In my final year
at college, studying theatre, we were told to write and direct our own play. I
can’t quite remember what the criteria were, but I know that we were required
to come up with at least ten minutes. In a response that was to typify the
majority of my writing since, I found it difficult to keep mine from sprawling
over half an hour.
That play –
which would have been produced in the spring of 2001, I think – was generally
well received (certainly it was very well acted). It was a murder mystery with
four actors playing four parts each, and – although I didn’t get the chance to
write this – the chance of four different endings. It was therefore almost
inevitably called ‘Four Play’. I did consider a whole lot of other titles
before going for the pun, but nothing else sold the concept quite so well. A
lot of the humour of the piece was inspired by watching far too many screenings
of the Tim Curry film Clue (which
also had multiple endings, and a frenetic, breathless final act), the acidic
humour of Mad magazine, and – now
that I think about it – an experience I had on another play in a previous drama
course, back in Croydon.
I was in a farce
called An Italian Straw Hat, and
found myself playing two fairly sizeable roles: an aging grumpy old man, and an
immaculate, humourless waiter. I’d like to think that this was to explore my
very obvious and significant range as an actor, but it’s more likely that there
simply weren’t enough men to fill the parts. I don’t remember it as a
particularly joyous production – more skewed towards bombastic performance
rather than acting – which, even in a farce, is leaning towards tedium. But
there was one moment where I had to leave the stage as the grumpy old man, and
then return as the immaculate butler in roughly the same amount of time that
it’s taken you to read that sentence.
Much of my ego
obviously got a kick out of this – managing to switch between two entirely
different characters, as well as a complete costume change, in under 40
seconds. In the event, I’m not entirely convinced that anybody noticed the
effort I was putting in, and that includes my fellow cast members. I’ve chosen
to conclude that that proves just how devastatingly impressive my character
switch was. Or something.
So, anyway. All
that was in my writing DNA in early 2001. In the week of the show, the course
co-ordinator took me aside and mentioned that a student on another theatre
course hadn’t gotten around to writing the hour long play that she was meant to
for the Edinburgh Fringe that summer. Each year, a select few of the college
were able to ride of coat-tails and get a show on at the fringe. Except that
this girl didn’t actually have a play finished. ‘And this,’ my course
co-ordinator intoned, ‘is fringe material.’ He asked if I’d be interested in
taking the ‘Four Play’ up to the Edinburgh Fringe. I was, despite never having
been up there, and not truly appreciating the magnitude of the offer. However,
the lazy playwright got wind of this idea, and pulled out all the stops to hack
out her play (which I increasingly now think was the whole point of my job
offer). Her play went up to the fringe, where it was reviewed with the classic
line ‘the worst thing on the fringe this year’ (which, as is the contractual
obligation, they blew up to a huge size and plastered it all over their
posters). ‘Four Play’, meanwhile, was liked well enough that the cast repeated
it the following year (after I’d left the course) for a revival. A shaky video
of that exists somewhere. I always knew that I’d want to write the play again
to full length, and establish the four different endings. However, as is often
the case when somebody does a drama course, I entirely avoided acting for about
seven years. Once I’d moved down south, I scoped out a few local drama groups, most
of which at that time had no interest in producing new work (and certainly not
one from a writer they didn’t know). One of the most promising was the New
Venture Theatre, and so eventually I posted my colours there. I knew that I’d
still have to play the long game - there
was no way they were going to offer a directing / writing gig to someone they’d
only just met – and so I had a couple of fun years as actor, and directing a
short play (by Mark Wilson) for a new writing showcase. After a while, I felt
able to submit my proposal for a production. I’m sure that there were probably
a couple of people who raised eyebrows at the idea of a writer directing his
own work (quite often a pretty strong signal of self-involved
self-satisfaction) but somehow I managed to get it through the gate.
And for the
second time, I was blessed with an excellent cast, and a truly amazing back
stage crew. There were around 120 complete costume changes, and on some nights,
it felt like half of those changes took place in the last twenty minutes. Most
audience members seemed to have a great time, some said that the play clearly
had a future beyond the confines of amateur theatre, and many gently pointed
out that it was a bit long. On this last they were absolutely correct.
