"No one claps at the end of a novel" - A Conversation with Laura Wade
Laura Wade's play Colder Than Here premiered at Soho Theatre directed by Abigail Morris in February 2005 followed shortly afterwards by her Royal Court Theatre debut Breathing Corpses, directed by Anna Mackmin. Laura was subsequently joint winner of the prestigious George Devine Award 2005, and also won the Pearson Best Play 2005 award for Breathing Corpses. The interview took place in London in July 2005, when Laura was working on a revised version of Colder Than Here for its New York opening as a MCC Theater Production in September 2005. Currently, Laura is working on new play commissions for Soho Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, and Hampstead Theatre as well as adapting an unfinished Jane Austen novel for the stage, under commission to West End producer David Pugh. Laura's newest play Other Hands, from which we feature an extract in our fiction section, has recently premiered at Soho Theatre. Laura was awarded the 2006 Critics Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright.
Interview taken in London in July 2005
The writing process
Christina Wald: When you burst onto London's theatre scene in February 2005 with your debut play, Colder Than Here, and your second play, Breathing Corpses, running almost simultaneously at two of Britain's leading new-writing venues, Lyn Gardner remarked, "At just 27, Wade has gone from the playwriting equivalent of 0 to 90 in what seems like seconds."[1]Lyn Gardner. "Death becomes her." The Guardian, February 2, 2005. I am interested in your preparation for this ostensibly sudden start - how did your interest in the theatre begin, which experiences did you make with the productions of your previous plays, and what role did young writer programmes play in your development as a writer?
Laura Wade: I was interested in theatre since I was really tiny. I remember going to see plays from the age of five or six and just thinking it was incredible. I totally believed it, I thought it was magical, and I still have that "childhood wonder" at theatre. I know that some writers work from wanting to make political points, whereas my writing just comes from an absolute total love of theatre - it's my favourite thing in the world. So I suppose I've always wanted to be involved. When I was younger, I wanted to be an actress for a few years and then decided I'd be terrible at that. And then, when I was about sixteen, I thought perhaps I wanted to be a director. So I wrote lots of letters to theatre companies around near where I lived, which was in Sheffield, and one director at the Crucible Theatre was very kind and let me come and watch some rehearsals. There were rehearsals for a new play, so they had the writer with them in the rehearsal room and I got to be friends with him and I thought he was really cool and he encouraged me to have a go at writing. At that point I wrote my first play, Limbo, around the edges of school work, and really loved doing it. Limbo ended up being produced; I showed it to some of the staff at the Crucible Theatre and they were looking for a play about young people. When I first started I was very much writing about myself - so this is a play about a young girl who is about seventeen and happens to live in Sheffield and have a life very similar to mine… It was all quite autobiographical at that point. But seeing my play being produced, I was hooked. I went off to university to study drama and I produced a couple of plays at the university theatre. After that, I spent a few years still fiddling around and not quite being able to find what I wanted to write about - I was going through the process of finding my "writing voice," I think. When I moved to London, three years after finishing university, it really kicked in and it was the "Young Writers Programme" at the Royal Court that really that helped everything fall into place. They run groups for writers between the ages of thirteen up to about twenty-six. You have a course of ten weeks, one evening per week, with a group of fifteen of you which is run by Simon Stephens. It's just a wonderful, wonderful opportunity because it really taught me a lot more about things like structure, approaching the writing with more rigour and having tools in your toolbox to tackle a problem. Another thing they really encouraged us to do was to read a lot. I hadn't read enough before and I think the best writers I know are the ones that read everything and see everything. It encouraged me to work a lot harder and it was while I was on that course that I wrote Colder Than Here.
CW: How does the Royal Court select the people who are allowed to take part in these courses?
LW: For what they call the "Introductory Course," you just have to apply. You don't have to have ever written before, you don't have to submit anything, so anyone can do it. And then they do a second course which they only run about once a year. This "Advanced Course" or "Invitation Course" is only for about ten people they pick because they feel they have some promise.
CW: To which degree, do you think, can playwriting be taught? Which specific skills can be taught?
LW: It's a very difficult question, isn't it?! There is something about being a playwright that is a way of looking at the world which cannot necessarily be taught. It's about this raging curiosity about people and that is an essential character trait. But there's something about spending time with other writers that's really useful, especially learning about other people's processes and trying out other people's writing exercises. The Royal Court course is very good in that it allows you to do that. It doesn't say "this is the only way to write a play and this is how you structure a play and if it doesn't conform to this five-act-structure then it's not a play." They really teach you to find your own way. I think if courses are structured in the wrong way, they have a potential to be damaging. But in my experience, it was enormously helpful.
CW: You have just mentioned your love for the theatre. Could you imagine writing something other than plays, novels for example?
LW: No, no one claps at the end of a novel. It is the liveness of theatre that excites me. You can't have two hundred people sitting in a room all reading a novel at the same time and experiencing it together. I think that's the aspect of it that excites me the most - and the collaborative nature. Writing plays is lonely enough, really. Because it takes months and months to write something before you have that gorgeous month when you are in a rehearsal room and you've got actors around and a director and you get to see everybody making it into a "real" thing. Novelists seem to be on their own all the time and I don't think I'd like that, not really. And novels take years to write - I'm not that patient.
CW: Are there other playwrights whom you find particularly interesting and who have influenced your writing, or are there maybe different playwrights for each play?
LW: It's always difficult to tell when you've been influenced by something, because you try to resist that. You are always trying to speak in your own voice… But there are always playwrights that I go back to. I think Caryl Churchill is wonderful. She's my playwriting heroine, in terms of the way that she finds a new form for every play she writes. And the story fits the form; it's never about structure as a form of fireworks. So I love her work. I'd love to have a career as long as hers. Continually doing something new throughout such a length of time, that's wonderful. I read her work a lot. I love Martin Crimp. My writing is not anything like his at all, but he inspires such a love of language, and his plays, even when he's describing something horrific, make me smile because of the way that he's chosen the perfect words to the perfect phrases to describe something. Reading his work is very invigorating. And I like David Eldridge. I read his play Under the Blue Sky quite a lot while I was writing Breathing Corpses because it was another example of a narrative that is stranded but all the plot lines are nonetheless linked in some way. And I like Joe Penhall's work very much as well - and Sarah Kane, she was a genius.