Thanks to The Hour, playwright Abi Morgan has enjoyed an incredibly prolific year. Next up, a Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep, a Steve McQueen film about sex and a play about God
Abi Morgan shows up late, full of apologies, to a cafe on the corner of Exmouth Market in London's Clerkenwell. I tell her it would have been understandable if she had failed to turn up at all. For she is Mrs British Screenwriter and it is daunting even to try and imagine her workload. This has been, as she says, an "extraordinary" year in which "it is all happening at once".
She has a hasty look as she bustles in, wrapped in a black shawl ? part Mediterranean peasant, part human dynamo. The minute she sits down, we both start talking at once, as you do with people who, for some reason you cannot as yet explain, you instantly like. Right away, we are analysing her Diet Coke habit and she is promising, unconvincingly, that the one she is ordering will be her last and I can see that, at this rate, we are going to blow right off course.
So: quantity. Could we concentrate on this first? Does she even know how many scripts ? for film and television and stage ? she has written? After some genuine attempts at counting, she has to admit she doesn't. All right then: there is The Hour, the 1950s newsroom BBC drama watched by 2.1 million viewers (she is now working on a second series); Shame, a film directed by Steve McQueen, to be released in January; and, in the same month, the eagerly awaited biopic The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. And then there is her adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, at last going ahead. And that is not to ignore her new play, 27, about to open at the Royal Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh. And we can't even begin to mention the scripts that never made it ? some her personal favourites.
If I am not sure where to start, how must Abi feel? How does she keep so many plays in the air? As she talks, her flesh-coloured Perspex ring (from Next, she says) catches the light as she pummels, boxes and burrows with expressive hands. She has big, brown, intelligent eyes, which she likes to roll (often self-mockingly). And sometimes she watches me warily ? she is not about to be tricked into blowing her own trumpet. She insists she is governed by "escape". If you have enough scripts on the go, there is always one to disappear into: "I am always running away from something." But she writes fast and adds ? understatement of the year ? "I don't have writer's block as such." She will do "eight or nine drafts" per script.
If I could spy on her at home, what would I see? She describes her north London house, currently a "building site", and her study in the middle of it. She has always had the ability to work in a hubbub. For her first 10 years as a writer, she had other jobs as telemarketer, researcher, caretaker, when she covertly scribbled. Now, her days are a combination of "frenzied work" and "procrastination". She starts at nine, finishes at seven. But this isn't solid working? "In that time, I am doing a hell of a lot of internet shopping, navel-gazing, picking away at my partner, sharing several cups of tea with whoever turns up?"
But the day has to be more organised than it once was ? children make one "conservative" and she and her partner, Jacob Krichefski, an actor, have two (Jesse, aged nine, and seven-year-old Mabel). She writes in chaos: a nest of papers, bits of chocolate, her daughter's hair slides, a huge whiteboard "besieged by my kids" and with nothing sensible on it. The promise to tidy her study is broken every day. And she never makes lists. David Hare ? she quotes him brightly ? apparently once declared: "If you can't remember it, it wasn't important enough." I protest at this. And her face clouds over, too, as she confesses she spends her whole time forgetting things.
I am a huge fan of The Hour and before we move on need to be reassured that Dominic West, who plays Hector, the news presenter, has survived into the second series (if only because it looked, at the end of the first, as if he might vanish into the beautiful, boring arms of his posh wife and forfeit his life in current affairs for ever). She delights me by saying: "Everyone in the cast is coming back" and: "I am really excited about where I can take Hector? I think there is a darker place for him to go but that is all I am saying because? [she pauses as if recognising the absurdity] I haven't written it yet and [a different, more thoughtful pause] we start shooting in two months." We talk about the brilliant casting of The Hour ? with Ben Whishaw as Freddie (she identifies with Freddie because he is "on a rollercoaster waiting to hit a wall") and Romola Garai as Bel. And she tells me that Jill Trevellick, who cast Downton Abbey, was responsible.
Anyone who has seen the trailer for The Iron Lady will agree that casting does not come more classy than Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, looking killingly plausible in her turquoise twinset. She is being told, by image advisers, to sacrifice the hat and pearls. But, deliciously, she pronounces the pearls "non-negotiable". The only thing wrong with Streep's performance is that, when she smiles, she is a smidgen too pretty. Nothing she can do about that, but she has worked on everything else. Abi says it was "an exceptional privilege" to watch her in the early stages: "The extraordinary thing is how quickly that voice was there."
