The Theatre of Simon Stephens

Jacqueline Bolton

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781474238656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Simon Stephens is one of Europe's pre-eminent living playwrights. Since the beginning of his career in 1998, Stephens's award-winning plays have been translated into over twenty languages, been produced on four continents, and continue to feature prominently in the repertoires of European theatre. His original works have garnered numerous awards, with his stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning seven Olivier Awards and enjoying acclaim on Broadway. In the first book to provide a critical account of Stephens's work, Jacqueline Bolton draws upon the playwright's unpublished personal archives, as well as original interviews with directors and actors, to advance detailed analyses of his original plays and their productions, examine contemporary approaches to playwriting, and deliver insights into broader debates regarding text, performance and authorship. Caridad Svich addresses Stephens's theatrical output between 2014 and 2019, and essays from Mireia Aragay and James Hudson provide additional perspectives on international productions and the playwright's adaptive practices. Andrew Haydon's edited interviews with six of Stephens's key collaborators – Marianne Elliott, Sarah Frankcom, Sean Holmes, Ramin Gray, Katie Mitchell and Carrie Cracknell – further illuminate the work from a director's viewpoint. The Theatre of Simon Stephens situates the playwright's oeuvre within his embrace of aesthetics and working relations encountered in European theatre cultures, focusing in particular upon shifting attitudes towards the function of the playwright, the relationship between playwrights and directors, and the role of the audience in live performance. The Companion serves as a lively and engaging study of one of the most restlessly creative and important dramatists of our generation.

Chapter 1

Tension

Bluebird (1998) • Christmas (2003) • Herons (2001) • Port (2002) • Country Music (2004) • On the Shore of the Wide World (2005)

The launch of Stephens’s career coincided with the relaunch of the Royal Court Theatre, London, at the turn of the millennium. This relaunch comprised, firstly, the appointment of Ian Rickson to the post of Artistic Director in 1998 and, secondly, the company’s return to its Sloane Square premises after a multi-million-pound refurbishment in 2000. As incoming Artistic Director, Rickson shifted the theatre’s agenda for new writing away from approaches that had prized (and arguably fetishized) ‘new’ plays by ‘new’ playwrights towards a model of new play development which would commit to supporting playwrights beyond their first production. As Stephens attests, it was a shift in the theatre’s priorities that, while perhaps not as ‘“radical” or “sexy”’ as the hype generated around ‘new writing’ in the 1990s, ‘did allow playwrights to develop and flourish over time’ (qtd in Haydon 2013: 68). In January 2000 Stephens was appointed Playwright in Residence at the Royal Court – a diary entry dated 4 January 2000 boldly states: ‘Today, I started life as a writer’¹ – marking the inception of a close working relationship with the theatre which, at the time of writing, spans two decades.

The Royal Court’s role in promoting, sustaining and shaping Stephens’s work during the early years of his career is central to his subsequent success as a playwright; a more rounded account of these formative years, however, ought also to acknowledge Stephens’s early association with the Royal Exchange, Manchester. The years 1998 and 2000 are again significant: in 1998 Marianne Elliott, who joined the theatre in 1995 as Associate Director, was appointed co-Artistic Director and, in 2000, Sarah Frankcom – who would go on to become Artistic Director in 2008 – was appointed Literary Manager. One of their first actions was to invite Stephens on attachment to the Royal Exchange; on his first visit in February 2000, Stephens’s diaries record his apparent surprise at finding himself referred to by the company as ‘Writer-in-Residence’: ‘I’m not entirely sure how I can reside in two theatres at once’.² Over the course of 2000–2002, Stephens – who was born and grew up in Stockport, a large town on the outskirts of Manchester – spent several extended periods at the Royal Exchange, working alongside Frankcom, observing the rehearsal rooms of Elliott, and meeting actors, such as Nick Sidi, who would become life-long friends and collaborators. His first commission for the theatre, Port (2002), was – unusually, given Stephens’s then relative obscurity – produced on the theatre’s main stage and won the Pearson Award for New Playwriting. Between them, Elliott and Frankcom have commissioned and/or directed nearly a dozen of Stephens’s plays over the past two decades, responding to and drawing out both the jagged psychological detail of his characters and the irreverent disregard for playwriterly authority for which his work is renowned. Stephens continues to work with both directors, providing Elliott with the first new play to be produced by her theatre company, Elliott & Harper Productions (Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle [2017]), and Frankcom with her final production as Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange (Light Falls [2019]).

