Jez Butterworth Plays: Two E-Book

Jez Butterworth

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 358

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'Come, you drunken spirits. Come, you battalions. You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come, you giants!' When Jez Butterworth's Jerusalempremiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2009, it served notice of an astonishing development in the career of a writer whose debut, Mojo, had premiered on the same stage nearly fifteen years before. Unearthing the mythic roots of contemporary English life, and featuring Mark Rylance in an indelible central performance as Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, the play transferred to the West End and then to Broadway, before returning to the West End in 2011. 'Storming… restores one's faith in the power of theatre' Independent. 'Unarguably one of the best dramas of the twenty-first century' Guardian. Jerusalem was followed by the bewitching chamber play The River (Royal Court, 2012), a 'magnetically eerie, luminously beautiful psychodrama' Time Out. 'A delicately unfolding puzzle… all of it is wrapped in marvellous language… extraordinary' The Times. This volume concludes with the multi-award-winning The Ferryman (Royal Court and West End, 2017; Broadway, 2018), an excavation of lives shattered by violence, set in a farmhouse in Northern Ireland in 1981. 'A richly absorbing and emotionally abundant play… an instant classic' Independent. 'A magnificent play that uses, brilliantly, the vitality of live theatre to express the deadly legacy of violence' Financial Times. Also included here is the screenplay for the short film The Clear Road Ahead(2011), published here for the first time, and an edited transcript of a conversation between Butterworth and the playwright Simon Stephens.

Leseprobe

JEZ BUTTERWORTH

Plays: Two

Jerusalem

The Clear Road Ahead

The River

The Ferryman

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

An Interview with Jez Butterworth by Simon Stephens

Jerusalem

The Clear Road Ahead

The River

The Ferryman

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

An Interview with Jez Butterworth

This is an edited transcript of Simon Stephens’ interview with Jez Butterworth for the Royal Court Theatre Playwright’s Podcast (Series 3, 2019).

Simon Stephens: What was the first time you went to the theatre?

Jez Butterworth: A school trip to Dick Whittington in Hendon when I was about eight or nine. The coach we went in was leaking and it was raining the whole way there, so I got soaked to the skin, and my main memory is of being both soggy and entranced.

Where did you go to school?

First in south-east London, to a school in Abbey Wood, and then when I was six or seven my parents moved to Chiswell Green near Watford, where I went to a local junior school and then to a comprehensive school in St Alban’s.

That’s a rather gentle, quite nice suburb of London, yes?

And like all of those places, it’s really dangerous. It was lovely and beautiful and Roman during the day, and like Rollerball at night.

You’ve talked about your experience of school not being a brilliantly happy one?

I didn’t madly enjoy school. In fact I think I sat through about ninety-five per cent of it quite literally waiting for each lesson to end. The things I enjoyed at school were playing cricket but mostly the creative-writing element of the English Language course – and the one drama class we had a week that lasted forty minutes.

Was that where you started to write?

I started to write little essays, and unlike everyone else in the class, I was desperate for mine to be read out. People found them funny, and after a while even the kids who were not into that sort of thing were actually starting to listen to the stories. They were like my first reviews, I suppose. But there was never any drama writing, like: go and write a play and come back. That didn’t happen. Until I went to university.

What kind of culture were you engaging with – music, for instance?

I was really into music from a very early age. One of my older brothers, Tom, had a friend who had an older brother as well, which meant you had access to records that were being listened to by seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, when you were ten. So you were listening to stuff that was completely outside your bandwidth. One summer we borrowed Chris Audley’s record collection and it contained like ten Captain Beefheart albums, loads of Frank Zappa, everything by Neil Young, everything by Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. That summer that was all we were listening to. To have grown up at a time when access to those things was just by chance had its own magic. It felt like you’d dug up treasure on the beach.

Then you went to university: where did you go?

