Oft-controversial playwright Mark Ravenhill talks to Matthew Amer about following in the recent tradition of epic National Theatre family shows by adapting Terry Pratchett’s Nation.
Now is a good time to talk to playwright and Nation adapter Mark Ravenhill. Tickets are selling well, rehearsals are going swimmingly and, at this stage, there is not a lot he can do. “At the moment,” he says in a voice strangely soft for a man of his imposing stature, “it’s really about the relationship between Melly [Still, the director] and the actors. I just pop in and have a look, say ‘You’re all doing really well’, and go away again.”
Sat in a small cupboard-come-meeting room at the National Theatre, in a straight-backed chair to help a trapped nerve in his back and munching on a pre-lunch flapjack, Ravenhill is a vision of calm; his shaven head and tall, broad frame making him easily recognisable, his faded jeans and grey sweatshirt helping him disappear into the background.
If I was him, I would be nervous. Nation, which Ravenhill has adapted from Terry Pratchett’s award-winning novel, is the latest in the string of National Theatre Christmas family productions that has included hugely successful adaptations of His Dark Materials, Coram Boy and War Horse. Each of those proved so popular that they returned for a second season, while Coram Boy transferred to Broadway and War Horse to the West End, where it is currently playing at the New London theatre.
Such pressure and weight of expectation, Ravenhill says, was quickly forgotten once he began work on the project and never caused him to pause before asking National Theatre Director Nicholas Hytner for a shot at the Christmas family show. The chance to stage such a large scale production in the National’s Olivier theatre, complete with music and puppets, was one enticement. The other, he says, was the opportunity to produce something for a family audience: “There’s something quite special about that, when everyone sits down together – Mum, Dad, kids, Granny and Granddad – and they all share the same experience.”
“There’s not many books that you read where you spend the last 30 pages just crying and crying and crying”
Though he is still best known for the controversial nature of many of his plays, which include Shopping And F**king, Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House, Ravenhill is no stranger to writing for a younger age group. His version of Dick Whittington And His Cat was presented as the Barbican’s pantomime in 2006/7 and he regularly contributes to the National Theatre’s Connections scheme, creating new work to be performed by teenagers for teenagers.
It was the process of adaptation, rather than writing for a family audience, that he found most challenging. “It is a very different thing,” he explains, “starting with somebody else’s book and getting inside their book and trying to get inside their mind and how that ticks. That’s a totally different process to writing your own play. When you’re writing it, you don’t think about children or young people, you just write the best play version you can of the book.”
Adapting, certainly on this occasion, is not what Ravenhill imagined it to be. “I thought I’d spend ages with the writer, but, in fact, I had a day in total.”
Pratchett was deep into writing his current Discworld bestseller Unseen Academicals and could not spare much time to the stage project. “My instinct was ‘I’m adapting a book, I want to meet the writer as soon as possible’,” Ravenhill says. “That was certainly my instinct; before I put pen to paper at all I would have spent as much time with the writer as I could, getting to know them and their approach to the book. But that wasn’t an option and it seems to have worked out fine.”
Instead Ravenhill worked closely with Still to bring their joint vision of Pratchett’s island-set tale to the stage. It was, in fact, Still who discovered the story of two strangers – an island boy and a Western girl – who are thrown together when a tsunami destroys Mau’s village and shipwrecks Daphne. Ravenhill had been searching for a suitable story to adapt for the Olivier when Still read a pre-publication review of the novel on a plane journey. Before long, Still, Ravenhill and Hytner had all read the book and thought “yes, it was the book that we wanted to adapt”. This was before the novel was even widely available. “We were committed to the adaptation before a single member of the public had bought the book, which is quite nice. We all had the same response as well to the last couple of chapters; we all blubbed our eyes out. There’s not many books that you read where you spend the last 30 pages just crying and crying and crying. It had a very strong effect on us all.”
