So, I’ve missed a few of these. And then when I started writing last week and hit on the meat of what I wanted to talk about, it felt quite scary, so I took another week to really do it carefully. It’s a longie, so do make yourself a cup of tea (a strongly brewed PG Tips, milk from a cow and no sugar is my jam) and strap in!
London – Brighton
Is that a smile or a grimace?
So, firstly it was the London to Brighton bike ride two weekends ago, and I actually managed to make it to the end in five and a half hours. It was. Amazing. I’ve never done so much as a park run, so it was exhilarating to be a part of some 4000 cyclists of such varying abilities cycling the same route. I didn’t sign up to do it for charity – the thought of asking people to donate so I can do a fun thing just feels a bit weird. Saying that, I really do admire those who do raise money for a loved cause at events like this, and having personally worked for a charity for many years, I know how beneficial these events are to them. So not raising money is just my social awkwardness around asking for money, not a principle. Anyway, instead I just donated to the DEC Pakistan Flood Appeal myself.
In the all-consuming news of a certain elderly lady’s passing, many news editors seemed to have forgotten that a third of one of the Queen’s much loved Commonwealth countries is under water, the overflown lakes and rivers have mixed with pesticides and fertiliser and sewage to become toxic swamps, and thousands are displaced, starving, diseased, dying. Women are giving birth in dinghies and families are struggling to find dry land to bury their loved ones. It pained me to see that a voluntary queue to view a certain coffin had more medical support and access to toilets than certain regions of Pakistan do right now.
So please, consider donating here if you are able: https://www.dec.org.uk/appeal/pakistan-floods-appeal
Downtime
Work wise (which to be honest in the face of such horrors, feels irrelevant) I had some rather positive feedback on that draft of a musical I submitted at the end of last month. It was probably the warmest reception of a first draft I’ve ever had. I’m told the script is going out to potential composer collaborators now which is beyond exciting. I can hardly believe how lucky and privileged I am to be doing this as an actual job and I have to keep pinching myself.
Since then, I’ve had a couple of weeks of downtime before I start on attachment at a theatre next week. I’ve been spending it reading and prepping for the attachment, finishing off a few TV bits and bobs, having a few meetings, reading the brilliant scripts sent in by this year’s Tamasha Playwrights, and doing a whole lot of nothing…
The downtime is weird and disparate and sporadic. I spend the majority of most days in sweat pants, sometimes just underwear and a vest, sans bra. I went to the cinema at 1pm on a Wednesday (don’t worry, I wore clothes). I treated myself to a post-bike ride massage (clothes were obviously removed) at 9am just so I keep some semblance of a work day, even if it’s… errr… well, the exact opposite of work.
Some days I am blissfully happy. Last Friday morning I sat by the Kings Cross canal in the cool autumn sun, enjoying an over-priced masala chai and samosa and face-timing my mum in Pakistan. As she laughed at the crazy amount I spent on said chai, I felt content down to my bones. Other days, I feel the depression* lurking just beneath the surface. Occasionally it bursts through and the day’s a total write off.
The jealousy
One thing that can occasionally send me spiralling is something I’m deeply ashamed of talking about and something that I’ve really tried to do a lot of work around. I don’t like it about myself, but here it is: sometimes I experience gut-churning jealousy over the success of other writers.
It wasn’t always there. For years I was writing away, doing my thing, not worrying about what other people were doing and where they were at. But then something changed. It started when I had just quit my day job. I had gotten too many commissions too quickly and was completely overwhelmed by it all. I didn’t feel deserving of them, and worried I’d only gotten those commissions because of my brown skin, so I was completely wracked with imposter syndrome and the fear of failure.
The imposter syndrome made me a dick. To bolster myself, I was constantly comparing where I was to where other people were. I couldn’t so much as go to the theatre with an open heart without comparing what was on stage to the last thing I’d written. It was pathetic and I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t shift those feelings. Then I stumbled across this wonderful piece by Cheryl Strayed:
It was soothing to think that perhaps we are all indeed savages who are capable of letting the pettiest ugliest jealousies overcome us, but it also held me to account. I had to get over myself. Cheryl says it all far more brilliantly than I ever could, in an empathetic but kick-ass firm way. And her advice really does help – the way to not be jealous is just to tell yourself to not be jealous. It’s simple, but along with a lot of therapy, it’s helped a lot.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked hard to recognise that feelings of jealousy are really feelings of inadequacy, and instead of being down on myself and everybody else, I have tried to take pride in what I’ve achieved. But when the show is over and all you have left is your memories and a handful of lukewarm reviews on the internet, it’s not always an easy thing to hold on to.
And every now and then, perhaps when I click on an article of a shortlist of most promising playwrights and I’m not on it, or when I see a play which I didn’t particularly think was very good has gotten a helluva lot of rave reviews, that old ugly resent bubbles up again and I can quickly fall into that familiar well of egotistical despair – why has my own work not been so lauded? Why am I not promising?
In an overcrowded and precarious freelance industry that is wracked with funding cuts, rejections and disappointments, where you’re putting out work that is dear to your heart and in many ways stitched into your sense of self, it can be hard not to compare and despair. Especially when your work, and by corollary, your sense of self is publicly attacked, dismissed, criticised, or met with indifference. Certain callous lines from certain reviews from my play The Funeral Director in 2018 still ring through my head like earworms, making me wince and clench my toes in pain. I try not to think of some of these reviews for The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs, it is too close, too painful to bear, when Ministry is the thing that I have done that I have loved most in world.
The most beautiful cast in the world
Sometimes it gives me pleasure to think of times when the critics get it wrong, like famously in 1995 when Blasted by Sarah Kane was widely panned. I think of the times where reviews have been completely divided over a show. Or I have been blown away by a play which has received mediocre reviews. And I breathe out a sigh of relief when the views of critics correspond to my own views. In that moment I think, thank goodness, maybe this is a game I still understand, I can still win.
STOP READING REVIEWS!!! You scream. I scream. We all scream. And it is a compulsion, one that I do in the vain hope of protecting myself and my immensely fragile ego, from the bad ones. If I can only work out why this play deserved such a cruel takedown, while this one was lauded, maybe I can control the fate of my next play.
The problem is, it’s not a game any playwright can ever have any influence over. It’s not the Olympics. There is no world record to beat. There are no objective metrics or clear ways to determine who wins and loses. Perhaps my fatal flaw is that my favourite subject at school was actually PE, and not English or Drama. Though maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, our entire formative education is based on an objective metric of achievement, and it’s hard not to feel like Press Night is exam day.
A play might take four years to write. An opinion can take a critic just four hours – often less – to form. They are not equal pieces of writing, equal pieces of thought. It is frankly stupid to rest my entire sense of self on a person who’s seen too many plays in too few days, who’s probably not of the community I’m writing about, who might be hungry, cranky, in the middle of a divorce, or indeed just someone with different tastes or politics or interests to myself. On top of that, a playwright has no control over the world in which that play is thrust out into – what political context, what social context, what are the headlines that day? Has something happened which makes critics or audiences feel uncharacteristically sympathetic of a monarchy and churlish about the struggles of people of colour? Have recent events re-galvanised a jingoistic spirit? Has a country just been devastated by floods of biblical proportions on account of climate change? And as plays meet the world, so do people who come to watch those plays, bring their own lived realities and experiences, another thing beyond a writer’s control. There are a million variables to each person’s experience of a piece of theatre. I can never control them, I can only control what I put on the page.
I stumbled across the following hilarious words from Harold Pinter recently:
“It took me quite a while to grow used to the fact that critical and public response in the theatre follows a very erratic temperature chart. And the danger for a writer is where he [OR SHE, HAROLD!] becomes easy prey for the old bugs of apprehension and expectation in this connection. But I think Dusseldorf cleared the air for me. In Dusseldorf about two years ago I took, as is the continental custom, a bow with the German cast of The Caretaker at the end of the play on the first night. I was at once booed violently by what must have been the finest collection of booers in the world. I thought they were using megaphones, but it was pure mouth. The cast were as dogged as the audience, however, and we took thirty-four curtain calls, all to boos. By the thirty-fourth, there were only two people left in the house, still booing. I was strangely warmed by all this and now, when I sense a tremor of the old apprehension or expectation, I remember Dusseldorf and am cured.
