I wrote my first play when I was 16, starting putting them on about 19, and somehow managed to start making a living from it at 24. Brilliant Adventures is my first ‘major’ production, or however you want to say it.

This means that every now and then I look up and see six actors, a director, an assistant director, a stage manager, and, depending what day it is, another three or four people milling about, and wonder how on earth I got to this point from when I first wrote the play, a process that involved me sitting on my own in the middle of the night, often only in my pants, trying to wrestle the idea out of my head and onto the page.

I finished the first draft of Adventures in September 2010. It’s a bit of an odd play, a mix of social drama and science fiction, and for some reason it feels like a Western as well. It’s set in a town 20 minutes down the road from where I grew up, so feels hugely personal, and when I finished it it felt like the closest I’d gotten at that point to what I want theatre to be – an experience made essential and exciting by the ‘liveness’ of it. I want to make sure anyone coming to see the play doesn’t feel like they could’ve just watched the same story on telly.

Anyway.

Once I’d finished it, I sent it out, and it was then promptly rejected by a whole host of wonderful theatres. Everyone seemed to like it, and everyone wanted to meet up and talk about it, and they said all kinds of lovely things and sometimes even bought me a lunch. But no one seemed to quite fancy doing it. Eventually, it was awarded a Bruntwood prize in 2011, which was a massive honour, and an incredible stroke of luck and good timing, as I was totally skint at the time. Looking at some of the writers who’ve won it in the past (Duncan Macmillan, Andrew Sheridan), it was a real joy for me to be a part of that family, and my emails suddenly started getting replied to a bit quicker. But even before that, the play had become my ‘calling-card script’ which means it was sent all over the place and ended up getting my foot in the door for various other bits and bobs.

One of the biggest things it got me was an attachment at the Royal Court, where I was given a little room and a wage, and set about writing a fairly terrible play. Hats off to the Court, they didn’t banish me, and instead invited me to be part of their ‘Supergroup’ of writers, and programmed Brilliant Adventures to be part of the Young Writers Festival in early 2012, as a rehearsed reading.

The reading was directed by Caroline Steinbeis, who would end up directing the full production because she is incredibly brilliant and ‘got’ the play immediately. It was great to be able to carry the same relationship with the director from the reading over to the full production, having become friends in the process. This means we now have a highly effective shorthand where I’ll only have to kick over about two tables for her to know I’m not happy with something.

Now we’re just starting week four of rehearsals for the show, and it seems like a long time ago I was sat in my undercrackers at one in the morning wondering if a comma was misplaced or not.

I feel immensely lucky to be in this position, staging a strange play with a strange title in two major theatres in two cities I love. I feel hugely attached to this script not just for its content, but because it’s been a companion for three years, taking me to all kinds of places and introducing me to all kinds of brilliant people who are now friends and colleagues. It opened doors to relationships with buildings like the Royal Court, where I’m fortunate to be working again this summer as part of their ‘Open Court’ summer rep season.

I hope the audiences respond to it – when you spend so long having meetings and talking about a play in an academic way, it can be very easy to forget that the ultimate aim is to put on a show for a group of people who’ve paid for a ticket, given up their evening, and are really hoping it’s not shit.

I hope they like it.

Brilliant Adventures runs in The Studio at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre from Wednesday 8 May to Saturday 25 May. It then transfers to Live Theatre, Newcastle from Thursday 30 May to Saturday 15 June.

Alistair McDowall

Writer Alistair McDowall is currently on attachment with Paines Plough and Channel 4. BRILLIANT ADVENTURES was awarded a Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in 2011 and was part of the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writers Festival 2012. In 2012 he was commissioned to write for the Soho Theatre/Live Theatre collaboration UTOPIA.

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The Easter weekend came right in the middle of our rehearsals. It was frustrating to stop working but perhaps, we thought, no bad thing to take a few days away from thinking about global conflict. And then we woke up to fairly apocalyptic news. In Korea, US stealth bombers flew a 6,000 mile round trip to drop bombs on a target range, demonstrating their willingness and ability to protect South Korea against the North. North Korea threatened violent, even nuclear, retaliation. Meanwhile at home, the government implemented massive benefit cuts in the name of “freeing” people from “welfare dependency”. We moved into British Summer Time but the snow continued and the world still seemed gripped by the mentality of the Cold War.

