Actors, Alcohol and 'And Ins (An outrageous reach, but let me have it)
End of the week! At last. God. I'm tired and it's my birthday tomorrow and my brain has already half checked out so I'll try and keep it brief today.
I reckon I'm mostly going be using this newsletter as a sort of working diary, with the occasional focus on particular topics every now and then. I'm an incredibly slow writer (and thinker) so it'll stop me feeling pressured to interrogate something deeply every week, especially if I've got a lot on. Also, I think people are curious about the rhythms of different writers' lives, I know I certainly am. This'll be a glimpse of that.
This week was fairly atypical in that the big part of it was over almost immediately. I'd been working on a script draft over the weekend and I handed it in on Monday morning, leading me to feel that it was immediately Friday, a feeling that was furthered by my getting to meet up with the younger members of the An Adventure cast for dinner. I'm going to do a separate post about how much I love actors but for now all I'll say is that being around them always makes me feel like I'm in the right job. That evening with them I felt so giddy and just...happy? I wasn't even drinking that evening and it was a small glimpse into how much I probably enjoyed my life before that first time I necked two cans of Fosters at my friend James' house and marvelled at how I couldn't feel anything anymore (let's not read anything into that).
The rest of the week was overwhelmingly taken up with reading and talking and not all that much creative writing. Reading outlines, making notes on outlines, having phone calls about outlines, wondering when I wrote my first outline and whether I could go back in time and stop myself from ever doing so etc etc. Though it can sometimes be excruciating to not do any script work for days on end, I have to say it's been nice to focus on pretty much one project for a week, a situation that becomes a lot less frequent the busier your career gets. In this case, it's Riz Ahmed's show Englistan (which I think I can say I've been working on now since he mentioned it on a panel the other week) on which I'm one of many kind and talented writers.
As part of researching ahead of more outline action, I spent yesterday revisiting Hanif Kureishi's play The Black Album, an adaptation of his own novel that ran at the National Theatre in 2009. It is, as I understand it, the last play by a British South Asian playwright on the National's main stages.* Ten years. Nice. ANYWAY! The only copy of the play text that I could find is what appears to be an edition that is made for the German market. It's not translated, but it has every single idiosyncratic detail - both English and Pakistani - referenced in footnotes at the bottom. I can't imagine the effort that went into it and while it was distracting at first, it ended up being incredibly useful as someone reading this story thirty years after it's set. I'd sort of love to see more editions like that. Editions that give a flavour of how we present ourselves to be understood by those who seek to understand us.
That is, if people haven't given up trying to understand us after experiencing the Brexit fiasco that continued to play out this week. But I'm not going to talk about that. Because you'll do it yourselves. Endlessly. That's our fate. Part of me feels like this is sort of what's going to stand in for our imperial reckoning - not a considered and difficult debate where we grapple with the tough questions from our past and how it'll inform our future. Nah. Just one, sad, slow moving self-inflicted punch into the national ballsack.
I should probably stop there.
Much love and happy writing x
*An honourable and necessary mention to Prasanna Puwanarajah's one-woman show Nightwatchman which starred Stephanie Street and was part of two new writing double bills staged in The Paintframe pop-up space in 2011. They teamed up again recently for an NYT show, with Stephanie writing an adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with Prasanna directing. What a pair of disgustingly multi-talented individuals. It's lucky they're also incredibly nice or you'd really hate them. (Guys, if you're reading, I don't hate you).
I reckon I'm mostly going be using this newsletter as a sort of working diary, with the occasional focus on particular topics every now and then. I'm an incredibly slow writer (and thinker) so it'll stop me feeling pressured to interrogate something deeply every week, especially if I've got a lot on. Also, I think people are curious about the rhythms of different writers' lives, I know I certainly am. This'll be a glimpse of that.
This week was fairly atypical in that the big part of it was over almost immediately. I'd been working on a script draft over the weekend and I handed it in on Monday morning, leading me to feel that it was immediately Friday, a feeling that was furthered by my getting to meet up with the younger members of the An Adventure cast for dinner. I'm going to do a separate post about how much I love actors but for now all I'll say is that being around them always makes me feel like I'm in the right job. That evening with them I felt so giddy and just...happy? I wasn't even drinking that evening and it was a small glimpse into how much I probably enjoyed my life before that first time I necked two cans of Fosters at my friend James' house and marvelled at how I couldn't feel anything anymore (let's not read anything into that).
The rest of the week was overwhelmingly taken up with reading and talking and not all that much creative writing. Reading outlines, making notes on outlines, having phone calls about outlines, wondering when I wrote my first outline and whether I could go back in time and stop myself from ever doing so etc etc. Though it can sometimes be excruciating to not do any script work for days on end, I have to say it's been nice to focus on pretty much one project for a week, a situation that becomes a lot less frequent the busier your career gets. In this case, it's Riz Ahmed's show Englistan (which I think I can say I've been working on now since he mentioned it on a panel the other week) on which I'm one of many kind and talented writers.
As part of researching ahead of more outline action, I spent yesterday revisiting Hanif Kureishi's play The Black Album, an adaptation of his own novel that ran at the National Theatre in 2009. It is, as I understand it, the last play by a British South Asian playwright on the National's main stages.* Ten years. Nice. ANYWAY! The only copy of the play text that I could find is what appears to be an edition that is made for the German market. It's not translated, but it has every single idiosyncratic detail - both English and Pakistani - referenced in footnotes at the bottom. I can't imagine the effort that went into it and while it was distracting at first, it ended up being incredibly useful as someone reading this story thirty years after it's set. I'd sort of love to see more editions like that. Editions that give a flavour of how we present ourselves to be understood by those who seek to understand us.
That is, if people haven't given up trying to understand us after experiencing the Brexit fiasco that continued to play out this week. But I'm not going to talk about that. Because you'll do it yourselves. Endlessly. That's our fate. Part of me feels like this is sort of what's going to stand in for our imperial reckoning - not a considered and difficult debate where we grapple with the tough questions from our past and how it'll inform our future. Nah. Just one, sad, slow moving self-inflicted punch into the national ballsack.
I should probably stop there.
Much love and happy writing x
*An honourable and necessary mention to Prasanna Puwanarajah's one-woman show Nightwatchman which starred Stephanie Street and was part of two new writing double bills staged in The Paintframe pop-up space in 2011. They teamed up again recently for an NYT show, with Stephanie writing an adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with Prasanna directing. What a pair of disgustingly multi-talented individuals. It's lucky they're also incredibly nice or you'd really hate them. (Guys, if you're reading, I don't hate you).
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to patelograms: