INTERVIEW with Simon Stephens

by Yulia Savikovskaya

This interview with British playwright Simon Stephens took place in February 2021 just a few days after his 50th Jubilee. Simon Stephens is an Artistic Associate at the Lyric Hammersmith (London), the author of Punk Rock (2009), Harper Regan (2007), Motortown (2006), Morning Sun (2021), Blindness (2020, adaptation of José Saramago’s novel) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012, adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel) that had been running successfully in London and New York, and has also been translated to Russian and has had a production in Sovremennik, Moscow. Stephens has also written British versions of classical plays by Chekhov, Ibsen and Brecht. He is a presenter of the Royal Court Playwright’s Podcast for which he met 40 different playwrights. 

Yulia Savikovskaya: Simon, do you feel now, having turned fifty, that you have now a sense of perspective on your previous career? Do you know at this moment what are your biggest achievements, and what are the ones to look forward to? Can you do ‘milestones’ reflection of your life?

Simon Stephens: Well, that’s a really interesting question. I don’t know, I think as an artist, as a writer, my inclination has tended to look forward rather than look back. My concern has tended to be with the piece that I’m writing, or working on, or thinking about, rather than the achievements that I’ve done. I try to enjoy those achievements. I think I’m just proud to… not proud, but pleased and grateful, to have been able to make the work that I’ve made, work with the people that I’ve worked with, the collaborations have been really exciting, especially those, although not exclusively, collaborations that I’ve been returning to, my working relationship with Sebastian Nübling, Sean Holmes, or Sarah Frankcom, very different working relationships as well, the idea that I’ve worked with Sebastian or with Marianne Elliott, or with Katie Mitchell, or Sarah Frankcom, you know, that’s been a great deal. The fact that my work has allowed me to travel, and I think that’s been the thing that’s been the most extraordinary, in the moments of most excitement, the places my plays have taken me to, man! That’s been genuinely remarkable. Sometimes it’s the place, sometimes it’s the teaching. I’ve been to Peru, or Melbourne, or Tokyo, or the amount of times that I’ve been to New York, or to go driving with my wife driving through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, because the play was taken to Denver, or to open a play in Sao Paulo with Ivo van Hove. I think the collaborations have been the things which I look back at with the sense of achievement. Being able to travel again, and being able to collaborate again, and to work with people – that’s something I’ve really been looking forward to. I’m not drawn to say I’m proud of a particular play, because I’m proud of all the plays equally, it’s more that I’m proud of the body of work.

But do you sometimes sit and think, ok, when I was twenty, I had these themes, and they are in these plays, and when I was thirty that was another thematic field, can you sort of already analyze yourself in previous texts?

I don’t know if I do this analytically because I don’t know how helpful it is for an artist. What’s interesting when I look back on the very first plays, the playwright Alistair McDowall asked me this question once – what was in my very first play that was also in my most recent play? The very first play was a dramatic monologue, a dramatization of a Tom Waits song called Frank’s Wild Years, and what is in that play that is also in my most recent play? So if I were to do that now – I think alcohol, I think family, I think a consideration of what is home. And I just think that you could apply that to pretty much any of the plays. And there are themes in the newest one that work, you know the newest one is a consideration of race, and whiteness, and the privilege of being white, but those themes of how we drink, where are our homes and where we come from, violence as well, in both of the plays there is some violence.

Do you have, through this year, also had a certain time to go into introspection, what was this year for you?

