NEW SCOTTISH PLAYWIIIGHTS
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The List: Neither of you had a theatre training, so how did you get into the theatre? Douglas Maxwell: I did a lot of student drama. I finished university with an English degree, so it looked like the job centre. I realised I liked the theatre more than anything, but didn’t like putting up posters and chasing money, so I decided to be a playwright. I left college and started calling myself a playwright before I’d written a word! But I realised I wrote better when I knew the space I was writing for.
Zinme Harrie. That’s what I think is important. As an undergraduate, I did Zoology, but I was very involved with student theatre. I went to Hull to do a postgrad, and what that gave me was a space you could play in. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got someone lecturing you on Brecht and Stanislavsky, what you need is: ’Look, there’s a IOO-seater, here’s a bunch of actors, no money, just get on with it’. If you have too much literary analysis, that sort of background, you can find it harder to write because you’re too conscious of similes and metaphors and so on.
DM: Yes, if I’d kept going with my own company from university I’d be writing very arty, learned plays. I adapted Confessions OfA Justified Sinner back then, but it was an ’I’ve read a lot of books’ play. It had lots of Wilde and Artuad and stuff in it, but these are the sorts of plays that never get played. So I started writing things I lived.
TL: What about the process of writing? Do you find that this has changed for you since you started out?
ZH: The more I learn writing, the more | slow down. You start off writing quickly, but then you learn it takes time. These days, I write a play in six to eight weeks, but I’ll have been thinking about it for eighteen months. You’ve got to let it gestate.
26 THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 3—10 Aug 2000
It’s the same with me. I used to send off plays, with a note in them saying there’s another in preparation which will be finished in a month. Now, I won't write again until October, and the last thing I finished was at the beginning of the year.
TL: What's the main pitfall of being a dramatist?
H: You’re wide open to criticism, right from the moment someone sees your play. We don’t go around making notes on other people’s work in offices, but somehow if you produce a play, everyone’s got an opinion, everyone wants to give you notes.
0W2: Sometimes people talk to you as if you know nothing, as if you've fluked it.
til-I: But don’t you feel you have? I keep being frightened that someone is going to discover that I can’t actually write. It’s like when l was at Oxford, when I thought that someone might find
out I shouldn’t have been let in.
HM: But you can’t know everything. I’ve got an
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This time last year they were unheard of, but now ZINNIE HARRIS (Further Than The Furthest Thing) and DOUGLAS MAXWELL (Decky Does A Bronco) are the two hottest writing stars of the Fringe. The List sat them down in the Traverse bar to reflect on the pressures and pleasures of playwriting. Words: Steve Cramer
honours degree, but I haven’t read everything. All the same, once someone said to me: ’These characters need to be more rounded. Maybe you should check out some Chekhov; have you heard of him?’
2H:God!
DWI: I said: ’What, Chekov from Star Trek?’
Further Than The Furthest Thing (Fringe) Traverse (Venue 15) 228 1404, 6—26 Aug (not lvlon) times vary, £12 (£7.50). Preview 5 Aug, 10.45am, £7.50 (£4.50).
‘ ,. Decky Does A Bronco (Fringe) Grid 3 Iron Theatre Company, Scotland Yard Playground (Venue I72) 226 5138, 7—26 Aug (not Sun) 7.30pm, £10 (£4/£8). Matinees 12, I8, 26 Aug, 2.30pm. Previews until 5 Aug, £5.