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Natasha says that I should be flying business class, so some of my fear of that is ebbing.
I really like the play, I realise. I think Michael Blakemore’s original production was good but occasionally not as mercurial as the writing seems to indicate. In the text it implies a totally unselfconscious mix of talking to the audience and being in several places at once, from phrase to phrase. I’ve always been intrigued by that in things I’ve done before, but this is potentially very interesting.
Back to material things. The hotel they’re proposing (the Capitol Tokyu Hotel) looks smart as anything on the website. I suppose I’d better investigate a laptop etc so that I can continue ‘my tokyo life’ while I’m there.
It looks as if I’ll be offered this production of Michael Frayn’s Democracy. It will rehearse in January in Tokyo and I’ll be there for about six weeks in total. It will all be in Japanese and I’d have to work through an interpreter. I think it’s already designed which is a pain* (Lindsay Posner was doing it but pulled out). The money’s ok and they’re promising a good hotel. Natasha is investigating the flight thing. I explained about my flight to Buenos Aires last year, when I was so anxious and upset that I wanted the plane to crash into the Atlantic. So she’s on the case.
It will be an adventure. I liked the play when I saw it (I sat next to Michael Portillo on the press night). It’s a fun piece, and there are correlations of course between the post war situations of Germany and Japan. But I have no knowledge of modern Japanese theatre or actors, and only a received impression of the culture there. January and February are grim months to be penniless in London and I can’t see anything else happening at that time now.
All in all I can’t think of any reason not to do it. Gulp.
*It wasn’t in fact.
…
My agent rings to say that there is the possibility of directing Democracy in Japan in January.
Immediately of course I think of the flight. Going to Buenos Aires nearly killed me.
…
There’s another of the by now traditional hand-wringing pieces, this time in The Guardian, about the dearth of new plays being done on the main stages of our big public theatres. The title dooms the article before it starts, of course: “Where have all the playwrights gone?” A better title might have been “How come there are more people earning salaries to ‘develop’ new writing than there are writers who can earn a living from the theatre?”
Nick Starr quite accurately says that there is “a spirit of self-denying caution” on the part of the managements due to money and Ian Rickson has a fair point about this obsession with new plays in big spaces being historically recent.
But there is a fair dollop of the old old confusion of two quite separate worries i.e. the aesthetic concern about what will physically work on the larger stage and the understandable panic about whether anyone will come.
The result, as here, is usually a lot of toxic guff about ‘public’ plays, ‘political’ plays etc etc. Zinnie Harris says that you can have a relationship between a man and a woman in a play but “the backdrop is civil war, so it’s talking about so much more”. What does this mean? And there is an idea that writers who have been working in TV will be able to jump in and write on this ’scale’. Again, I just don’t understand this.
Michael Grandage is implicitly criticised for only putting new plays in his studio at Sheffield, but that’s not true at all. In his first season he asked me for new work, and we put on two new plays (by Simon Bent and Richard Bean) in repertoire on the Crucible stage. Both were about life as it’s lived now but were neither wholly naturalistic nor self-consciously epic. And they occupied that big stage, no question. (And the Crucible stage is big – the Royal Court Downstairs stage is not). The fact is that compared to the shows with Ken Branagh or Jo Fiennes, they did no business at all. But then Michael (and Grahame Morris) hadn’t budgeted them that way anyway – it was part of a long term view.
The Olivier was explicitly designed, as Peter Hall records in his diaries, so that “one man can play Beckett or a hundred can fight the Wars of the Roses”. And at its best, this has been proved. Its just the worry about whether a paying audience will turn up. The Lyttelton Theatre gets a lot of stick, too, but I saw Athol Fugard’s Master Harold…and the Boys there when the Cottesloe was closed in the mid-eighties. This three-handed naturalistic drama in a 890-seat theatre was one of the highlights of my life. I can still see bits of it in my mind’s eye and that was twenty years ago.