I went to Cambridge. Because of one thing, which was Translations by Brian Friel. My brother Tom had gone to Cambridge before me. Not many people went to Cambridge from our school. I think Tom was the first for a very long time. I’d not done well in my O levels, and so I’d given up. I went to see Tom in Cambridge, and he was in a production of Translations… It was just wonderful: a small, student production in a very small black- box theatre. 1985, but I still remember it like it was yesterday. They had real music playing, everything lit by candles and they were burning turf on stage… This play absolutely gripped me. And afterwards – it was the last performance – they had this big party, and by the end of it I knew what I wanted to do next! I didn’t know anywhere else where you could put on plays with your friends without teachers involved. I went home and spoke to one of my teachers who liked my writing and said I wanted to go to Cambridge, but I didn’t want to go to study, I just wanted to put on plays. He said, ‘Don’t tell them that.’ At the interview they said, ‘You haven’t got the grades.’ So I said to the Director of English Studies, ‘Just make me an offer that you think I won’t get, and then who loses out here?’

I remember on the day when I had to get my application in, I didn’t. And suddenly my English teacher, Don Jones, who was about to retire, showed up on my doorstep and said, ‘It’s got to be in today.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’ve changed my mind.’ But he just sat there at the kitchen table and filled out the form with me. I know, after the fact, that he lied through his teeth about how diligent I was, and how attentive… I think he just really wanted me to go there. I owed it all to him. There was space on the form to put what you want to do when you grow up. And I was going to put something sensible, like ‘lawyer’. But he said, ‘What do you really want to be?’ ‘A writer.’ ‘Well, put that.’ And that was the first question they asked me.

Did you tell them about Translations?

I played it down. I didn’t tell them that was the only reason I wanted to be there. But when I got in, I did only do that.

So what was it like?

The most wonderful experience. I didn’t have anything to do with the academic side of the university: I went to one lecture in the three years. In the middle of my second year, they were going to throw me out – and my tutor, who was Tom Morris, who co- directed War Horse. He’s a really lanky lad, and I remember him chasing me across three courts of St John’s for an essay. Physics was against me, so he was gaining on me, and he grabbed me as we got to the Bridge of Sighs. He said, ‘If you don’t do this essay, I’m going to make sure they throw you out.’

He came to see one of my little plays. He thought there was something in it, so he went to the university and told them, ‘He’s not doing any work, but he is working on this other stuff. It’s not great but it’s got something. If you sling him out, in twenty-five years we might regret it.’ So that was it: they just left me alone. I wasn’t doing the essays, I wasn’t doing the tutorials, I was just doing plays.

Have you still got those plays?

Some of the people who were in them might have them. They were written on an old typewriter that my dad used to write his articles for Tribune. We went to the Edinburgh Festival two or three times. It was fantastic. It was all we did from morning till last thing at night. The very first audition I did, the first person to walk in through the door was Rachel Weisz, aged nineteen. I didn’t cast her!

I didn’t realise your dad was a writer. What was he writing?

My dad was a lorry driver, born in 1924. He got a Trade Union scholarship after the war. He’d fought at D-Day: he was on Omaha Beach in the first wave.

And after that he drove lorries for the Co-op and got a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and became a lecturer in economics. He was extremely left-wing and wrote some articles for Tribune, which every few years he’d get out and show you.

And did your mum write?

My mum trained to be a dentist, and then had five kids. And after that she worked as a receptionist in a surgery in St Albans.

And your brothers? Not only were they a major cultural influence on you but you’ve written with them?

I’ve written with Tom and with John-Henry. One’s older and the other’s seven years younger than me. It’s completely different, and it makes it much more fun in lots of ways. When you finish something together, there’s almost more pleasure than when it goes on.

When you left university, did you carry on writing?

I sort of fell off a cliff after I left. I don’t have a very clear idea of the future to this day. I didn’t plan for anything: I didn’t think, I’ll make this contact or that contact. We were doing plays on the Friday, and on the Monday I was out of a job. I was at home, living with my parents, no money, and this entire dream that I’d been a part of for the past three years had evaporated.

How did you cope?

I got really depressed, and I went and got a job working for an advertising agency.

Writing copy for them?

