A fun night at the Kowalsky Gallery on Wednesday, and thanks to Alex Topham-Tyerman for her performance of my response to Phil Ashcroft's Where You Go I Go Too.
Here's what I wrote (pdf).
One of the most enjoyable parts of writing
The Tent was choosing the music.
I picked most of the tracks as I went along but it was only on a later draft that the producer/director Toby Swift and I decided we needed a song to go with the fantasy phone calls from 'Jennifer'.
I thought immediately of I Want You by Elvis Costello from Blood And Chocolate - an album I used to listen to all the time on tape back after it came out in 1986.
It's a fabulous set of recordings, mostly much more frenetic than the very intense I Want You - and all the tracks,
according to Wikipedia, were 'recorded in a single large room at high volume, with the band listening to each other on monitor speakers rather than headphones. Costello describes it as "a record of people beating and twanging things with a fair amount of yelling".'
Highly recommended. In fact, it's high time I went to Amazon and got a new copy for myself.
(Here's
a more in depth assessment from blog critics.)
I'm one of the six writers taking part in a collaboration between the Writers' Guild and the artists' licensing body DACS on 2nd July at the Kowalsky Gallery in London.
I went to the private view a couple of weeks ago to select an artwork to write a short piece about and initially found the possibilities a little overwhelming. Almost any artwork could invite some kind of response, and I was also tempted to reflect on the rather heady atmosphere of wine, canapes and everyone talking very animatedly with their backs to the pictures.
In the end I went on instinct. This lightbox by Phil Ashcroft, Where You Go, I Go Too, just kept catching my eye.
I'll keep my response to it under wraps for the moment but will post it here after the event.
Arcadia is a play that leaves almost nothing to be said. I emerged from the theatre bludgeoned by brilliance. And a little bit tired.
My radio drama The Tent will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Monday 1st June at 2.15pm.
Here's the iPlayer link (it will be available online for seven days after the broadcast) and the press release (scroll down).
Here are the production details:
Fay ...... Sian Reeves
Gavin ...... Jeremy Swift
Anna ...... Joanna Scanlan
Rebecca ...... Janice Acquah
Ukulele played by Hester Goodman
Directed by Toby Swift.
And, finally, a copy of the script - The Tent by Tom Green (pdf).
I'm probably wrong, but I think fiction will never compete with fact when it comes to sport.
None of the supposedly great sporting dramas have ever done much for me - Raging Bull didn't feel remotely real, The Natural is just enjoyable fantasy and Field Of Dreams is just fantasy. I liked This Sporting Life, but that's more as a social commentary than a sporting one.
I'm thinking off the top of my head, so might have missed things that disprove my case. But, also off the top of my head, I can think of loads of truly great factual sporting films and books. Hoop Dreams, for example. Murder Ball. Searching For Booby Fischer. Zidane. And now Friday Night Lights.
Like the rest of my list, Friday Night Lights is more than just an account of some matches. It has a breadth and depth to rival a novel, as well as a real insight into a community and a way of life. But the sporting drama is also gripping. Even though the events described took place 20 years ago, they still feel like they matter in a way that something made up just wouldn't.
I can't really explain why that should be the case for sport and not other aspects of life - perhaps it's because sport is a sort of fiction anyway, a suspension of reality in which an audience pretends to identify with people they don't know and to desire an outcome that really shouldn't matter to them at all.
My fear is that the good factual writing on any subject actually beats most fiction (Homicide by David Simon is surely better than almost any crime novel) - but that can['.
Amazing how quickly Blair has receded from public consciousness. After dominating the headlines for a dozen years, he has pretty much disappeared.
Probably too early to really know what his legacy is, but currently, it feels incredibly shallow. A continuation of Thatcherite policies of promote free-markets and centralise the state. The Thick Of It style aggressive, tribal politics.
I guess his real legacy will be reinventing the Labour Party - no small achievement (for good or ill). And the war in Iraq.
Anyway, while thinking about writing a play about him, I've dug out some Conference speeches. And I find them strangely compelling. As Simon Hoggart has pointed out, he favoured verbless sentences. So it reads like a collection of haikus that teeter on the edge between meaning and nonsense.
Here's his conference speech from 2004:
Labour is working.
Britain is working.
The longest period of economic growth since records began, an economy now bigger than that of Italy and France.
The lowest unemployment and highest employment rate of any of our competitors for the first time since the 1950s.
Living standards up, for everyone, and for the poorest up most.
The biggest reductions in child poverty and biggest increases in investment for decades.
This isn't a country in decline.
The British people aren't a people on the way down.
We are winning. They are winning.
And why did they vote for change? Because we had the courage of our convictions and we dared to change....
For so long, we knew only the importance and futility of Opposition.
But because we dared to change, we dared to dream that we could win again.
And we did.
And now we stand, in a position no Labour Party ever dared to dream of standing before, with a third term Labour Government beckoning.
With the values for today and the ideas for tomorrow, and a policy programme that will change the country for better and for good.
Power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.
That was and is our mission and our purpose.
I want us to win a third term not so that we can go in the history books.
But so that we can consign Britain's failings to the history books.
Build on the progress we have made.
Give everyone the chance to make the most of themselves.
Deliver better lives for working families.
United in our values, proud in our record, optimistic about the future.
With the courage of our convictions, we can win the third term, deliver the lasting change.
It is worth the fight.
Now let's get out and do it.
And this, from 1999:
We know what a 21st century nation needs.
A knowledge-based economy. A strong civic society. A confident place in theworld.
Do that and a nation masters the future. Fail and it is the future's victim.
The challenge is how?
The answer is people.
The future is people.
The liberation of human potential not just as workers but as citizens.
Not power to the people but power to each person to make the most of what is within them.
People are born with talent and everywhere it is in chains.
"The Future Is People" would make a good title for a play, I think.
An interesting piece by Tim Adams in The Observer about Thatcher's legacy. What sets it apart is that he actually travelled to Grantham to assess how she's seen there.
The results? Overwhleming indifference. A small exhibit in the corner of the local museum and not much else. Amazing when you think that US Presidents get huge library complexes, however awful they've been.
Not sure whether it says more about Thatcher - perhaps her legacy isn't quite as strong as we sometimes think - or the British flair for understatement.
Then again, reading the ranting comments under the article, she still seems able to rouse plenty of passion.
(Tim Adams interviewed me for the article. But I'm not sure how he managed to re-locate one of my characters to South Wales...)
Strange how many plays I've seen in the past year or so that involve people being locked into their own homes. Relocated; The Walworth Farce; The New Electric Ballroom. And now Tusk Tusk by Polly Stenham.
Relocated was very obviously influenced by the Josef Fritzl case (though the Enda Walsh play pre-date it) and I wonder if Stenham was, too. For though her child characters aren't literally captive in their new flat, their mother is missing and they know that, if found, they will be put into care. There's also a basement...
It's a powerful, entertaining and very sad play about how children try to survive parental neglect but are ultimately bound to suffer. Great seeing it in the Royal COurt Theatre Upstairs, so close to the action, and with one of the youngest audiences I've ever seen - the majority must have been late teens or early twenties.
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