So, while it
needed a pretty savage edit, even people who had criticised the length said
that it didn’t really feel that long – it was just, in order to make the whole
thing commercially viable, it needed a chop. This was true, and I was content
to leave it alone for a while as my mind attempted to solve the problem without
my interference (due to the complicated nature of the set up, it was never
going to be as simple as, say, cutting the third scene – each moment was
stacked on the other like a house of cards). Meanwhile, almost in passing,
someone asked me if I’d heard of a thing in London called ‘The 39 Steps’. I
said that I hadn’t, and the conversation drifted elsewhere.
In the five
years since, I have of course heard of ‘The 39 Steps’, and I’m aware of the
similarities between that production and
‘Four Play’: both are period pieces where a limited number of actors play
multiple parts. It seemed like someone had got to the joke before I did, so I
was intrigued enough to check out the London show to see if ‘Four Play’ was a
lost cause, or if it was entirely different.
Well. It’s not
entirely different. I found myself in London recently, and had a chance to see
‘The 39 Steps’ for myself. ‘Four Play’ does indeed share a very central gag
with 39 – that there are four actors (why did it have to be four?) playing lots
of different parts. A lot of the joy of both plays is that they are fringe
shows done big – unashamedly punching above their weight, and we can see the
actors working hard just to keep up. There’s even a joke in both plays that is
essentially the same, when the script ‘cheats’ with an apparent fifth cast
member in order to facilitate a plot point. Understandably, I spent much of the
production squirming between enjoying the show and seething with annoyance.
Seems like I can still switch between personas really quickly.
I did some
homework to see who had their original production first, and – perhaps
surprisingly – I was actually pleased to discover that ‘The 39 Steps’ had
beaten me to the punch, in their original fringe production, by about four
years. I think I’d rather that than the alternative: that I’d written and
produced something, and then did nothing with it for nearly ten years while
someone else managed to get in first. That would have been upsetting.
And yet.
Although there is clearly a lot of shared DNA, there are marked differences. 39
delights in the impossible task of creating a Hollywood movie on stage,
complete with planes, trains, and car crashes. ‘Four Play’, on the other hand,
gets overly complicated by getting trapped by its own form and set up: actors
aren’t able to arrive on stage as one particular character until they have the
opportunity to leave the stage as a previous character, and as a result there
have to be additional narrative quirks to facilitate the entrances and exits,
as well as some humour coming from the actors/characters forcing the others on
stage into ever quicker and more difficult changes.
The humour in 39
(I would claim) is also slightly broader: they have fun with breaking the
reality of the staging once or twice, and the joke I spoke about earlier, the
one about the fake fifth cast member, is actually somewhat different. In ‘Four
Play’, it occurs relatively early in the text, and is reasonably subtle: all actors
are on stage, interrupted by a knocking on the door. They are momentarily
confused before shrugging it off and continuing. We didn’t explain the gag any
further (it’s the first time the play implicitly references the number of
actors), and I knew each night that if the audience laughed right away, then
they’d got the gag, and we had them for the rest of the night. And so it
proved. In ‘The 39 Steps’, they lampshade the joke a lot more, having an actor
yell out in frustration ‘This is meant to be a play for four actors!’ (again,
why did they have to have four?). The audience enjoyed it, but I felt it
laboured the joke. That said, it was an indication that, no matter how much
‘Four Play’ and ’39 Steps’ appear to have in common, they are actually quite different.
However, I’ve
spent a lot of time since undecided if I want to be all depressed about the
whole thing – throw it all away – or take comfort in the fact that there’s
clearly a market for this kind of thing. Nowadays, it’s all about the money:
when I was able to produce ‘Four Play’ the first time round, doing it with a
local theatre group – complete with its own studio space, etc, easily saved me
thousands. Now, if I was going to produce it myself, it would be beyond me. So
I consider the possible thought processes of any potential producer – will they
react with ’39 Steps already did this,’ or ‘if people liked 39 Steps, they’ll
love this! ..’
In the end, I
rather think I’ll strap myself in, complete the edits, and then hawk it around
to any possible interested producers or agents. Because, after all, I rather
like this script. And after all, if ’39 Steps’ really did get to my idea of four
actors playing multiple parts, I can take comfort in the reality that we can’t
possibly have been the first.