That’s what I hoped I was going to do, and what I’m extremely glad I didn’t do because I’d probably still be doing it. They put me in as an account manager, and I lasted less than six months. They often call advertising ‘the nephew game’. I was there because my uncle, who was the only person in the family who had any money, had an account with them. So I was there as an idiot nephew, but I made the mistake of telling another nephew that I wasn’t in this for the long run, ’cause I wanted to be a writer and I thought it was all bollocks. And he went and told his uncle who was running the company. He called me in and said, ‘A little birdie tells me you’re not madly into this.’ I said, ‘That’s absolute nonsense. Who told you that? I would die for McCann Erickson.’ And he said, ‘I don’t believe you and you’re…’ ‘I resign!’ ‘…fired.’ I’m not exaggerating: it was like a photo finish. There was a silence, and I was being all defiant, till he carefully pointed out, ‘If I fire you, you can claim unemployment benefit on Monday.’ ‘Right, I’m fired!’

You were living in St Albans?

I’d moved into Islington, just off Highbury Fields, doing that classic thing where there’s someone sleeping in the living room, and someone sleeping in the kitchen…

This would have been the early nineties?

End of ’91.

And continuing to write?

I put on a play at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden about six months after leaving Cambridge, rehearsing at night, dressed in a suit and tie, trying to keep the whole scene alive…

What was that play?

I can’t remember, but it had Stephen Mangan in it, and Paul Ritter, Sasha Behar and Paul Chahidi. Those were the people I graduated with. It was an extraordinarily talented, and subsequently fêted, group of people, who we were doing all the stuff with. No wonder it was fun.

What was London like then for you?

I loved living in London. I remember thinking that if I had twenty pounds a day I could get through life. That’s all I need. And in some ways, I wish I’d stuck to that.

It’s an intoxicating city… Just wandering the streets.

The very first TV commission that Tom and I got was for a ‘Shorts’ thing from Carlton TV – films set on the underground, about half an hour long. We delivered the script, and they called us in, and we had to walk from Islington to St Martin’s and back, because we didn’t have the money for the Tube.

I want to talk about the writing of Mojo. But before I do: you didn’t write in other forms?

Simultaneously with writing Mojo, we wrote something for Channel 4, which was the last piece for TV I wrote for twenty years.

Did you act at Cambridge at all?

Yes I did.

Were you any good?

I had a range about an inch wide, and if what I was called upon to do fell within that, then stand back! But anything outside of that was a disaster. I remember doing it, going up to Edinburgh in 1993, just to get some money while I was doing my own play. And I got an agent out of it. Because it was within my range of certainty. They offered me a few parts that were out of that range, and it quickly came to its natural conclusion.

I often think of people struggling to get their plays on. And the success of Mojo, being ostensibly your first play, must be massively dispiriting to all those people. But it wasn’t the case.

It absolutely wasn’t the case. To the extent that it was my first play, it was the first thing I wrote that felt like a play afterwards. In that sense it’s a first play. Some of the things I’d written before that were fifteen minutes long.

But they count, right?

They did at the time.

Tell me how Mojo started from the writing point of view.

In 1993 I got asked to do a TV project for Channel 4 with Malcolm McLaren. He’d done a thing called The Ghosts of Oxford Street. It went fairly well, so they asked him to do The Ghosts of Père Lachaise, the cemetery in Paris. So we went out to Paris and met with Malcolm. In the week or two before Malcolm absconded with all the production money back to Poland – so the thing never happened – we were sitting in the bar, weirdly enough, of the Almeida Theatre, drinking red wine at about three o’clock in the afternoon, as Malcolm loved to do. He started telling me this story about Soho in the fifties – twenty years before he’d done Never Mind the Bollocks – and about Larry Parnes and the crossover between the pop world and the criminal world. And he said, ‘You know, Jez, someone should write about that.’ About a year later I bumped into him in that pub just round the corner from the Royal Court, and he’d just seen the play. He looked at me, and he knew exactly what had happened. And we both played this little game – for about half an hour – that that wasn’t what had happened. And as he was leaving he said, ‘Jez, I really must learn to keep my fucking mouth shut.’

But he couldn’t have written it.

Not in a million years.

Do you remember the process of writing it?

