Penny Wincer, Charlotte Adorjan: caring, love and untold stories

My friend Salima Saxton has a podcast with Jennifer Cox. In this episode, she interviews Penny Wincer and Charlotte Adorjan. We know Penny and Charlotte - in part - because they are “our people”.

Our people because they have lived experience of caring. There is an autism thread running through this conversation. Caring is often unfair. It’s very often gendered. The burden falls on the women.

These are also the stories that are mostly untold. The untold stories of women, and carers. Untold stories of love and care. Untold stories of womens’ experience and the complexity of motherhood.

This is important that I’ve made a transcript of the conversation below (it won’t be entirely accurate as I’ve had to use automated transcription) but it should give you enough sense. You can also listen above.

"I've had to embrace the fact that I am now a carer. It's really hard to get your head around that, and the feminist voice in my head is screaming 'Don't give up your career'. But actually, what I want to do is try to make it work for me, rather than me trying to change it. 

Welcome to 'Women Are Mad', where we invite women to bring their anger into everyday conversation. We're all feeling it, let's get together to work out what to do with it. I'm Jennifer Cox and I'm Salima Saxton.

'Riddle me this, Salima, with your Cambridge degree and your excellent brain, why have countless successive governments failed to solve the caring problem of this country?' 



'When you say "this country", you mean Britain?'



'I mean Britain, because I've got the numbers for Britain. They're bastards. I'm sorry to be cynical, but I have the answer because I've got a sheaf of papers in front of me that I'm rattling away. There are 1.25 million sandwich carers in the UK as recorded. Sandwich carers are people caring for an older relative as well as a young family. I know for a fact that the actual number is higher because so many people don't think of caring as an identity. Instead, they think of it as just a natural part of life or an obligation, which is partially why the government hasn't gotten to grips with providing a real solution. The other reason is that 68% of these sandwich carers, remember these are just the recorded numbers, are women, and women are not permitted to speak up about their dissatisfaction or rage. They'd be seen as uncaring, as cruel, shirking their responsibilities. But if you put the problem back to these women who are voiceless, it sorts the whole thing out. It's gone under the carpet, we can leave it there, and that's the answer to my Riddle Me.' 



'Okay, well, thank you for answering your riddle. I'm very pleased that we're doing this special episode actually, this week, then. Related to Carers Week?'



'Yes, so we must say, this is a British thing, isn't it? It's the first week of June every year: National Carers Week. So, who have we got with us today?'



'Our first guest is Penny Wincer, she's an acclaimed author, a book coach, a podcaster herself of the brilliant podcast 'Not Too Busy To Write'. She's a parent, and she's a carer. Oh, and she's recently swapped hometowns actually with our fellow guest, Charlotte Adorjan. Charlotte hosts the brilliant 'Village Lantern' podcast and she's recently moved with her family from London to Melbourne. Both her children, Essie and Woody, have autism and as a family, they've launched "Woodism", which is an award-winning art collaboration between Woody and his dad who has turned Woody's unique phrases into linocut prints. My particular favorite one is "I love you all the way to the end of counting." Thank you so much for being here, we really appreciate it. Should we dive straight in? I'll go with the first question, the first formal question: What makes you angry? Penny and Charlotte, you should go first. Penny, go for it.'



'I've been really surprised, actually, by how the older I get, the angrier I get about everything. There is this narrative, I think, that as you get older you get - there's a lot of talk about "oh I don't give any shits anymore". Actually, I do give a shit. I give a shit about a lot of things.



 And so of course, that means lots of things make you really angry. The more life experience we have, the more injustice we see around us.'



'Yeah, yeah. Charlotte?'



'Yes, I mean this whole kind of angry women thing. There's that quote "if you're not angry, you're not paying attention" or something. And I feel like the people that aren't angry are probably the men, to be honest. Or they're the ones that don't directly get affected by the issues that we are facing. Do you think that it's actually that there were women, many women, I would say, who sort of forgot to get angry and weren't encouraged to develop a vocabulary for it? So it just sort of stays there in a nice package kind of under the surface and normally gets conveniently diagnosed as something else, like anxiety, depression, migraines. And this is why we've started this, essentially. Because there's so much mistaken rage out there. Also, it's been interesting, some of the response actually, because some people have said, "You've never struck me as an angry person, Salima". I think we're all much more multifaceted and able to express anger in many different ways. And actually, if we were all listening and paying attention to every other human, we could, I think, we would all connect with some kind of anger within us. Which brings me to it being National Carers Week, actually, as well. But, Charlotte, continuing on with what you were initially saying, does any of that anger come with navigating being a carer as well as being a parent, as well as being a woman?'



'Well, I think it's funny because I've had quite a lesson from my autistic kids on you know, they really hate unfairness. Their gauge for fairness is really solid. They hate being wronged. And to be honest, a lot of my rage comes from the world not being a level playing field. And if you add in things like being an unpaid carer, or the fact that I'm a copywriter in advertising by trade and it's a very male-dominated world. And you know, when I left my job, my boss, I remember him saying "You know when I think of a word to describe you, I think angry." And I was like "Oh my God, my 22-year career and this is the one word." And I thought, "Well yes," because it was never a level playing field and I was always pissed off because I never got the good briefs or I was always having….. To say, 'Well, why am I doing a four-day week now I've got children, when the dads, when they start having babies, they don't put their hands up for a four-day week?' You know, why? Like, what do they not want to see their children? Who's looking after their children?



So, I've always worked for myself since I was 24. When I went on maternity leave (and I use this term very loosely) I did not take maternity leave with either of my two children. But, it was interesting because I was spending a lot of time with other women who were on maternity leave, right? Because I met through my local neighborhood, a fantastic London neighborhood where we had to organize our own kind of meetups. There was loads of stuff going on.



I made some really good friends that year because there were women around, which was awesome because they were taking maternity leave. I was not jealous of them one bit because I was dipping in and out doing a bit of work, coming back and hanging out with them, hanging out with my child, going back to work doing a bit of back and forth. It was great. It was the dream, basically.



But they all went from really intense full-on careers to looking after a baby 24/7. First of all, I was not jealous of that, those two extremes. And then they were having to make the choice between going part-time and basically still having to do the same job because otherwise, they would never get anywhere in their career but earning way less money, or they would go back full time and they would spend all their money on care for their child and also feel really, really guilty and also not really want to be away five days a week from their child either.



I just felt like there were no good choices there. It just felt like there were no good choices in any of those. And if you take the time, then you take the hit. Your career takes the hit because you lose all of those years while everyone else is still kind of slogging away trying to make it work.



Absolutely. And I mean, even I, you know, I was so much more affected financially by having kids than I thought I was going to be. I was the higher earner. I'm not married anymore, but at the time, I was the higher earner per day and I thought, well, that means that we prioritize me and my work. And then we did, at first, and then slowly over time and a second child, suddenly it's not quite so much of a priority anymore, even though I was the higher earner initially. And I think that's actually really, really common as well.



And I think what I didn't understand when I was a younger woman was the hit not just in going part-time but the massive hit you take on your career for the rest of your career by slowing down a bit at that point but also on your pension. You know, the difference between women's and men's pensions since the pension cap is unbelievably huge, frighteningly huge. Yes, and it's because of the care work that women do. It's so true.



And then the care work that we do later at the end of the career because the numbers there are still startling to stop your children. I mean obviously, you know, Charlotte and I have disabled children who will require more support. But even if you don't have that and your children grow up, it's very likely that if you were the one at home caring for children, you're very likely to be the one that steps in when mom and dad, and mom and dad-in-law need that support because, well, you've already worked part-time for years, so



 why wouldn't you step up and do that? You know, there's no catching up from that, you become the go-to person at that point.



I think also the lack of catching up comes down to identity and confidence, right. Now having stepped out as an actor for well quite a few years when my three kids were young, launching myself back in has required an iron will, a kind of rhino skin, and what I just keep thinking, 'Well, you know, you just, just now or never.' So then I kind of oscillate between like wild abandon, enthusiasm for what's going to happen and it's happening, and panic.



Yeah, I think it's underestimated the impact of taking either slowing down or taking a break from a career on what that does to you and what that does to other people's view of you.



I was a photographer for many years, and when I first had children, that was my job. And it is actually a very masculine role, you know, there are now quite a few female photographers, but actually, when I started out an assistant there was hardly any. Even in the early 2000s, there were only just really just coming up, and I was the one that definitely on set I worked with loads of women, but I was the one on set who had the kind of traditionally masculine role.



So when I had my second child, I do feel like I disappeared. People assumed I wouldn't work. I lost work because people just didn't ask me because I'd had a second child.




*



I'd love to know where your ambitions lie for both of you right now. Do you have strong personal ambitions, Penny, Charlotte, unrelated to anybody else? It's very interesting because I've changed my entire life. I've moved from London, where I was born and, I think, I've only ever lived a mile from where I was born to literally the other side of the world. I'm in Penny's hometown now, weirdly, and she's in line which is nice.



I've changed everything and, to be honest, it's difficult because you want to cling on to things that you knew and loved. I had this career in advertising, a 22-23 year career that I worked really hard for. But the whole time, I was fighting a system that wasn't set up for me to be in. So yes, it has a quite male, Mad Men kind of vibe, and people would say it's changed a lot but not if you've got children or anyone with additional needs that you need to care for.



I'm meeting so many amazing women that have insane careers and they've had to become carers and reinvent how they work. Maybe that's where the multi-hyphen method has come from. So many women have lots of strings to their bows now because to be honest, we can't put all our eggs in one basket anymore. We need flexibility to the point of breaking. I mean, we never know day to day. Like this morning, I was woken up by my daughter at 2 AM and that was the day.



So if I had to go and do a day in an advertising agency coming up with amazing ideas, writing brilliant stuff, and presenting to clients, I'd be a dribble of a person and no one would get the best of me. It's really difficult but I've had to kind of change my entire world. 



Now, I think maybe I need to reinvent what I see as success. Actually, for me now, success is being able to give my kids the time they need. I think this is the issue when you've got children who have a disability. It doesn't necessarily get easier the older they get. Often it can get harder, and you're needed more. 



I'm now dealing with lots of mental health issues, things I never thought I would have to deal with as a mom. There's none of this in the kind of baby books about how do you talk to your child who wants to kill themselves. It's really difficult, so you've got to be there. You can't be like, "Sorry, I've got to go off to a meeting about a chocolate bar and sell a chocolate bar to millions of people." It's really difficult. 



So not only has my ambition changed from being about me, but I also need to make money for them because they're going to need financial stability growing up. It's almost like I have to decide where to put my energy. I have such little energy left for the bit that needs to make me money. Actually, I'm asking myself, "Why am I giving it to huge corporations who are going to make billions off my ideas, whereas I'm getting an ulcer and a child who's sobbing and needs me?" It's really difficult, so it's a bit of an epiphany for me.



Silencing is the problem. If these are your priorities, then you must be allowed these priorities and people need to hear them and listen to them. Yes, I mean, I think that's it because a lot of carers' voices just get squashed because A, we're really tired, and B, no one really wants to hear it. They're like, "Oh, that sounds really hard but anyway, cool, I'm just gonna pop off."



That's why you got called angry. I think it's because it was really unwanted. And if you explained it to people, they would just be like, "This person's moaning." And you're like, "No, no, I just need to get across why today is quite a hard day."



Coming to the other side of the world, weirdly, I've kind of formed this underbelly of carers, my kindred spirits. They're all from all walks of life. The other day, I was in the supermarket and I got this scream across from the other escalator. It was a friend of mine. She's a Jewish mom with two autistic children. She fell into my arms sobbing and she's like, "I can't do this anymore." We had a moment in the supermarket and everyone was kind of going around us. I reassured her, telling her, "You can do this. You're amazing."



Her day was basically going to be spent coaxing one of her children off the sofa to eat because her kids were in rock bottom autistic burnout. After we buoyed each other up, she went off. I thought to myself, "These are my people."



These are my people, where there's no rage anymore. The anger's gone. We don't have time for anger; we're too exhausted to even fuel the anger. It's just, "I need you, help me. Here's what you need." 



