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Do you have the other life, the dream life, the life you think you should be living? The other life where you got what you thought you wanted, the dream job which came through, the booker who saw your band’s potential, that one person you really fancied who said yes. Most of us aren’t unhappy exactly, but even the best life presents opportunities for the odd minute of dreaming, of picturing the other life where all is better and more grandly lived than here. Yesterday’s dream.
I was thinking of this because I was recently reading Nicholas Hytner’s memoir of his time as director of the National Theatre, and thought of all the times I’ve dreamt of running a theatre. Oh, of course I’ve directed my own plays, but not like that. Not at the National. I’d say that of all my unrealized professional dreams, running a theatre company is the one I return to most.
I tried. I even came close enough to it at university, writing plays furiously and working with a small group of recurring student actors. What an incredible level of freedom to have at just 19 years of age – a freedom I never came close to since.
I had a go as an adult, too; over 2014-23, I made a concerted attempt to break into the theatre in London, writing no less than six full-length plays and translating another. It wasn’t a complete wash out; I had three excerpts on at scratch nights, one shortlisting for a script award, and a staged reading was given of my play ‘The Mayor of Hackney’ at the Arcola in 2017. Given I made a contribution to the costs of said reading, I still finished my London playwriting career slightly in the red.
There remains on my OneDrive a file filled with positive feedback from some of the finest theatres in England – but I never did get anything produced.
In late 2023, I left London because a good job came up in Brussels. No regrets there; I have a rich life here now. Besides, this newsletter took off, meaning I wasn’t exactly without attention from my work. It was just, in that intense phase of productivity, fully committed to London, knowing exactly what I wanted, the opportunities did not appear. Despite what some people claim, just manifesting outcomes is not enough to make them happen; as cliches go, there is much more truth in the simple call to ‘Go with the flow.’
In my other life, I am on the terrace of the National Theatre. I am drinking a coffee with the head of new writing there – not Nicholas Hytner, who left in 2015. It’s a sunny day and we are talking about plays, in a chewy inside-baseball way, and I am being given a commission to write a new one, on some theme which seems to suit me to a tee. 75 years of the German Federal Republic, for example, that sounds the kind of thing I could rustle up something for.
‘And what would you really like to write for yourself?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’d like to write a trilogy of political plays. I’ve written the first one, ‘The Mayor of Hackney’, already – it was on at the Arcola in 2017. I’d like to follow the main character over an entire political career; through local government in the first part, European in the second, and finally into national office in the last. Proper state of the nation stuff.’
‘The problem I’ve been having,’ I say, the sun shining on my best T-shirt, ‘is that I write political and topical plays and by the time I get anywhere with them in staging the jokes have all expired. So I need a page to stage pipeline which is much quicker.’
‘Well,’ says the imaginary head of new writing, ‘We can go as quickly as we can.’
‘So you’d like to help me?’
Following this I spend the rest of the 2020s writing a vast and brilliant theatrical trilogy, timed to coincided with what happily turns out to be my creative peak. So pleased am I at this final recognition of my talents, so validated do I feel, that I decide to reproduce.