee for the Forward Poetry Prize is one of the creators of this new sketch show, from this group who got five stars with their show last year in Edinburgh.

Other comic highlights include William Adamsdale who won the Perrier award in 2005 has a new show called The Human Computer. Josie Long - Trying is Good - If.com Best Newcomer - Pleasance, and in another of his legendary durational stand-up gigs we have Mark Watson Saves the Planet. A 24 hour show being held outside the Fringe ticket office across the 13th and 14th.

From the Telegraph’s highlights, Tony! The Blair Musical (C, I think) sounds interesting, not least because it features one Edward Duncan Smith, the son of the former Tory leader, playing Alastair Campbell. Not to be confused with Tony Blair, the Musical over at Gilded Balloon Teviot.

I’ve never seen Fuerzabruta, by the Argentineans behind De La Guarda, or Leith. Now I can do both (Fuerzabruta - Black Tent, Ocean Terminal, Leith)

I also intend to see a lot of stuff at the Aurora Nova, which I always find impossible to either preview, summarise or review, and a lot of shows by friends (in particular, Dan Bye’s excellent pair of companies Sliver Tongue and Strange Bedfellows).

Writing what you know

If, as I’m starting to suspect, all blogging is a long game of follow my leader, then, following Mark Ravenhill’s recent Guardian Arts blog post, this week’s hot topic is biographical readings of writers’ work. The subject has already kicked off a heated exchange on David Eldridge’s blog between him and critic Ian Shuttleworth*. Ravenhill’s original post is as fair-minded and witty as it is light, but he raises an interesting point. The most striking passage for me is his admission ‘I'd bump into friends from university and see they were longing to ask: “How long were you actually a rent boy for?” In the end, I decided all this gave me a grungy glamour. Without ever actually lying, I never disabused them of the notion.’

Of course he did. We all wanted to look grungy and glamorous in ’96. But there’s something else going on here. It is David Eldridge who connects it to Max Stafford-Clark, to whom the quotation “all plays are either autobiography or journalism,” is attributed. The way this belief manifested itself in Stafford-Clark’s work with writers has cast an extremely long shadow in its legacy for the Court.

A writer friend of mine, who shall remain nameless – for reasons which shall become clear – once wrote a provocative (and immediately countered) article for Noises Off magazine arguing that Graham Whybrow’s claim that he could identify the work of any Royal Court writer on the strength of a single page of their work was probably predicated on the fact that within the given page there’d either be a character who was a one-legged black lesbian; so it was probably by the Court’s one-legged black lesbian writer, or... so on, and so on.

I wouldn’t go that far, but it seems fair to say that for a while a certain brand of identity politics was at the very least not-discouraged, particularly around the young writers programme. I shall give a biographical example: - a few years ago a (different) writer friend who I knew from university had a play staged as part of the Royal Court’s Young Writer’s festival. I had produced an earlier (first?) play of his at university – it was a Camus-esque, Big Themes play in which six people gradually discover that they are in a lift to hell during some sort of (presciently enough) Islamist holocaust. His piece staged for the young writers’ programme was about growing up in as a Persian (which he was), in Wolverhampton (as he had) and working in one’s father’s corner shop (which he did). Perhaps it is unfair to blame the Royal Court for this – and perhaps it was the stronger play for not being so ambitious – but you can see from where the idea that they didn’t discourage a certain type of biographical authenticity comes.

This idea has turned on Max Stafford-Clark and bitten him on the arse at least once. There is a passage in Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia in which the young Karim (a thinly veiled, wish-fulfillment version of a young Hanif Kureshi, m’lud) is working as a writer (as Kureshi did) with a director of strong left-wing inclinations, who is widely thought to be a thinly veiled version of M S-C (with whom Kureshi did indeed work when he was a young Royal Court playwright). The book contains a scene in which the director, along with his wife, seduces Karim and his girlfriend with the aim of essentially stealing the girlfriend. So much for teaching people to write what they know. This story has an amusing – if wholly apocryphal coda: when filming the excellent BBC adaptation some years later, the set for this (enormously memorable – at least to this impressionable young thing) scene was dressed to exactly resemble M S-C’s house. Shortly after this has been televised – so the apocryphal story goes – M S-C had invited a couple of people back to his house. They arrived at the house, and entered the living room in question.

“So, this is where it all happened, then?” says one of the party, with a knowing look.

Awkward silence descends for the rest of a much-shortened rest-of-evening.

But I digress.

While Ravenhill suggests that it is a little odd to be confused with a character from your play, he then goes on to note the useful critical insights that such a school of criticism can sometimes offer. Eldridge, however, uses the occasion to take some issue with his work being read autobiographically –understandably, given the personal repercussions which he describes. What is fascinating is the fact that he does not comment on the fact that the play has also been reviewed autobiographically. He cites some initial comments from Ian Shuttleworth’s review, but omits to mention the end:

“I come from a similarly sacrificing working-class family, and I keenly feel similar debts to the departed. I could therefore be expected to connect profoundly with Eldridge's play. But not a sausage, I'm afraid.”

As a critic (ha!), not a writer, I find this sort of thing fascinating. Shuttleworth, after all, is giving explicit and personal grounds for the reason that he didn’t like the play. No pretence of objectivity or Olympian judgment here. This is explicitly a man with a history, sitting in a theatre, watching a play about another man with an apparently similar history. While on one hand it suggests it should have been a pushover for the play to have *got* him, it simultaneously admits the possibility that as someone so strongly identifying with the subject matter, he may not be the best judge.

Critics are often criticised for the dual, contradictory sins of both pretended objectivity and excessive of subjectivity. I find it interesting (not to mention brave) how readily Charles Spencer will talk about his position as a recovering alcoholic to contextualise his response to works dealing in similar themes of addiction. Similarly, if you can find a review of a play about Belfast by Ian Shuttleworth in which doesn’t mention his connection to that city, then you’re a better man than I am.

I guess the point of all this is that all writers, not to mention directors, actors, probably sound-designers and lighting designers, and other artists of any stripe you care to mention, will bring something of themselves to their work - both wittingly and unwittingly; and those watching their work, whether writing about it or not, will speculate over it, as much as they will appreciate other elements and the whole. But is it really, as David Eldridge says, “reductive” or “wrong-headed” to speculate? In much the same way as his play pricked the curiosity of his reviewers with its incidental spatial and temporal intersections with his own life, isn’t it precisely these same sorts of starting points that often ambush writers with ideas?

At the same time, I do hope we have gone beyond the era of identity politics into one where “write what you know” is only a helpful suggestion rather than an absolute and final restriction. I don’t want to be party to a culture, which, when faced with two plays on any given issue, will always pick the one written by the person who has the closest personal connection to the issue over the play that is best, irrespective of its author.

So, write what you know. Or don’t. Some part of you will creep in anyway and give your biographers and critics something to agonise over. But, if you are writing about what you know, please don’t do what John le Carré does and forget to tell everyone what it is you know before continuing the story; it makes it almost impossible to understand.

*In the interests of full biographical disclosure, Ian and I have a long personal history; I don’t know Mr Eldridge at all.