Making it up
I can make things up – and do –even in the factually based drama I prefer these days. But I can’t really imagine any more sitting down with a blank screen and fictionalising. From early on – my first performed play was a slice of my mother’s life – I was more comfortable with ‘facts’. Once the subject is established - that particular year in Shakespeare’s life, say - the way I write these days is to accumulate a mass of material and find a satisfying dramatic way through. Somewhere among the research and note taking the play is constructed and often part written. I like the fact that I have to incorporate (in ‘Mrs Tolstoy’) Tolstoy’s desertion of his wife – no way round it - or use, as the entire basis of a play, an amiable dinner engagement of E M Forster’s on a particular night in July 1909, with a young man called Ernest Merz: ‘He left me, normal, at about 9.40,’ Forster wrote. ‘Next morning he was found dead… I may meet sadder things, but never a more mysterious..’ There is no record of Forster talking to the police about Merz’s unexplained suicide, but in ‘A Dose of Fame’ I used a jump-cut from Forster’s saying goodbye to Merz along Piccadilly to a scene where a police officer visits Forster and his mother at home. The rest of the play then unrolled more or less according to the chronology as we know it, though I concertina events. We know a great deal about Forster and even more about the Tolstoys. My job with the them (a five part ‘Woman’s Hour’ Serial) was encompassing thirty years of married life – the five daily episodes facilitating the necessary time shifts, babies born etc. My rule of thumb is to alter things only when I have to and then only at the latest stage. In the play about the French essayist Montaigne, ‘Living with Princes’, I headed quite happily to Paris with the central character on his (real life) mission to reconcile the French King Henri 3 with his troublesome relative, the King of Navarre. In August 1588, we know that Montaigne was thrown in prison in Paris by the all-powerful Duke of Guise, and was then released fairly pronto on the orders of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. Tip top dramatic stuff, but the play had shifted under me in the writing. I’d already had an ambush (helpfully well documented) in the first half of the 90 minute play, and to have Montaigne clapped in jail and then rescued would have left me with too little time to adequately finish the play that had rather surprisingly emerged. The (too?) obviously dramatic incident had to be jettisoned, though it happened. One listener regretted the fact that Guise, though frequently mentioned in my play, never made an appearance, unlike his starring role in Marlowe’s ‘Massacre at Paris’ (which, though it was on my desk as I wrote my own epic, is shamefully still un-read). I like a character who never puts in an appearance (think ‘Godot’/think Pinter/think Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’) There was another factor too – one of the few disadvantages of biographical drama: Guise, like Henri 3 and Henri Navarre was also called Henri. Three Henris, one play. Guise went. But cutting the prison drama meant, sadly, I couldn’t bring Catherine de Medici back. She makes a fair impact early in the play – and, in truth, deserved a whole play to herself. Instead I introduced a fictional character into ‘Living with Princes,’ Montaigne’s secretary, Peslier. He was nowhere around in the synopsis which sold the play to Radio 3, just wandered into the first scene once I’d begun writing. We know Montaigne had a secretary. I made him a young man not unlike myself at his age, a bit provincial (he was played with a Northern accent). The relationship between him and his master, Montaigne, stole the show for me, despite the murderous antics of the Princes who surround them. I went with what interested me. It’s the only way. There were one or two other minor fictional characters, necessarily introduced to keep the wheels turning - Peslier was joined by a (Sergeant) Soumillon and (Captain) Guyon. They are all named after French jockeys, who rode in Sea the Stars’ Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. I am still awaiting what used to be known at the BBC as the ‘green ink’ letter of complaint...