This is no reflex rave. Abi knows about acting. Her father, Gareth Morgan, was a director; her mother, Pat England, is an actress. When reading English and drama at Exeter, she wondered about an acting career herself ("like someone whose dad is an electrician, having a go at changing plugs"). But after a university performance, she asked: "Mum, what do you think?" The reply was: "No, darling." Wasn't that hurtful? "Not at all. I felt incredibly relieved ? I thought it was quite funny."
Her tutor's verdict was discouraging too. He said she was "'too short'. 'But what about Judi Dench?' 'Ah, but she has that voice.'" And what Streep has, we agree on, is "exceptional intuition". She "observes and listens and finds the character through the work". And what about Thatcher ? did Abi meet her? She hesitates ? sworn to silence at this stage. My guess, for what it is worth, is that she did.
Shame could hardly be less like The Iron Lady. I am amazed by a preview I see after meeting Abi. It is a stunning film. Michael Fassbender stars as a sex addict whose sober demeanour is completely at odds with his chaotic sex life. In no way is it about the joy of sex; it is about nightmarish compulsion, a New York underworld. Yet the two years Abi spent working with Steve McQueen were "joyous". McQueen is "brilliant? one of my favourite people".
Sex addiction is barely recognised in the UK, one reason why the film was shot in New York (this sort of territory is not new for Abi ? 2004's Sex Traffic, about prostitution, won a Bafta for best drama serial). But what she and McQueen were interested in was how the "currency of romance" has been devalued by the internet, where "sex has become a phenomenal industry". They met sex addicts and the professionals working with them. It made her conscious of a peculiarly 21st-century agony in which "the quest for love and sexual intimacy swims against the tide of a therapised world that deconstructs love and a cynical internet world that commodifies sex".
Phew ? and we haven't even got to the play that is our ostensible reason for meeting. This isn't fair, because 27 sounds extraordinary too. It is set in a convent in the west of Scotland and is an exploration of faith versus science. "I used to believe in God as a child. God, for me, was linked with hope." The inspiration was Abi's meeting with "two elderly nuns on a train to Edinburgh, returning to their convent". She realised they were a "dying breed ? there were only five of them left". She thought their dedication "amazing" and wondered how they felt "about their own belief system with no one following after them".
She was also inspired by a "wonderful" book: David Snowdon's Aging with Grace about the effects of ageing on the brain in relation to Alzheimer's, based on a "study in midwest America of several hundred nuns who donated their brains after death".
After this, we talk a bit about age (Abi is 43 although her "inner age" is fixed in her late 20s) and about families ? her childhood and her parents' divorce (she talks about the "bravery" it takes for people to admit their marriage is over). We also talk about belonging. She feels she grew up with no fixed abode, had a theatrical, peripatetic childhood. "The thing I love about London is that it is filled with migrants, including myself." And we bond over our mutual love, as children, for a Marine Ices kiosk that sold wonderful Italian ice cream on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We talk coconut versus pistachio. We talk children and technology. She exclaims that for her kids "the page is interesting but antiquated". She describes herself as a "technophobe married to a technowhizz".
We talk about husbands. And she tells me how "fantastic" hers is. He keeps the family going. "The answer to 'I don't know how she does it'," she says, "is usually 'someone else does it'" (and that someone might be a husband). She hopes she doesn't sound smug. She notes that this division of labour (the woman as main breadwinner) is becoming more common. By the way, did I know women's salaries are starting to overtake men's? It could be a "new world order". She wonders if there might be a play in it. I start to egg her on ? you can see how things begin with Abi: a new play round every corner.
By the way, she hastens to add, she is around for her children at weekends, breakfast and bedtime. And she is glad her children can see she has a "huge passion" for work. Yet she struggles to see herself as a success. She is somewhere between modest and incredulous. "I am a short, tenacious woman running around trying to fit in a haircut. I don't look back. I don't look forward. I am totally now. I think: God, is someone going to pay me this week? That is totally amazing."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/16/abi-morgan-27-thatcher-shame
Weekend breaks Lloyds Banking Group New Castle United Reality TV Banks and building societies Green politics
No comments:
Post a Comment