Very clearly. I was living in London, as I say. And I decided to move to the countryside with my brother Tom. We’d got given a little bit of money to do a thing for Channel 4 – an hour-long thing – so we had enough money to live on. We didn’t have a car, we borrowed my friend’s sister’s bikes for a year. (They got nicked the night I finished the play, by the way, from right under the window.) We’d moved into a little flat in a place called Pewsey, and I started writing the play on an old Olivetti computer that my dad, I think, had nicked from work. I knew I wanted to write a ‘proper’ play, a play that had an interval in it for a start. I came up with the rough story. I remember dates for some reason: it was June 10th 1994. And it was mid-August when I stopped writing the first ten pages over and over, obsessively. I was trying to find a tone and a voice, but too afraid to plough on through this process that I knew nothing about. Then for some reason, like learning to swim, I stopped doing widths and just swam out. And within about three days, I’d written it.

Were you aware there were differences between what you’d written and the shorts that you’d written before?

If there’s one thing that characterises my playwriting career, it’s that I make really broad gestures that some people think are so corny that they wouldn’t dream of doing them. This going to the countryside to write a ‘big play’ and bring it back to London and put it on at the Royal Court and have it knock the lights out… that was my plan! I’d worked as an usher here at the Court, and I’d seen Death and the Maiden, which was the only play I saw, apart from Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field. Those were the two plays I’d seen, and I thought I bet I could get one on here. It’s just terrible, terrible…

What are your memories of the production?

I was conscious of it being dream-like at the actual time it was happening. It was a boiling hot summer in ’95. I’d spent the winter in that little flat in Pewsey with Tom, playing the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? machine in the local pub, hoping to win enough money to put into the meter so we could charge up the Olivetti. And suddenly I’d won the George Devine Award, and it was five grand. I remember playing pool in that same pub that summer, with a cheque for five grand in my back pocket. I used the money to rent a flat on Dean Street in Soho and lived on Dean Street for the next three years. And just started this mad adventure, which was the exact opposite: living in the centre of town, collecting loads of awards… It was really crazy.

They’re self-perpetuating, those moments. Once you’re acknowledged, everybody acknowledges you.

What always surprised me about this sort of stuff: on the one hand these sort of brazen moves, on the other hand, like most playwrights, I found myself to be incredibly brittle. I ended up, after Mojo, losing contact with the Royal Court.

How did that happen?

Specifically because the BBC wanted to make a film of it. Ian Rickson, who’d directed the play on stage, quite naturally wanted to direct the film. But I, also, wanted to direct the film. Quite naturally. I remember we sat outside the Court and we had a disagreement about it. That was the last time we spoke for five years. So the entire time Ian was running the Court, we never spoke. And I didn’t know anyone else in any other theatre at all. And I didn’t have the brains or the courage to go to someone else and restart the whole thing. Plus that coincided with me suddenly getting into film. And so the next five years were me making a couple of films, writing several films and just moving into that world. And completely forgetting why I got into this in the first place. When I say ‘the first place’, I’d add the caveat that on TV I had watched ten thousand movies before I saw that pantomime. But I forgot what the theatre was for that time.

What did the film world give you? I’ve always been nervous of getting involved in it.

Would you do me a favour and keep it like that? I was really excited going into that world. And a lot of it has been and still is very exciting. From a writer’s point of view, imagine the absolute opposite to when you do a play at the Royal Court and how you get listened to, and how you get treated. Writing for film is like being a sperm donor: they absolutely need you, they can’t do it without you, but once you done your thing…

…they never want to see you again.

And don’t come to the birthdays. Do it in a room on your own. And when you’ve finished, leave. And as you leave they look at you: what kind of sick bastard does that for a living?

Thinking about your time doing theatre at Cambridge and afterwards, what I get from you is a sense of the joy of collaboration.

It’s why I don’t write novels. I want everyone to be involved. As a social occasion, film never happens. When does a film happen? When you shoot it? When you edit it? After a play, everyone’s got to walk out of the back of the theatre and find somewhere to go to eat. It’s alive and it’s present. I could talk all day about the differences between the two, but essentially theatre is a hundred times more vital than the cinema, but also a hundred times more likely to let you down, because the investment’s just so much higher for the audience, who are actually there.

What brought you back to the Court?

I started talking to Ian again and realised how much I’d missed it, and I started writing The Night Heron.

How did that feel?

To use Harold Pinter’s phrase: I felt I’d been banished from myself. But I wasn’t aware of it, of quite how much I’d missed the theatre and how much it was a decision based on fear and misunderstanding, as much as anything.

Fear of…?

My ideas for a second play were just awful. I didn’t write them, and I’m glad they didn’t happen.

Having had a success with Mojo, your first play – your first ‘proper’ play – there’s a burden to that level of success.

Absolutely there was. It made a big splash at the time, albeit never went to the West End in its first iteration. It went to the Atlantic in New York – Neil Pepe did it there – but it’s never been on Broadway.

I could talk to you about The Night Heron at length. I could talk to you about The Winterling, about Parlour Song. But I want to move on… When I was part of the Young Writers Programme at the Court in 2002/2003, there was a call-round to all the staff to do a reading of a Jez Butterworth play, ’cause you’d written this fucking play about rural England that had like a million people. This was the start of Jerusalem, yeah?

Yes it was.

How long were you working on that play intellectually before you wrote what might be considered a first draft?

I wrote that first draft of it in about two months in 2003. And from the day of that reading, I literally put it in a bin outside the theatre, as we walked out. It had been the single most excruciating experience of my life, just the readthrough of it, because it was not in any way to my ears a play. And I thought, somewhere down the line I’d forgotten what a play even is. I thought, I am never going near that idea ever again. Also I’d bitten off more than I could chew – just the size of the adventure. It wasn’t until 2007 that Mark Rylance had got hold of a copy of it – I think Ian sent it to him – and he saw something in the character. What was weird was, even when we were rehearsing what I eventually wrote, he would often refer back to this first draft. And every single time it was like someone sticking a knife in my eye. I’ve never considered the two events to have anything to do with each other. I met Mark here at the Court in the director’s office with Ian. He’d cycled over, and he sat there in his cycle shorts and kept his cycle helmet on throughout the entire hour we were talking. He’d forgotten he had it on: he’s so unselfconscious. We had an incredible conversation: I’ve had a few conversations like it in my career – one with him, one with Harold Pinter – where you just come out and you feel changed. I’d met someone who was going to massively influence me. It was about a year after that I really started writing it. The actual draft of the play was done really quickly, in less than a month, and wasn’t finished by the time we started rehearsals. We had our first rehearsal on June 1st 2009, and we had our readthrough of the actual draft seventeen days into the four-week rehearsal period.

So how were you rehearsing with an unfinished script? Were you in the room, rewriting?

I was in the room. I’d just been producing a film that I’d written with my brother John-Henry called Fair Game with Sean Penn in New York, and I was writing Jerusalem at night. It was one of those moments that writers have, where you’ve got to do two things at once. I knew they’d hired the actors for Jerusalem, they’d hired the theatre and they’d probably got the ‘Z’ out of the dusty room upstairs where they keep the letters to put up on the front of the theatre – so I had to finish it. I remember showing up on the first day, knowing the script wasn’t right, but so long as I sat there and listened, we’d get there. And I was in a state somewhere between grace and madness that had followed on from the death of Harold Pinter and the death of Anthony Minghella and the death of Sydney Pollack, all within nine months of each other. They were the three people I used to show my work to first. Suddenly all bets were off. I didn’t know what to do, other than show it to Ian. Those first couple of weeks were joyous, like making a suit for the people you had in the room.

Had you done anything like that before, writing for specific actors?

At university. You’d always show up with half a play – written in pencil because I couldn’t get a typewriter ribbon – and make the rest of it up. It was a process of which I wasn’t remotely afraid. What I loved about it was: neither was the Court. Dominic Cooke was like, ‘Just put it on.’ Actually, it was a bet Dominic couldn’t lose, because Ian was directing it, and if it went down the toilet…

These two plays – the one which Mark Rylance was shown by Ian, and the play that eventually reached the stage: were you investigating similar themes at the time?

