I’m a feminist, but … I went to university in 1997 and in those days Girl Power was all we had. Ladette culture meant that the shorthand for gender equality was matching a man, pint for pint, until you’d drunk him under the table. I had recently fled a patriarchal religious group where I was looked at with suspicion as some kind of feminist troublemaker, so I was bursting with energy to join a movement. I’m sure feminists were active then but I couldn’t find them.
The constant conversations about social change young people have now were certainly not happening. I remember students saying that gender studies were boring because we were already on a level playing field. If anything, too level! I was in the final intake where university was free and I thought it was important to speak out against uni fees, having heard someone heartlessly joke in the Oxford Union: “Pull the ladder up, Jack.” I was one of six who turned up to the official protest with a cardboard sign. My aspirations of being part of a movement for social change withered on the vine.
Then, while studying Victorian playwrights, I read some letters between Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was bemoaning the heavy British censorship because the lord chamberlain read every play that would appear on the stage and red-penned anything that might encourage immoral behaviour.
Wilde’s response was that he hid his most disruptive ideas, critical of the crown and cabinet, in comedies of manners. He suggested that while Shaw’s plays were constantly censored, his own subversive politics were overlooked because the censor simply saw ladies and gentlemen quipping in drawing rooms. Perhaps this is why Shaw once (allegedly) said: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
All of this was floating around my head when I entered the Cameron Mackintosh new writing festival in my second year of university. Thrillingly, my play was chosen to be produced at the Burton Taylor Studio. Rather fortunately, I think, that text is now lost to time, but it was my first scripted effort and being produced gave me the confidence to write more.
Up until then I’d been completely focused on improvisation, which I’d studied in Canada with legendary teacher and director, Keith Johnstone. He had started out at the Royal Court theatre, reading and writing plays. Keith (a colleague of Pinter and Beckett) who sadly died earlier this year, aged 90, became more interested in the sparks that flew between actors when they didn’t have a script telling them what came next, and developed an extraordinary school of play.
What pushed Keith to Canada? Well, the lord chamberlain was still at it. The censorship laws were enforced until 1968, which meant it was illegal to perform improvisation in a British theatre all through the radical 60s. Keith often told us that the great Russian theatre companies would tour their shows to London from behind the iron curtain and (embarrassingly) offer their sympathy for the terrible censorship they saw the British theatre community labouring under.
Keith taught us that ideas are nothing special and to let them go because there’d be another one along in a minute. He said the two enemies of great creative work are fear and ego. He tried to free us from the lord chamberlain in our head, red-penning our best ideas before they saw the light of day.
When Emma Butler, then a rising star resident director at the Almeida theatre in London, asked me for a text we could develop together for an in-house workshop, I was delighted that she had a similar attitude to the work of play.
I wrote Never Have I Ever, which is about two couples who went to university together, meeting up because one couple has invested in the other’s soon-to-be bankrupt restaurant. They regress, as you do with uni friends, and play a dangerous drinking game in which some long-buried truths are revealed. What emerges are some toxic feelings they have been censoring out, rather than sharing with each other in our world of fast-paced social change. The audience is the fifth dinner party guest enjoying this uproarious night of booze, music and ludicrous fun but also implicated in the themes of class, cash, identity and infidelity.
I wanted the play to be a great night out at the theatre that instigated some excellent debates in the bar – and when Chichester Festival theatre said they would like to produce the show we were able to attract the most extraordinarily talented and committed cast to bring these very contemporary characters to life. Comedy and exciting plot twists helped Wilde distract the censor and they also allow us to rest our defences (our social censor) and laugh at the worst excesses of ourselves. I don’t believe any real, lasting social change is possible through fury alone. We also need play.
Never Have I Ever is at the Minerva theatre, Chichester, until 30 September
