Playwright Howard Brenton describes his passion for storytelling
Howard Brenton
Howard Brenton has written or co-written more than 40 plays, as well as features, essays, poetry, a novel and scripts for television, including 13 episodes of the BBC’s award-winning Spooks. His best known work includes Brassneck
What drove you to become a playwright?
I was shy when young but, like so many shy people, I had a drive to entertain, to story-tell. I acted in school and amateur plays, participated in debating societies.
As an actor I was poor, given to rushes of blood to the head, putting in my own lines. So I turned playwright, and tried to get other people to do what I could not. Writing a play is a kind of performance: you always have a theatre in your mind’s eye in which sometimes you’re actor, sometimes audience.
I don’t know where this storytelling, entertainer’s compulsion comes from. It’s powerful though and doesn’t go away.
Did you face much rejection initially?
I didn’t really have early rejection. Things were sticky for two of three years after I left university, but it was the late sixties, everything seemed possible. The Royal Court took me under their wing and put on my first full length play, Revenge
The difficult time for me was the late 1990s when I was in my mid-fifties. I was deeply out of fashion, I wrote two stage plays, a television series, three screenplays, none of which came to anything.
Then in the 2000s the wheel turned and I’ve had three new plays on in the last three years. Some writers believe there’s a Goddess who is sometimes with you, sometimes not. I can see why.
What was your first play about?
It was a ludicrously overblown farrago I wrote when a student about a fool struggling against an underground, hierarchical society. It was humourless, incomprehensible and given to long speeches influenced by Jean Genet: butterflies fluttering on rotting meat and so on.
It was put on, lavishly, at the Cambridge student’s theatre, the ADC, and was a stonking disaster. All copies are destroyed. I still shudder…
Some of the cast are still in the theatre and delight to now and then remind me of the occasion - one of them is Nick Kent, who runs the Tricycle Theatre.
How do you feel your writing evolved between that play and Pravda?
I was so burnt by the experience of the first play that the second was maniacally pared down and, to my surprise and everyone else’s, turned out to screamingly funny. I’d got the knack.
I went on from there, still prone to occasionally over-reach. But it seems an honourable thing to be an over-reacher: wasn’t Christopher Marlowe?
How do you feel theatre in the UK has changed during your career? Have audiences’ expectations changed?
The theatre outside London has contracted. The network of subsidised theatres with their studio theatres eager for new plays has diminished. Though in the last few years, thanks to just a little more taxpayer’s money, there has been a new blooming of venues. In London the desire from performers and audiences for theatre is a plant that won’t die; it seems to force itself through the cracks everywhere despite the dire economics.
I find audiences today quicker, brighter, more adventurous. Certain things are going over the horizon: Biblical and classical references, even a knowledge of recent history. But this doesn’t mean audiences are ‘dumbed down’:
I think the language of film and TV and game console cutting has sharpened and speeded up comprehension. You have to be on your mettle writing for the modern audience: they can get ahead of you, their boredom threshold is low.
What is the intent behind your writing? What responses are you aiming to provoke?
This question is all but impossible to answer, forgive me. The great sculptor, Henry Moore, was once sent a learned psychological analysis of his work. He didn’t read it because, he said, he feared that if he knew why he made the sculptures, he’d stop.
How does writing for the stage compare to writing for television?
They’re both forms of storytelling - the art of lying, as Oscar Wilde called it - so they are more similar than it seems.
The biggest difference is paradoxical. Millions watch a TV drama but, when writing it you can only imagine one or two strangers watching in a room you will never know. So it is a very intimate medium.
But a play, which will only be attended by a few hundred people a time, seems a big, public event. Television writing feels secretive and anonymous; theatre writing feels open and democratic.
What do you find the most challenging aspects of writing?
The greatest challenge is exhaustion. The second half of many a play is weaker than the first because the author got tired, scrimped and rushed. This happens to the best: see the last thirty minutes of Shakespeare’s Measure by Measure…
What do you enjoy most about the process?
The elegance, the music of it when it works and the chance to lose yourself in the world you’re trying to write about. And rehearsals: that concentrated and endlessly fascinating time when you help to deliver a play to the people without whom it has no existence: the actors.
Whose writing do you admire?
Jean-Paul Sartre; Oscar Wilde; Christopher Marlowe; the Shakespeare of the 1590s; John Milton; Guy Debord; Leo Tolstoy and recently, after years of not getting him, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
What inspires you?
Stories of people who try to drive straight lines through a crooked world.
Where do you carry out the majority of your writing?
At home, at the top of our house, in a chaotic small room.
What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
Whatever you’re writing now, FINISH IT.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m writing two screenplays: one for BBC Film, about Lawrence of Arabia after he was famous, the other for Focus Features based on Vikram Chandra’s vast and brilliant novel Sacred Games
In the theatre I’m writing a new play called Night Swimming commissioned by the National Theatre; I’ve just delivered a new version to the National of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death
I’ve been commissioned by the Chichester Festival Theatre to write a stage adaptation of Robert Tresell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
On Monday June 29th 2009, Howard Brenton will be taking part in In The Same Boat’s Write to Play series at the Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
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