Why I Write
by Hugh Leonard

Because I am vain and a show-off.  Because I have an urge to be known.  Because I have a creative urge and a flair that goes with it.  Because I am good for nothing else.  Because it is a way of being one’s own master.  Because writing is an illness, a virus that no science can isolate and cure.  Probably the last of these is the true reason, but there is no certainty.  One might as well ask why one lives. How I work is another matter.

There are as many ways of writing as there are writers.  For me, a play is cause and effect.  I start with people and a concept.  In my play Summer, I began with the idea of two picnics six years apart.  I wanted to see what time had done to my people.  At the beginning, a metaphor was in the back of my head, and it was that at a certain point in our lives we move from a bus to a tramcar which travels along an ordained route, unable to change its course.  We, the passengers move around inside it, giving ourselves the delusion of freedom of choice and destination.

That was more than enough to begin with: eight characters, six middle-aged and two teenagers (at least to begin with), and, as a setting, an unspoiled hillside in the first act, and the suggestion of an impinging building development in the second.  And I had a couple of rules, or rather one rule and an acid test.  The German dramaturgist Lessing said that in a good play every character is in the right.  So much for the rule, and it is unyielding; there are no villians.

And Schopenhauer divided humanity into two types.  There is the optimist who believes that if he obtains that money, that job, that girl, that dream, he will achieve happiness; he goes through life like a donkey in pursuit of an eternal carrot.  And there is the ‘realist’ who knows that the heart’s desire is a delusion and that all turns to ashes.  The former might be Blanche de Bois or Willy Loman, the latter could be Stanley Kowalski or Loman’s son, Biff.  The collision of the two is drama.

Most playwrights work their way through a first draft, then a second and as many as it takes.  I go by a thornier route, not as a matter of choice but by nature. If I were to work out a scenario in advance, it might rob my people of choice, propelling them forward along certain paths, bending and warping them to a theme.  Besides, the thought of writing drafts, of making the same journey repeatedly, fills me with ennui.  I write to find out about me.  I am at one with Graham Wallas, who said, ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’

I work very slowly, cutting and compressing as I go; my plays are inclined to err on the side of shortness.  In the case of my play Da, the first step was into the dark; I had no idea as to what settings I would need or how many people would be necessary to make the journey.  One takes a deep breath and makes a leap.

Working at the rate of a page a day, one gives the subconscious mind time to evolve a character, to decide what happens on the next page.  And one day the end of Act One comes in sight.  As to where the play is going, I have only the faintest sense of destination. Like a man travelling in an unknown part of the country, one tastes salt on the wind and sees the trees bent by inshore gales, and I know that the sea is not far off, but I still am unsure where it is or how to get to it.

You do, if you are lucky, arrive.  Sort of.  There are writers who regard their ‘final’ word as writ in stone and not to be altered.  More and more, I come to the belief that a play is not finished until after the last preview.  Writing is a lonely business, and I enjoy the rare opportunity of working with actors and a demanding director – with an adaptation, one is naturally more inclined to meddle and experiment with the text; one treats one’s own creations with less abandon and more reverence!

Each play goes its own way in the writing.  Summer evolved and was almost independent of its author.  Da was about my father, and the theme of a life remembered gave the play a shape, an almost cinematic movement through time.  In A Life, I posed a question: who is the better man; one who never dissembled, lied, loafed or betrayed a trust, but was without a shred of affection for his fellow humans, or one of life’s drones, who probably never read a book in his life and yet oozed good nature?  The need for an answer shaped the play.

From A Life

MARY: You haven’t noticed my room.

DRUMM: Haven’t I? [Looking about him] Oh, yes.

MARY: We did it up with the compensation.

DRUMM: It has taste.

MARY: And got the few new bits of furniture.

DRUMM: I approve.

MARY: High time, says you.

DRUMM: I don’t say.  I felt always at home here.

MARY: It was too dark.  The old people, them that’s dead and gone, they went in for that: no sunlight, everything morose and dusty.  I thought we’d get into the fashion.

DRUMM: You did.