Last week, when I was confined to bed with the flu, I texted a friend and told her I was unwell. She immediately offered help, "I'm bringing Bolognese." It's not about sympathy or superficial comfort, it's practical help, a question of, "What do you need? Here's what I'm going to do." These are the people that understand you. 



When I'm with these individuals, the rage dissipates, because we're on a level playing field. There's no pretense, no small-talk about Johnny's tennis lessons. Our kids aren't involved in such activities like everyone else. We're just on a level playing field, and that's when my anger subsides. That's when I feel the most at peace and the most like myself. 



This is a new development, something that's only happened recently since I moved to the other side of the world. Perhaps when you have to make new friends, you end up finding kindred spirits more easily. 



Now at 46 years old, I've observed shifts in my support systems and friendships. As you become caregivers yourselves, have you noticed a change? Have surprising people entered or exited your lives? 



What I've found is that some friends here, friends of my husband since we moved to Melbourne, have gone out of their way to understand the type of autism my children have—PDA, Pathological Demand Avoidance. They've read up on it and followed the same people as me on Instagram. They've put in the work, and that is a mark of a true friend. 



My experience, on the other hand, has been interesting. Since my schedule isn't flexible due to my son's needs, I can't meet up with friends outside of my immediate neighborhood. It's stressful to take him anywhere, so I stopped doing that a long time ago. Consequently, I don't see my friends that don't live close by very often.



Nevertheless, the friends I've made in this neighborhood have been incredible. Though I didn't make friends through my son's peers, I made incredible friends through my daughter. These friends have embraced my son, known him since he was quite young, and even help out when we go on holiday. 



Interestingly, I was forced to ask for help. As a single parent, there are times when I literally cannot manage everything on my own. For instance, when my daughter was invited to a birthday party but was too young to be dropped and left, I either had to bring my son with me, or someone else had to pick her up and take her. It's situations like these that make you ask for things you wouldn't ordinarily ask for.




"If I hadn't been in that situation, I would message people, 'Oh, who's going to so-and-so's party? Can anyone else swing by and pick up Agnes on the way?' And someone would be like, 'Yeah, sure. No problem at all.' Then, I'd take her there with my son, and my son maybe would stop coping after half an hour. I'd say, 'I'm going to skip out. Can anyone else drop her home?' And there'd be like three volunteers going, 'Yeah, we'll drop her home. No problem.' 



We're in this really quite incredible community here where people just stepped up, but I had to learn to ask. I learned to ask, and actually, this comes back to my other caring experience. I really, really, really, really hate not being independent, and part of that comes down to the fact that I was a young carer as well. I cared for my mom when I was a teenager.



If you meet and speak to any young carers, one of the things you'll find is that they are hyper-independent. I had to learn how to look after myself at a very young age, so asking for help does not come naturally. Like it doesn't for a lot of women, but particularly for someone who didn't -- I would say -- was not being looked after by anyone from when I was about 12. 



Arthur has forced me to confront that and the challenge it's about. And if he hadn't made me do it, I'd be having to face that when I was older and needing to receive care myself. Because we don't like the idea of having to receive it. We're very scared of having to receive it because we see it as something that is something that none of us want. 



We talk about it as being the worst thing in the world to go into a home where other people would care for us or to have our child constantly having to care for us. But, it's a really natural human thing to happen that we need care towards the end of our lives if we're lucky enough to live a long life. 



But there is also a real problem there because there is a natural desire to care, but I think that desire is exploited in women. Far fewer men are expected to, and women are doing it at least ten years earlier. And they're often doing it for much longer. I think double the amount of time that men are doing it, and in terms of the people who are doing it for more than 35 hours a week, it's 75% women.



To replace unpaid care in the UK would cost something like 162 billion. The amount of money that unpaid carers contribute to the economy is the equivalent of running a whole other NHS. So, if there weren't unpaid carers, the whole society would collapse. It would completely crash. 



I don't know what the figures are now. They're much higher because there are a lot more carers now than there was pre-pandemic. There's a lot more people living with chronic illness now.



If someone is a carer and they're listening to this right now and they're struggling, the thing you have to do first is admit that that's what you're doing, that you're a carer. It can take people years to admit that that's what they're doing. They don't want to see it. 'I'm just a daughter, doing her job, doing what's expected.' 



But the first thing you have to do is admit that this is work. It is unpaid work, but it is care work, and it's on top of the relationship you have



 with that person. It complicates the relationship you have with that person. They might hate receiving that care, for instance. This can be a very complicated relationship.



So, I think the number one thing you can do first is always admit that's what you're doing. Like with a lot of things, as soon as you kind of admit it, then you can open up to other things, like maybe admitting that you might not be able to do it all on your own. Which can be a really difficult thing because sometimes people, even though it's very difficult, want to be able to do it all on their own, but physically can't anymore without some serious consequences.



What would you say, Charlotte? Yeah, I mean, and also connection with people that are similar to you, because silence is really dangerous. Penny and I are both writers, and we're obsessed with telling stories. There's a reason that women need to tell stories because otherwise, it all just becomes unsaid it gets lost.

Lehman Trilogy review: gripping in places, but missing elements

“The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrive in America and found an investment firm/brokerage  through to the collapse of the company in 2008.”


As a playwright and equities market participant I should have made time to see Lehman Brothers earlier. I think logistics and its length had put me off. 


I’m glad I went. In part because I certainly feel there is room for more plays about financial markets. 


My arguments would be that financial markets as a human construct reflect much and enable much  of what human society does… the good, the bad,  the ugly; the sublime, the silly, the pointless and that markets are powered by people and people are all of that. 


Dramaturgically, it was insightful to observe that the vast amounts of expositional story telling - performed well written sharply - was often gripping to many. 


(Not all, as some were switched off; and not at all moments - perhaps the difficulty of the story). 


In many ways, the direct to audience story telling is a technique I use in both my latest shows - and stand up comedy uses it as its major technique - but I’ve sometimes been cautious as to how well it will hold. 


I’m now convinced that good writing and performance can hold it well. 


The live music provided emotional and dramatic counter point.  I found those aspects of the  theatre instructive.  (Although I have minor quibbles with some aspects of  the performative story telling; a little too much one note shouting in places; not enough use of the quiet). 


In terms of finance and economic history, or even the cultural history of persons then I  learned new things in the first act about immigration, Jewish culture, slavery, cotton and the civil war.  I could even draw some links even when there were not overt references. 


You’d still learn more from a history book if the time or on economic history by listening to my podcast with, for instance, Mark Koyama (!). 


These ideas weakened in act two and were very slim in the last act. 


The play tackles the financialization (money!)  of real goods (eg cotton!) with a passage about words which hints of the truth. 


The Lehman brothers trading in the words of cotton.  There is no cotton but the word cotton. There is no coffee but the word coffee. 


This abstraction is true and not true on many levels and I liked it.  Mathematics is a language that seems to describe properties of how we perceive the real world. Mathematics is not the real world. A contract on coffee is not coffee, but it represents how coffee will trade. 


Financial market contracts or the words between men - are a human language construct that allows the movement, trade and manufacture of real goods like cotton to be turned into shirts - which people can buy for a promise (a money note) - to wear to keep them warm or to signal their desirability. 


They are a language of trust. They are not - mostly - a description of the “real world”. 


But I bring my views to that. The play touched only lightly on what financialisation of goods might mean and how it comes about. 


That was even weaker in the third act suggesting that computer magic - buying numbers low and selling numbers high - was at the heart of trading - the universal language of computers.  


I think you could argue this - I would not buy this but there could be an element of truth that trading is this human construct - but the play did not - more stating it as the truth of what these financial players were doing. 


I was disappointed but heartened to find this lacuna - because it means there is still a play for me to write.


The other disappointment in particular into act 3 is the increasingly perfunctory treatment of the personality and characters. 


I think liberties with the timelines for dramatic effect would be reasonable. Robert - Bobby - Lehman died in 1969  and wasn’t dancing, right to the end of Lehman Bros.


The most famous dancing metaphor was given by Citigroup CEO/Chair, Chuck Prince around 2007. 


"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."


One small example on the characters:  


Pete Peterson was given one short main scene - one that was mean to represent an internal political battles. 


But Peterson went on into government and then on to found one of the biggest and most influential private equity firm in the world today.  He became a billionaire and a major billionaire philanthropist- in that other grand graduation. 


the strong links between finance and politics - foreshadowed by Herbert Lehman in the 1930s - and even before in the links of the civil war, north and south - New York - Alabama - 


were absent into Act 3 - 


If people think this is the modern day story of finance - with politics absent - then people are missing  a major piece of the stroy.


The play makes the arguments in Act 2 that banks were going to fail before the government would step in to help the stronger remaining banks to survive.  This was in 1929


This same echo happened in 2008 


Some of the players were the same - Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs -


Similarly the politicians involved - were surrounded by ex-finance people.  Look them up.


There would have been a very true and lovely ellipsis pattern to this history if it had been more fully explored. 


Dick Fuld and many of the 2008 players are still alive so perhaps that makes it harder.


Still for someone who had lived this history and see within it the echoes of a longer arc of history (and even echoes with  today's bank runs) it was unsatisfactory.

That said, much of the play is narrated in a gripping fashion and it does bring some character to a world which really does bring the money for the rest of the world to function.  So I think it’s recommended viewing. 

Very Short Stories

Mini Sketch. Been thinking about Lydia Davis. I’ve always loved the short form and more experimental form but only recently have been reading Lydia Davis. This is one very short story, her first version and last version. I’m reading her book of essays. Recommended food for thought for writers and those interested in writer craft. (Amazon link to book)

He ordered truffle, wild mushroom and rare breed sausage sourdough pizza, but to exclude the sausage to make the pizza vegetarian. The waitress at intervals was keen for us to order more. I asked what one things would you change? This is a sustainability dinner. The answers. A global price for carbon. Investments in womens education. The food nutrition obesity challenge. What do you gain for travelling to Mars? Not the destination. All the inventions needed for the journey, we hope. We hope. We finish the glass of Italian red wine.

She arrived by bus. We meandered. Two and three quarters circuits around the city park. A steady stream of dark suited sharply dressed grey haired couples and singles pass by. We can not figure out who has died. The sun reflected off her pale make-up. We drank fizzy apple juice. She ate an ice cream. We talked. We spoke of dementia, effective altruism, writing deadlines and pronouns. When you can not understand you have repeated yourself two and three quarter times. The sadness of forgetting. Those writing deadlines. We leave by taxi.

Jane Bodie, Ben Yeoh in conversation, writing, art and life.

Jane Bodie and Ben Yeoh talk about creative processes, how they have ended up as makers, the impact of the pandemic what does or doesn’t make great art. For Ben the importance of travel (having travel agents as parents) and his early work as a photographer (when the photo world was analogue see some here). For Jane, on teaching, family - having a mother as a brilliant artist, and understanding what makes a for a brilliant writing day.

See the transcript below or watch the video (about 1.5 hours).

Ben (0:01): Hey, so we have Jane and I'm just going to do a very quick intro to Jane. Jane Bodie is an amazing writer; a playwright primarily, has got prize-winning stuff all over the world. She's also a brilliant mentor and teacher, probably more important to me and one of my dearest friends. So we've got together here to have a chat.


Jane (0:29): And I think I should do an intro to you then, which is that Ben is a writer, playwright, environmental and sustainability guru (sorry, Ben) you're a philanthropist, a performer, and a public speaker. And also, one of my dear, dear friends.


Ben (0:45): Makes me sound really posh, right?


Jane (0:47): Makes you sound well posh.


Ben (0:48): So we had this idea for having chats around, you know, post-pandemic and all of that. And we were going to call it something really fancy. And then we've decided not to.


Jane (1:00): I wanted to call it 'Ways of not being', because we both been obsessed with Ways of Seeing (by John Berger) and talked about it for years and years. And then I think ways of being sounds a little bit yogic, and a little bit like a sort of self-help thing. So we were chatting about it the other day, and you said why don't we just call it 'Chats with Ben and Jane during Lockdown', which is what it kind of is. So let's call it what it is.