I don’t think anything was really similar. I didn’t know what I was trying to do, what I was trying to get at… I have to go back a little bit. After I wrote The Night Heron, I moved to the countryside again – exactly ten years after the first time – with Gilly, my wife at the time. We bought a dog, and the dog meant that I had to go on these long walks every day. They got longer and longer, and I was using these walks to try to work out what it was I wanted to say, not knowing what that was. I’d read a quote from Jackson Pollock, where he says, ‘Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.’ I felt that very strongly. I could write a play like Mojo, which is full of heat, but where’s the light? And I knew the types of register that gave me chills, and I wanted to pitch my work into that register. You can’t just do that from a standing start: it took about three years of thinking about nothing but that. And listening to music, and focusing on it in such an obsessive way that something in me broke through to a way of receiving the drama that was on a completely different level. So no, I don’t think there’s any similarity between the two versions.

Could you define that register that you’re finding in the music?

David Mamet said that truths are simple: they’re just not easy. The biggest truth, the simplest truth, is that we’re all going to die. And it’s not easy to take – famously! I think the truths arrange themselves along a spectrum. I was watching one day outside the window a load of crows on the telegraph wire, and I had this idea that the crows were arranged in the order of courage, or difficulty. And to get the crow from the easy end to fly down wasn’t going to be that hard and wasn’t going to cost you that much. The ones in the middle were going to be a little bit sticky but you were probably going to get through it. But what about that one on the end there? How do you get her down?

Could you talk a little bit about Ian Rickson – the plays you did together – because there’s a real power in that collaboration.

I don’t think I’d be doing what I did in the first place without Ian’s initial excitement about the play. And Stephen Jeffreys, who was a massive supporter of the play in the early stages. David Lan as well: he was the dramaturg on it. But Ian had to get in there and make this thing work. I think he’s done an extraordinary job of every single one of my plays. It’s been the collaboration of my professional playwriting life. The sensitivity Ian brings to the rehearsal room is absolutely extraordinary. Ten minutes into any rehearsal he’s in a register where he’s just feeling things that are kind of super-sensitive. And he’s got a terrific ear. And he’s such a gentleman. He makes the process fun, and exciting, and I always felt fully supported.

How has being a dad affected your writing?

From the get-go it was only a galvanising thing. When those births happened – my second child was born two days after Harold died and was not even crawling by the time Jerusalem went on, and I did two plays and a couple of films. I tried to be like them and be as alive to the new ideas as much as they were being.

I want to talk about Harold Pinter. Did you meet him making the film of Mojo?

He was in the film, so I directed him in that, and then we lost touch for a bit. We got back in touch round about the time that I’m talking about, around the time that I got the dog and started on those long walks. The first thing he asked me was ‘Where have you been?’ But it’s not that easy to phone up and ask if Harold can come out to play? We started to have these longer and longer lunches. And they were like the missing ingredient. I was building a spaceship, and the fuel in the tank was his support, his complete support. And things he said to me about my writing, and things he said about his writing, that I carried away with me and made all the difference.

We need those mentors.

In my case it’s been essential. Like I say, there’s a bullish confidence at times, but there’s also a lot of brittleness and self- doubt, which just finds its way in. It inevitably does if you’re going to write as few plays as I do.

Why do you think you write so few plays?

Nowadays I like to wait a very long time after having an idea for a play before doing anything about it.

Do you make notes?

I don’t really, no. I figure that if it sits with me, and lives with me, and keeps bothering me, then it will be worthwhile. And I like to wait around ten to fifteen years. If I do that, and it’s still interesting to me, then there’s every chance it’ll still be interesting in another ten to fifteen years – to me and perhaps to other people. Keith Richards said he knows that, except for people, the things he loves will be there tomorrow when he wakes up. They’re not going to go away. So he goes to bed happy. I’ve had all sorts of ideas for things which seem very apposite, and fizzy, and exciting – and give you the idea that that could really work – and then I wait on it and wait on it, and then they go away. I only write the ones that stick with me and keep haunting me.