It’s hard to believe that the decisions to implement such life altering events are approved by one person, one brain using the same cognitive process as you when you decided what to have for breakfast today. It must be a staggering responsibility. When we ask our world leaders to reflect on the human cost of their decisions, they usually deflect scrutiny. They say, “I inherited certain circumstances and I had to make an impossible decision. It’s not a matter of doing what is ethically ‘right’ because neither A nor B is ideal.”

Fair enough. Perhaps we cannot fathom the ramifications of their choices, the information that they are privy to and the pressures that they operate under. But can we accept that the choice is as binary as it is presented? Is bargaining with terrorists the opposite of licensing torture? Is cutting benefits the opposite of closing hospitals? In an impossible choice between A and B, what would it mean to table option C?

When we started devising The Situation Room, we wanted to examine this question through the lens of war. Because it’s there that the results of split-second decisions are furthest reaching. We wanted our audience to have a distanced, top-down view of the war in question. So we explored the period of history most famed for its proxy conflicts, The Cold War. We read about The Cuban Missile Crisis – the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war; about the partition of Berlin, about Vietnam, Korea, Chile, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, El Salvador; all conflicts propelled into greater violence by the intervention of the USA and/or the USSR. We found that despite their opposing rhetoric, in order to gain support in their ongoing global power struggle, both of the superpowers were prone to supporting despotic regimes throughout the developing world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the American-backed President of Nicaragua, “He may be a Son of a Bitch, but he’s our Son of a Bitch.”

Roosevelt’s comments were typical of the attitude the greatest good was the resistance of world domination by the evil forces of Communism. Because the enemy is presented as utterly remorseless, and their threat is shown to be constant, any action taken to preserve ‘Western Values’ – be it supporting a corrupt military junta or ordering a village to be napalmed – is acceptable.

On our enforced break from rehearsals we were reminded that sadly this is not an outmoded way of thinking. Even today as we step back into the world of The Situation Room, we’ve been reading about Camp Nama, the secret joint US-UK installation at Baghdad airport, where prisoners were kept in cells the size of dog kennels, beaten and electrocuted with cattle prods. Governments are still committing atrocities in the name of their version of civilisation and spreading fear of what is other to make those actions more acceptable to their own people.

Researching the rhetoric used to discuss these kinds of decisions, we’ve found that it’s helpful to look at war as a game and lives as a resource.  In the twentieth century, Game Theory was devised as a way of measuring the arms race. Its application grew in The Cold War; it became a way of second guessing the response of your intended actions by an unseen enemy. Like thinking five moves ahead in chess. Predictably, when you spend so long scrutinising the guy sitting opposite, you don’t think too much about the pawns.

As our audiences arrive at Shoreditch Town Hall, they’re divided into two teams. Their objective is simple: to beat the other side. As the show goes on, the actions become more extreme, the morality more blurred. The choice between A and B becomes harder to make as the pressure on you to make it becomes higher. If the game is violence and the goal is victory, will you win at all cost or will you play to lose?

A Younger Theatre readers can see The Situation Room for £10 (tickets usually £15) with our exclusive ticket offer. 

Image: Simon Carroll-Jones as Benjamin Stokely in The Situation Room. Photograph by Vish Vishvanath.

James Blakey and Tom Mansfield

Oscar Mike make interactive theatre and theatrical games for audiences who want to be at the centre of a story. They return to Shoreditch Town Hall to continue their collaboration with this exciting and growing venue. The core company are directors James Blakey and Tom Mansfield, and designer Hannah Sibai who began working together at West Yorkshire Playhouse and have collaborated on This City (WYP / Light Night Leeds), True Colours (Manchester Histories Festival / Library Theatre / Northern Stage @ St Stephens), The Falling Sickness (Theatre-in-the-Mill / Upstart Theatre). They are currently commissioned by The Festival of the North-East to develop Wall, a sandbox game about justice set in a modern Britain enslaved by the Roman Empire. James and Tom trained together on the Arts Council MFA in Theatre Directing. In addition to their work for the company, they work nationally as freelance theatre directors. Tom Mansfield is artistic director of Upstart. James Blakey is currently a staff director at The National Theatre.

