Gods Behaving Badly Locations

Missed this while I was away - interview with me, which you may or may not find interesting, but accompanied by a fantastic set of photos showing various locations from Gods Behaving Badly. Great work from Rachel at Londonist. And only when looking at the pictures did I realise that the book contains a major continuity error which escaped my editor and me through months of forensic corrections. See if you can figure it out, it's obvious from one of the photo captions (though of course you'll only spot it if you've read GBB).

A bit of me

Do you miss me? I miss you. But my gorgeous, demanding little nephews and their equally gorgeous, slightly less demanding and far less little parents are visiting me from Mozambique so I am ignoring my responsibilities.

Fortunately, here's an interview I did earlier. Just to keep the wolf from the door.

And you're coming to the Firestation Bookswap on Thursday of course, so I'll see you there. Remember, if you can't come because you live in Canada or something, you can post questions for Jessica Ruston or Robert McCrum here and I'll ask any that aren't actually obscene.

Vanity: fair?

I have just been interviewed by Italian Vanity Fair magazine. We had the interview at my house, at my request, because I feel self-conscious doing interviews in a cafe where people can overhear.

The interview was at 10am. At 9.30am, I suddenly realised that if you do an interview in your house, it is not only you being interviewed: it is the house itself. Flurry of panic. I was, of course, not ready myself either. Thus had to do a whole series of appraisals:

- will Vanity Fair be more shocked by my not drying my hair, or by having all my laundry inc underwear on drying rack in corner of room?
- will Vanity Fair be more shocked by my not having any make-up on, or by drifts of dust and loose hair on my white-painted staircase?
- is it worse for doorbell to ring while am carrying dustpan and brush, or with only one set of lashes wearing mascara?

And so on.

But hurrah for confused cab drivers: the journalist was 15 minutes late. Thus was able to open door with styled hair and emergency-level make-up (you know what I mean: hadn't curled my eyelashes, had stretched to Touche Eclat), graciously accept apologies for tardiness, and lead journalist into gleaming house with nary a trace of laundry to be seen. It was only when I went to make the tea that I noticed the wok from yesterday's stir-fry still sitting soaking in the sink... but she'll never know about that. Except when she looks up the blog to help her with her research. Ah well.

The thing about being interviewed, you see, is that you forget: it's not just you bring interviewed, it's your house. And your blog. And your book. Maybe I should worry less about being overheard?

This Play Is Not Grim

As promised, my interview with playwright Stephen Brown, author of Future Me.

'I was on the edge of my seat!' - Time Out

'Unexpected, peppery humour' - London Metro

'Packed with ironies and funny lines' - San Francisco Weekly

'Informative, creepy, humane, thought provoking and riveting' - San Franscisco Chronicle

And that's just the play! Imagine how good the interview's going to be.

MP: Tell me about Future Me.

SB: Future Me is about a successful young barrister who gets sent to prison for sex offences. It follows him over five years, into prison and back out again. It shows you all the people around him – his girlfriend and his brother and the people he meets in prison – and the effects of what he did and how he changes on them as well. And it’s about a number of different things; it’s about sex and compulsion and desire, and it’s about change, and just what does it mean to say ‘I can’t change’ or ‘I have changed’, and how would you prove it – how would it be possible to prove it. It’s about how we as a society think about our monsters, and about the collision between our desire to forgive people or to let people have a second chance and our visceral reaction to certain kinds of crime – to horrific crimes that turn our stomach.

MP: Most people would expect to identify with the other characters in the play, with the victim or the family, but in Future Me, you’re also encouraged to identify with the protagonist, which is more unusual.

SB: The most complex and exciting and testing relationship within the whole play is the relationship between the audience and the characters on stage. Half the characters of the play are sex offenders and you’re actually, in different ways, sympathetic to all of them, even though you’re simultaneously invited to judge them and to question what they’ve done and whether they’re able to change. And so the play works by giving people a very complex experience of identification.

MP: What was that like for you as a writer?

SB: One of the things that I’ve learned from writing it is that you can write about anything if you want to. You can take your imagination into places that are extremely dark. Writing the play took me on a difficult personal journey into a world that was quite disturbing. But then that’s the point of the play. It’s easy to pontificate about justice or mercy or what it would be like to have committed a crime or to want to commit a crime, but the nature of a play is to take the audience on an experience where they’re at ground level with those questions and living them with the characters. The play puts you right in those people’s world. And it shows you them struggling with who they are and what they are and what they’ve done.

MP: It’s a play about sex offenders but it’s also a play about temptation and self-control and about the dark side of anyone, and I think most people will find it an uncomfortable watch, because we all know what it’s like to want to do something that you know you shouldn’t do.

