I'm going to start this week by announcing I'm going to do a reverse IPO and eventually take this newsletter private. I'll still write it, it's been undoubtably good for me to do it, but I won't mail it out and I'll treat it more like a diary. Not just yet because I want to hit a year which means there's twenty or so more weeks to go, but after that, yes.

I've always believed that it's useful to be public facing as a playwright from a minority background because it's something I would've wanted and needed to see as a kid wanting to get into the arts. But I find I'm increasingly less willing to do it and worry that the consequence of that is that I'm going to get less honest with both you and myself in the work. I'll still write the occasional public newsletter/blog and, again, it won't be for a while yet so do stick around! For now, onwards...
 

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I was sad to see collaborator and friend, Madani Younis, step down from his job as Creative Director of the Southbank Centre. There's a lot I want to say about it but there's a great piece by Lyn Gardener in The Stage that I think is worth the reading and speaks to some worries I have in a more eloquent way than I would put them. With Kully Thiarai at National Theatre Wales, Indhu Rubasingham at the Kiln and Madani at the Southbank Centre, among others, the start of 2019 felt like a good place for British South Asian arts leadership in institutions. Two of those people have since left their positions (protect Indhu at all costs!) though I wish Kully well at Leeds 2023 and I hope to see Madani's face/haircut return to prominence somewhere soon.
 

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Here's the meat of today's newsletter...

I've read Michael Frayn's Copenhagen as part of research for a play I'm writing. It examines a moment the friendship fractured between a German physicist Werner Heisenberg (him of the Uncertainty Principle) and his Danish colleague & one time mentor, Niels Bohr.

Yes, it's one of those plays that takes a scientific conceit and crudely uses it as a metaphor for something tricky in the heart of humanity but I think it carries that off better than most. It's at times thrilling, capturing that excitement of discovery, and at other times incredibly dense and undramatic. I tell myself I would probably be more patient with it if I saw the text living within actors but the part of Margrethe, Bohr's wife, is probably one of the more thankless roles I've ever seen. Her position is very useful for the play and she gets her moments but mostly she's a side character and it feels somewhat uneasy to use her as the excuse for the two clever blokes to speak plainly rather than in a high falutin', sciencey ways. There's probably a whole other play about what's going on in the head of the actress playing Margrethe for most of this play. If you're reading this, have played the part and have some thoughts, lemme know.

Having said all that, I loved this edition, the Methuen modern classics, because it has a postscript from Frayn at the end that takes us through the response to the play and his response to the response. You hardly ever get that insight and it's an absolute gold mine. Here's one part I like about how research finds its limit when confronted with interior lives:

The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people's heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions - and this is precisely where record and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists' heads is through the imagination. This indeed is the substance of the play.

Frayn goes on to recount how he ran into Heisenberg's son after the play's premier in New York and was told by him that while the fictional character doesn't resemble his father at all, he understands why a character in a play has to be different (which is remarkably generous on his part I think). From this stimulus, Frayn writes:

The seems to me a chastening reminder of the difficulties of representing a real person in fiction, but a profoundly sensible indication of the purpose in attempting it, which is surely to make explicit the ideas and feelings that never quite get expressed in the confusing onrush of life, and to bring out the underlying structure of events.

The justification for biographical works and the danger out them laid out very simply: through our narrativising we can see structures that lead to moments more clearly. But there is a neatness and a compelling force in narrativising that gives the feeling of truth so there is great responsibility there if we wish to tell these stories to wide audiences who will imbibe that story as What Really Happened whether they mean to or not.

I want to include the direct follow on from this quotation because it speaks a little to my concerns about doubt from last week:

I take it that the nineteenth-century German playwright Freidrich Hebbel was making a similar point when he uttered his great dictum (one that every playwright ought to have in pokerwork over his desk): 'In a good play everyone is right.' I assume he means by this not that the audience is invited to approve of everyone's actions, but that everyone should be allowed the freedom and eloquence to make the most convincing case that he can for himself...I suppose that this is what sticks in some people's throats - that my Heisenberg is allowed to make a case for himself - even to criticise others.

Another way of looking at this is to see that - outside of the realms of advocacy dramas - our arguments are best made in opposition to the best arguments of the other side. Sharpening our knives on the hardest stones. This doesn't need to lead to a simple, both-sides whataboutary. I've always loved Roy Williams' Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads which has just had a well-received revival in Chichester not just because of the muscularity of its dramatic writing but also because it gives the antagonist space to make the truest account of themselves. It doesn't pull punches for the sake of asserting its own morality, and yet it is clear that the play is not on his 'side' either.

Likewise, the reason I really loved Bruce Norris' The Low Road (I know I've mentioned it before but bear with me), is that it made very clear why capitalism was fun. Why it felt subversive and exciting and something to be caught up in. It also made me weep in its final moments at how, for all that, it leaves the weakest behind. The moral force of the play wasn't dimmed by grappling with the case for other side because while it gave that strong case, it also demonstrated the potential ramifications of the ideologies and that feels crucial.

In contrast, another play I saw that season featured a banker character who was literally meant to be making the case for himself and h is industry. He attempts to and then is hit back by a few choice arguments from the other side and crumbles, pondering: "Why didn't I know that?". I literally wanted to stand up from my seat and go "I can make a better case for the banking sector than this guy!" For me, without their being the possibility of everyone being right - at least to themselves - it feels hard to trust a writer's morality, if not just because they've not invested in the humanity of all of their characters.

Right! Done with Frayn now, and to bring it back to Patelsville, here's a little bit of process on my part. When, as part of research, I'm looking at dramas that are in the ball park of what I'm attempting, I answer these questions after I've read them:

What did I like?
What didn't I like?
What would I steal?

I've been doing this since 2011 and I find it helps you calibrate your tastes and intentions before (and while) making your own work. Give it a go!
 

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Having argued quite vehemently in a debate earlier this year that cats are the better writer's pet (honestly, click that link and have a look around half way down for the full understanding of the absurdity of my life), I felt like I want to end this newsletter, maybe all newsletters, with an observation about my pair of furry pals that I find interesting/delightful/sad.

Today: The way that Chill Cat makes the exact same noise every time he hops up onto the bed, as if to warn you of his approach. It's incredibly cute and I'm grateful for his forethought. Many a time Pretty Cat, who is a BULKY BOI, has thundered across me towards his sleeping spot as I drift off and sends me rocketing up which in turn freaks him out and he goes lolloping off into the dark, his claws clacking against the wood laminate, perhaps never to sleep again...

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