Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s a very unusual novel, a gay novel. Neil is an activist, a gay writer, a playwright, and also the director of the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, and he has written a number of novels and plays. This novel is about a 50-year-old man who doesn’t know anything about his sexuality. And the subtlety with which Neil tells about this man’s bemused discovery of his sexuality through his relationship with his nephew is very beautiful.
Can you tell me about some of the books that have directly or indirectly influenced your practice over the years?
The books that we have chosen are not necessarily about theatre per se, but they have had a profound influence on our practice in theatre, either because of the way that they have handled themes that we have wanted to explore but did not know how, or because they helped with practical elements of our work.
Our first book is Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett, an activist, a gay writer, a playwright, and also the director of the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. This novel set in the sixties, is about a fifty-year-old man, a furrier, who doesn’t know anything about his sexuality. While most gay novels are about the gay, usually American, lifestyle – a kind of Los Angeles gay scene – this one is about a character who doesn’t know he’s gay. And the subtlety with which Bartlett tells about this man’s bemused discovery of his sexuality through his relationship with the nephew is very beautiful. The context is knives and fur – you’re in the middle of a very claustrophobic state of mind, a highly eroticised atmosphere.
This serendipitous read has led to your work on a new play for the National Theatre. Can you describe how that has come about?
As soon as I [Basil] read this book, I thought, I’ve got to meet this person because he is handling a theme that I have always wanted to explore in my work. Rae Smith, the designer of War Horse was also his designer and she introduced us. We met and immediately felt that we had to work together. So he put a proposal to The National, which he had not done before, and it was accepted, and so we have been working on a play together.
Why was it so important to you to do a play with a gay theme?
The first adult play we did was about two gay women, and although their sexuality was incidental to the story, very subtle, it did inform their political decisions. We wanted to find somebody who could do that, who could tell a story about being gay but in a subtle way. Neil’s solution to the problem was to do a play about a long-term relationship, which we thought would be like watching paint dry, but he said, Watch me. And so I [Adrian] made two puppets of ninety-year-old men and two puppets of nineteen-year-old men. We took two sketch puppets to London to show Nic Hytner at The National and he loved them. So it’s been a wonderful journey from reading a novel to making a play.
Read full interview
Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler are founders of the cutting edge Handspring Puppet Company whose signature style involves puppeteers sharing the stage with their puppets, along the lines of Japanese Bunraku but adapted so that the puppeteers are not obscured but form an integral part of the action on stage. Their creations for the smash hit War Horse are stunning audiences this Christmas at the New London Theatre and will hit the Lincoln Centre in New York in 2011 after a European tour. Their production of Woyzeck on the Highveld is currently touring in Spain and France.