Ben (1:07): Yeah, so exactly. So these are chats with us. I guess we, we were really interested, well, I was really interested when we were talking about, you know, our own creative processes and creative processes of artists, you know, in the widest sense, and then obviously, our own kind of experiences. So that was one of the genesis for the idea of having these chats.


Jane (1:46): Yeah, and I think there's a huge amount of these on at the moment, people doing interviews with playwrights or creatives, or artists because we're all in lockdown and we can do it. So I suppose we also wanted to make it a little bit different. And what I'm really interested in, is talking about creative process, how that's been affected by lockdown, but in the bigger sense, how one might have come to be the artist you are and what led you to it, the sort of how and why because I find that really interesting, you know, people become playwrights or writers or artists for a whole range of different reasons. And I know that our beginnings were very different. And I've always found it really interesting talking to you about how you became what you are, and how much that's got to do with your family and your background and your education and the places that you studied. So it's something I'd like to talk about.


Ben (2:32): Yeah, so we start there. So we'll maybe ask it first to you then because you got to trade it back to me, which was like, yeah, how did you, did you fall into being a writer? Or did you always know? It's funny, I'm going to segue, we're going to do this a lot because when I speak to a lot of directors, it's very rare that they said at 15, oh, I really know I want to be a director, right? It happens maybe to a couple of them, but it's something that you discover, often a little later on.  Whereas sometimes I find people, you know, teenagers, or when they think back to when they were teenagers, or even younger, and they kind of always knew they wanted to be a writer, and they were always going to write in some fashion. And so that was always that kind of thing, as opposed to actually, typically directors I find, haven't and then act to some people kind of always knew that they wanted to act or whatever. 


Jane (3:22): Yeah, I wonder if with directors, they just know they want to be involved in theatre, I think often, probably when we're kids, and we want to be involved in theatre, we just want to be on stage. And then, later on, we perhaps realize that our skills lead us towards a different element, or we fall into like directing at school or at university. I mean, I wrote my first play when I was seven. It was shit, because I've still got it, my mom gave it to me and my 30th birthday. But there is a line in it that I used in a play about 20 years later, which to me is fascinating, much more fascinating than the play itself. Because it's almost like there are things going around in my head that are just waiting to be used. 


They're waiting to kind of fall off the conveyor belt and find a place. So there was a line about a woman wearing makeup, and it suiting her, and it turned up in a play of mine called Still about 20 years later. So I reckon I must have heard that line and thought it was interesting, as a human being, not necessarily as a playwright at seven, you'd hope because that would make me very terrifying. But I was writing dialogue when I was seven. And that may be and I've made jokes about this many times in reference to my mother, but it may be because it was quite hard to get a word in my house because there are a lot of fierce talkers. And so maybe I went and wrote dialogue as a way of having conversations in which I didn't get interrupted.


 Ben (4:39): Yeah, as good a reason as any.


Jane (4:41): Yeah, indeed. So yeah, I did want to be a playwright from a very young age. And I'm interviewing Annabel Arden on this in a couple of weeks, which I'm very excited about from Theatre de Complicite and I saw a Complicite show with my mum. I was lucky to have a mum that took me to the theatre, and she took me to see a play at the Almeida, and I must have been like 13 or something because I remember fancying people, some of the cast, I was just thinking they were kind of grotesquely beautiful. And I saw that play, and I remember just going, Okay, that's what I want to do.


Ben (5:17): Wow. Okay.


Jane (5:18): So you, what about you? 


Ben (5:20): Well, I guess we'll get towards that. So I probably did always do some writing and I see thinking about it, I did when I was around 9 or 10. I did write a short play. And it was for the so this is the kind of upbringing I had. It was for a competition where you, it’s a Latin play, so it gets translated in Latin. And, you know, London independent schools have this kind of Latin play. 


Jane (5:48): Yeah, we didn't have that at Islington Green.


Ben (5:50): So that was what I was doing.


Jane (5:54): In Latin?


Ben (5:55): Yeah. So we performed in a kind of Latin play competition. Can you imagine this, and it still goes on to this day. But usually, they take excerpts of actual things, but the play won, but we only won because we were the only ones who were barmy enough to have actually written our own play. I don't even remember what it was about. I think we all dressed in togas, and it was, you know, that type of thing. But it's kind of...


Jane (6:23): Sorry to interrupt, but had you seen a play? Did you know what a play was?


Ben (6:26): I had seen a play and things, but that was a little bit later, as a teenager. I saw Pygmalion at the National and I remember thinking like, oh, okay, and I think I'd seen maybe the movie or kind of vaguely knew about it. And I went in with really low expectations. I think I went with my godfather or someone who's like, oh, we should go to the theatre and I wasn't, I didn't think, oh, this is going to be brilliant or anything. And I'm just thinking like, wow, they've actually, they've actually done something quite good here.


Jane (6:59): Yeah, you'd probably seen My Fair Lady with the worse accent ever.


Ben (7:02): And then I remember, actually then, okay, so skipping forward a little bit. So I directed the play at secondary school high school, so about 16 or 17, which was Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf. And I was much more into directing than writing at the time, and then later on I saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, but I had a very positive experience with a playwright at that time. So we had an issue that Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf was going to go on in the West End, the next year, to this was to be in around 1995-96, something like that. And so, being the good school boys and girls that we were, I wrote as a director to the publishers, agents saying,' Can we have amateur rights for three nights a week during the school play?' And they wrote back saying, 'No, you can't do this play, because it's going to go on in the West End.'


Jane (8:06): As if your production would affect a west end show...


Ben (8:15): People are going to come and see our production over the one with Diana Rigg in it, so then I was like - oh my god, and we'd already started setting up and so we've invested too much for it to kind of go...I didn't think I could pivot at that stage. So I thought well, you know what you're not in charge of this, Edward Albee's in charge of this, I'll write to him and see whether he has any comments. So I wrote him, yes I'm 16, 16, 15, 16. And so I wrote him a letter, kind of nice one. I guess those are you know, you didn't really have email anyway.


So I wrote him a letter and I just sent it. I didn't have his address, so care of the New York publisher something, I think it might have even been a penguin or fable or whatever. Then I said, okay, let's hold and just see what happens. And actually quite quickly, like two or three weeks later, I got a wonderful letter back saying 'Yeah, of course, you can do my play'. 


Jane (9:17): From Edward Albee? 


Ben (9:17): From Edward Albee saying, ‘Of course you can do my play a really good luck with that you've chosen a really difficult play to do' which I hadn't really appreciated.


Jane (9:47): That is the most glorious story! I doubt the playwrights today would be so generous what a divine thing.


Ben (10:03): Later on, I heard that sometimes he could be quite grumpy with some people, but that was my only real interaction with him but I think, and I wouldn't.


Jane (10:12): He probably quite liked the fact that you'd written him a letter.


Ben (10:17): Yeah, like someone famous playwright bothers to write back to you.


Jane (10:41): My version of that story is much shorter and doesn't have such a wonderful ending, which is that I was going to do Betrayal, which is still one of my favourite plays by Pinter, although I think it's got become quite dated. But I was doing Betrayal in a place called The Cheese Factory, which was a place in Hackney. And I was in it and I'm slightly worried I was directing as well. But anyway, and we had to apply for the amateur rights and we got an absolute no. 


I mean, no one was going to see it because no one was going to treck to this Cheese Factory in Hackney. It was quite good, actually. And yeah, I'll probably get into a lot of trouble now saying this, but I think we did it and didn't sell tickets, or we sold wine, we did something. But you know, hilariously at the time, I was older than you and I thought if I rewrote the letter, but put a lot of pauses in it maybe I'd get a yes. 


But anyway, later, a few years later, and my mum's a painter and he bought a painting of her and I really wanted to write to him and say, 'You didn't let me do your play at The Cheese Factory, but I didn't.


Ben (11:53): I suspect why mine got through is because I wrote to him directly, albeit care of.


Jane (12:04): What a lovely early story about your first kind of furore, you know, your adventure into playwriting. 


Ben (12:11): Yes, at the time I was studying well, Double Maths, Physics, Chemistry, although I did an Art A-Level as well, so I was very, still very interested in that. And then I did Science at Cambridge University, although I did mainly directing there and obviously, there's a big theatre tradition. But then I went to Harvard, where they have a much bigger tradition of teaching both Dramaturgy and Playwriting, I think, has changed in the UK and Europe a little bit. But particularly at that time, there was a definite feeling that you can teach the craft of playwriting at least to a certain extent, and, you know, still debates about that, and I had a really positive experience that I did also do some directing work there. And I had a very inspiring poet teacher as well and also a photography teacher, kind of a fine art photography teacher. So I was very much involved in, like, the debate, although it's kind of very East Coast, US, you know, people are very well to do around, around Harvard, you know, taking the Arts seriously, both as a potential career and also, you know, a money thing or, or a calling, and that type of thing.


Jane (13:26): And we've talked about that before because my mother was the reason why my mum kept my play, my albeit shit plays that I wrote when I was seven, was because she was a painter. And my father was, I mean, he was a builder, really, but he was also a musician and had at some point made his living doing that. So that, you know, that question that sometimes people ask, you know, how did your parents feel about that? And I feel that you probably did Double Physics, Maths because there was an expectation on you from your parents, or is that a terrible assumption I'm making?


Ben; I was good at it, yes. I was definitely better at it than the equivalent in English. But except that, I mean, as you see, you don't really teach creative writing in secondary school. I mean, you might do a bit, but you're teaching practical criticism and literature and close reading, and you might do some plays. And even if you do drama, you're sort of learning about drama and all of that.


Jane (14:25): Sorry again, to interrupt, but unless you have a brilliant English teacher, which I had, who I think probably wanted to be an actress and she was Miss Tersighni, and she gave us plays to read.


Ben (14:38): Yes. Well, I mean, I'm sure you were reading it and doing it, what I meant is that it wasn't in the curriculum, there was no test.


Jane (14:43): No, sure. 


Ben (14:44): But I think even at 16, I probably wouldn't have gone that way anyway, because I was always much more interested in the sense of doing and I did photography, I did sculpture, I did other practical arts of which I was interested in, and I don't think I quite considered, I hadn't considered the playwriting thing in the same way. And then coming to Harvard, particularly with all of these arts, you know, teacher practitioners, I think a little bit like you, someone who actively teachers, but also practices their art. Yeah, and I find that that, that was quite influential for you know, 20–21-year-olds. 


Jane (15:30): Yeah and we've talked about that, you know, you have had many influential teachers


Ben:Not that many


Jane:  but you had a few, perhaps enough. I remember we talked last week about this about the, was he, a photographer, the teacher?


Ben (15:48): Yeah, so my photographer, mentor, Chris Kilip, his name, we had him and there was a little bit of this also in terms of poetry as a career, because a lot of poets, most poets actually do something else, as well as write poetry because it's virtually impossible to be a poet as your career, make money out of it. And even if you are a poet, you often have academic posts, But he, we did a lot of reading other people's photographs, particularly modern, practicing modern photographers, and you know, what are they trying to do?


How are they doing it? And then photography hasn't got as long a history as other things. So the history of photography is in there. But one of the things which came out was this, and some of us were really thinking about perhaps taking up photography, or fine art photography, particularly as a career, because Killip had things in MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and we'd had those photographers come and teach us and talk to us about it.


Jane (15:51): And you were a really good photographer, weren't you?


Ben (16:47): Yeah, I guess I was, was good enough to go straight into this. I won photography prizes at university and exhibitions elsewhere. And you've seen a couple of them.


Jane (17:00): Yeah, the travel ones.


Ben (17:01): And, and I took some that with very high quality. But the message came across from this, like, week-long session, that there were these photographers who we could see who we all agreed were really great artists. And then, I guess, most of us, were very surprised that they hadn't made very much money, and we're continuing to not make very much money. And then there were other photographers who, say, had mixed reviews, some like, oh, that's quite good, but there wasn't that huge consensus of saying, look, this is definitely great work.


And their photographs were worth a lot of money and continue to be a lot of money. And then we saw some photographs, where they're saying, look, these are people who were photographers, but they never really exhibited much, never really had a public profile, and were never going to have a public profile. 


Ben (18:01): And the conclusion was that there was limited correlation between great art and being paid a great amount of money at that time, at the same time. 