So what’s a working day like for you?

Oh god, Simon… I don’t have one. That’s all I can say about it. I don’t have a working day, and I never have. I have deadlines, and that’s the only way I can get myself to do it. Now, with four children, increasingly: that’s the only way I can find the time. For instance, I haven’t had any sleep last night, because I was up all night writing the last episode of the second series of Britannia. That’s a working day!

Tell me about The River.

The River is a good example of what we were just talking about, because I had the idea for The River fifteen years before I began writing. The first thing that came to me was the central device; namely, one actor leaving the stage and another entering and the scene be continuous. I couldn’t believe no one had ever done that. So that device rattled around for about five years and then I was fishing one day and the story began to come to me. And I did nothing for about a decade, and then I got my heart broken. I wrote The River in 2012, the year my marriage ended and the year my sister Joanna was dying. She was in a cottage on our farm and I was in a cabin in the next field. I finished the play the night before she died. I know you’re not supposed to have favourite children, but The River is my favourite play. It’s dedicated to Joanna.

I’d love to talk to you about The Ferryman. How did the process of writing that compare with the process of writing the other plays?

Similar in that I’d wanted to write something set at harvest time for about fifteen years. And I’d wanted to write something about vanishing within relationships for about ten years. And I then discovered that my partner Laura Donnelly’s family had this personal history with the ‘disappeared’, namely that her uncle had been one of them. He was the first one to be exhumed. A play really starts in my head when something within me that I really don’t want to admit attaches to something outside of me, like a metaphor. And the whole thing starts to spin and has its own gravitational pull. And when I come to write it, the symbolism and the characters are all part of the same kind of soup. You can’t say which part of it was stew and which wasn’t. So the real catalyst for that was visiting Belfast on the day of the funerals of two of the disappeared, when they were found in late 2015. One of the boys was sixteen years old when he’d been murdered by the IRA and vanished. And his contemporaries were all in the cathedral, and they were in their sixties. And just this thing of having these sixty-year-old men with their grandchildren running around, when the coffin was brought in of a soon-to-be seventeen-year-old boy, murdered in 1971… Just that sheer discrepancy really haunted me. The degree to which it haunted me is demonstrated by the fact that I wrote the play anyway, despite it being the last thing on earth that I wanted to do, namely write a play about the Troubles set in Northern Ireland, being an Englishman. That struck me as a really stupid idea. And so I fought it and fought it and fought it, until I couldn’t fight any longer and gave in to it. I just didn’t want to do it.

I’m aware of the response the play has attracted for its representation of ‘Irishness’, but it’s not a play about the Troubles really, is it?

The bit of Jerusalem that interests me has nothing to do with England, and the bit of The Ferryman that interests me has nothing to do with the Troubles. I wasn’t there, just like I wasn’t in Soho in 1958. I don’t choose these subjects. I think to ringfence writers and say where you can and can’t go means you wouldn’t have, you know, The Rolling Stones; you wouldn’t have half of Shakespeare’s plays.

You wouldn’t have Translations.

The only issue with The Ferryman isn’t ‘Did he get this right, did he get that right?’ It isn’t that at all: it’s because I’m English. That simple.

If you’d been American or French…

…it wouldn’t have been a problem.

Do you enjoy success? Because the way you talk about living on twenty pounds a day and hanging out with your mates at the Etcetera, there’s something quite compelling about that.

I do enjoy it, but in the theatre I don’t require it. One of the things about working in film as well means that I don’t have pressure to make more than twenty quid from the theatre, and that has kept it the way it is. What if the play doesn’t have to make twenty pounds? What if it can just be itself? This has provided me with the opportunity to do it, and the fact that they’ve been successful has something to do with the fact that they’re not designed to be.

I want to talk about how your gender has affected your writing. Do you feel yourself to be a masculine, a male writer?