“The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity; a poem, a play, no difference. These facts are not easy to reconcile. […] But basically my obligation has remained the same. What I write has no obligation to anything other than to itself. My responsibility is not to audiences, critics, producers, directors, actors, or to my fellow men [OR WOMEN, HAROLD] in general, but to the play in hand, simply.”
Sometimes it can feel like I have handcuffs on my wrists, as I try to write to please every imagined critic, every angry leftie on Twitter, every wine-swilling liberal intellectual, every member of the brown community, every member of the queer community, and of course my mum (who would gladly frame a grocery list of mine, so proud she is of anything I do).
Thank goodness for my mum to be honest, because apart from her, it is impossible to know who I might actually please, and unhelpful to the play itself to try to contort it to suit the imagined and capricious fancies of all of those people.
As Pinter goes on to say:
“If I were to state any moral precept, it might be: beware of the writer who puts forward his [what’s wrong with a nice inclusive ‘their’, Harold?] concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be.”
There are writers who write like this, often to great success. And sometimes those shows are needed and important. So I wouldn’t be as hardline as Pinter to warn against writing from that impulse. But it is not and cannot be how I write. I have found that the more I think about outside voices embracing me, the more hampered my writing becomes and I can’t hear my own voice in amidst it all.
The anchor
For me, I’ve found that the most helpful thing is, rather than to reach outside myself for thoughts and opinions, I must go deeper into myself, holding fast and true to the very deep place my writing comes from.
I’ve heard a version of that told by many artists. Recently I saw Maria Friedman perform in tribute to Sondheim and she recounted a time where she was a young nobody, going on stage as an understudy for a big somebody. She said you could literally hear the audience groan when the understudy was announced. And when she went on to sing the big solo – I can’t remember what it was – she was petrified. But then instead of looking at the expectant faces on the balconies and stalls, she buried herself in the place that is the safest place to be: the work itself. Everything else disappeared and she belted out a corker to resounding applause.
The work, deep inside yourself, is the safest place to be. I still find it hard to ignore the tempests of twitter and critics and awards and stars. But deep inside there is an anchor, the place where the work has sprung from, which if I hold on to it, if truly believe in it, I don’t get lost with all that other shit.
It’s not always easy, and the shame and embarrassment and self-loathing about those ugly feelings just makes it all worse. But truly, truly believing in your own work really helps with it. I am relieved to say that though my enduring feelings around The Funeral Director in 2018 were ones of sadness and jealousy and despair, my feelings about Ministry this year have been overwhelming joy, gratitude and pride. The critical reception for both plays were about the same, but my relationship with myself is the thing that’s changed.
Most of the time now, I love immersing myself in a play that someone else has written and can let myself to be moved or to laugh or to be amazed or entertained or educated, and not feel that ugly curdling resent in the pit of my stomach. It’s an honest blessing to let myself sit in that dark room and be carried away by a story, or be overjoyed when nice things happen to writers I know. And while I still slip into those old feelings, I probably always will, on the whole I am a much happier person and grateful for the anchor I’ve found.
That’s it from me for the next month or so. If you’ve read this far – well done! I’ll post again after my attachment and talk about how that’s gone, if that isn’t too much of a snooze fest.
*on a side note, depression is such a yucky word isn’t it? I hate using it, though perhaps that’s shame. I’m reminded of a fantastic book by Jools Walker called Back in the Frame where she talks about being a black woman blogging about cycling, and her own depression which she calls ‘sparks’ to shield herself from the stigma. Reading this book and Jools’ description of anhedonia- an inability to feel pleasure from ordinarily pleasurable activities – was one of my early dawning realisations about my own depression.