Jane (18:14): Yeah.


Ben (18:15): And you could very easily be a great artist, you could see great artists work, you could see that, and they, they were probably going to never make any money and I think one or two had died as a pauper. So...you kind of know this because you had great artists in history, right? Who died with no money because art wasn't paid for, but actually, there was a very high chance you could be a great artist, and make no money. Or perhaps even worse, you could make quite a lot of money and your art might not be very good...


Jane (19:07): Very interesting question, which is worse and of course all artists, would say I'd rather be a great artist and make no money. But I think the reality is, we would probably rather make some money and some of our art be great. And sometimes, we just have to make the art that we make, although, you know, during lockdown, my running joke is I'm going to have to get a job in a shop because I've lost a lot of work. And my husband will say there won't be any shops anymore soon, Jane, so that I can no longer say that. 

The interesting thing is that when you told me that story last week, I thought, this guy said that to you and you had a particular reaction, which I want to hear in a minute, but I mean, I knew that I just wouldn't make any money, because my mum (as a painter) certainly didn't make any money.


I tell people that I played the steel drums, at school and people think how cool. I did it because it was the only free instrument to learn because no one wanted to play it, well actually girls didn't want to play it. So we didn't have any money and my dad didn't certainly didn't have any money as a musician. So I don't, oddly, there was no pressure put on me (to make money) not that there was on you necessarily. But also, I think if someone had said to me, you could be great and never make any money, I wouldn't think I'm not going to do it. 


And oddly, I probably I did work out that I wasn't going to make a lot of money at some point. I mean, I've been a playwright, really, since I left school in my 20s. I've made a semi-living, and sometimes made a very good living, but normally, that's when I've been writing telly. And I've had one or two kinds of jobs related to playwriting, I was head of playwriting at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art, in Australia) and I worked at the Royal Court teaching playwriting, both fantastic jobs and wonderful to do. But I've got to the stage now where I'm old enough where I go, this isn't going to make me a huge amount of money and I don't have much of a pension either. And now I can't really do anything else. But for you, it had a very different effect, which I think is really interesting, because of what that guy said to you.


Ben (21:00): Well, yeah, maybe it was because probably my primary artistic practice at the time, was photography. So I thought, well, I've got other things I'm interested in. And I'm always going to do personal photography work, although digital changed that a little bit, so it just shows how much we know when we're 20. And so I thought, you know, what, I'm going to maybe do these other things. And I think there was also a part of it, that, maybe this is unfair cause you've got very high standards, but I thought, you know, people tell me, my photography is very good, and I can read it and I could see it was good. But was it of the standard that it would reach the Museum of Modern Art? Well, at 20, no.


And there were all of these other things I was interested in, but I kind of always knew, and this is also where the poetry and playwriting was emerging. And maybe this is the other artistic practice like I'd kept, because of doing A level Art and always kept a sketchbook, actually until the age of 21-22, I still keep a sort of notebook, but a sort of drawing, practice sketchbook. And I'd always had a personal practice and I thought you know what, that personal practice is always going to be really important to me, and I'm going to keep that going. And that was more important to me than a public practice. And I could already see that I was going to be influenced least in the photography world by saying, Well, if this is the kind of photography, which sells maybe I should be more interested in nudging my work that way if you want to make a living, and I decided to.


Jane (22:45): So practical Ben. So practical.


Ben And then I thought, you know what, that's not what I want to do with the brain space that this occupies.


Jane (22:54): You're a professional multitasker as well, you do and you often advise on how to do eight to nine things at once. But perhaps for you, you thought I can keep that personal private practice going but do something else. I mean, your parents were Travel agents, and did you make money to help them?


Ben (23:25): Yeah, like I think this is maybe an Asian tradition type thing from very young. Well, there are two or three things that my parents told me one is to travel is to be educated. So we did a lot of travelling, although that's maybe because they were travel agents. But there was a sense that I was going to take care of them. And I was going to be much better able to take care of them than they were maybe even then themselves with all of this education and qualifications.


And I guess one of the other things I like thinking about, there you made me think about things I haven't thought about for a little while, is we had a great family friend, called Ibrahim Hussein.

he was what we would call Malay as opposed to Chinese Malay. He was a friend of my dad's from the 1960s, and actually he was at art school in the 60s, went back to Malaysia, and then ended up being one of Malaysia's most famous and celebrated abstract art painters and was just painters' full stop. And he came with his family every year through London. And I guess I saw two or three things. One, I saw him in painting clothes. So one day there was like I need to paint and we got him wallpaper, which is all we had, and we went to the hardware shop and just got somewhat paint they had and what brushes they had, because he was... 


Jane (24:43): Needs must when the artist... 


Ben (25:04): yeah, and so and so he painted, which was quite inspiring. And then also, he made a living from his painting. So and so he was reasonably well off, probably from by Malaysian standards well off. So I've actually seen that painters could do that, which I've come to realize is actually quite rare and is actually very rare in Malaysia, to be a painter who could sell paintings for 10s of thousands of Malaysian dollars in fact probably hundreds of thousands of Malaysian dollars towards his later career. Maybe that was also influential, my A-Level Art was being inspired by him.


Jane (25:57): I mean I've said to my students across time, don't become a playwright because you want to make money. I mean, obviously, some playwrights do make money and you know, the first time a lot of actors, read your first play or early plays, you're just excited if the sentence holds together, and, and the jokes are funny where they're supposed to be, you know, the sex scenes aren't too cringe-worthy, although I always cringe at sex scenes, I don't know why I put them in anymore. But I think what's really interesting about that is, you know, your expectation, you talk about an idea quite early on, but your expectations do get kind of higher.


You know, like I did write about my own experience, my first few plays, as I think many playwrights do, because we probably need to write our own stories, but later on you want to do more with your work, and you want to be bigger, do more. But yeah, I don't think that that thing of making money or not to make money or whether it's a living or not, it's so interesting, I always wonder if it's if I'm too old to start another career when I worry about playwriting not being a great living, but I just am a playwright through and through. And actually, when I was teaching, I would love teaching for a period of time, and then I'd get to a point where I'd want to stop talking about it and just do it.


And one of the lovely things about teaching, because the conversations that you have with your students, hopefully, and often are so inspiring, and the work they make is, but at some point, you want to stop talking about it and do it. And I'm very miserable, if I don't write, which you know. And there was a great thing on Radio Four yesterday, a woman was writing about, talking about writing a very sexy book. And the interviewer said, rather boringly I thought, how do you write the really full-on sex scenes? And I thought, well, she just does. 

But what she said was, I just imagine, no one's ever going to read them, which was such a great answer. And in a way, you know, perhaps we it's like that, you know, that crap quote dance like nobody's watching, perhaps in a way we need to write plays sometimes from the darkness of our soul and think it doesn't matter if nobody watches or loves them.


Ben (27:57): I think I certainly respond to that. I just remembered one last thing on where we come from writing from your life experience. So, we were taught when I was at Harvard by a brilliant photographer, brilliant, called Nan Golden. 


This was it, because part of her work was kind of photographing her life and my life certainly didn't compare. So I was kind of like, well, I couldn't even do it from that thing, because if I were to photograph my life, it just seems really, really boring. So there was that element like I couldn't even do that, I couldn't. 


Jane (28:32): Yeah, yeah. She photographed her punk friends in bedrooms, didn't she kind of?


Ben (28:35): Yes and it felt more purposeful and everything. But on your thought about writing as if nobody's looking. I do remember when I was learning under you this, that sort of thing, particularly when it comes to sort of first draft or ideas, or that impulse, that you sometimes have to hold back the editing impulse, or the kind of person who says like, in your head - what you're writing is completely rubbish, because you can't know at that stage, whether it is or isn't rubbish at all. 


And part of this is maybe coming to your writing process, do you still have that where, particularly when you come in, sit down and write, you need to write a big chunk of it out? Or do you do a kind of planning thing? Do you do a bit of both? How do you approach writing today? And has it changed much over even over the last 10 years, but I was thinking over like 10, 20, 30 years of your writing career?


Jane (29:32): (I'm not that old!) Well, so many good questions, Ben, so many good. So I think through teaching, I've clarified my process, which has been a lovely sort of second-hand bonus from teaching. I do plan like a fiend, I plan now because I wrote a play called A Single Act, I think I wrote it while I was teaching you at the Royal Court, or perhaps it went on then. So I wrote a play called a single act, which had a very complicated timeframe, and that one couple went forward and one went backwards. And I'm not very good at Maths, so when I was writing it, I thought, I'm going to get horribly stuck here, structurally. And the short answer to that bit of the question is I did a sort of map of the timeframe of both couples so that I could stay on track, and also so that it could feel relatively seamless in the unfolding because, I think it plays become too, you know, when plays are like, very kind of self knowingly complicated in their structure, they can feel confusing, and I think plays shouldn't confuse us. 


You know, we don't want to have that David Lynch thing, where he's sitting somewhere going. I really fucked you up when I made you confused there - ha!. So I think plays should feel simple in their unfolding, even if they're nonlinear. So I wanted the structure to feel simple, so I did this kind of map. And ever since then, I've mapped out my plays. So I do plan and by that, I plan kind of the central characters, the perspectives, the story, which I think, you know, is really central, and the structure and by the structure, I mean, when does it happen? Where does it happen? 

Over how long a period of time? And I plan what each of my scenes are, or might be, and then I will say to my students who pull faces at me when I say that, like because they're like, you're just taking all the fun out of the creativity, I will say to my students or any writers that I'm talking to, or with, mentoring, you know, there are no playwright police, no one's going to come around and say, you said that that scene was going to be the scene where the couple split up, but now they're getting it on, you know, no one's going to do that. And you may change that, but you've got something to sort of hang off.


So that kind of foundation is good, and then interestingly, when you get lost or go on to sort of what sort of wank fest if you'll pardon the phrase. And by that, I mean, you just have a day, when you just write and you just sort of free-fall, and you lose your way, you can always go back to that Foundation, which I find really helpful, because it means that I can, I can kind of free-fall or free form within the structure and then go back and knowing why did that in the first place. So I do plan, like a fiend. But I've also written maybe 19 plays now, you know, so I need to.


Ben (32:13): Did you always plan with your first one or two less than you thought, you know what they didn't go as well as my latest one or two? 


Jane (32:20):  No, I didn't plan because I think my first few plays came out, like sort of showers of bullets and I think plays should, you know because I think, when we start, we are writing our own experience, when we write our first few plays I do, whether we are aware of it or not, we're writing sort of who we are and what we want and what's going on in the world and we often write about our age, you know, as in the age we are in the age we live in when we first write, but I think as I've got older and written more plays, I don't want to do that anymore, or not so overtly. 


So the planning for me is a kind of a support structure that I put in place to help myself because, because the process in some ways becomes easier as the right place or a very long answer to this question, the process becomes easier for me because I have more skills and more craft. So I know how to shortcut problems that will cause problems, things that would have caused problems for me in the past. But also now I want to do something new and different and exciting every time. And that becomes harder and harder in some ways, I think.


Ben (33:25): Yeah. That makes sense. And so has locked down, changed your process or nothing obviously, like a lot of creatives? There is limited time to workaround. I mean, obviously, there's some, but it's really diminished, which I think has been really hard on our industry and sector. But it kind of knocks.


Jane (33:47): Yeah, I mean, it's like.


Ben (33:48): What, what do I write with all of this and all of that?


Jane (33:51): Yeah, it's catastrophic. And I've been talking to a few writers back in Australia, where I lived and worked for a while. I mean, some writers, luckily have work and depending on where they live in the world, you know, some things are going on. Interestingly, I've got a tour opening, well rehearsing at the moment in Australia. My play, Lamb, is about to tour nationally and I talked to them yesterday on the first day of rehearsal and then today, they've gone into lockdown. So yeah, I don't know. I can't bear to get in touch with them actually. 


And it was the first bit of work I've had for a year. But you know, it's in Australia, it feels kind of far away and I can't be there. I think from my limited talking to other people or some talking to other people, but I think that a lot of people found the first lockdown, terrifying, but then interesting creatively, creatively because I think that they had time to themselves and quiet and the lack of looming deadlines and time to think. So friends of mine that are painters or, or designers or artists or poets actually said suddenly they had this time and this quiet and that was both daunting, but also quite freeing.


I feel like now people are going, is there any point in using that quiet time to work? Because is anyone ever going to hear it or listen to it or produce it again? So it's really, I think the most interesting thing for me, and I want to ask you about this as well, the most interesting thing for me is you go, what am I making work for? 


Like, my husband is a musician and I said to us both the other day, let's use this time where we've got nothing on, we've really got no work on, let's use this time to make some new work. But then what's the end game? You know, what are you making it for, for your own sense of expression, which of course, in some ways, as an artist, that's what you're doing. But I'm used to now writing things that then go on and are produced, and at the moment, I'm not sure if they will be so it's whether you then choose that time to write something you've never normally write because you think fuck it, it might never go on or whether you end up doing something else entirely. It's really interesting. So for you, what's this time been like, what's locked down been like, broken your work, but also for your creative work?


Ben (36:13): So I'm going to answer this askance and then come back, like you're very interesting, long answer as well. So I remember reading during lockdown, first lockdown that Pushkin when he went into lockdown, he was amazingly prolific. And I was a little bit suspicious, because it's like, yeah, maybe, maybe not. So that's one thought. Another thought as to specifically in this area of the Creative Arts is I think, musicians, to some extent, playwrights particularly, is all work often isn't really finished, until it's finished in front of an audience, that's the thing which completes it, actually going full back around sort of to Ways of Seeing, or ways of being, this idea that art is completed with the viewer or the participants. 

But you know, you could, you could paint for a while, and paint for your own thing, and then feel that okay, at some point that will be exhibited. 


But for something like the live arts of playwriting and musicianship, that disconnect, the longer it goes on, I think the more we feel it, because I think for a lot of it isn't quite complete like that, you know, the play is there, but it's not being performed. So it's not got its ultimate expression. So I do think that the thing, and then I also think that, I do wonder, so there's a lot of talk around, can we reset? Do we come back better? And all of that and the pandemic, around Theatre Arts, so we could talk about it in the world. Yeah, broadly and widely, which is also an interesting question.


And I'm not sure it's really going to do this reset, I'm now more worried that what's going to happen is you're going to have a generation, or just a lot of people who to your last point, are going to end up having to do something else. For a huge variety of reasons, might be money might be things you might have given up, you might feel it's whatever. And actually, that is just going to end up as a creative loss. So I've got a little bit more pessimistic on that. On the other hand, I do acknowledge that these types of crises have often produced a kind of flourishing sometime afterwards. You know, this adversity produces a sort of creativity.


Jane (38:35): Yeah, roaring 20s coming up. Yeah, I wish. My husband says, you know, that the roaring 20s came after the last crisis, and yeah, they flourished. But that wasn't a disease.


Ben (38:47): No, and I do think it might happen, but it might not happen for the same people. So the people who get to flourish are not the same people who got hit really hard here. So this is kind of transferred. Yeah, I got to go really askance. It's a little bit like we would like these coal mines to stop and we would like them to become wind turbines. But to tell the truth and you have to tell the truth, the coal miner, the typical coal miner...


Jane (39:12): Will not be able to work?


Ben (39:14): Will not be able to work. Now his or her son or daughter might well do that, so there's a intergenerational shift, I mean, this is kind of slightly fairy tale, but the example would hold that that might well happen. But if you're an old-time coal miner, it probably isn't happening for you. So there's this interesting intergeneration you can see on the system's level, now there's a new breed of maybe artists coming through particularly if you could be supported by some money, so you don't have to like scrabble for your rent. And then there might be this other flourishing when it comes to flourish.


But I, I worry for those now who, let's say don't have money to support themselves, and so have to retrain and do something else, or those are over a generation older and who might, we might get lost. So I am sort of slightly optimistic because I do think flourish, things do happen. But I am actually now more worried that they're the kinks shift in time will be a little bit more will be a little bit more damaging.


Jane (40:12): Yeah, and I think also the work that will be around will be more scarce. So, you know, like, applying for sort of art jobs at the moment, normally, where there would be, you know, 50 people applying, there's now 500 people applying because they've lost stuff. I think what will happen is that artists will have to work in new ways, or they'll have to do new things. You know, we've all had to learn how to use Zoom, is the very simple version of that and I did some Zoom teaching, which I just thought I was going to loathe. And lots of people signed up when I did it last year, and I loved it, actually, partially because I could wear my tracksuit.


Ben (40:47): You should definitely do more of that. But there's nothing like digital theatre, until recently. 


Jane (40:53): It leaves me cold. 


Ben (40:55): Also, people have not prepared to pay as much for it. So this is the whole. And it might be because actually, you’re the whole shared experience element is less. I mean, there is obviously something in it, because people are watching and you can get millions of people who watch a series on TV, and then we can talk about it. But there is something about actually this is something in common maybe with the music gig scene, right? That there is something about that live shared experience


Jane (41:21): Yeah, totally.


Ben (41:24): Which is different from it online.


Jane (41:26): And I mean, I think I'm sure when I taught you a lot, and this includes you, I used to at the first lesson, I don't think this was original, I think Simon Stevens used to do this at the Royal Court, and it's probably Steven Jeffries anyway really, you know, I'd ask what is the fundamental difference between theatre and film? And we get the writers to kind of get a list on the board or the students to get a list on the board and that was so we could talk about what we should embrace when we write plays, you know, that plays can be set anywhere, or that can be set in someone's mind, in one location, play with time, all of those wonderful imaginative things.


I think what's really interesting is that, you know, one of the reasons I love going to theatre is for that kind of being in the dark room sitting next to someone I don't know experience. But I also like the risk of that. And, and going to see theatre can be amazing and I can be transported or I can just spend the whole time thinking about what I'm going to have when I get home for dinner. And, and you know those, those kinds of polarized experiences. But I kind of love that you take that risk, it's like going to the live comedy, right? You kind of sit down, you don't know what you're in for, bad or amazing. 


But I don't want to sit down and watch the telly and it be that. I'd rather watch something I know is good. So if I'm not all in, sitting in a room with a load of people, I don't know, and the lights go down and the adventure begins whether it be good or bad, I'd rather watch something I know is going to be good if I'm sitting on my couch and just turning an ON button. So it's problematic for me, and I'm really trying to watch theatre on TV, actually Sky Arts, which is free now which is brilliant has been showing some theatre. And I watched Jane Eyre the other night, which was brilliant, the National Theatre production it was I sort of felt like I was there, but I was on my own in a dark room on the couch, there was no one around and so and I sort of very consciously committed to it but and it was very long.


 But I'm worried about digital theatre. And I thought, what I'm really interested in I spend all day thinking about it at the moment is how can we write plays that embrace digital theatre, so we're not just putting on the plays that we were seeing before, as digital, you know, how can we embrace the form? And the other thing is sorry, 98 answers...the other thing is, can we now write things that don't acknowledge the pandemic? And do they feel contemporary? Like, if I'm going to write something, a TV idea, or play they're about now, does it have to be post-pandemic? Or are we going to get sick of those post-pandemic plays?


Ben (43:47): So I think so this is one question that we've been discussing, I haven't got the answer on this. So do you think what makes a good play is going to have to change post-pandemic slightly? I get that plays in a time of climate change is one thing, but I do wonder, I think that thing you hit on like the incursion of digital, which is its own form and space, but it plays still have to be a different thing. They can't try and squeeze themselves into digital because then they're not plays right in the same way. Do you think its going to change or not change?


Jane (44:25): I don't know because unlike you, I don't understand how money works because I've never had any and I don't know what the pressure is on theatres to, I don't know...it's such an interesting question to me and I...I still secretly smoke cigarettes and I often stand on my back stoop having a cigarette, sort of staring into the sky thinking, you know, what's going to happen to theatre? Like, what's going to happen? I don't know. I don't know.

And I don't know what we'll be clamouring for.


And the last Zoom teaching I did the last lesson I did, I said to my students, I want you to write the play that if this was the first play that people were going to see when the pandemic ended or when lockdown ended, I want you to write that. So is it that that plays then about, you know everyone with masks on in lockdown? Or is it that we want to see a play where people can licking each other's faces with gusto, the great joy of human contact and exchange bodily fluid, you know, it's like, what is it? What's the, what are we going to need from theatre? But I suppose you're asking what will theatre need to be? Which is a different question. It's really interesting. Yeah, yeah.


Ben (45:34): Yeah. So on the one hand, sometimes these things happen, and they, we don't change that much, you know, there's been swine flu, there's been other things, you know, we still, I speak to a lot of people on Zoom, something like men misunderstand. I was speaking to a lot of women on video call and they're still putting on perfume, right? Because it's not, it's not for the video. It was cool because it's for themselves and for all of these other things. And that's probably not actually going to change for people to use perfume and all of that type of thing.


Jane (46:07): But make up sales have dropped Ben.


Ben (46:09): Have they?


Jane (46:10): There was a whole thing about it on the radio this morning. They went up because everyone was doing Zoom, like Oh, my God, I look terrible. And now they've gone down because people just like, yeah, yeah, can't be bothered. So we're all going through it, up and down.


Ben (46:21): Maybe that's like it with writer's creativity went up in the first couple of months. Like, oh, and then it's like...


Jane (46:28): I don't have to go out tonight anymore. Also, I think people's timetables went all skew which is great for creativity, if you're a new writer or not a morning person. But yeah, and then in the way that mental illness and, and sort of trauma and stress and anxiety has gone really up this lockdown because we, we just feel like is it just going to be an endless series of lockdowns. So do our plays have to acknowledge that we are in a time of no fixed plans? 


Or should our plays you know, it's so interesting for me like one of the, it's so interesting when you watch TV at the moment, I think like I watched something the other night, it was about a DJ who died tragically, or no, not tragically, but he died. And you know, there were just crowds of there was just it was only a few years ago, there was footage of people in crowds, you know, dancing and sweating, touching each other. And it feels like another era already.


Ben (47:30): Although, so on this, so this on this is the wider pandemics. And I think there's going to be really interesting geographic splits as well because so we can have an arm about the UK response and there's probably quite a lot to criticize. But the half the country will probably be vaccinated quite soon.


Jane (47:49): Yeah, you keep saying that, I love it.


Ben (47:52): Actually, our lockdown, if you think just about the UK, which we'll come to, but by summer, call it June, July, there should be 70 to 80% immunity coverage across the country, which is enough to actually exit from lockdown and all of that. But if you compare that somewhere like, yes, it is, well roughly, let's say approximately, it is. Yeah. It approximately is within sort of, you know, a lot of these forecast errors, but it, it is particularly is for the vulnerable. Mass majority over 80 will be done and overseas.


Jane (48:30): Yeah, yeah. 


Ben (48:32): But if you look at even places like France and Germany, they're quite a way behind. And before you even get to, say, Africa or India, so you might have well, London if it wanted to, might be able to escape lockdown and maybe you, you know, this whole thing like, okay, and people from other countries aren't really aren't really coming. So you have this, you have this partial reopening and, and maybe you could get on with it, but only in a kind of more localized way. And I don't know, so maybe then that will be that for the UK. The pandemic flashed, flashed away in a year to 18 months, and not so many changes, except that you had a generation who couldn't earn anything for two years, and therefore, they disappeared.


But yeah, I do wonder then about and that is that broader movement, that we've had kind of globalization for quite a while. Now that's the signs that you've got, what I would call relocalization. So the local corner shop has become quite important now and you always had a place in the community and all of these exhibitors A lot of localization effects, as well as globalization effects. And actually, you'll have these two things coming together. And I don't know whether that will encourage creativity, or


Jane (49:46): It's like everyone's going to set all their plays in the supermarket? Is that the only place we go? There'll never be any food in restaurants again. Oh! Yeah. It's such a yeah, there's an advert on at the moment, which is quite incredible, I don't know if you've seen it's not an advert, it's not advertising anything, it's a very beautiful kind of public information. It's a woman, who goes to the supermarket with her child, have you seen it? 


Ben (50:11): No.


