9 questions for
Simon Stephens
- Set up -
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Are you religious? Any sort of spirituality or anything?
Well, that's a question I would have answered way more confidently about 2 months ago before I read Yuval Noah Harari's definition of religion. I don't know if you've come across Yuval Noah Harari the Israeli Historian and author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, who distinguishes quite importantly between spiritualism and religion and also has a very interesting definition of religion. For him religion is not necessarily a set of cultural beliefs - an organisation predicated on the assumption of the existence of a god. At least not god we understand as existing outside of mortality so much as a structure built around a commitment to a shared set of beliefs. In which case, Capitalism is a religion. He defines Nazis as a religion, Communism as a religion, Socialism as a religion, Humanism as a religion. In which case I would say yes, I am religious but my religion would be described as being I guess Secular Humanist. I don't believe in any kind of life after death, I don't believe in any kind of deity. I do have a faith in human being which is often tested. I guess in that sense there's a lack of spirituality in my religion. Liberal Humanism! (Laughs.)
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What would your hell look like if you had to think of one?
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I think on of the defining geniuses of all concepts of hell is eternity, like a proper consideration of eternity. There's an extraordinary consideration at the end of Marlow's Faust when Faust is preparing for his eternal damnation and he tries to bargain with Mephistopheles and asks to be damned for hundreds of thousands of millions of years but not eternity. I guess the notion of the eternal carries within it a kind of hell. I think there's a more playful answer to that which would something like being away from my kids, being away from my wife being away from Manchester United, being away from music (laughs), being surrounded by Tories (laugh.) Being in any of those situations for eternity would be pretty bad.
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If you had to choose two people to be stuck in hell with, who would it be?
There's part of me that want to say - my wife and kids. Though I don't really want to damn them to eternity in hell. It's like a perverted extension of the game 'who would you like to dinner party with?' I don't know, I don't know…. It's very interesting. I'd like to spend more time with Eric Cantona (laughs.) I don't know if I want to spend eternity with him. Mark E Smith would be interesting. You know, Mark E Smith would be very good because actually, he would be very difficult to live with for any period of time but also quite compelling. There's an element of sexual in Huis Clos (No Exit), no? Then somebody really beautiful and kind of amazing like… who's the actress in Bony and Clyde? Faye Dunaway. That would be my answer. Faye Dunaway and Eric Cantona.
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The 9 Circles
1 - Which character do you identify with
in the play No Exit?
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It's really tricky cause I haven't read in in 30 years. I remember as a 17 year old boy, for reasons that I would probably embarrass me now if I re-read the play, I remember being quite compelled by the character of Garcin. I quite like his kind of bullishness, his dryness, his defiance, his cynicism. They are all characteristics that I found quite compelling. And actually a lot of the characters that I wrote in my early plays share a lot of those characteristics with him. When I read it at the time, as a 17 year old reading in 1988, he felt like a much more modern character to any characters that I've come across in English plays that I read - more filmic in a way, you know. Who's the actress in Alphaville? - Just one second Nathan, just one second! (stops to talk to his wife.) What was the question? It was about Garcin. - You got your dog?… Sorry I was just talking to my son now. - But, yeah, I haven't read it for ages. He might be a total prick.
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2 - What was the first play you ever read?
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S: The first play I ever read?… I was never somebody who read a lot of plays. We didn't have plays in our house. I wasn't from a family who had access to plays so it would be plays that I read at school. I remember reading Willis Hall's the long and short and the tall when I was about 14. Theres a character at the heart of that play that has similar existential concerns as Garcin. But Huis Clos (No Exit) was one of the earliest ones. I read Waiting for Godot around the same time. When was Huis Clos written?
NGY: It was written in 1944 and played for the first time in 1945.
S: I know, I was just trying to do the maths in my head whether or not that period of time between me reading it and now was bigger that the period of time between it being written and me reading it.
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3 - What is the first play you've ever wrote
and what was it like bringing it to life?
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The first play that I wrote was an adaptation of a Tom Waits song called Frank's Wild Years and the play was called François' Wild Years. That's a song on his album Sowrdfishtrombone. I wrote it as a monologue. I wrote it the same year the I read Huis Clos (No Exit.) This is all happening in the same time for me. I was quite a bad play. but I guess it was interesting. It was in consideration of the ethics of murder. It was set in the prison interview of this guys who murdered his wife and set fire to his house. It was produces at my first year of university when I was 19. It was on a double-bill with a play that I was in, a play that I had co-written called Asylum occurring with two other writers. And Asylum was much more indented to Huis Clos. Asylum was about three characters trapped in a space together. I've not really thought about this for years, but the character I was playing in that play was really just like a pastiche of Garcin. The whole play in a pastich of Huis Clos. - Sorry I just need to sneeze cause I got a terrible cold. Sorry, that's really rude on an interview.
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4 - What's the most challenging play you've ever written?
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Gosh!…. I'm in the early stages of having finished a play which may never be produces called the Uncountable. It's a faustian play about somebody who sells him soul to the devil. That's been the hard write that I've had so far. It's been about two and a half-year in the writing. The trickiness is how dramatise somebody who's damned for eternal… - Hold on. (speaks to his wife.) - How do you dramatise somebody who's damned to eternal suffering but still be a character you have compassion for but also think there deserve the damnation? Not so humane that when they're sentenced to eternal damnation you think the sentence in unfair.
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5 - What genre that you've never written and
would be really interested in writing?
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I never start a play with the consideration of genre. There's a couple of detective plays I've written, noir plays I guess. You know Three Kingdoms and one minute and even The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time takes that form. I've never written a western. I don't really know if I'd like to. I'd like to write a horror actually, like a proper horror. Like the exorcist is a great film or a great drama, the way the Omen is or the Blair Witch Project or something like that.
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6 - What is the best thing about being a playwright?
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Working with actors. The rehearsal room is on of my favourite things. I love audiences but actors really… actors and rehearsal rooms - I really adore that. There's a rare oddity in the art of making theatre which is really extraordinarily talented people committing to make manifest something you have imagined. That's really deeply moving.
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7 - And what the worst thing about being a playwright?
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Having to live with the constant possibility that you're a failure or a fraud, that you're shit, that the work's shit. The constant sense of the possibility of shitness of what you've done. Self-doubt.
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8 - What is something you know now that you wish you knew
when you first started as a professional playwright?
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That what matters is the work, not the carrier. That is fundamentally feels the same when you're writing a play for the National Theatre or for or for the Royal Court Theatre. The feeling is the same as when you're writing a play for the Bedlam Theatre in Edinburgh - it feels the same. It's not like there's a special pass you get when you're a professional playwright in which the work is more serious or you take it more seriously. That what matters in not success, what matters is the work.
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9 - What brought you to writing in the first place?
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I think I've written all my life. I've written ever since I was a small child. As long as I can remember., I've tried to make sense of my position in the universe through words that I wrote. I think it's true that often people go to writing because they're readers and I think as a child I read things that helped me make sense of my sense of self. I was probably a bigger reader when I was a child than I am now.
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Last Words
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Any project coming up that you'd like to tell us about?
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I've got no world premier in 2018. So I've just got to get some writing done. It's a writing year, yeah.