“I want to have a lifetime of working in theatre”
It was not just the emotional tug of those final pages that convinced the National team that this was the story which could become the next Christmas classic. The first third of the book, Ravenhill tells me, features Mau and Daphne coming to terms with the very adult theme of what death is and what it means to them. “There’s not much of that in adult writing, even less in children’s writing.” It also features the meeting of two very different cultures, and scientific and philosophical exploration, “yet it’s all told as a fantastic adventure story”.
Ravenhill has always been interested in theatre. As a youngster, before he had even seen a professional production, he was staging plays with his brother and inviting people to watch them. “I do believe that theatre is a basic human instinct,” he explains. “Leave a group of people alone on a desert island and even if they hadn’t heard of it they would invent theatre to pass the time. They probably would never invent a video game.”
From the seeds of interest as a child, he followed his dream, studying English and Drama at Bristol University and having his first play Shopping And F**king staged by Out Of Joint in 1996. He made his name at the centre of the controversial and shocking In-Yer-Face theatre movement, but in recent years has turned his hand to more playful, experimental theatre. Recent projects have included Breakfast With Ravenhill (2007), in which he wrote a new play every day of the Edinburgh Festival, pool (no water) (2006), in which he collaborated with physical theatre specialists Frantic Assembly, and A Life In Three Acts (2009), in which he played himself interviewing Bette Bourne – played by Bette Bourne – live on stage.
“I want to have a lifetime of working in theatre,” he states. “Some people write a couple of plays and then disappear into films, but I was very clear from the beginning that I was in it to write plays till I drop, hopefully when I’m about 90. That’s a lot of years, so I want new challenges and new ways of working, because I want to sustain that. I had my first play produced when I was 30, hopefully my last one when I’m 90, so that’s 60 years of work. I want to find as many different ways of making theatre and working with people as possible really. Can’t do one thing for 60 years; you’ll certainly bore yourself if not other people as well.”
“Theatre is pretty basic… It’s just a group of people playing around, trying to create a game that they want to invite some other people to come and see”
Ravenhill’s passion, forthrightness and inventiveness probably has a lot to do with why Hytner brought him to the National Theatre in an advisory capacity when he took over as Director in 2003, since when he has seen the tradition of epic family Christmas shows that are not saccharine sweet or audience participation-crazy rise and rise. Ravenhill has been uniquely placed to see quite how the National Theatre has achieved this: “I think there’s just a real hunger for great big epic stories told in a big space in a spectacular way and in a way that people of all ages can get it. Nobody else is really doing that and nobody else quite has the resources to do that as well. Even though it’s such a vast space and it’s a large cast, you still get the real joy of theatre, which is you can actually use some very simple means to create some very powerful moments.
“With War Horse, in a film you’d have lots of horses and lots of CGI. Although there’s obviously massive skill in the way those horses are put together [for the stage production], they’re also incredibly simple. You can imagine as a young person you’d probably rush home and try to make one out of an old loo roll and bits of stick. I think what is exciting about these Olivier shows is they get the balance between the bigness of it and the spectacle of it, but also they have the simplicity of theatre, that it’s not geared up to be some huge machine that’s just based on CGI or hydraulics.
“Theatre is pretty basic. Even when you get into Rehearsal Room 1 of the National Theatre, which is the biggest rehearsal room here in the biggest theatre in the country, it’s still just a group of people playing around, trying to create a game that they want to invite some other people to come and see. I think that is one of the greatest things about the theatre, that it’s simple; you arrive here at the National Theatre’s Rehearsal Room 1 and you think ‘Wow, this is as big as it gets,’ but it’s just people in practice skirts with a few old props messing around; it’s the same as theatre would be anywhere.”
Now is when the playing, to a certain extent, stops; when Nation is performed before a paying audience. Only then, says Ravenhill, will they know how the piece works: “The audience tell you what the play is, probably even more with this kind of thing where it’s such a diverse age range. You don’t really know what you’ve got until you’re with that audience. You don’t know who they’re going to root for in the play, which bits they’re going to get really excited about, which bits they’re going to shuffle in their seats a bit. Really, that’s when you find out what it is you’ve actually made.” If Ravenhill’s passion and belief is any barometer, they will have made a fourth National Theatre Christmas hit in a row.
MA