Jane (50:11): And she is sitting in the car and there's voiceover, which is her saying to her partner, it was just really busy, as the queues are really long and you know, because of the pandemic, and when is it all going to stop. And then you realize she's just sitting in the car with her child. And obviously, she doesn't want to go home. And you're thinking, okay, is there something wrong? And then when she gets home, there's a just a beautiful, which is incredibly subtle where you realize she's potentially in a violent domestic situation. And, yeah, so she's been lying to her partner, and they've just been sitting in the car for two hours just to get away.


And then the line that comes up is like, you know, during lockdown, for some people, home isn't always a safe place, or something like that. And that for me, has been the thing that's risen about the pandemic that I want to write about, but I don't know what yet, as in this idea of people, you know, the idea of the domestic being wrong, or hard, but actually, during the pandemic, that underscoring of the kind of underclass, or people that are not safe, they feel like the people that we should be writing about. And, yeah, if I had my way, what I would do is somehow go into those parts of society now and say, we need to hear from you.


Ben (51:29): This is the untold stories element, right? 


Jane (51:32): Yeah. 


Ben (51:34): Actually, their stories always resonate. But yeah, that's one of our purposes of storytelling. 


Jane (51:39): Indeed. And, and perhaps that's what's changed for me in my career is that I, I wanted to tell my untold stories, and I've told all my stories, they're all told, and I'm really interested not because I want to like speak for the masses, because I'm really interested in the people that aren't Zooming and don't get to have these, you know, places to talk and what the pandemic is like for them. And I have a brother who lives partially on the streets, and I have a mother in care, so I'm obviously thinking about them, and, and, and what their stories are during the pandemic. 


Yeah, so I'm doing that thing that I do, Ben, which is that I'm trying to work out what matters to me during this time, and therefore, what do I want to write about? And kind of what is it? How do I do it? And I did a session in my Zooms, which was called Writing in Time of Crisis, which was me saying, do we write about the pandemic or not, as I said earlier, but it was also like, how do we sort of authentically respond to what's going on now as writers. And in a way, we all have to do that very individually, I think, you know. We will be so sick of Zoom the Musical in a few months' time, so how do we write the plays that metaphorically matter, I suppose, if that doesn't sound too wanky, respond to what's going on now, which is really interesting for me.


Ben (53:00): Which brings me to my question which was related to that, what would you say to us, or people, writers now? Like, is that good advice of the moment? Or what kind, is it changed? What was your advice generally? I kind of feel like your advice was a little bit like my advice a while back which was you need to write, right. And I've always felt this is one of the things there's a period when I felt like I wasn't writing I might not write again. But I've started a writing practice up again, and I've written again, from it. But I wonder whether you know, there is, there's more to that, that has to be a bedrock, like, if you're not writing, then that's a bit tricky, or seeing stuff or being involved.


Jane (53:40): And when you tell them you haven't been writing. Like you, you're often busy with your life and work and your family, as you should be because that's your life too. But if we meet up and I say, Have you been writing? And you often go a bit like, you know, No, I haven't been. So you feel, I think, a sadness when you aren't writing.


Ben (54:01): Yeah, and I think you're going really back full circle, compared to like when I was young and thinking about that, because I didn't, I didn't feel that sadness was when I wasn't directing. Whereas this broader element of creativity, drawing yeah, and writing, writing for sure (I need to do that, in some way). And I still get like small scraps of time, but I've also realized that now I probably do need half days, maybe full days; I tend to be a night-time writer. Like I kind of dwell on things during the day, but it really only comes together towards night and actually, my eldest son is definitely a night person, as well. But yeah, I guess, what's your advice to writers or writers now? I guess we can't necessarily talk to ourselves that much. 


Jane (55:02): Well, the only thing I say to myself at that moment is no, it will come back (creativity) because you've done it for too long, I've done it for, you know, most of my life, I know that it'll come back. I used to go away on kind of writing retreats, or yoga retreats, creativity retreats, when I could afford it! I used to go and I'd never do any work on them. I'd never do any work. I'd always just sleep and cry, or walk or get cross. And then when I came back, I'd always start writing. And interesting I said to John the other day (my husband) it's almost like, I like a bit of like, a bit of chaos to write in, but not this much world chaos.


It's like, some people like to respond to a deadline, my equivalent of that is I like a bit of kind of world chaos, but there's much chaos at the moment that I feel overwhelmed. And I suppose my advice to writers at the moment is to, to not allow the pandemic to, to heavily influence what you're writing, just write what you were going to write anyway, or want to write anyway, and see how the pandemic kind of naturally influences it. Because I think that's when the great metaphor plays happen.


You know if we think of The Crucible by Arthur Miller, I mean, I think he definitely wanted to, I think he was probably really fascinated by the story of The Witches of Salem and then it probably came to him that he wanted to write about The McCarthy Witch Hunts, and that those two things beautifully sat together. Yeah, and I suppose the other thing is to find the time of the day when you find it best to write, don't try and...it's like people that are not morning people trying to be morning people. It just doesn't work. Ben does it? No, we both know that. 


Ben (56:42): I was really, I reading that He was a Pace man. You read the part, novel series. But he writes like this is whatever, 100 over a year ago, but he wrote everything from 4 am to 7 am, or whatever, and wrote tons of novels and did really well on like, no sleep.


Jane (56:59):. But I reckon it's like physiological, it's sort of blood sugar. You know, for me, I cannot write first thing in the morning, I can just about do my emails, but I'm much better like making coffee, cleaning the kitchen, I kind of have to potter a bit. But I'm sorry, I keep saying this, but I would say to my students, and it really worked for them over the years and they were all really different, my strange brood of children, and I would say to them, find the time in the day when you find it best to write and it probably has to do with blood sugar or something like that and, and have that as your time, and for me, it's an afternoon and night thing.


So if I get all the stuff done I need to do in the morning, and then I sit down after lunch I can write from 2 to about 10, which is about as much as I can do now without getting bad back and a bit sort of twitchy. But then you know that time is for that. It's like knowing when you're best to eat breakfast or knowing when you're best to go to sleep. I think that's a really good bit of advice because days at the moment are just stretching in an untimely fashion aren't they, and time loses all sense.


Did I give you any great advice when I was your teacher? Was there anything you held on to? 


Ben (58:15): Yeah, what I think a lot of it for me was about thinking about structure and form and things like that, and your actual story you know, turning points and things, things I have really been dwelling upon. So a lot of it I guess, well that's craft, so it was just another level, and then the craft saying look these are some guidelines and then this is where, you know, your brilliance, or your complete opposite of brilliance, will go outside the guidelines, it will work or it might not. And so that that sort of thing, I think I took away, I took away that this is, go on.


Jane (59:02): No, but that when you asked me about structure before, and then my advice, I mean, I'm very big on structure and I love teaching structure and I think it's something I do well and I love it as well. I'm like a structure kind of fruit loop, that's my technical term, in that I get very excited about structure because it kind of opens up doors for me and it's like, it's like wrapping a present beautifully, or just functionally, I get very excited about it. But I think what's really interesting at the moment is that time and space are not normal, at the moment. 


So, for example, you know, when I was teaching structure on the Zooms, I ended up, everyone was in their room, you know, like, normally, I would say, 'How do you feel about location? And how does location affect your scene? And if you think about putting characters in different places, what does that do to your characters?' And, you know, some characters like being in a closed, neat room, or like being outside...etc 


And at the moment, of course, we're just thinking about space in a much more interesting way, because we're all in the same four walls, essentially and we're also thinking about time in a really interesting way, because we can't plan anything. And days are kind of monotonously the same. So I think my advice would be to think about placing your play in a time and place that somehow sticks two fingers up to COVID. So like, build a play that sits outside, this time and place, you know. Or really acknowledge the sort of guidelines, the restrictions that COVID has placed upon us in your play. Like, at the moment, I just bought loads of books on, on astronauts, because I'm really interested in writing something about astronauts, which you'll go what, as you know me you'll go, why Jane? And it's because I'm really interested in writing about the kind of quarantine that astronauts would go into in the past, when they got back from space, as a way of looking at how that affects us now. Have you gone quiet?


Ben (1:01:02): I'm just, yeah. Astronauts, yeah, that is really fascinating. I'm aware that we could probably talk for ages. 


Jane (1:01:08): I know we could.


Ben (1:01:09): Maybe we need to...because I kind of felt we went into some on our creative processes and processes by hand. We felt we want more, but I might ask my last question then.


Jane (1:01:20): Okay, good.


Ben (1:01:23): Yeah. Well, maybe we're going to, maybe my last question would be if you weren't writing, what do you think you would doing or should be doing?


Jane (1:01:35): I love that question. It's so full of possibilities. But at the moment, I'm so terrifying unemployed, so. 


Ben (1:01:42): Let's say a fantasy job to have then...


Jane (1:01:47): Can I have three answers? So I'm, so I'm really obsessed with food as are you and cooking and I found cooking during lockdown really healing for whatever less annoying word. I've really missed cooking for other people. So I've started cooking in lots, like way too much food for me and my husband. Like on Valentine's Day, I'm made cake and delivered it to people where we're living. 


So I think I'd probably run some kind of thing where I had to cook for people. And I did a playwriting retreat in Australia when I was living there, where people pay a lot of money to come and have me teach them, I was mentoring them for the weekend. And I also organized the food and I enjoyed doing the food more than the teaching. So I'd do something to do with food. I would be in a band is my fantasy job because my dad was a musician, I'm obsessed with music. 


I would sing in a band, though I'd probably be dead by now if that was my career. And I think I would have really liked to somehow gone into law, but I don't think I was clever enough, not in the right way, but I've just got a very strong sense of justice and I get very arsy about stuff, but I don't think I'd have been very good at it and I'd have probably failed. Okay, I'm going to ask you


Ben (1:03:14): You'd want to be a lawyer, really? Then I'd be a politician. [Inaudible 1:03:18]  


Jane (1:03:20): Yeah. But you can make and change law with plays, I think, change the way you see things. 


Ben (1:03:27): Probably maybe even to a greater extent with stories, then you can work with actual legislation, the stories would shape the legislation and shape people.


Jane (1:03:36): Yeah, and I did say that to my students. If you could change the world with your next play, what would you write? Which is a bit sort of lofty and hefty I know, but why not? So I was going to say if you were not a playwright, which you are, and you are many things, what are the other jobs that you would be doing? If you weren't doing the jobs that you are doing?


Ben (1:03:57): Well, food service is something we have in common. I, I don't know exactly, quite what. So this is kind of sort of fantasy because it doesn't really work, but I would maybe do this thing where I would be the chef maker, but I would, a little bit like these very high ends. 


Jane (1:04:16): What's a chef maker? 


Ben (1:04:17): Well, so I'm going to describe, so like, that's very high end. So chefs nowadays, like, they direct their sous chefs to do all of the things and they stand around their plate and they do a bit of cooking, but they don't really do cooking. 


Jane (1:04:28): Yeah.


Ben (1:04:32): So this chef maker, I have is like these master sushi makers, but I wouldn't be doing sushi, I would have maybe eight seats and I would cook something personally for all eight of you and we will probably have a conversation, whilst we're cooking about this is why I've chosen that and this. And so I guess that's like a dinner party, but I'm doing it as cheffing and fooding. And we would eat all together and they would not, be more than, maybe eight. So you could come in couples, or it could be two fours. And you wouldn't also really get a choice. I mean maybe I'd have to do like a veggie thing or not veggie thing, whatever. But it will be basically, you turn up. And this is what you get.


Jane (1:05:19): I am so coming around your house for this, when we're allowed to [Inaudible1:05:23].


Ben (1:05:25): So that would be my foodie thing. As of late, I do wonder whether something along teaching, but not, I guess for very non-traditional teaching. Like, I don't quite know how it works, but essentially, they would be like little salons and things over sort of topics but where we get around, and you know, discuss, you know, the things that we know or have discovered, like, I guess if it was in playwriting, right, although on me other.


Jane (1:05:53): Well that's kind of what this is what I suppose. 


Ben (1:05:55): Yeah, but this is we, playwright collectively, although we might argue about a lot of things, there are some aspects about our craft, which I would say unknown, or we might still debate about them, but you know, there's 50 or 60% of things that people would agree that this these are ingredients.


