Mike Bartlett interview: 'My rule is that, if someone could say it in life, we have to put it on stage and trust the audience'

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Nick Curtis @nickcurtis14 October 2019

Mike Bartlett creates highly original stories, from his early plays My Child (2007) and Cock (2009) to the state-of-the-nation dramas Earthquakes In London (2010) and King Charles III (2014), to his runaway TV hit Doctor Foster.

But he also occasionally adapts an existing work — for instance Medea or Chariots Of Fire — “if I feel it taps into where we are now”. When director Tinuke Craig gave him Maxim Gorky’s Russian family drama Vassa Zheleznova to read he was gripped.

“Most families are socialist in their essence — they share resources and power — but in this play that is turned on its head, and the rules of capitalism apply to personal relationships,” says Bartlett, 39. “Vassa is a mother, a matriarch, her husband is gravely ill and she’s been running the family business pretty much single-handed for decades. Her wastrel children and her awful brother-in-law are fighting over what happens with the money when the father dies, but she wants to control her business and legacy.

“It has that feeling, which I think we have now, that things have grown out of control. One of the characters says that people you used to think were normal and sensible are now saying dangerous things — people on the street, not politicians. And as with a few Russian plays of this period, it’s quite knockabout. It maybe doesn’t have the intricate finesse of Chekhov but it has a lot more people falling over and being funny.

“There are moments of real cruelty and lines that are offensive. There’s been a debate about whether some lines should be said, but my rule is that, if someone could say it in life, we have to be able to put it on stage and trust that the audience has a brain. If art starts to think it has a political duty to tidy up life, it’s dead.”

The opening of the play was delayed when Samantha Bond, who was to play Vassa, suffered a back injury and had to withdraw: Siobhan Redmond stepped into the role. It marks a return for Bartlett to the Almeida Theatre, where he previously explored the British constitution in King Charles III and our national identity in Albion (2017).

“At the heart of this play is the question of how we are commercialising our choices and how much we resist or buy into it,” Bartlett says. “You see it with Donald Trump; literally every interaction he has is a deal. I find it a very contemporary concern — that ideas of love, morality, selflessness, kindness are very unfashionable at the moment, but they are probably going to be resurgent. They are going to have to be.

Siobhan Redmond stars in Vassa
Marc Brenner

“Social media has monetised our private lives as data, and the line between art and commercialism is blurring. My feeling about capitalism is that I just want it to say what it is: it’s the hiding, the hypocrisy [I can’t stand], the pretence — particularly in new media companies — that they care about your opinions or feelings. They lie, they follow you, they cheat you, they don’t pay tax. I’m not a communist. I’d love it if someone came up with a new way of operating society that worked, but no one has. Capitalism is the least worst option, I agree. But at least let’s call it what it is.”

Bartlett, the Oxford-born, Leeds-educated son of a headmistress and a psychologist — an upbringing he once said was good training for a playwright — is astonishingly prolific for a man not yet 40. As well as 18 plays or adaptations there have been works for radio, and on TV, The Town, Trauma and Press in addition to Doctor Foster. The second series of the latter, starring Suranne Jones as a wronged but far from put-upon woman, got a remarkable average audience of 8.9 million.

“It helped in terms of [me] getting things made, but it doesn’t help me personally in terms of writing a good script,” he says. There are no plans for a third series at the moment. Nor does he plan to revisit the royal family, although he remains fascinated by them (their constitutional position, not the gossip).

He has a three-part series for ITV, Sticks and Stones, about bullying in the workplace, due out in December, and is working on a six-parter for the BBC called Life, which tells the stories of four households in four flats in a shared house. He’s doing all this as a commuter, having recently moved back to Oxfordshire. Bartlett has young children with his wife, writer and director Clare Lizzimore, but he won’t tell me how many or how old they are. In the past, discussing his play Cock, which was about a gay man who falls in love with a woman, he wouldn’t say if he was gay or straight. He believes the less the audience knows about a writer, the better. I doubt he’d want to talk about Lizzimore if they weren’t working on a play as well as a family together.

Snowflake, previously staged at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, will come to the Kiln in December. It tells the story of a middle-aged man convinced that his long-estranged daughter is coming home for Christmas. “It’s about generational divide, the way they talk different languages, both politically and in terms of cultural reference points,” he says.

“If you have different reference points, you have different views on what the country is.” He wants to give it a happier ending than in Oxford “but I’m not gonna fake it”. He and Lizzimore first worked together on his play Bull in 2013 “when the ink was only just dry [on the wedding contract] so we were taking quite a risk if it didn’t work out. But it did. She just knows what my work needs. And also she is one of the country’s best directors.”

I ask what effect their move back to his home county has had on his writing. “Moving between London and not-London is actually very useful,” he says. “Because not-London is increasingly different to London. They are like two different countries. I’m only in Oxfordshire but the way people talk about London… it’s a different culture of understanding.” Those who feel we haven’t yet had a great Brexit play should perhaps keep an eye on what Bartlett writes next.

Vassa is at the Almeida, N1, (almeida.co.uk), until Nov 23, Snowflake is at the Kiln, NW6 (kilntheatre.com), Dec 10-Jan 18

October's best theatre

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