SB: There are two ways of looking at deviant or criminal behaviour. One of them is to separate those people off and view them as abnormal and try to put them in a different box, as another type of human being, and the other way, which is my way, is to view everyone as being on a continuum. For me, the really interesting thing writing the play was to say simultaneously that these are human beings like us, who have their attractive aspects so we sort of like them, and at the same time, not to tell lies about the reality of what they’ve done. It’s very easy to make somebody who’s done something awful attractive by minimising what they’ve actually done, but the play is very, very clear that certain kinds of behaviour are really damaging to the victims and are wrong.

MP: People think you either condemn or you understand, and that understanding is condoning, but I think you can condemn and understand at the same time.

SB: That divide, or that contradiction, is just where justice lives. Justice means that, over and over again, you need to make a judgement which in some sense is impossible.

MP: Why did you call the play Future Me?

SB: Future Me is a phrase taken from a therapy programme that is given to sex offenders in British prisons, in which the prisoners are invited to list the characteristics of their Old Me, while they were still offending, and then list the characteristics of their Future Me. The whole play, in a sense, is about whether the central character has a Future Me. People who’ve committed sex offenses end up in a position where, like alcoholics, you’re never not an alcoholic. It’s always there within you. And so you can never really enter into the future. You’re always facing the future but always on the brink of your past as well.

MP: The play is quite funny, which people might not expect from everything else that you’ve said.

SB: The humour just developed naturally. I wanted to do something where it wasn’t po-faced because I don’t think life is po-faced, and I think life is particularly not po-faced when it is dealing with serious things. If you go into prisons and talk to the people you meet there, you find this massive streak of black humour, and that was certainly true in the prisons I went into, amongst the prison officers and probation officers and psychologists and so on who were dealing day to day with people who had done, in some cases, really appalling things. Equally, if you make a child abuser into this incredibly shadowy, terrifying figure who’s the bogeyman, it dehumanises them, and somehow at the same time reinforces their power over the people they abuse, whereas the reality of these people is that they do terrible things and they’re also slightly absurd and laughable. A lot of these guys are fundamentally emotionally immature, and there’s a lot of comedy in that, but it’s dark, edgy comedy.

MP: The play doesn’t take the tone you’d expect. It’s not hysterical, it’s not a heavy, miserable experience. A lot of people will think ‘why would I want to go and see a play about sex offenders?’

SB: It is funny, and it’s also exciting. It’s a bit like a thriller, there’s a lot of jeopardy. One of the characters is basically trying to save the other character, and it’s a tense and exciting story. Guy Retallack, who’s directing it for this tour, said, ‘One of the things I say to the actors is that this play is about anything that’s unspeakable.’ It’s about secrets, about people dealing with things that they find at the edges of what they can talk about, and how difficult that is. The play observes how people deal with these extreme pressures. That’s making it sound terribly, terribly grim.

MP: It’s all right, I won’t make it sound grim.

SB: Edit that out. Just put in loads of jokes.


***Ticket Giveaway***
Stephen Brown and Scott Davison Productions are offering three pairs of tickets free, to any performance. The only condition is that you review Future Me on your blog or website, ideally before the run ends... If you want to take part, e-mail me on strugglingauthor at tiscali dot co dot uk.

Future Me is touring the UK:

New Greenham Arts, Newbury
Tuesday 24 February
01635 522733 / www.cornexchangenew.com

Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry
Wednesday 25 – Thursday 26 February
024 7652 4524 / www.warwickartscentre.co.uk

The Lowry, Salford
Monday 2 – Tuesday 3 March
0870 787 5780 / www.thelowry.com

Theatre Royal, York
Thursday 12 – Saturday 14 March
01904 623568 / www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

Burton Taylor Studio at Oxford Playhouse
Thursday 26 – Saturday 28 March
01865 305 305 / www.oxfordplayhouse.com/BurtonTaylor

Only Connect, London
1-26 April 2009
0845 370 7990 / www.onlyconnectuk.org

Further details available from www.scottdavisonproductions.com

Please note that the play is suitable for ages 15+ only.

Apologies

I think that my creative cup has run (temporarily) dry. It has been a tough couple of months. I have been very blog slack.

If you are missing me, there is a 40-minute radio interview with me here. I actually sound remarkably perky given that I was suffering from laryngitis at the time (and still am, or rather it has now mutated into a nasty chest infection.)

At some point in the future I am fully intending to have interesting thoughts again, and when I do, you will be the first to hear about them.

Me On Telly

If you can stand it, there's a half hour long interview with me here. The interview was done for German TV so you will have to negotiate a German website and guess some of the things to click on. Also, you'll need pop ups enabled. And the first minute is in German before it goes into English. But if you get through that you can enjoy two girls in short skirts on a sofa, one of whom is me, one of whom should really have brushed her hair first, one of whom is me.