Jane (1:06:13): Can you hold it? Someone's knocking on the door with a parcel I knew that was going to happen. Oh. Hello. Yes. That's very good. Thank you very, very, very much. That was quite a good moment because he said Brody, and I just thought I'm not going to say it's Bodie.


Ben (1:06:38): I'm doing a little bit, but I do wonder whether that's, that's the thing, that's the thing you, that's the thing you could do. I might have gone on to be, with my scientific training parker career. I know, my professors were disappointed that I didn't go on into science. And I do wonder whether I would have made maybe more of an impact in science. So actually, I had a conversation here, kind of circle back with my science professors as well about careers and things.


And my science professor at the time, who was one of the youngest professors in this area of neuroscience, and he said he spent, although he didn't mind, maybe 50% of his time doing funding application type science or funding applications, 20 or 30% of his time teaching, which he really enjoyed and then only 20 or 30% of his time left to doing the science he wanted to do. And I'm not sure that was the split I wanted.


Jane (1:07:38): That's really a good question for future, for these conversations, the kind of percentage what, because I think one of my questions was and interestingly, we haven't gotten to them because we've had just as interesting a conversation around other things led brilliantly by you, but one of my questions is, you know, what's your ideal creative working day? And sort of the in brackets like does any of us ever have that? And I suppose like, what's your percentage? So what is from you? What is your ideal creative working day and I'm not involving your children, your wife in that, because that's a given.


Ben (1:08:16): Would probably be, so this is the fantasy because I don't think this happens right would be two hours work. Okay, so the super fantasy would maybe be two hours work in the morning.


Jane (1:08:29): Work on other stuff to make money?


Ben (1:08:32): No, no, no. This is a creative day. 


Jane (01:08:34): Yeah, perfect.


Ben (1:08:37): Two hours creative practice, although that might not all be writing this, that might be reading, right? Or something else. Then, unfortunately, a light lunch because if it's a big lunch, really let's be honest like you can lie to yourself, but...so light lunch and then another couple of hours and then probably if it's a writing day, it probably is a lighter dinner as well and then a couple of hours after dinner as well. I don't think I've ever achieved such a day.


Jane (1:09:11): I completely love, you have your creative day also involves your meals.


Ben (1:09:17): Oh, yeah.


Jane (1:09:18): I love it, I love it though. Because I'm like, 'What's your idea of a creative day?' You're like a light lunch for starters...


Ben (1:09:31): But so I think the practical one would probably be only having two of those sessions. But I think in all fairness, I probably have only ever managed one, I think I probably managed sessions where one or two hours and maybe spent reading thinking, and then another two or three in a writing but I don't think I've had a 10-hour breakthrough writing day or. 


Jane (1:09:56): Never?! 


Ben (1:10:00): Well, I probably have I wouldn't have considered them good creative days, right?


Jane (1:10:10): That's really fascinating. Yeah, so you asked me a brilliant question which I answered terribly. So my advice would be to people at the moment or just at any point, would be to observe your own creative process and the days where you are really productive in the days when you aren't, which are partially chemical, part other things, you know, rain, sun... 


Ben (1:10:31): Yeah, this is why keep on talking about food. Because I know, so I don't if I'm going to have a good creative day as well, I try not to eat a very big breakfast.


Jane (1:10:39): I love it. I love it.


Ben (1:10:41): But it's really true.


Jane (1:10:43): So I basically when I'm having a really good creative day, I don't even eat, right? Look at me, like I look like I don't eat, yeah, right. So I know what my perfect creative days because during lockdown, I've really observed it and I've got one of the days down, knowing when it works, which is really good. So I get up having had a good night's sleep, which isn't always because I'm menopausal. But, ideally, I get up having a good night's sleep. And I have an hour in the morning where I have no pressure on, no phone calls, turn the phone off, I listen to radio for music, which is very good for me pre working, make myself breakfast, coffee, have a few cigarettes, apologies to peeps, kind of look at the sky for a bit of dream time, like an hour or so.


And then, I've worked out here that I need to go and do something physical for an hour, whether it be a walk, or some yoga or something, which is kind of getting rid of the nervous kind of and the fast energy for me. And then I sit down and either read or read through what I'm currently writing, or read through my research stuff, though I don't do a lot of research, but at the moment, something I'm writing is taking some; so that's my astronauts. So I look through some stuff that kind of gives me some dream time, write some notes, whatever. 


Then I will have my lunch, I will have some lunch because otherwise, I'll get so hungry, I'll start kind of eating myself. And then I need to sit down at two, which pisses me off because two is The Archers on Radio Four and also The Radio Play, which is sometimes really good, so sometimes I don;t then start till three if the radio play is good. And then I work solidly three to eight, or if I'm going well, three till ten, I just write. 


And that is my perfect creative day and that is when I can get whole scene done, or rewrite something and make it loads better or fix something that's not working, or if my creativity that day is reading a play, I can get a whole play read and write some really good notes, so that I worked out it's like two till eight or two till ten. And then if I'm having an amazing day when I'm writing like the last play I've written Tell Me You Love Me, I'm having an amazing day, I'd eat at nine and then I'll keep going, because then I think this day is so good, I have to harness it. But I don't have children like you.


Ben (1:13:01): I've not had days where I say I can do all of this writing. So I think I probably don't know what's actually the best one. So I'm going to take your advice, I'm going to think about what it is. But also I don't think I can achieve it anytime soon. Because I'm doing stuff.


Jane (1:13:17): You could try doing something like it?


Ben (1:13:19): Well, maybe, I don't know. So, we were discussing my wife, who has to go and she's writing creative nonfiction at the moment. And she goes to the car for two hours at a time to get out of the house to be able to write, because there's just, this is the whole...I don't want to say...the tasks of home in their widest sense, just infiltrate everything, to be able to have that space. 


Jane (1:13:54): Thank your wife. The fact that she goes and as I said to you when you told me that a couple of weeks ago, I just said normally, the stories I heard that people are going to drink in the car. It's people that are like, so devoted to drinking. But she is amazing, that's real dedication. That's because it's the nearest space she can get to that is quiet and private.


Ben (1:14:15): Yeah. 


Jane (1:14:16): And that's like at the Royal Court, the Writers' Rooms looked like toilets, I think they probably had been toilets. When I first got there, I thought no one could write in there, but you know, if needs must when you want to write and you want a quiet space, you just want a desk. You don't care if you've chairs ergonomic. Like, because I always end up writing at the kitchen table anyway. So I would say to you, you need to, in your notepad, you need to observe a day where you get some really good writing done, or just writing that feels like it, it worked well for you that day. And you need to observe what that day was, and make a note of it.


Ben (1:14:51): Yeah, although actually, that first thing. I know. It's all supercharged when I have really great sleep, so.


Jane (1:14:57): Yeah, indeed, everything is.


So maybe should have two questions, each quick ones. I'm going to go through my list. And we're only we have to answer them quickly, which I know that I am the person that can't do that.


Ben (1:15:25): Go on.


Jane (1:15:27): Um, so I have many questions, but have you got through your questions?


Ben (1:15:33): For me, it's a bit of a conversation. I've got a bazillion more that I could ask.


Jane (1:15:41): I don't know what bazillion, well so. 


Ben (1:15:44): Bazillion is more than a zillion.


Jane (1:15:47): I didn't know that. 


Yeah, so I suppose my first question is, what are you dreaming of creating when COVID is over, as a piece of art, and it can't be a meal menu?


Ben (1:16:12): Yeah, so I am working, I think I might have mentioned it a little bit about. So my current show, which is still going on in a digital form, it’s called Thinking Bigly and is about an.


Jane (1:16:23): It's brilliant everybody.


Ben (1:16:25): It's kind of what we call a performance lecture, because a lot of it is about what happens in climate and sustainability, but it has a lot of other elements too. And I'm actually doing one I've just started, so this is a lot of R&D time, and I haven't sat down to piece it all together. But I've got a lot of Post-its on it in the similar vein on essentially on how we die. So taking a lot of elements around death and so this is I started this pre-power.


Jane (1:16:53): How can we, plan for that better?


Ben (1:16:56): So it's quite all-encompassing, that is one element. Another element or you know, what are the risk factors which cause us to die. Like it's very different in the UK than it is in Africa and then it's also through time. So how we died 150 years ago is different today. And then those that splits into those various elements. So what we died off was very different in 1800 to today, but they were also much closer to death, right? They actually probably understood it more, because you might die by the time you were 20. So you would have multiple, you would enclose people, people in your neighbourhood, it would have been an ever-present item and actually...one of the things around the pandemic. 


Which is quite, interesting is sort of the wrong word, is that it has borders, a lot of us are closer to death in our in our everyday lives. Which has shocked us, but actually, in some way should not be shocking us because it is actually always happening around us everywhere. And I know with your mum and everything, that's sort of present, but so this thing about that, and then we plan for it really badly. Partly because we as humans probably don't want to face up to mortality and all of that, but you know, these are the layers.


Ben (1:18:08): Why haven't we sorted out those questions? So I've got a kind of performance lecture in me around that where some of it is my own thing.


Jane (1:18:17): I'm just going to say one thing, is that not a play as well then?


Ben (1:18:24): Maybe, but I haven't found the play format because it was too much. So this is the whole thing about drawing on your own stuff, it draws too much on


Jane (1:18:32): On your own stuff.


Ben (1:18:33): On my own stuff, in a way that I don't want to transform it into another and also I want it to draw on other people's stuff. So Thinking Bigly, you've got me talking now. So Thinking Bigly, you start with, you write your own climate confessions and own climate actions and in the same way, I'd probably open up how we die, something like, so I will ask you what is the song that I should play at my funeral? But you can write that for me. But then what is the song you should play at your own funeral, if you've got to choose? So you should write that down. So there is the opportunity to input some of their thoughts, you know, what is the reading you choose for yourself? I mean, how, why haven't we thought about that? And we should we think about that.


Jane (1:19:18): I know my Desert Island Discs, so you'd think I'd work that out.


Ben (1:19:22): Yeah. Why? And I don't know, I don't know what the piece of music would be. So this was like, the thing is like, oh, I'm writing this, I have no idea what my piece of music would be, what my reading, I have now a little bit of it because I thought about it and actually, I have two or three choices. It's like, well, how should you shape what the funeral is, you should check for me and that's I guess, the theatrical gimmick around the around it, we have a little bit of that. So that is the piece of work I'm actually currently working on, as well as kind of all of the other stuff. So I've actually got a shape for it.


Jane (1:19:54): But also its really good that the piece is like looking at how we die. Because we've, as you said, become closer to it because of the pandemic. So in a way, that feels like your response to the pandemic.


Ben (1:20:05): Yeah, so it is and maybe one of the reasons I've delayed, putting all of it out there is that.


Jane (1:20:20): And, and my answer to that is that I want to write something about sort of confined spaces, which is partially about the pandemic, but it's also to do with my mother, who lived in a big house and was a traveller and an adventurer, at the end of her life being in a care home and those two things have kind of come together in a COVID way for me, so I'm going to write, I'm going to read about what I'm really interested in, in the first people that had to quarantine, which is astronauts, and what that was like in a time and that was really understood and what our understanding of that was, and I'm interested in, in someone having come back from space, being in a quarantine situation with, with their family and, and, and so looking at sort of quarantine in that way. 


Don't nick that idea anyone because it's really good, Jane Bodie said it first. And really you've kind of answered my questions, because really, I was like, What are you going to make next? And you've said what you're going to do.


I suppose, what's the best piece of work you've seen during COVID? And it can be a response to COVID? I know that's annoying because then you'll be like, oh, I can't think, and then you'll remember it while you're making a cup of tea, or some food knowing you. But have you seen anything during the pandemic, other than that brilliant Zoom meeting the other day where that guy shouted at that women? Have you seen anything that you've loved?