This chapter charts Stephens’s development as a playwright from 1998 to 2005, during which time seven stage plays were produced in as many years. My intention is to offer a reading of these plays, and the formal and thematic characteristics they exhibit, that attends to the theatrical institutions within which they were conceived, written and produced. Drawing upon private notes made by Stephens during his residencies at the Royal Court and the Royal Exchange, I wish, on the one hand, to posit the influence of theatre cultures and discourses upon the written play-text, and, on the other, to attempt an account of the qualities that make Stephens’s theatrical voice so distinct. Uniquely among his peers, ‘residing in two theatres at once’ meant that the mentorship offered to Stephens at the Royal Court was complemented by the concomitant opportunity to practice, contrast and question these principles in the rehearsal rooms of the Royal Exchange: a large-scale, in-the-round, theatre located in the heart of a city two hundred miles north of London. This observation is not intended to pit the Royal Court and Royal Exchange in opposition to, or competition with, one another but rather to recognize the distinctive environmental conditions in which Stephens learned and developed his craft, and to acknowledge the domestic theatrical culture(s) in which his writing was recognized, supported and championed before international acclaim followed. Stephens’s personal notes and diary entries from this period offer a historical record of the prevailing discourses circulating in practices of new play development within UK subsidized theatre at this time; a subjective record that is patchy and partial, of course, but one which nevertheless reveals something of the lessons and impressions available to an apprentice playwright at these theatres in the early 2000s.

The Royal Court, London, and Royal Exchange, Manchester

As Writer-in-Residence at the Royal Court in 2000, Stephens assisted the then Literary Manager, Graham Whybrow, providing feedback on solicited and unsolicited scripts; watching shows free of charge; and sitting in on rehearsals of in-house productions. He was introduced to networks of directors, producers, playwrights and actors and, most importantly, attended an intensive week-long writing course during which established playwrights and directors including Stephen Jeffreys, Hanif Kureishi, Max Stafford-Clark, David Lan, Ian Rickson and Dominic Cooke held workshops with selected writers. In 2015, when delivering a workshop to emerging playwrights at the Royal Exchange, Stephens refers to this course as ‘the week that defined my next fifteen years [. . .] The things I learnt and the things I thought about in that week sustained me and galvanized me for the following years’ (Stephens 2015c: 2). His notebooks from this period capture some of the approaches to, and techniques of, playwriting taught in these sessions, including Stephen Jeffreys’s workshop on the manipulation of time and space; a seminar by David Lan on dramatic narrative; Ian Rickson on the significance of location; and Dominic Cooke on character objectives, behavioural tactics and ‘transitive verbs’ (a workshop derived in part from the directorial practice of ‘actioning’ established by Max Stafford-Clark, the Royal Court’s former Artistic Director).

A culture of mentorship and training for its emerging playwrights has endured at the Royal Court, albeit to varying degrees and in different guises, since the first Writers’ Group was established by George Devine in 1958.³ Stephens’s account of his first meeting with Stephen Jeffreys in June 2000 is suggestive of this legacy, and intimates an established master/apprentice approach to pedagogy at the Court:

I went for lunch with Stephen Jeffries [sic]. I felt a little like Luke Skywalker, hanging on his words of advice [. . .] Stephen Jeffries [sic] is seen as a patron, a father, to an entire generation of Royal Court Writers. There are good reasons for this. He has a towering intellect. He is a good man.