Yes, for sure. The lockdown was announced quite late in the UK, which was catastrophic, as it happens, so these couple of weeks when there was a lockdown in Italy, and there was no lockdown in the UK, when the coronavirus was spreading through Europe, the UK decided not to lock down, I was really scared, I became quite frightened, in fact. And I’m not normally a frightened person, and I’m not normally panicky, and my wife was slightly freaked out by how frightened and panicky I was, so I really gave myself a talking to, and I changed habits of my life, I started meditating for the first time in my life, I’ve never done that before, not with any great length, and not with any kind of brilliance, but just ten minutes every day, just kind of breathing and thinking, it was really calming. I tried and still do an hour’s reading every morning on something that’s not related to the thing that I’m working on. This is to remind myself of the joy of reading, and the joyful processes involved in that. I started keeping a journal which is not related to the work, job, and trying to keeping that, though often failing. But actually in the last year I’ve worked a lot. I’ve spoken to a lot of playwrights who have not worked a great deal in the last year. And I’ve written a new play on my own, I’ve written a new play with another playwright, I’ve written a dramatic monologue, I’ve written a piece of a quite abstract dance text, I’ve written a film, and I’ve written two first episodes of TV dramas and I’ve written several kind of short pieces for theatre companies and YouTube channels, so I’ve done a lot of stuff.

I was thinking that always the real interaction, and maybe visits to theatre, I presume they always fed you, and kind of gave you some additional motivation to work, but that kind of seems the opposite situation, when you seem, you say, that you have been very productive while all the external input into your mind has been cut, right? So why is it, do you think, how did you turn to being an introvert? I remember that you were going to the Royal Court or other theatres two or three times a week at some point…

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t necessarily conscious in that way. I think and it was just a means of surviving in the situation. I was really fortunate, my wife built me this room to work in, it’s a beautiful room, it’s my favourite room I’ve ever been in, and I’ve got everything in here that I need, I’ve got my guitars in here, my records are in here, my drink cabinet is over there full of Japanese whisky that I love. You know, it’s a really happy place for me to be, and I think there’s a lot of coincidences that come together to create a year where I was able to be in a space that was all meditative, I needed to go to that space in order to deal with the panic that I was feeling. In recent weeks there’s a part of me that’s started to worry a little bit about theatre and how the theatre is going to come back. I’m really ready for the stimulation of other playwrights and theatrical experiences.

You have made a lot of British translations of other playwrights, including Chekhov. I’ve never asked you about these works. In Russia you usually have one (or may be two) translations of a certain text, the text sort of exists, different  people use it in their productions… In Britain it’s the reverse: each new production commissions a new translation of the foreign text. So for example, with the Katie Mitchell, when she said she wanted The Cherry Orchard, or The Seagull for the Lyric Theatre, how did your process go, did you look at previous translations, did you immerse yourself in Chekhov?

Oh God, I am terrified to talk to a Russian about translations. The processes were very different for both translations, and here it is the very weird and insistent question of the vocabulary. I try not to use the word translation or the verb to translate on The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard, or I am the Wind, or Doll’s House, or The Threepenny Opera. Because I didn’t translate them. I didn’t work from Russian, I worked from literal translations, so it seems a slightly inaccurate verb to use. I call all these ‘British language versions’. With all of the plays that I’ve written versions of in the English language, I’ve tended to be very loyal or tried to be very loyal, they’re not for me adaptations, I am not really changing the form or the content, or the structure or the characters, I’m trying to keep them quite… I only do plays that I love, and so the gest of me making a version it’s kind of like an attempt to share my love of the reading of the original play. On neither of those occasion have I read the play in the original language because, well, I could have done it, but would have need subtitles. It so happens that I haven’t seen either of those plays in Russian, or read them in Russian, so my relationship with them has always been through other people’s versions. With The Cherry Orchard, for me, like it’s a holy text, like in my own particular relationship with playwriting, it is a sacred text, The Cherry Orchard, it’s kind of one in a handful of plays that I think transcends… There’s a TV series called The Last Dance which is about Michael Jordan playing for the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, and watching him play basketball… it’s not like a normal human, it’s like a man from another planet, and The Cherry Orchard feels like… it’s Michael Jordan writing a play (laughs). Finding a human in that play is almost impossible because it’s so deeply perfect. So when Katie Mitchell first asked me to write a version of The Cherry Orchard I said no for about two years, because I didn’t think I was good enough. Then I was ready, and I said I’d like to go with it. With The Cherry Orchard I really reread all the Chekhov stories, I read the letters, I read different versions from different writers of all the different plays, and I worked very slowly, and very carefully. With The Seagull, I did the opposite, I didn’t ready any of the versions, I didn’t go back to the stories, I didn’t go back to the letters, I was literally trying to attack it, actually I think I did a better job on The Seagull than on The Cherry Orchard. I think The Seagull is actually a very good version, I’m really pleased with it. I think The Cherry Orchard feels a bit nervous. When I read my Cherry Orchard I can feel myself being careful. And when I read my SeagullI can feel myself not being careful. And I think it is because I didn’t have the same relationship with The Seagull. I thought The Seagull was an extraordinary play, but it was like a practice draft before he got to The Cherry Orchard. So I didn’t feel so sacred about it. I just felt more confident. But actually the more I worked on The Seagull the more I thought it’s perfect (laughs). It is extraordinary. And now I want to do all of them, I want to do Uncle Vanja, and I want to do Three Sisters, and Platonov, and Ivanov, but I don’t think I’ll be able to because I think probably the theatres don’t commission white middle aged heterosexual men to write versions of Chekhov anymore, they’ve got plenty of them. So if they do a new Chekhov, the job will go to other writers.