My journey as a writer has gone from writing a play that had six men in it to writing The Ferryman, which has about a dozen female characters. Three of the actresses were nominated for Olivier Awards for their roles, which was one of the proudest moments of my life. You want to be able to understand the whole truth and the lies of what it is you’re trying to say. My life has changed completely since I began writing. I have four daughters. It’s a rare day that I see a man. If someone delivers a pizza to the door and it’s a man, I try to hold him in conversation, or else I’d never get to see any men ever. One of the things that’s happened is that I’ve started to listen to how women talk to one another and what it is that they require and miss, and their losses. It does relate to having young daughters. It’s way more compelling to me than anything that’s going on with men at the moment – any men that I know. It’s a level – and this is a really male perspective – a level of being that I find hugely dramatic. The idea, for instance, that the time in which you’re fertile is finite. Like being a wine grower: you’ve only got a certain number of seasons. And there’s someone like Ronnie Wood walking around with his new twins and he’s seventy-one years old. That’s a massive difference between the sexes. I don’t think there’s enough written about it. I’ve just begun a play which has mostly female characters – a big cast – and I did it without thinking. Something that rings true is that when you have an idea for a play, in the very first instance, when it starts to work on you and you’ve got to do something about it, and the doorbell rings and you go and answer it, there’s either the six blokes from Mojo standing there and they say, ‘Can we come in?’, or there’s twelve women, four men, a dog and a goose, and whatever it is, four babies, and you’ve got to decide whether to let them in. It totally depends on what environment you’re in, what’s troubling you, whether they get past.

Looking back, do you notice any repeated patterns? Are you drawn back to certain groups who you do let in?

I don’t think so. There are some playwrights where, like a football team, you could buy a player out of one play and stick them in another, and you wouldn’t really notice. I think with me, you couldn’t really walk a character out of one play into another. I like that. I like that there are these independent worlds. The next play doesn’t know anything about the last. It doesn’t owe it anything. And I don’t think I’ve gone over the same ground, except that I’m completely haunted and obsessed, to an almost pathological degree, with the past.

Do you have an idea what theatre’s for?

To make a connection with the world. I take theatre incredibly seriously, but I don’t really know anyone that works in it. I’ve kept myself at one remove from the machinery of it. And as such, it’s remained in my head as an imaginary thing. I’ve probably spent only as much time in the Royal Court as it’s taken to do my plays. I’ve come to see shows here but I don’t hang out around theatres. And although I adore working with actors and consider them to be co-conspirators, I don’t have lots of friends who work in the theatre. So the theatre is absolutely essential as a kind of dream idea, and I’ve tried as hard as I can to keep it like that.

The full interview can be heard at:www.royalcourttheatre.com/podcast/s3-ep1-simon-stephens-talks-to-jez-butterworth/

JERUSALEM

For Gilly

Jerusalem was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, London, on 15 July 2009 (previews from 10 July), with the following cast:

PHAEDRA

Aimeé-Ffion Edwards

MS FAWCETT

Sarah Moyle

MR PARSONS

Harvey Robinson

JOHNNY ‘ROOSTER’BYRON

Mark Rylance

GINGER

Mackenzie Crook

PROFESSOR

Alan David

LEE

Tom Brooke

DAVEY

Danny Kirrane

PEA

Jessica Barden

TANYA

Charlotte Mills

WESLEY

Gerard Horan

DAWN

Lucy Montgomery

MARKY

Lewis Coppen / Lennie Harvey

TROY WHITWORTH

Barry Sloane

Director

Ian Rickson

Designer

Ultz

Lighting Designer

Mimi Jordan Sherin

Sound Designer

Ian Dickinson for Autograph

Composer

Stephen Warbeck

The production transferred to the Apollo Theatre, London, on 10 February 2010 (previews from 28 January), with the same cast and creative team, except for the following roles:

DAWN

Amy Beth Hayes

MARKY

Charlie Dunbar-Aldred/Lennie Harvey/Jake Noble

It was produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Royal Court Theatre Productions, Old Vic Productions, in association with Robert G. Bartner/Norman Tulchin, Lee Menzies and Rupert Gavin.

The production returned to the Apollo Theatre, London, on 17 October 2011 (previews from 8 October), with the original London cast and creative team, except for the following roles:

LEE

Johnny Flynn

PEA

Sophie McShera