This is a good four weeks out of date,
but then the kids' summer holiday in its entirety involves
frantically chasing my tail. It was commissioned by and intended for
publication in the Guardian's theatre pages, to coincide with Stuart:
A Life Backwards opening at the Underbelly during the Edinburgh
fringe, but then Will Adamsdale (who plays Alexander Masters in the
production) did something to his back during rehearsals, and by the
time the show was back on and the piece came back to me for rewrites
I was on holiday and had forgotten to bring my computer (I felt its
absence as melodramatically as if it were a lost limb). So I hit the
spike. Usually I'd just throw the original version up here, but my
editor called me out on a journalistic failure and further piqued my
pride by wanting me to put the quote that I had at the end at the
top. So I've half-rewritten it and now it's a jerky, jolty, funny
little piece of perversely anti-commercial arts writing that would
make everyone on the arts desk shake their heads in dismay. Exactly
what having a blog is for, then.
I didn't get to see Stuart in Edinburgh
but Lyn Gardner did and liked
it very much. It's touring this autumn, to Watford
and Sheffield
– but if you haven't read the book yet, I recommend you do that
first. I read it in a two-day blitz not quite in time for talking to
Jack Thorne but before interviewing Alexander Masters; that was five
weeks ago and I'm still nursing the wound.
*
Alexander Masters had already completed
two degrees, in physics and maths, abandoned a PhD in the philosophy
of quantum mechanics, and tentatively begun a career in journalism
while working as an assistant in a hostel for homeless people, when
he accidentally added biographer to his haphazard
CV. His first subject was a violent,
drug-addicted, spikily engaging homeless man called Stuart Shorter,
whose chaotic existence seemed to defy all logical conventions of
biographical writing. His second was a mathematical genius obsessed
with bus timetables. He's now working on a third book, inspired by
147
diaries by an anonymous writer, which Masters
found in a skip.
He's clearly quite a character, but one
who prefers to maintain control over his own story. “I don't mind
writing books about other people, but I don't want someone doing it
to me,” he says. Which has been a bit of a problem, because his
celebrated
first book, Stuart: A Life Backwards, has been turned into a play and
Masters is one of the lead characters. Speaking in the run-up to its
debut at the Edinburgh fringe festival, he readily admits that: “The
whole thing panics me.”
Stuart Shorter's story has already been
dramatised once, but for TV: the film, starring Benedict Cumberbatch
and Tom Hardy, was screened in 2007 and Masters himself wrote
the script. At the time, Masters harboured a
quiet ambition to stage it, too, but was put off when people
repeatedly assured him: “Oh no, you couldn't possibly turn this
into a play.” Their problem, it seems, lay in the way the book
zigzags through time, moving both forward through the story of
Masters' unexpected friendship with the homeless man, and backwards
through Shorter's prison spells and tumultuous teenage years to the
childhood trauma that devastated his existence. Masters had already
conquered this fragmented chronology in the book, and felt he knew
exactly how stage it: by taking us inside Shorter's head. He came up
with the idea of setting the story entirely in Shorter's poky
rehabilitation council flat, animating the furniture in some way so
that it would seem to speak to Stuart directly. “I got all carried
away,” he says cheerfully. “But no one else was keen.”
One of the people who felt Stuart
couldn't be staged was Jack Thorne, a writer who splits his time
between TV (he's worked on episodes of Skins, wrote The Fades, and
collaborated with Shane Meadows' on This Is England '86 and '88) and
theatre (including a translation of Durenmatt's The Physicists, an
adaptation of the vampire story Let
the Right One In, and Mydidae,
a two-hander set in a bathroom). Yet it's Thorne who has collaborated
with director Mark Rosenblatt on the adaptation touring Britain this
autumn. Thorne has loved the book passionately since he read it –
in a pre-publication unproofed copy – in 2005, but believed its
natural second home was on screen. “There's quite a lot of story to
get through, and it's a lot easier to be faithful to the book when
you're doing stuff for film,” he says. But when Rosenblatt –
another long-term aficionado – invited him to write the play text,
“I couldn't let anyone else do it: I had to have a pop.”