MARY: We never set foot in here except for Christmas and funerals.  That was the style in them days: one room for living in and another that was a museum for cracked cups.  The Room, we called it: ‘Who’s that at the door?’ ‘Father Creedon.’  ‘Bring him into the Room.’

DRUMM [smiling]: Yes.

MARY: I made a clearance. It’s queer.  The furniture was easy got rid of out the door and that was that.  But the smell of beeswax and the lavender bags my mother filled the house with: nothing’ll budge that, it’ll bury all of us.  Still, we use the room now, by me song we do.  And I had the kitchen done up as well.   Do you remember how it was?

DRUMM: I know how it was.

MARY: See if you recognise it.  Come on.

[They start out of the room]

Do you remember the old range and the dresser and the one top over the sink?

DRUMM: [humouring her]: Not all gone?

MARY [pleased with herself]: You’ll see. In you go.

[During this, they crossed into the area at the left, passing the foot of the steps
as if walking across a hallway.  As they enter this area lights come up.  We are
looking at the kitchen of forty years ago, with the dresser, the range and the
cold-water earthenware sink as mentioned by Mary.  At the kitchen table are MIBS and DESMOND, who watches as she reads silently from a book, her lips moving.  There are exercise books and pen and ink.  DRUMM looks at the young MIBS as MARY talks artlessly about the room as it is now.]

What do you think of it? Mr. Comerford put in the kitchen unit and the shelves, but they had a fierce job with the new sink and the hot-and-cold, and as for the washing machine, don’t talk to me.  Anyhow, with that done I thought I might as well be the divil for style and break the bank altogether, so I got the new table and chairs.

DRUMM [only half paying attention, looking at MIBS]: You’ve done wonders.

MARY: At our age, what harm is a bit of comfort?

DRUMM: None.

MARY: If we don’t spoil ourselves, no one else will.  [Prompting him] So what do you think?

[DRUMM, standing behind MIBS, touches her hair.]

MIBS: Stop that.

DESMOND: Sorry.

MARY: Do you like it?

DRUMM: I’m sorry.  It shines.  What’s that odious new word, that jargon they’re so fond of?  Functional.  It functions.

MARY [flatly]: I see.

DRUMM: I meant that the word was odious, not the room.

MARY [coldly]: Yes I know.

DRUMM: Once it was for living in, now you cook in it and wash clothes.
It suits its purpose.  Formica surfaces, a refrigerator, yellow cupboards –

MARY [almost snapping]: They’re primrose.

DRUMM: Are they? [With false enthusiasm] So they are.

MARY: I’m sure you’re interested.

DRUMM: Mary, you must never ask a man to give you an opinion of a kitchen.  Dolly now would be over the moon about it.

MARY: Dolly has taste.  You left your drink.  [Still mildly affronted, she leads the way back to the living room.]

 

Comment
In my play A Life, the character Desmond Drumm, aged 65, calls upon his old friend Mary, whom he loved and lost more than 40 years previously.  She proudly tells him that she has had her kitchen redecorated and modernised.  They cross the hall, but the kitchen we see and Drumm sees is the shabby room of the distant past.  Seated at the table are Drumm as a youth and Mary as a girl.  He reaches out and touches her hair, whereupon she snaps, not at him but at the young Desmond: ‘Stop that!’

The critic Harold Hobson called the moment ‘electrifying’.  For me, it works on a number of levels.  First of all, I believe that the past exists side by side with the present, and this is the underlying theme of both Da and A Life.  Drumm is not remembering the past, he is reliving it.  Secondly, I think it is a mistake on the part of playwrights to see their work wholly in terms of dialogue.  We go to the theatre to look at a play as well as to hear it; the eyes have their needs as well as the ears.  Audiences love whatever is visual, and it is so rare in the theatre as to be a bonus.

Finally, a good play should consist of ‘moments’.  A lady wrote to me about my adaptation of Great Expectations, and she most vividly recalled the young Pip facing Magwitch in the graveyard, Miss Havishham’s first, almost ghostly, appearance carrying a candelabra, Mrs. Joe turning into Biddy – the same actress played both parts – and the assembling on stage of model houses, domes and churches, representing London. These are ‘moments’ and all are visual.