Tom Green

The run of my new play, Fighting, at the Brockley Jack, ended on Saturday. I was pretty much overwhelmed by the response it got - after the final performance a local regular told the assembled cast that it was the best show she'd ever seen at the venue.

It was a real pleasure working with the director Kate Bannister and the entire cast and crew.

Fighting
By Tom Green
First produced at the Brockley Jack theatre in London, February 2010

Directed by Kate Bannister

Cast: Daniel Brennan, Peter Clapp, Martin Durrant, Davin Eadie, Alex Gatehouse, Laura Glover, Lucy Gratton, Annabel Pemberton

Production: Karl Swinyard & Tanith Lindon
Design: Kate Bannister & Karl Swinyard
Costume: Tanith Lindon
Sound design: Joe Churchman
Lighting: William Ingham

One of the best things about the launch night of the Write Now season at the Brockley Jack last night - apart from the excellent Compression by Joy Wilkinson (on until 20th Feb) and extracts from Fighting (by me, on from 23rd Feb) and The Bitch From Brixton (by Kate Gallon and Kate-Lynn Hocking, from 2nd March) - was meeting people from several south London theatres.

It made me realise how much theatre there is in south London and led me to wonder how much more could be achieved if some or all of the venues worked together. (Judging by the conversations I had last night that's not happening much at the moment)

The truth about fringe theatre in this country is that it is mostly a fairly marginal activity - apart from to those involved - except during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In those three weeks thousands of people take a chance on new work by people they've never heard of and the media lavish those same shows with attention.

Trouble is, the Edinburgh Fringe is full-up. It really is. Hats off to them but the cost of venues has got ridiculous and for those of us hundreds of miles away transport and accommodation have to be added on top of that.

So why hasn't London developed it's own fringe festival? Or, for that matter, just south London? Not to compete with Edinburgh - that would be foolish. But to establish a few weeks a year when fringe is in the spotlight, awards are given out and, most importantly, the public are encouraged to buy tickets and go.

Please do it, someone.

My new play, Fighting, will be performed at the Brockley Jack (23-27 February).  Tickets are now on sale.

The play is part of the theatre's Write Now season, alongside Compression by Joy Wilkinson and The Bitch From Brixton by Kate Gallon and Kate-Lynn Hocking. Why not come and see them all?

Fighting by Tom Green

Directed by Kate Bannister

Cast: Daniel Brennan, Peter Clapp, Martin Durrant, Davin Eadie, Alex Gatehouse, Laura Glover, Lucy Gratton, Annabel Pemberton

Production: Karl Swinyard & Tanith Lindon
Design: Kate Bannister & Karl Swinyard
Costume: Tanith Lindon
Sound design: Joe Churchman
Lighting: William Ingham

I wonder if Alan Bennett specified how old the writer should be in his new play The Habit Of Art. Author of a play (within the play) at the National Theatre about an imagined meeting between WH Auden and Benjamin Britten, he is, in this production, in his mid-30s.

While I enjoyed the play enormously, I didn't think for a moment that this character had written what we were seeing on stage - even the deliberately weird bits. And perhaps that didn't matter.

But, given that some of the strongest moments in the play come when Auden urges Britten to stop pussyfooting around and deal with things head-on, it's tempting to ponder whether Bennett thought about making the writer himself.

My new play Fighting will be produced by the Brockley Jack theatre in south east London from 23-27 Feb 2010.

Here's the press release:

Write Now: new play season for southeast London at the Brockley Jack Theatre

Thank you to all writers and companies who submitted scripts to the Brockley Jack Theatre for our festival of new writing in February and March 2010. The theatre received a tremendous amount of scripts from writers based throughout south London.

With some very strong writing and unique voices to consider, it was a challenge to come to the final decisions on the plays we will be working with on this occasion.

In February and March we will be giving the first public performances of Joy Wilkinson's Compression, Tom Green's Fighting and Kate Gallon and Katelynn Hocking's Ruthless. Further details of the productions will be released shortly.

 Update (1st March): Fighting - script and production shots
Here's the leaflet for the Write Now Season:

Fighting by Tom Green

Directed by Kate Bannister

Cast: Daniel Brennan, Peter Clapp, Martin Durrant, Davin Eadie, Alex Gatehouse, Laura Glover, Lucy Gratton, Annabel Pemberton

Production: Karl Swinyard & Tanith Lindon
Design: Kate Bannister & Karl Swinyard
Costume: Tanith Lindon
Sound design: Joe Churchman
Lighting: William Ingham

Watching Brecht's Mother Courage recently at the National Theatre, I was reminded of the character of Johnny Rooster Byron in Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth.

Both Courage and Rooster are charismatic outsiders who inspire loyalty bordering on devotion, despite their oft-expressed cynicism and self-interest. Both have a strong hedonistic streak and refuse to compromise. And both, in many ways, are victims of mainstream society who could easily be pitied.

I suppose these characters might be called antiheroes  - they certainly have things in common with characters in this list (which, fabulously, includes Arthur Dent). But I also like the term 'Machiavel' (derived from Machiavelli) that I found recently in Jonathan Bate's book about Shakespeare, Soul Of The Age.

In Elizabethan times, Bate explains, Machiavelli's writings were widely demonised and a writer like Marlowe only gave voice to them in patently 'evil' characters.