It's taken five years to get from that
invitation to production. Partly the delay was down to money, says
Thorne: unlike Masters, he has opted for a six-person cast, hard to
finance in the current
funding climate. But it also reflects Thorne's
long quest to find a suitable structure for the play – a problem
Masters himself experienced when writing the book. Masters devotes an
entire chapter to confessing how worthy and tedious his first draft
was: Shorter himself rubbished it, and advised Masters to write it
backwards – contrary to the usual structure of biographies – to
give it the pace and intrigue of a detective story.
What Thorne was resisting was the
traditional arc of stage stories: conflict, dialogue, resolution. “I
didn't want it to be too linear. There's a way of staging it that has
Alexander not understanding Stuart in the first act – but actually,
he likes Stuart from the beginning. It's not The
Odd Couple: it's a love note to a very
complicated man.”
Although he felt acutely the
responsibility to honour the book, Thorne was reluctant to engage
with Masters, or anyone else related to or acquainted with Shorter,
while working on the adaptation. “I've written a couple of real
people before and find it very, very difficult if I've met them,”
he says. “I feel I can't tell their true story. It's quite hard to
explain without sounding like an idiot, but I don't hear their voice
more clearly, I hear their voice less clearly.” On Stuart as on
previous TV biopics that he's written, Thorne relied on the people he
was working with to liaise with the subjects of the story, while he
absorbed himself in the parallel fiction that he was creating. “Mark
was brilliant and totally understood my problem. He was talking to
Alexander a lot, people were talking to Stuart's family. The fact
that I didn't meet them makes me sound as if I didn't care, but it
wasn't a matter of not caring, it was a matter of asking, how do I
tell this story best? I personally would find it very difficult to
write some of the very dark things involving Stuart's family having
met them.” Eventually, this problem became key to the script he was
writing: “It's what the play's all about: how do you tell the truth
about someone? It's something I struggle with quite a lot.”
The trouble is, Thorne's solutions to
the problem of truth-telling are so contrary to Masters', and the two
men's modus operandi are so at variance, that initially there was
some tension between them. “I was never quite sure what he didn't
want to be led astray by,” Masters says tartly. “I didn't mind
him not talking to me, but if you're going to write about someone
like Stuart, you have to meet the people involved.” Masters admits
he “kicked up a hell of a fuss” after reading a first draft, in
which Thorne explicitly dealt with the childhood abuse that damaged
Shorter's life, because: “You cannot write that sort of stuff
without seeing the nearest person involved.” Thorne's willingness
to address the issues that Masters raised, however, soon assuaged the
biographer: “From being cross with him, I ended up having lots of
respect for him.”
That respect is mutual: when Thorne
talks about Masters, it's about the only time in our conversation
when he doesn't nervously interject a rapid “d'you-know-what-I-mean”
every few words. To Thorne, Masters is an outsider: someone who
didn't settle well into social life at university, spent years
searching for his place in the world, and feels a deep affinity with
others who don't quite fit the profile of normal. And Thorne comes
across as another outsider: friendly but shy; a jittery,
self-deprecating speaker; a solitary soul in a garrulous profession.
He finds attending rehearsals hellish. Although a committed member of
the Labour party who once dreamed of becoming a politician, he is
wary of speaking out, “wary of political acts. I'd love to be able
to stand up and say: this is what I believe.” Previously, when he's
written about politics, for instance in his play 2 May 1997, set on
the night of Labour's first election win in almost two decades, he's
done so – to quote Michael Billington – “obliquely”.
Thorne is trying to change that, in that he's working on a big, more
directly political piece, “but it's hard. You feel like you're
embarrassing yourself.”
Ask Thorne what the point is of turning
a story that is already a successful book and film into a play, and
it's the politics he turns to. “By its nature, theatre is a
discussion. There's a lot about Stuart that we don't understand: for
me, there's a discussion there to be had.” Not only that, he says,
but cuts to welfare benefits means that: “The number of homeless
people has gone up and up and up. Shelters are closing. It's getting
even more crucial to hear Stuart's story.”
Masters agrees, but also points to two
specific themes in Shorter's life that have universal resonance:
“Loss. The fear that you have not made your life into something
that it could have been, that you have lost all your opportunities,
that it has been a waste. And the sense of injustice that Stuart
battled with, that affects so many people and so many situations.”
This is what makes Stuart's story connect so powerfully with people,
he thinks. “It isn't a book or a film or a play about a homeless
person: it's about these themes that Stuart characterised to an
extreme.”
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