Mark Ravenhill discusses his career as one of the UK’s most exciting contemporary playwrights
Mark Ravenhill
Mark Ravenhill is one of the UK’s most exciting, controversial playwrights. His plays include Shopping and F**king, Some Explicit Polaroids, and the monologue Product, which he performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005. He has a fortnightly column in The Guardian arts section.
What made you become a writer?
I started out wanting to be a director. My first paid job was as an administrator in a theatre, which I did while doing bits of directing work. Generally I paid the rent by doing literary management – reading unsolicited scripts, working with commissioned writers and taking them through drafts of their plays.
I got more interested in the playwriting as I went through this process, and gradually interfering with other people’s plays became less interesting than writing my own. I had already spent about seven years around writers, so I knew a lot about the process.
I decided to set myself writing challenges, and wrote lots of small ten-minute scenes to learn the craft. One of these was Fist.
At that time I was directing a series of short plays in a room above pub in Earls Court, London. I asked the producer if I could include Fist, and it became my first performed piece.
Director Max Stafford-Clark saw Fist and asked me if I had a full-length play. I didn’t, but I said I had, then spent the Christmas Break writing the first draft of Shopping and F**king.
The process from writing that first draft to seeing it staged in the West End took about two years.
How does your work as a director influence your writing?
There’s a practical element to theatre, and to write a good play you need to understand how actors work, how the space works, and how the audience works. Being a director is a great way to learn this. It’s good to learn the craft of theatre before beginning to write.
How did you make the transition from writing plays to writing as a journalist for the Guardian?
It began with me writing occasional on-off things for the paper, and in 2005 they invited me to have a regular column, which appears in the Guardian every second Monday.
I didn’t know anything about that kind of writing, but I learnt as I went along and I find it a good challenge to have to put my thoughts into 800 words once a fortnight. It’s an interesting discipline and complements the playwriting well. While playwriting engages my imagination, the column uses a more conscious, more opinionated, less emotional part of the brain.
With your plays, what comes first – the plot or the characters?
Neither – it’s usually a single image or a line that intrigues me and gets me going. When I’m writing the first draft, I let whatever happens happen, but the second draft is much more about editing. Plays are a very structured medium, and subsequent drafts are a much more conscious process.
What are the key ingredients to a successful play?
I like to surprise myself, and the audience. If it feels like a play I’ve written before, I stop writing and throw it away. It has to be new and different. A successful play is one that isn’t like any other successful play.
What do you find to be the most challenging aspects of writing?
I find myself typecast a lot. When I started out as a playwright in the 1990s, there was a lot of emphasis on using your plays to represent your own minority group. It was exciting for a while, but then it became a bit trapping. I found myself wanting to use my imagination more and find out what it was like to write about other groups in society. I’ve written quite enough about gay male characters, thank you!
So now I write primarily about heterosexuals, but people still see me as the edgy playwright who writes about heroin addicted rent boys. That doesn’t interest me at all now. It’s what happens between human beings in society that fascinates me.
The other main challenge is that to work in the theatre, you have to be a person who enjoys collaborating with others, who enjoys working as part of a group. But writing is a solo experience. I don’t like that. I get it over with as quickly as possible.
Whose writing do you admire?
Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond and Bertolt Brecht are all writers who have all fed into the writing I’ve done.
There’s also a lot of exciting playwriting happening at the moment. I love the work of Leo Butler.
What advice would you offer an aspiring playwright?
Become involved in the practical side of making a play. Gain experience with your local amateur theatre before beginning to write. You can’t learn the craft of playwriting by taking a course or sitting in a room – you have to be there, in the theatre, learning as much as possible.
When you’re working as a playwright, it’s good to remind yourself that it’s the actors you’re writing for. To get back in touch with that, I set myself the challenge of performing one of my own pieces, and went to the Edinburgh Festival with my monologue Product, which was a fantastic experience.
Please describe an average writing day.
There’s no such thing. Plays are only about 20,000 words long on average, so the writing part is less intensive than, say, writing a novel. You can actually write a play in a just a few days. But the thinking time takes longer, and you need to be able to understand when the play is ready to be written.
When the ideas become very pure and very simple in your head, you can begin to write.
Mark Ravenhill’s latest play, Over There, will be on at the Royal Court Theatre in London from February 25th until March 21st 2009.
For more on Mark’s activities, click here
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I sometimes wonder if a person who focuses on a single idea may become a specialist and might offer something important for the rest of us. Alternatively is it better if the person widens their interests and skills, and thus effects the world anyway? I never conclude this. But I do notice that, emotionally, I always feel pleased when I see someone moving on from one specialism to another. That feeling occurred again as I read Mark Ravenhill’s interview - my heart leaped when he said that had felt typecast. His creative spirit helped him to move into a wider world, focussing on what happens between human beings in society. It feels great to me… but would other people feel that he had abandoned their interests?