Ben (1:21:45): I haven't. There has been stuff on, but like it's been on, it's not been a covered pandemic, like related piece of work. And this is interesting because I have felt that, and this is to your earlier point that I don't think theatre has produced a piece in response, either digitally or in some other way, I don't know what the other thing, so this is this is where we probably, this is where we probably struggled. And so there have been things, but it's kind of I think the kind of interesting question is, have you seen a piece of art, something theatrical somehow COVID pandemic of its time, form, or shape from where we are and has made you go, wow? Actually, I haven't. I don't know what I was expecting to see. But maybe, this is maybe our tragedy is that we've, we've not done it yet.


Yeah, there's Netflix and digital theatre and all of that, but yeah, so my answer is No, no, I haven't.


Jane (1:23:07): No, okay.


Ben (1:23:08): There's been some artwork and there's been some good work on different sort of levels. But if I were to say, you know, is that a theatrical COVID response? No. And this is interesting because I want to say that we've maybe had two or three moderate responses. But I would say theatre hasn't also done a particular climate response, either. Partly the narrative of things and so it's kind of interesting that you do a lot of echoes of pandemic and big system-wide things, and of climate.


Jane (1:23:43): Is he called David Finnegan, that you do Thinking Bigly with?


Ben (1:23:50): Yeah, we've done some and he actually his view is that all are at the moment is climate art, actually, because we're living in a time of climate change, and therefore art is that, without having to be. 


Jane (1:23:59): That's a bit generous to art.


Ben (1:24:01): That interesting. So maybe theatrical responses don't work on big systemic things in the same in the same fashion? I don't know.


Jane (Or, like, like, like my play a single act, no, like, after 9/11, I felt that the plays that were immediately, there are a couple of immediate responses to it, that were incredible. That were kind of very knee-jerk. But then there are a spate of very terrible plays about 9/11 because I think playwrights fail if we're not writing about 9/11, like, Who Are We? But I feel like actually, those events, those happenings, those presences, those present times they need to kind of percolate and drop a bit in. You know, Joe Penhall talked about writing a play about his father's death, and then it just being a terrible experience for him, and everyone else, and just a sort of betrayal of, you know, like, things need time and distance, I think things need to percolate and drop in and sort of be digested in a creative sense before you...it's like bad love poetry otherwise. Give it a bit of space.


Ben (1:25:15): What about you? Have you seen anything?


Jane (1:25:17): No, and I agree with you totally. I've seen moments of things. I think the strongest thing I've seen is the advert, which everyone should see, the woman sitting in a car, because you just go, fuck, she can't go home and yet she's in a pandemic, so she has to. So she's going to supermarket pretending that she's been there, that is so powerful. And that just maybe does what good art does, because it made my heart open up to someone else's...reality, possibilities, what was going on for someone in a way that just made me think all afternoon about it. And made me think, what are the stories that we should be writing? So I think that's probably the best thing. I've quite liked staged with Michael Sheen and David Tennant, but it's a bit kind of, of the moment light on.


Ben (1:26:02): So let's finish with the kind of contact blah blah spiel. So if people are interested in you know, maybe you're going to do another online tutoring thing or Zoom teaching, or just want to find out more about you. Is there a Twitter?.


June (1:26:22): I don't do Twitter, I do have a Facebook, but I don't really check it. Yeah, we should probably give our email. So I am going to be doing some Zoom teaching again, we haven't really talked about it, but they went pretty great and were really well attended and people loved them. I do a five-week playwriting course. And I'm going to be starting that again in March.


Ben (1:26:39): If you're interested. 


Jane (1:26:41): If you're interested. 


Ben (1:26:43): Ask me.


Jane (1:26:45): Yeah, ask him! 


Ben (1:26:46): You can get hold of me like, everywhere I go. So I keep a blog, thendobetter.com. And you can contact me through that.


Jane (1:26:52): It's really good. your blog, Then Do Better.


Ben (1:26:56): Yeah, thendobetter.com, because the idea is if you think you can do better, then do better. So don't just complain about stuff, do stuff. I'm on Twitter @BenyoBen, you can find me sort of everywhere. 


Jane (1:27:10): Thinking Bigly?


Ben (1:27:12): Thinking Bigly actually, so Thinking Bigly, there's got another showing in April, but I'm not sure it's going to be a super public showing. So I will find out when the next public one will be, but there's nothing immediately on the cards.


Jane (1:27:26): And the How To Die show is currently percolating?


Ben (1:27:29): Yeah, work in progress. Though, I have got a couple of things... 


Jane (1:27:33): In between your meal breaks. 


Ben (1:27:34): Yeah, exactly. And there's a project that I've gotten going, that will be something called Climate Unconference or Sustainability Unconference. And so I don't know if you know, or theatre people listening to know that the theatre world has devoted and disgruntled, which is kind of run by improbable, which is a participatory form of conference discussing the state of theatre, that just actually happened not too long ago. And essentially, I'm interested in a participatory form of talking about climate and the intersection of creatives and also policy and finance people. And I'm hoping that will go on, maybe around about June. So that is of interest you can also get in contact with me that's.


Jane (1:28:23): You dropped that pearler in at the end, as you do. Juicy bit of stuff there. I love talking to you, Ben.


Ben (1:28:35): I really loved it. So, yeah, we'll do, we'll do some more, we'll do some more.


Jane (1:28:40): I'm talking to Annabel Arden, actor and director, formerly of Theatre De Complicite next, and today I got an email from playwright Francis Poet, who's just been shortlisted for the Susan Blackwood prize. I'm going to also be interviewing her and that is what we've got so far, and there will be more...


Ben (1:28:59): So, look out for it. Thank you. Bye.


Jane (1:29:02): Bye.



Tom Stoppard biography

On reading Tom Stoppard’s life

  • -Why are there so few rightwing playwrights?

  • -Good playwrights seem to see a lot of theatre

  • -I don’t want fame

  • -Theatremakers as not-writers



I never want to be so famous that someone will want to write a biography of me. Even a friendly biography must cover some light warts even if not deep scars. I


In my early years, I never read much biography or even non-fiction. Poems, plays, novels, graphic novels even. The world of imagination seemed the most exciting.


As I age, I read more non-fiction. Real life is some times more incredible than fiction. Where ideas come from has been of increasing interest to me as well as what the ideas or stories are themselves.


Tom Stoppard has been described by David Hare as “conservative with a small c” although I can see his politics are complex and don’t easily fit on a left-right scale.


Still this makes Stoppard one of the only 5% or maybe 10% of playwrights who could be viewed more right of centre - with particularly emphasis on freedoms and freedoms of speech.


I find this notable on many counts but first:


Why are so few playwrights right wing? If you take the recent UK and US elections or more broadly you had for example a 69 / 66 million split in favour of Biden over Trump that’s almost 50/50 whereas playwrights would by 95/5 I am guessing. Is this more pronounced in theatre writers over even other creative arts? I’m unsure.


But, then how interesting to have such a well regarded playwright be “small c conservative” - are there ideas we should confront ourselves with in particular, as Stoppard writes in theatre from such a theatrically under-represented tribe?  These are not the extreme views of an Ezra Pound but a rightish-centre.


Secondly - the importance of letter writing within all this - both as a record of what was happening and as an important medium of the time - the 1950s,1960s - perhaps emails have replaced that now but there is an element that we seem to miss from those letter writing days. I would not swap it back and lose emails but there is a piece of slow thinking we would find helpful.


Stoppard seemed so fully immersed in theatre and arts - via journalism and meeting and conversation - in the 1950s and 1960s and of course beyond.


Theatre was particular exciting creative art of that time. The biographer Hermione Lee conjures up the theatre and artistic discourse of the time and extracts strangely intriguing patterns and details

Pinter was a figure of great interest to Stoppard, long before they became friends and fellow playwrights. He would never forget their first encounter, in January 1962. When, just over fifty years later, Stoppard was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, he began his acceptance speech with that memory. Pinter came to Bristol to see a student production of The Birthday Party for the Sunday Times Drama Festival. Stoppard found himself sitting behind him.

Thereupon I became distracted by the necessity of speaking to him. I needed an opening gambit, and started to consider several. So, when The Birthday Party – to which I gave as much of my attention as I could spare – was over, I tapped him on the shoulder, and – I’m sorry to say – spoke to him as follows: ‘Are you Harold Pinter or do you only look like him?’ He turned round and I got an early inkling of Harold Pinter’s unflinching, unswerving gaze. He said, ‘What?’ [This word performed by Stoppard in a low, sinister, threatening tone.] I don’t remember any more. Perhaps I fainted.

The next day, Pinter spoke to the drama students, and Stoppard was there with his notebook. His report (‘The Tense Present’), though unsigned, was unmistakeably his work. He described Pinter’s talk as ‘an erratic staccato of grudging self-exposure’. It had ended with an unidentified quotation: The fact would seem to be, if in my position one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to – I forget, no matter. Stoppard recognised this from Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, and finished the quotation in a footnote: ‘And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.’

So this piece in the Western Daily Press of 8 January 1962 is the first publication in which Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard are on the same page – all speaking, in their different ways, about the relationship between speech and silence. [My emphasis]

He noted that the student questions which followed Pinter’s talk ‘suggested respect, reverence, suspicion, antagonism and scant understanding. Mr Pinter remained polite.’ And he gave extracts from what Pinter had said, prefacing them with the phrase ‘Harold Pinter, he say:’ – as if listening to an oracle. These were some of the oracle’s words, as reported by an otherwise silent and anonymous Stoppard:

I’m going to make categorical statements which should not be taken as categorical.

If I were to state a moral precept, it would be: Beware of the writer who declares that his heart is in the right place and has it in full view. This is a body lost in an empty prison of cliché.

My characters tell me so much and no more.

Between my [knowledge] and what they say there lies a territory which is compulsory to explore … Not that I regard my characters as anarchic, out of control. I do the donkey work. The shaping is me.

[I do not agree] with the tendency to seek allegories in my plays.

There are two silences: one is where no word is spoken, and another where there is a torrent of words. The speech we hear is an indication of the speech we don’t hear … an anguished smokescreen, a constant stratagem to cover nakedness … What takes place in the silences is an evasion, a desperate rearguard action to keep ourselves to ourselves.

Of all these Pinter-statements, the one that stayed longest in his mind was: ‘Writing for me is a completely private activity … What I write is not obligated to anything other than to itself.’

He quoted it, half a century on, as a demonstration of the quality he most identified with Pinter: honesty.

How immersed in creative discourse are our greatest writers? It seems to me a great many of our playwrights are extremely immersed.


From Stoppard to Hare to Bennett to Pinter to Churchill to Ravenhill- I hear the stories of them going to, involving in and absorbing from the theatre. Even those who never go on the public record such as Caryl Churchill (who is one of the very few British writers who could possibly argue for more greatness than Stoppard in theatre) are seen  heavily engaged.


Certain novelist seem to be able to be more recluse but it seems to me that theatre writers are in a constant conversation to form their work.


Tom Stoppard was very seriously involved in the craft of plays. He reviewed over 130 in a year in the early 1960s. He went over Godot line by line for a failed film adaptation. He wrote a lot. Saw a lot. And was friends with remarkable other artists ranging from O’toole in his early life (early 20s) to Pinter. He had a strong agent from early on (Kenneth Ewing).


He travelled fairly widely. I’m only in his early life but his immersion in the world of theatre and creative arts seemed very deep. That does bring me to advice I hear for young writers who want to be brilliant but who don’t see much theatre. It seems to me that within theatre at least - active involvement seems to be a helpful and maybe necessary step on a path to brilliance. 


I think it’s noteworthy to dwell on what type of theatre maker Tom Stoppard is not. Stoppard is in “the playwright as the centre of the theatrework” tradition. There is a counter tradition from ensemble work or theatremaker not-as-playwright.


To me this was a running debate in the 2000s between David Eldridge and Chris Goode, in a series of blog conversations. It also influences my work today as I’ve produced work which arguably might fit in both traditions at times.


I won’t recount the debate here but there was a recent podcast* where Eldridge and Goode reconcile and reminisce on their respective views.

Coda one, while having a long running intense disagreements, I’m fairly neither would be considered rightwing theatre makers.

Coda two, biography Hermione Lee is in her own right an admired and accomplished biographer.

Links:

Blog on Goode + Eldridge

Amazon link to Hermione Lee’s biography on Stoppard