What do you think now would be a prerequisite for a playwright to transcend the cultural and initial borders? I have found that even when translating adaptable plays, it’s not that easy to promote them in a new country, because it seems that the theatre worlds are not so porous as we might want them to, so each culture, even each city, St Petersburg and Moscow are hermetic, and England, Russia and France. What should a playwright do to be able to transcend the borders, or do you think you have to be dead to transcend the borders?

I don’t necessarily think you need to be dead. I think that’s… I wonder if it has ever happened during somebody’s lifetime. To be held at that level of esteem. May be Carol Churchill gets there… Arthur Miller perhaps, during his lifetime… Tennessee Williams perhaps to a degree, Harold Pinter probably. I don’t think it’s something you can prescribe a formula for, or predict. I don’t think it’s something you can tell a writer how to do. I think there are some writers who reach into the understanding of our sense of self, they are not just writing about things which are culturally specific, they’re writing about humanness that goes deeper than that. Maybe in that depth of humanness it’s possible for people to recognize themselves in the stories that are being told. It’s an alchemical thing, really. It’s not something you can prescribe or predict.

So there is no logical way to say to yourself – now I am going to write an internationally acceptable play, right? You can’t do this.

You just write what you want to see, all you can do is write a play that you want to see. If you’re trying to do anything other than that, then you’re just lying. You just write the play you wish somebody else had written so you can watch it, that’s all you can do, as soon as you start doing anything other than that, I think you’re starting to lie.

At the moment the only play of yours that is known in Russia and has been staged here is The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time. I’m sure you’ve been telling the story now lots of times but could you describe how you worked with Mark Haddon, with his book, how did the play take shape?

It’s a novel I’ve read years before I met Mark, and years before I took on the adaptation. I read it when I was writing Motortown, which is a play which has a character on the Asperger’s/autistic spectrum. And I read The Incident in order to research and explore the spectrum. And there were very striking reactions to reading The Curious Incident back in 2005, one was that I genuinely loved the book, I think it’s a glorious book, it’s really gorgeous, and two, because of the brilliant decision on perspective that Mark made, a slight sense of frustration that you really don’t know a great deal about or see the constellation of people who surround Christopher. So even before I met Mark, I remember thinking, I wonder what Christopher’s Dad’s like, or I wonder what Christopher’s Mom’s like, so a part of my imagination was turning the novel into a kind of three-dimensional iteration that didn’t exist in the novel. And then I met Mark in 2006. At the National Theatre Studio we were in an assignment together at the same time, we made friends with one another, we liked one another. We hung out and we had a lot in common, we just enjoyed each other’s company. He was trying to write plays and I read his plays, and we had kids the same age, we were into the same kind of music and all that kind of stuff. A couple of years after that, in two thousand and eight he called me home, and asked me if I’d think about adapting The Curious Incident. And I remember having a range of different reactions. On one hand being quite grateful, being aware that the book was a phenomenon, international best-seller, and if I didn’t fuck it up, it could be quite a lucrative job, (laughs) I remember thinking I could make money out of this, if I don’t fuck it up, it could be quite good. On the other hand Mark is a friend and writer who I have a lot of respect for, and I didn’t want to let him down, and I’ve never made an adaptation before, I didn’t know how to do it. The other thought I had before I started working on it, I think I started working on it in 2009, maybe 2010, my kids were eleven and seven and two years old, and I really want any of my kids to go and see my work, but they couldn’t go and see Punk Rock, or Pornography, or Motortown, or any of the kind of savage, strange distressing plays I was presenting at that time (chuckles), so I was really tickled by the idea that I could write something that my kids could go and see. I said yes to the job, I said yes on the condition that we didn’t go to a producer, or take a commission, because I wanted to be able to just say to Mark, I’ve tried my hardest, I did my best, and I couldn’t do it. And he was very cool with that. And so that’s how I made it. I wrote it for Mark, and I wrote it for my kids. And I think being released from the burden of a commercial production, from the burden of anybody else’s expectations allowed me to be really free. Practically, I remember there were a couple of steps involved in making the adaptation that were really key. I realized the difference between the work of a dramatist and the work of a novelist is that while the novelist is able to consider the idea or reflection or memory or observation, a dramatist concerns themselves with the behaviour. And all of the abstraction, all of the reflection, all of the memory that a dramatist might explore needs to be distilled through behaviour. And in a way for a novelist it doesn’t, they can just have a character thinking, a character remembering. But if you just inform a memory in a play, there ends the drama. One of the seductive things in Mark’s novel is Christopher’s voice, and the way Christopher reflects, or remembers, or observes, is so charming, and so truthful, that I was aware that this was something that was going to be a hazard, because if I allowed myself to fall into Christopher’s voice too much, I would turn my eye away from the drama.

So I did two things: the first thing was to go through the book, and just make a list of all the things that Christopher does, all of the events, to move away from reflection, memory and observation, and look at the behaviour. And then build the play from this list. Not from Mark’s astonishing voice, but from that list. And the second thing that I did was I went through and I transcribed all of the direct speech, because I had an intuitive sense that when the novelist has their character speak out loud, in direct speech, and uses quotation marks, there is something, whether the novelist does this consciously or not, something about the heat of the moment when the character is made to speak out loud, that is the centre of the author’s interest in that world. And so I created a twenty-page skeleton script with all the direct speech and the novel and I walked to the National Theatre Studio and got a handful of actors who were in the company there just to sit around the table and read that, just to see if there was anything in it, and it was really exciting, it really felt as if there was potentially something to be done, there. There were some plot holes that needed exploring and fleshing out, it was kind of pretty technical and practical. The other thing was that to entirely lose Christopher’s voice would be a great shame, you know, the novel is about the way Christopher sees the world, and while I think it’s right to build the play around the drama rather than around the observation, to lose it entirely was the real dramaturgical struggle. How to get Christopher to speak to the audience, when having Christopher speak to strangers would have been such a profound betrayal to Christopher’s personality? I tried various different methods of this, at one point I was thinking of having two Christophers, one who could speak to the audience and one who couldn’t, and have the one who could speak to the audience work as a kind of spirit guide for the one who couldn’t speak to the audience. I think that there was still something in that, and there is still something in the play that exists like that a little bit, but exists in Siobhan’s (Christopher’s teacher) incarnation.