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In this new blog series, David Byrne, Artistic Director of the New Diorama Theatre, will explore the process of writing and staging a musical, looking at the place of musical theatre in Britain today…

This April, here at New Diorama Theatre, we will stage our first musical. The Universal Machine will be a new musical about the life and death of Alan Turing. And I really didn’t want it to be a musical. I fought against it for quite some time but it was the only way to go and, as soon as I gave in, it felt right. The most recurring question or reaction I’ve had to the piece is why have we turned such a potentially tragic story into a piece of musical theatre?

There is a prevailing assumption that all musicals are staged with lines of kicking girls, jazz hands and camp choreography. Personally, I’ve never seen a musical like this. I’m not sure they really exist outside pastiches in The Simpsons. Most musicals, especially popular ones of the past 20 years, are centered around obscure subjects and issues that you wouldn’t initially dream of setting to music – just look at the Lloyd-Webber back catalogue: the life story of the wife of an Argentinean dictator, obscure parts of the Old Testament and, soon we’re told, the Profumo affair.

The truth is we’ve made Alan’s story into a musical for one main reason: the content fitted the form. I wanted to show the world of a man who can make the most incredible, genius intellectual jumps but had problems connecting to those around him. Showing the people in Alan’s life moving with erudite ease, able to express themselves and their emotions with effortless clarity seems to fit the idea of a completely choreographed piece. Here, through a musical language, characters can communicate freely and try to connect through music, which is always hardwired into us emotionally.

That is the basis on which we’re going forward.

The smaller reason was I’ve been dying to programme some musical theatre at New Diorama. One of the recurring themes I’ve noticed in my professional career has been the complaint that there aren’t enough new musicals. Barely six months goes by without somebody writing an article or starting a debate to ask why in the UK there are so few new pieces of musical theatre attempted while our cousins State-side, seem to churn them out to a more consistent high standard quite regularly.

I’ve always been a huge fan of musicals. Early in my career this was scoffed at by my superiors but, landing a venue of my own to run and programme, I was determined to make musical theatre part of the mosaic of work we present. Also, Jemima, our General Manager had championed new musical theatre while she worked at Arts Council England and fought for companies such as Perfect Pitch to get public funding for the first time. We felt like the right team to do it.

I started off at the big festivals (mainly Edinburgh) trying to find really strong new British musicals. I then moved to looking across the London Fringe, attending showcases and new productions. What I found was a surprising lack of variety and innovation, especially when compared to developments in other dramatic forms, with nowhere near the same number to choose from. I’ve been wondering why that might be the case.

My theory is that all the best writing programmes in the UK that playwrights gravitate towards encourage “straight” theatre – after all, few new musicals are staged at The Bush, the Royal Court, Hampstead etc. I think there’s also an historical issue: for some reason writing musicals is barely a respectable career in the UK. In America, the musical is a respected art-form but here it’s seen as an embarrassing cousin to ‘serious theatre’. At university I wrote my first musical and it was a great success – we won several prizes and a good time was had by all. After it all died down one of my lecturers took me to one side: “Stop with this musical theatre business”, he advised. “Why not try working on some European translations next, maybe move to Paris, live in a squat and date a whore. That’s the respectable way to do it.” He added, with a glint in his eye, “after all, it worked for me”.

Photos: The cast of The Universal Machine in rehearsals. By Richard Lakos for A Younger Theatre.

David Byrne

David Byrne is the Artistic and Executive Director of New Diorama Theatre (NDT), an 80 seat space in Central London. Photo: David in rehearsals. By Richard Lakos for A Younger Theatre.

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I have a confession to make: a few years ago, I flirted with stand-up comedy. Theatremaking is collaboration; I love that in the job, but part of me was ready to speak in my voice for a while, unmediated.

I had a few routines I was proud of – I remember one about Sigmund Freud publishing his Oedipus theory and going home for family Christmas to find that his dad has hidden all the knives and forks for fear of being killed, so the family eats their turkey with plastic cutlery. It always got laughs: it had defined characters and a tight structure, but after performing it even five times, I was bored. Beyond the mechanics of the joke and the fun of riding its rhythm, there was little going on under the surface.