Shakespeare, however, while 'recognising the theatrical charsima of the Marlovian Machiavel', makes them real characters with real motivations. Characters like Richard III, Iago and Edmund in King Lear who 'say the unsayable' and challenge conventional thinking.

That's what Courage and Rooster do, too.  And like, Shakespeare's characters, though appearing to be completely cyncial, deep down they are in fact supremely principled.

That's why they break our hearts.

Having written a play about the death of Margaret Thatcher, I feel strangely sensitive (perhaps even protective) about the event itself.

So this story on BBC News today caught my attention:

A misconstrued text message announcing the passing of a beloved pet has sparked a flurry of diplomatic activity in Canada.

Transport Minister John Baird sent a message reading: "Thatcher has died".

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was soon informed that 84-year-old former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had passed away.

But it was actually Mr Baird's beloved cat, named after his political heroine, who had died.

Of course, the fact that such a non-story made the news, and the traffic to the blog about my Thatcher play tripled overnight, shows just how much fascination her eventual demise continues to hold.

Update: Obviously this post should have been titled "The death of Moggie Thatcher"

The dialogue in Orphans by Dennis Kelly might be described as ultra-naturalistic. But, to me, it played as ultra-stylised. All those hesitations and false starts and repetitions and restatements as questions - I found it a barrier to my enjoyment of the play.

Why, it led me to wonder, did the Pinter dialogue in The Birthday Party (I recently saw the old BBC TV production) seem so much more real - even though the characters often say quite unlikely things?

Obviously we accept all sorts of 'unreal' things in any kind of fiction, so perhaps the whole notion of naturalistic or stylised is flawed. It's all stylised in one way or another.

The secret, I suppose, is for the dialogue and the characters to feel truthful. That's the magic connection (or not) between writer, performer and audience.

In The Author by Tim Crouch, I found that connection missing most of the time. I enjoyed it, and found it interesting, but was never fully involved. Perhaps that was the point. 

The previous plays of his that I've seen, and loved - My Arm and An Oak Tree - make various (apparent) attempts to create distance from the audience that in fact draw you in. Whereas in The Author the cast sit among the audience but I didn't feel close to them.

My favourite part was the character playing an audience member. His monologue at the start, "I love this. This is great. Isn't this great? etc", about being an audience member at the start of a play range completely true in a way that, for me, the rest didn't.

I wonder if Lucy Prebble's Enron, a play about greed and excess, might be best served by a production that's stripped down and austere.

Director Rupert Goold certainly didn't think so. Songs, video projection, dance routines, special effects, the inevitable slow-motion miming bits (including a man jumping from on of the Twin Towers).

I guess I have quite ascetic tastes (more so than the critics, who loved it) but I found all the showbiz got in the way of a good, mainly documentary, play about what used to be America's biggest ever bankruptcy. I'm not sure how much if it was new - the idea about how long it would take to count to a million and then a billion, for example, comes from John Allen Paulos's  book “Innumeracy” - see a reference in this article by John Lanchester) and presumably a lot of the rest is indebted to The Smartest Guys In The Room (which the play has led me to order.) But it was well explained, witty and fairly even-handed. Great performances, too - especially from Samuel West.

I preferred the much smaller-scale Stockwell, however (full disclosure: I know Kieron Barry, who edited the transcripts from the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and have worked with him in the past).

I've not seen any of the previous transcript plays and was, for some reason, a little sceptical. But this made for compelling theatre and a powerful indictment of the Met Police's incompetence and arrogance. And the clarity of the production worked perfectly with the text.  

I reckon most writers feel they know what high concept means - an idea that's instantly understandable and captures the whole script in a phrase. Get the concept high enough and you only need the title: Snakes On A Plane.

But digging a bit deeper today I found a couple of articles that got me thinking.

Initially I found them quite persuasive.

From this piece by Steve Kaire the point that stood out for me was the first: 'Your idea should be original and unique'. Hard to argue with that.

And in Conquering the high concept James Bonnet  suggests four requirements for high concept pitches:

1.    The fascinating subject,
2.    The great title,
3.    The inciting action, which is the problem of your story, and
4.    The hook, which reveals the uniqueness or special circumstances of your story.

Again, hard to argue with.

But on reflection I'm not sure if you can be this prescriptive.

Yes, an idea must be fascinating else why would anyone commission it. But how do you define fascinating in this context? Bonnet can't. It's completely subjective. Come to think of it, 'Original and unique' only really means: hasn't been done before in precisely this way or if it was it was a long time ago and no one will remember.

Likewise 'great title' - overwhelmingly a matter of opinion.

Meanwhile, the inciting action and the hook are (arguably) standard script requirements, that, I think, might or might not be part of a high concept pitch. 

Instead, I think the key to high concept pitches is in what Bonnet says about why they're important: because commissioners don't have time to try and work out what your script is going to be about.

So, what high concept really means is expressing an idea in the clearest and most concise way possible. Everything else is just a matter of opinion. (Actually, even 'expressing an idea in the clearest and most concise way possible' is a matter of opinion, but never mind)

So, there aren't high concept pitches and low concept pitches. There are just good pitches and less good pitches.

Maybe.