What I realized, and in my memory it was kind of an epiphany, I remember walking down the street, I had the realization that Mark’s novel is a novel that pretends to be a book written by a character in the book, yeah? It presents it as though it’s Christopher’s book, and it’s actually quite a concrete thing, Christopher’s book, it’s his homework, that his teacher set him to do. And then I became quite interested in this object of Christopher’s book, and I wondered if there was something useful in there. I realized that there are three people who read Christopher’s book. Christopher reads it himself, Christopher’s dad reads it, and Christopher’s teacher reads it. And I tried different versions and different ways of using those three readers, as a means of getting Christopher’s voice out in the auditorium. I tried a draft where it started with Siobhan reading, and then it was Christopher’s dad reading it, and finally it was Christopher reading. And these moments in the text where Christopher speaks to the audience, there is a weird kind of moment, when suddenly, when Christopher is navigating his way through Swindon to get to the train station, all of a sudden Christopher speaks to the audience, and dramaturgically it comes out of nowhere, that bit, it’s a messy corner but I quite like it. And there’s a dramaturgically better bit when Christopher’s dad reads the book out loud, but what you realize is Christopher couldn’t stain his position as narrator because it would have felt dishonest. And the Dad wouldn’t have worked as a narrator because his relationship to the material was too hot, right, it was too emotionally heated. Every word he read in that book hurt him, so that would bring a tone of agony to the play that didn’t feel right. But! Teacher reading the book was perfect, because although the teacher is a really small character in the novel, I think Siobhan appears only in two paragraphs in the novel, she reads his book. I’m a teacher, I still teach, so I know what it’s like to read people’s work and know the strange sense of dislocation and joyful connection between a student’s work and knowing the student. So you sit down with the student’s book and think oh my god it’s amazing this is them, this is what they’re like. And I thought that energy and excitement was how the readers of Mark’s novel read the novel, so she felt as the perfect narrator in that sense. The other thing I thought is that everybody who’s ever been to school, which increasingly is everybody in the world now, everybody who has ever been to school, even people who hated school and had a miserable time there, they had one teacher who they had a really key relationship with, who they felt as though that teacher understood them more than anybody had understood them, they felt they could be true to that teacher, in a way they could not to anybody else. So I turned that play into a play about the relationship between Siobhan and Christopher, it is a play about teaching. The key point of that play is to see the world the way Christopher Boon sees it. And that would be one way in, because we can see the world through the prism of a relationship with a special teacher.

So in a way, while he is on a quest of his own, we are on the quest into his brain, right?

Yeah, because we’re on that quest, what I think is interesting, is that we’re not necessarily on that quest from his point of view, I don’t think we see the story from his point of view, really, apart from one really important moment, to which I’ll come to. I think we see it from Siobhan’s point of view. We want him to succeed because Siobhan wants him to succeed. I think emotionally the play ends with him getting an A star. And the play really ends… one of the first conversations I had with Mark was about the ending of the novel. Because the novel is written from Christopher’s point of view, the ending has this incredibly confident, celebratorily tone about all the things that Christopher was going to do with his life. And when I read it I remember thinking there is a deliberate irony there. Mark knows that Christopher’s imaginary future is not going to be easy. It’s a kind of tricky fifteen-year-old kid with, what’s the phrase, behavioural issues, or no, he’s difficult… when you’re breaking the rules you can feel the hostility of the people around you. 

You’ve been mentioning teaching and you’ve been involved in the Youth Program at the Royal Court, and you also did your podcast with other playwrights. I wonder if you could elaborate on this part of your life, so first, do you think that the knowledge, the playwriting skill, the knowledge can be transmitted? Or when you  are teaching you are fostering a talent, not transmitting your own knowledge? And then with the podcast, what was the goal of it, picking the brains of other writers?

I think… I love, I really love both of your metaphors there, although I’ve not used them or come across to use them before, but I think that both are brilliant: transmission and fostering, I love that. I think fundamentally, with fostering you create an environment where writers can think and develop and nurture. That can be a process of asking questions, that can be a process of offering reading suggestions and reading lists, engaging in conversations and ways of reading, but I think it’s really easy to romanticize the impossibility of transmission. I think there are some things that we can transmit to one another. In a way it’s slightly self-aggrandizing to say: I don’t think it’s possible to teach playwriting but I think it’s possible to teach open-heart surgery. (chuckles) Or I think it’s possible to teach somebody to land a jumbo jet. You know, I dare say that landing a jumbo jet is more difficult than writing a play, or that carrying out open-heart surgery is more difficult than writing a play. But you wouldn’t have an open-heart surgeon saying I can’t really teach it, you just gotta feel it (laughs). There is this, and this, and you have got to learn it. Of course every open-heart surgeon is different, and every open-heart surgeon brings their own personality to the process of surgery, but there are certain fundamental tectonical rules. I think the differences of understanding them in drama is when you think you’re dealing with the rule, but actually you’re dealing with the convention. And the convention has a particular ideology that is worth being aware of, the cultural specificity of those conventions and the cultural specificity of the ideologies that are underpinned, which is slightly different to open-heart surgery. But I do think you can teach people dramatic action. I think you can teach people to think in images, and to think in stage craft, and to consider their relationship with directors and designers and actors. And sometimes the reason I would resist the romantic notion that it’s impossible to teach playwriting is because I think there is an ideological position underpinning that romantic assumption, and the ideological position is that it’s only really possible for certain people to write plays. And historically, if you look at that, this was never being made explicit, but this kind of position, unconsciously, would suggest that it’s only possible for straight white heterosexual men to write plays (laughs), and it’s politically ideologically deliberate – if not consciously deliberate. It supports and sustains structures that are innately conservative. So there is part of me that goes: you know what? That’s bullshit. Let me tell you, someone who’s never thought about writing a play before, what you need to do if you want to write a play. Let me give you a skillset you might have not have had before because that might make you better at writing plays and it’ll give you some power that these people have maybe got  from years of privilege. The gesture that I aim for in the podcast was the same. The same gesture of empowering aspiring playwrights. It’s meant to encourage or empower. Somebody asked me yesterday how political the podcast was, and I started to say it’s not political at all, and the more I thought about it the more I thought it’s really political. It’s really political that we have a fifty-fifty gender split in that podcast, that we do forty podcasts, with twenty of them being women. If you’re looking at the cannon of contemporary playwriting in Britain it creates the sense it’s fifty percent women, which is the right sense, but actually there’s a lot of white cis hetero men that aren’t included in that podcast, some of them like Martin Crimp whom we asked three times and he said no, and others we didn’t ask, because we wanted to have a fifty-fifty gender split, and we wanted to have ethnic diversity, and a diversity of colour. We didn’t just want kind of white guys. And we wanted the diversity of sexuality, and we wanted it to be free, and we wanted it to be no adverts. So in a way it’s kind of free Open University education for any aspiring playwright, for free. If you want to listen to how Anney Reese writes, or how Roy Williams writes, you can get an hour in their company, for free, anytime you want, there. That’s a deliberate provocation of encouragement.

But then there would be, I think, in my life, and maybe in many other people’s lives, a neurosis of internalized meritocratic doubts. In Russia, I would say, there is a strong division between someone who is talented (has been called so) and thus has a right to write, and someone whose first play is not taken anywhere and then he or she just internalizes the feeling that they are not eligible to enter the writing world. What would you say to people in this situation?

Listen to the fucking podcast! Listen to that podcast. There isn’t a single playwright in all forty of those podcasts who say ‘I wrote my first play and it was immediately produced, and it was a massive success’. The difference between the writers who get produced professionally and the ones who don’t is when those… it is an ideological thing, to a degree, it’s when you get rejected and when you fail with your first, your second, or your third or your fourth, or your fifth, or your sixth, or your seventh play that you write an eighth. And is it that sense of entitlement is really ideologically charged. For sure it’s easier for men to feel the entitlement than for women, for sure. And that’s just a consequence of patriarchy. Patriarchy in my lifetime as a child in the seventies and a teenager in the eighties and a young adult in the nineties, in my lifetime, it has never worked as an explicit exclusion. So I’ve never really been to many places apart from, until quite recently, toilets, in which women weren’t allowed. And I’ve never been in a meeting, and I’ve been in about a billion meetings, maybe four or five official meetings in top levels of internationally celebrated theatres, I’ve never once heard an artistic director say ‘We don’t want to find female playwrights, we want more male playwrights, and we need more white male playwrights’. The total opposite was always the case. Every artistic director I’ve ever worked with at that level has actively searched for non-white female playwrights. Because patriarchy doesn’t operate as an explicit exclusion, it operates through structural entitlement, and it’s really hard to combat that. Because the way in which people running theatres read on an unconscious level might exclude some styles of writing. It’s really really hard to be alert to that. And if you’re a young artist I don’t know what the answer to that is, the only answer that I’ve ever been only able to find was to share with non-white writers or to share with female writers or gay writers or trans writers, queer writers of different forms is that they need to know that every time they write they’re engaging in political activism. And so they’d be encouraged to write another play, because they’re being politically active in the writing of that play. Rather than feel defeated or deflated they should step up and go back to work.