In one of his more grandiose moments, the late Steve Jobs said that, whatever we put our minds to, we should mean to “put a dent in the universe”. I stopped doing stand-up is because ultimately I had little to say through comedy about the world.  Even if the audience laughed, all I could manage was a shrug. The comedian Daniel Kitson has talked about this on stage. In his 2006 show, Weltanschauung, he says that if an audience laughs for the wrong reasons, such as taking a piece of irony at face value, then its laughter is “as piercing to him as thrown fruit”.

I saw Kitson a couple of weeks ago at Battersea Arts Centre, workshopping a new set, After the Beginning, Before the End. He starts an international tour in a few weeks’ time, and last month he junked the entire set he’d been working on. On stage, he sat at a desk and read from notes. Parts of the show had an assured rhythm, other parts were tentative. A few times he repeated bits, playing with the composition of individual sentences, trying to find “the comedic key to a locked door”. At the end, he talked about what he wants the show to be, and what it isn’t yet. I can’t say any more about that because he asked the audience not to, but he wanted his show to be more than just gags. He wanted to find the danger again. On his website, he goes into more detail: “I’ve been waiting to have the idea for this show for weeks, for months. A space held open in my head waiting for the idea. For months. I’ve done previews and I’ve booked the tour and I’ve stared at the internet and I’ve made chicken and I’ve tried not to worry. But the idea has not come and I have worried. I’ve worried and doubted and waited more and more and more. But then today, having dropped my dad off at the train station and met my friends for some coffee, whilst driving home to write this (very overdue) brochure copy – dreading the thought of heaving half lies and optimistic promises into something vaguely intriguing but not developmentally restrictive – halfway home, it happened. Somewhere between East London and South London – It arrived. The Idea. Just like that. Like a child, late home from school, oblivious to the worry and the panic and the phone calls. It just walked in and sat down like it wasn’t even a big deal. So now I’m typing this in my bedroom because the boy who lives next door is playing the James Bond theme on what I assume to be a trumpet. And you have to trust me. Two hours ago I didn’t have the idea. Now I do. And it’s going to be good.”

I’m fascinated by this idea of the turn in the road, the moment that you commit as an artist to putting yourself in danger every time you make something, and not putting anything into the world that you don’t love or that hasn’t scared you.

In a few weeks, I’m seeing another comedian I admire, Louis CK, perform in London. After years of stringing together jokes about tourists and the weather, the second stage of his career has been one of the most remarkable in the history of stand-up comedy. Each year, CK writes and tours an 80-minute set, and at the end of the year, he records it, releases it on his website for $5, and retires the entire set, except for its strongest joke, which he’ll use to start next year’s set, so that everything that follows has to be even better. Explaining his approach a few years ago, CK said that, for him: “…the goal of comedy is to just laugh, which is a really high-hearted thing, [a] visceral connection and reaction. And any time I take laughs away… I have to replace it with something at least that high… it can’t just be interesting. It has to be ‘holy shit!’ one way or the other: ‘holy shit, that’s funny!’ or ‘holy shit, that kind of scared me’. I’ve been interested in scaring people too because it sort of runs by some of the same rules as laughing. Or ‘oh my God, I really feel that’. Or ‘what the fuck is this? I don’t understand this’. These are all heightened responses and I have to be getting one of those.”

Watching Daniel Kitson perform stand-up is the reason Johnny Vegas stopped performing. And watching Louis CK, I realise that I wrote maybe one joke that came close to what he’s talking about. In many ways, a life in the theatre is an insane choice for an adult to make. Humans have always told stories, but there are faster ways to respond to the world than writing and rehearsing a play, mediums that reach wider audiences and economic models that make more sense.

You can’t know what artistic directors want: there are always trends and ‘me too’ productions, but what anyone really wants is to be blown away by something new, and there’s no map for that. The only way to make that dent is to accept that you’re rolling the dice with your career and go all in: scare yourself.

If you’re going to go down, it will have been fighting.

Image: Felipe Avello Presenta

Russ Hope

Russ Hope is a writer and sporadic theatremaker. His directing work includes productions, scratch performances and workshops of new plays by writers including Davey Anderson, Nick Payne and Richard Marsh. His first book, Getting Directions: A fly-on-the-wall guide for emerging directors, is published by Nick Hern Books.

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