Monday 8th June 2015

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.