I’ve been listening sometimes to podcasts about blogging, and they always begin with this thing: ‘even if you don’t have anything interesting in your life, start a blog’. And if somebody asks you something like that: I don’t have anything interesting to say, I don’t have a particular voice, I don’t think I am special’. What would you say to them? Why is their voice still interesting? Is there some kind of distinction by interest of voice? Yes, maybe a voice of a gay black woman is maybe now the most interesting because it has never been heard before, but what about what used to be termed the normal? Somebody would say ‘Yes I’m a white young man who has been to Oxford and I think I’m normal, and is my voice to be heard by anyone? Or maybe I just won’t litter the space with my writing’.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, hum. I’ve met straight white men in the last few years who feel exactly that anxiety. I think the way voice operates in playwriting is different to the way voice operates in blogging or vlogging or whatever, because normally the interest of bloggers is to transmit the direct experience of that person, it is autobiographical in that sense. Even playwrights who present themselves by being directly autobiographical are actually always creating fictions. As I think this out loud I imagine that is also true for the blogger, it’s not about a pure unmediated distillation of themselves, they’re creating fictions, too. The job of the writer is not purely to communicate their own experience, it’s to tell a story, it’s to create a fiction. And it doesn’t matter in any way what life you’ve lived, what matters is your capacity to imagine, create and communicate stories. And the imaginary world, the fictional world could be drawn from anywhere. Your responsibility is just to commit to the craft of storytelling with as much clarity as you can, and as much determination as you can. 

Everybody who writes faces that crisis of self-confidence, everybody! Like fucking Carol Churchill faces it, I know this for a fact, I’ve sat down with Carol Churchill and asked her if she doesn’t – she does! I used to teach playwriting in prison, I’ve been talking to a guy in prison. I did a kind of game where they could introduce themselves to one another, and there was a guy called Angus. I remember him introducing himself to the rest of the group and he said, it’s really funny, I thought it’s really strong. He said his name was Angus and he was a criminal, and one of the professional hazards of being a criminal is you have to spend a certain amount of your life in jail. And I was thinking it was a very funny way of looking at the penal justice system, that it was just a professional hazard. You do crime, you’ve got to go to jail, it’s part of the game. I think a professional hazard of being a playwright is having to live with crippling self-doubt. And all of us live with this crippling self-doubt. You know, I live with crippling self-doubt all the time. A little voice, it’s always a voice in your head, telling you you’re not worthy of writing. And I get that voice, and so you get that voice with your plays, every playwright I’ve ever spoken to has got this voice. And this voice is cunning, it takes different iterations. So the voice would tell a thirty-year-old female playwright in Saint Petersburg that she’s never going to make it because she’s just some kind of white thirty-year-old girl in Saint Petersburg who wants to be heard. But that voice won’t tell me that because it knows I’m a fifty-year-old guy professional playwright living in London. So what the voice tells me is you’re past it, remember when you were good? Oh, the time when you were quite good? Between 2007 and 2012 you did really good work, since then everything’s been disappointing, and anyway who really wants to work with this middle-aged cis guy now? And that voice would be speaking to a kind of fifteen-year-old black kid in Manchester and say ‘nobody’s really interested in black teenagers’. And it’ll be also speaking to twenty-two-year-old Oxford graduate saying ‘sorry, Oxford graduates are very unfashionable nowadays’. And all you need to know it is just the fucking voice, you just have to somehow turn it off, or welcome it in, but acknowledge it for what it is, make it a cup of tea, make it sit down next to you and say ‘alright you fucker, you be you, I’m just going to write my play’.

And what are the most rewarding moments? Can you describe these flashes of pleasure that you’ve got, either on seeing your play or some moments of getting an idea, or finishing, what are those moments?

Oh there’s so much I enjoy about it! There’s so much which is rewarding and really nourishing. That part of the working day, you know, where I get to read a book, I get to watch a film, I get to think about an idea, I get to sit in this room, this beautiful room, and go into my mind and imagine stories and worlds, and that’s my job. I get this travels in me through other artists, and that’s my job, again. To work with actors, I fucking adore actors, the idea of the actors to give of themselves… imagine having a dream, a nightdream, I had an amazing dream last night, there was a moment in my dream last night I remember, I was going to the toilet without any clothes on but anyway, it was a nightdream, imagine your nightdream, you know, you wake up, and if you never tell anybody your dreams it’s always very boring, yeah, what if you do tell somebody your dream and rather than being really boring you tell it to a group of incredibly talented actors and designers and directors and instead of all of them going oh fucking hell not another dream story they go right, let’s make it real. And then bring that brilliance to enact that dream. How intoxicating is that? I would say that the rehearsal in Broadway for The Curious Incident, watching the stage management team, Alex Sharp, how to construct a train track. Watching brilliant minds trying to just build a railway track together. And me thinking, this is astonishing, there was a point where I wrote the stage directions to build the biggest train track in the world, and all of a sudden I’m in New York, I’m in Broadway, and we’re making this come true. Incredibly moving. And as incredibly moving as, you see, an auditorium of forty or a hundred or four hundred or two thousand people, and they hold that breath, to see what happens next, that’s astonishing.

A final question: how actually involved are you, usually, at the rehearsals, and do you like to control what’s been done with your text?

Normally when it’s a world premiere, I like to go the first week and then leave them alone and then come back for the final weeks, and for the previews, and be there for the opening. I try to acknowledge that when I’m there all I am is a skill set in a room, and the most important is I’m working for the director, it’s not my play, our play, specifically it’s the director’s iteration of my play, it’s a re-tale of my play. My job is to empower and to help, not to control or dictate. And so often directors understand my plays much more deeply than I ever do. To not celebrate that would seem crazy because when I get to watch how Sebastian Nübling or Katie Mitchell or Marianne Elliott work on my plays, they’re fucking brilliant, they don’t need me to tell them what to do. It’s more like we’re having a conversation with one another. It’s like I’ll be having a conversation with someone and say that’s the wrong thing to say at this point, you need to say this thing for this conversation to work, that would be like a fucking horrible conversation, right? (laughs) So you need to be open to that possibility of cooperation. And now that I’m fortunate enough to see productions of my plays the countries and productions I’ve been able to work in, I don’t think I’ve ever gone and told somebody they’ve got it wrong. It’s just a privilege, and sometimes they teach me things about my plays or about my writing or myself that I didn’t realize.

In your view, might the digital effects and all the new technologies of communication enter into theatre-making and maybe even theatre consciousness for both writers and the viewers?

I mean, well, it’s hard to tell at the moment, in a way that novels affected the playwriting, you know, playwriting was around before the novel, and then the novel changed playwriting. You look at the way Ibsen or Eugene O’Neill or George Bernard Shaw were affected by the novel, on some way that permeates the way of tectonic thinking of those playwrights. In a way cinema has percolated into playwriting, or the internet has percolated into playwriting, so the digital technologies will also percolate into playwriting… I don’t think it’d be a smart thing for a playwright to consciously try and engineer that. I think all you can do as a playwright is write the play you wish somebody else had written so you can watch it. As soon as you start thinking I know how to do it, I’m going to write the great play for the Zoom age, you fuck yourself. You’re hamstringing yourself, so don’t do that. Just write the play you wish somebody else had written so you can watch it.

Yulia Savikovskaya (RU) is a playwright, translator, and theatre and music writer. Her plays have been staged in Moscow, St Petersburg and Sofia. The Leak (2017) had been shortlisted for the Liubimobka Drama Festival and staged at the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow in 2021. The Snails has been shortlisted for Remarka Drama Festival 2023. Yulia has also translated three modern British plays, including The Uncertainty Principle (2017) by Simon Stephens. She holds a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Merton College, Oxford.