As we stood on the corner of Sloane Square he asked to see my hand. Confused, I thought he wanted to see the time so I showed him my watch. But he held my hand and turned it palm upwards. ‘Ah, you’ve got it’, he exclaimed quietly.

– What?

– My acupuncturist told me that this (he pointed to a break in the lines of his own left palm) is writer’s hook. You’ve got it too. There. Only yours goes downward.

It was a magical, generous gesture. Like a beautiful card trick. He turned to go but before he left he looked over his left shoulder, smiled and told me ‘keep at it’. I walked off, grinning from ear to ear.⁴

Stephens’s anecdote is illustrative of a culture of ‘a sort of [. . .] “respect for [your] elders”’ that the director Gordon Anderson remembers prevailing at the Royal Court in the early 2000s (2010). Indeed, the language used to describe the development of writers at the theatre during this time – playwrights were ‘schooled [. . .] taught and encouraged’ (Gompertz n.d.: online) by a Writers’ ‘Tutor’ – is suggestive of a teacher/pupil dynamic in which an older generation passes down knowledge to a younger one.

A central axiom within these principles, one to which Stephens returns most in his notes, is ‘characters’ desires are the engine of theatre’.⁵ A diary entry from 16 May 2000 records the following from a conversation with Graham Whybrow:

A scene consists of a dramatic action – the playing out of the behavioural tactics a character uses to get what he or she wants.

A drama consists of a story which propels a character into progressive states of crisis.⁶

Later that month, Stephens records the following:

Narrative is born out of desire and learning what characters want. Identifying the specific nature of desire is a keen way to structure insight – political, emotional, philosophical. [. . .]

Stories dramatize desire.

Plays play out the conflict of this desire.

Desire is the human response to political/emotional situations.

We are what we want.⁷

The claim that ‘narrative is born out of desire’ is accompanied by the proposition that ‘desire is a politically specific phenomenon’,⁸ a perspective that suggests that what and how we desire is a social phenomenon that can be collectively constructed, directed, frustrated and exploited. If the substance of dramatic action is the repertoire of behavioural tactics characters adopt to get what they want, then it follows that the playwright’s task is, firstly, to create complex and beguiling characters and, secondly, know these characters intimately, so as to understand not only what they ‘want’ but also how they would go about ‘getting it’.

There is, in the notes Stephens makes during these workshops, a further dimension to consider: while the action of a scene may be driven by the desire of a character, the most compelling drama is that which ‘inserts a tension between the desire and the action’.⁹ Fear may be dramatized by depicting efforts to remain calm, for example; failure may be communicated by dramatizing the attempt to succeed. According to this dramaturgical model, if there is no tension between what the character wants and the behavioural tactics they employ to get it, then the space to engender an engaged act of interpretation is foreclosed and, effectively, the role of the audience nullified. While this dramatic model takes as axiomatic the idea that theatre audiences are not passive voyeurs but interpretative agents within the live event, it also, arguably, implies a fairly prescriptive range of spectatorial activity: to look for, and correctly diagnose, subtext; to identify and appreciate psychological complexity; to assume a discrepancy and fixed relation between ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ appearances; and, through a ‘uniform transmission’ of meaning, to ‘get out’ that which the playwright has ‘put in’ to the play: ‘What the spectator must see is what the [playwright and] director makes her see’ (Rancière 2009: 14, original emphasis).¹⁰ Interestingly, this is a model of dramatic writing that would later be challenged by the German director Sebastian Nübling when working on Stephens’s Three Kingdoms (2011) – ‘Sebastian [. . .] enjoy[s] it when text articulates idea, rather than text releasing idea through sub-text, so I [wrote] text that made ideas explicit’ (Stephens qtd in Bolton 2012b: vii, original emphasis) – and, indeed, later of Stephens’s works (Carmen Disruption [2014], Nuclear War [2017]) explore the fusion of, rather than tension between, intention and utterance.

During the same period at the Royal Exchange...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Contextualization
• 1 Tension
• 2 Transgression
• 3 Juxtaposition
• 4 Contradiction
• 5 Critical Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright