Me, My iBook, and Writing in America (Mark Ravenhill)

I SOMETIMES WONDER IF I would ever have written a play it if hadn’t been for Apple Mac. I made various starts at writing a play during the first thirty years of my life – bits of scenes in old exercise books, a few pages on a typewriter bought in a junk shop, a student attempt on an early Sinclair computer with a printer that printed a page of text every ten minutes (you’d set aside an afternoon to print out the draft of a document), bits and pieces on various friends’ PCs. But it was only when I was sharing a flat with a friend in 1992, a friend who had a Mac, that I started to make my first serious attempts at writing, attempts that led, three years later, to me becoming a professional playwright. Now I wouldn’t claim that it was the Mac alone that made me a playwright. That would be silly. There was also the political climate, the Major government returned once again for a final period of ‘o¹ce without power’; there was the personal experience I went through in 1993 of losing my boyfriend to Aids; there was the jolt to comfortable assumptions about good and evil brought about by the murder of Jamie Bulger;1 there was a change in theatrical fashion which meant the high water mark of performance and physical theatre had turned and once again it seemed like a smart thing for a young man with theatrical aspirations to write a play. All of these things played their part in making me a playwright. But the actual technology, the actual thought processes, the actual mechanism of creating those plays? I think the Mac was an essential part of all that. Because my hunch is that the technology available is not just a recorder of the artist’s thoughts and feelings but itself makes some thoughts and feelings possible that were never possible before, makes other thoughts and feelings no longer transferable to the page. It’s a slightly fanciful notion, but all I know is that once I’d opened a word document on a Mac, once I was clicking on its icons, once I was dragging across its desktop, I felt that it thought as I thought, that here was something that was an extension of my heart and head in a way that the pencil or the typewriter or the PC had never been. Sat before the screen of a Mac, I was a writer. A writer used to be heroic. You could lock him or her up in a prison cell for twenty years and still they’d find a way to carry on writing. They’d risk everything to pass around samizdat copies of their work. The Church or the State or the Stasi were out to get them but they’d carry on writing – even if only in their head. There is not an ounce of the hero about me – maybe none of us are heroes today, maybe we’re in a post-heroic age, maybe we’re all more Carrie Bradshaw than Solzhenitsyn – but I certainly wouldn’t have finished a full-length play and written several drafts without a Mac. I may just be romanticising my own lack of heroism. Maybe I am a writer. And if I had to write on a typewriter I would. It’s one of the tricks of new technology that within months we cannot imagine a life without it. (However did I call my partner from the train to say I was on

my way home before the invention of the mobile phone?) But certainly now, as I approach ten years as a produced playwright, I cannot imagine having produced the body of work that I have without the programmes of the several Macs I’ve got through over the years – currently iBook, OS X 10, AppleWorks Word Document. The rhythms, the structures, the themes of those plays are as much Mac’s as they are mine. There is an irony about this of course. Plenty of commentators, mainly journalists but a few people who should know better, have chosen only to report the ‘shocking’ moments in my plays: the ‘bloody rimming’ moments. But other commentators have spotted another, bigger project in my plays to date: something which may even report upon, maybe even critique, a world of globalised capitalism. I’d like to think that’s there. There’s nothing very schematic about writing a play:you tend to start with an instinct and only later, often after the audience have seen the play, can you say ‘ah maybe that’s what this thing is about’. Even so, I’d like to think that the best bits of my writing have captured some of the weightless, soulless emptiness of contemporary global capitalism and in doing so opened up a space for some of the audience to think more critically about The Way We Live Now than they might have done before. So of course it’s ironic that this writing is been made possible by the technology coming out of Silicone Valley, the nerve centre of that same globalised world. This is the embarrassing contradiction I find myself in as a playwright: I would like to think of my plays as oppositional, of critical, of outside of the ebb and flow of information and capital but I suspect they would never have existed without start-ups, bubbles and chips. I’d like to be a free thinker but maybe in truth I’m just another microserf. And if I were just going to be a jolly postmodernist, I could embrace this. I don’t want to do that, but nor is it just possible to deny this irony, return to the pre-ironic simplicity of a world where I would have written on a Remington – or probably reclined on a sofa while a poorly paid fifteen year old girl from a Secondary Modern School typed on a Remington for me. So what is to be done? I first became really aware of the word globalisation (no doubt later than most people) towards the end of the 1990s. Searching around for material for the play that would become Some Explicit Polaroids, I took a whole pile of books away for a week to a cheap room in Ibiza and gave myself a crammer course, trying to understand how the world’s economies had changed. In the spring of 1999, Max Sta»ord-Clark asked me if I’d like to do a week-long workshop for this new play. I had very little text to show (and indeed didn’t have much more text to show when the play began rehearsing in the autumn) but I said I thought we should look at this subject of globalisation and Max, myself and the actors in the workshop made up lists of people we would like to meet to interview and try to find out what this globalisation thing was. I’m not sure who came up with the idea of meeting Charles Saatchi. I think it was one of the actors. But I went with a couple of the actors from the workshop – I think it was Lesley Manville and Monica Dolan – to the headquarters of Saatchi and Saatchi and we were shown into the o¹ce of the great man. He told us that several years before his company had identified ‘globalisation’ as the wave of the future and had been preparing themselves for the new globalised economy. ‘But really’ he said with a weary smile, ‘globalisation is just a weasel word – what we’re really talking about is Americanisation’. I was very taken aback by this. This somehow seemed to be the sentiment of an anti-globalist,

an anti-American and Saatchi was clearly neither. ‘So would you say’, asked Monica Dolan, ‘that globalisation is a good thing or a bad thing?’ ‘Oh you can’t say something like that is good or bad,’ Saatchi said. ‘It’s a fact. It’s like the wind blowing or the tide coming in. It’s not good or bad. It just is.’ I was struck just how in that moment he resembled one of Brecht’s capitalists, who always forget (or deliberately deny) that the economy is a human construct and not a tsunami. It was as though he were speaking from the selfsame script as Brecht’s Pierpont Mauler in St Joan of the Stockyards. Saatchi was a fascinating character, hugely charismatic and a big influence on the development of the character of Jonathan when I came to write Some Explicit Polaroids. Was Saatchi right? Was ‘globalisation’ ‘Americanisation’? There was certainly plenty of Americanisation about me. I think this is something you become particularly aware of when you start writing about your experiences as a gay man. Because contemporary ‘gay’ identity is almost entirely an American construct. The group lobbying for gay legal and democratic rights in the UK is called Stonewall after a bar in New York that only a tiny proportion of British gays and lesbians can ever have ever been to. Most gays and lesbians rehearse their coming outs by engaging with American coming out narratives:the gay genre fiction in any British bookshop is almost entirely American. Early generations of British gay men made an ironic appropriation of the camp images of Hollywood glamour. Maybe in the absence of robust European or British narratives of gay identity, or maybe by excluding them, it is American images and narratives that have defined British gay identity. Try to buy gay porn featuring men with British accents and you’d be hard pushed (so to speak). It’s all California dudes or daddies with, in the last few years, a wave of new Eastern European product. And as if to prove how entirely hegemonic all this is even the challenge to ‘gay’ with the early 1990s ‘queer’ was a largely American movement, albeit in part inspired by European philosophy and critical theory. Now I felt pretty pleased with myself that my first play Shopping and Fucking had managed to move outside of the parameters of a ‘gay’ narrative without being too self-consciously ‘queer’ either. The characters enjoyed or su»ered what Little Britain calls ‘some cock and arse action’ but there were no coming out narratives, no hugs, no learning. I was troubled by one particular block (of several) that I hit while writing Some Explicit Polaroids. In the play the character of Tim, who is HIV positive, refuses to take his medication and eventually dies of an Aids-related illness. Now this was the most autobiographical thing I had ever written: five years before I wrote the play my boyfriend, also called Tim, had died of an Aids-related illness. And yet when I came to write these scenes for the play I couldn’t connect with anything that had happened to me in real life because all I could see, all I could hear, was stu» from other people’s Aids narratives: The Normal Heart, Longtime Companion, Angels in America. As soon as I stuck a character in a hospital bed and gave them a Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) lesion they would start to talk with an American accent and before you knew it Meryl Streep was sitting by the bed and everyone was hugging each other. I think it’s important – certainly for me when I’m writing – that we don’t just play the weary game of referencing and quoting other narratives in a warm glow of cynicism. I want to test in my writing how much the new experiences of humanity can be captured in a piece of theatre. But for months I would come back to writing those scenes, always with the same e»ect. A play

that was supposedly set in London would suddenly lurch over the Atlantic once the doors of the Aids ward were open. Eventually I became really angry. This was my experience. This was my narrative. How dare Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner colonise my life like this? Why was I seeing the first revelation of the KS lesion from The Normal Heart or Louis, Prior and the Angel when I shut my eyes, and not my own memory? Damn you for writing your American Aids plays! I didn’t feel, having written Some Explicit Polaroids, that I had done anything other than chip away at the subject of globalisation – if indeed it is still a ‘subject’ (is something a ‘subject’ when it is so integrated into our lives?). It’s still something I want to write about but I keep on hitting the same block every time I sit down wanting to write dramatically about it: the action wants to happen in America. The research I read, the popular anti-globalisation books are about American companies doing terrible things to American workers and consumers for the benefit of the American shareholder. And I don’t feel it would be honest of me to write with a setting of Americanoise (I did it in my play Faust is Dead with mixed results). Of course Brecht used a mythic America repeatedly as a setting that allowed him to write an earlier stage of capitalist development but I can’t help feeling that to write plays set in America is to have one’s narrative defined by America, however critical the play might be of America or globalisation. Britain may have become increasingly part of a global economy, and culturally and economically we may be more and more American, but the fashionability of these truths is in danger of preventing commentators and dramatists from exploring what is specifically British about us. Because there is still plenty about us, I think, that is very specific to this island. Writing globally, nationally, locally, personally, it’s a lot for a playwright to do. ‘Where is the state of the nation play?’ a dying breed of grumpy old men still ask, assuming that the state of the nation is the same thing as the fate of the planet, the choices facing the globe or the way of the world – all of these concerns every bit as ambitious and political as the ‘state of the nation’. Because if you were to take the conflict between capital and labour as a basic motor of human experience (a widely discredited idea but still one with a bit of life in it), you can see how problematic it is to dramatise for a contemporary playwright. Hauptmann could bring his nineteenth-century weavers in conflict with their bourgeois masters by setting his play in a small German town. Of course, nineteenth-century ‘free trade’ saw a fair amount of movement of goods and capital but it’s possible to imagine many, many situations where a dramatist can place the seller of labour and the owner of capital in the same geographic space. This is far more di¹cult today. Where did the food come from that you ate today? Who made your trainers? Who wove that cloth? They are phantoms and the profits have vanished o» to phantoms elsewhere. Certainly a very di»erent type of play is needed if we’re going to write about this world. But actually this very fundamental conflict between capital and labour – perhaps the fundamental social and economic conflict – was rarely ever at the heart of the British ‘state of the nation’ play, an ideal model of a play that perhaps never quite existed in the British theatre from the 1950s through to the 1980s. The main tradition in British ‘political’ theatre was an oppositional voice that spoke up against the crushing hand of the Big Other: the Headmaster, the Priest, the Colonel, the Men from the Ministry – the Daddy who wants to deny the voice and energy of his o»spring. It was at the heart of the satire boom of the 1960s (laughing at these Big Others fuelled Beyond the Fringe); it was

the ‘heroes led by donkeys’ anger of Oh What A Lovely War; it was Osborne’s Jimmy and Wesker’s Beattie. (Osborne and Wesker are good dramatists and so invite complex responses to Jimmy and Beattie). It’s a drama in which tradition and its intertwining with class plays a very significant part and fuels many writers’ anger, but in which no very significant part is played by the economic life of the characters, nor by the conflict between capital and labour. British theatre never produced a character with the force of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman or Brecht’s Mother Courage, characters for whom at the very core of their being, at the basis of their conflict with the world, is the economic. We nearly always preferred to play a scene in front of a Union Jack and attack ‘authority’ and call this ‘political theatre’. This was ‘oppositional’ theatre I would suggest but was rarely rooted enough in the economic to be thoroughly ‘political’. If anyone has the time or the inclination I think it could be illuminating to do a word count for the occurrence of the word ‘England’ in English plays from the 1950s to the present day. I suspect you’d find a pretty steady occurrence of the word from the 1950s through to the 1980s, with a rapid trailing o» in the 1990s. From John Osborne’s rallying cry of ‘Damn You England!’, ushering Jimmy Porter and Archie Rice and his bumping and grinding Britannia onto the stage of the English Stage Company, through to Edgar’s Destiny and Brenton’s The Churchill Play, in which Winston Churchill leaps from his co¹n at his state funeral, and onto Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, the ‘English’ word rings out alongside the iconography of Englishness. But then something changed. I think maybe we reached a stage in the 1990s where a new group of younger dramatists weren’t so interested in criticising these figures in power (the basic patricidal impulse) – largely I suspect because these figures of power have learned to speak a di»erent language – one that promises (or threatens) inclusion rather than coercion. Looking at my own plays, rather than railing against patriarchal figures, the characters tend to have a nostalgic hankering for a time when there was a stern father figure looking over them, a time when we weren’t expected to make so many choices for ourselves. David Hare once remarked that it was a strange thing but you only needed to mention the word ‘Weybridge’ to get a huge laugh on the London stage. I’ve noticed that Alan Bennett’s audiences seem to find ‘Battenberg’ or ‘antimacassar’ similarly hilarious. It is as though British theatre audiences, certainly mainstream London theatre audiences, like to be reminded of their parochialism, of their na»ness, of their not quite moving with the times. There is real pride in that laughter at ‘Weybridge’ or ‘Battenberg’. When I started writing my first full length play Shopping and Fucking, I didn’t have much of an idea about what course the action of the play was going to take or what the play was going to be about. Playwrights often don’t. But starting on Shopping and Fucking I did have a clear idea, a rule that I set myself: there would be no geographical references, no references to England, London, Streatham, Halifax, Weybridge and also no references to anything that had been in use for more than a decade or so; characters were allowed to use a microwave but not a kettle, send an email but not a postcard. Very consciously, I wanted the play to have a di»erent relationship to history and geography from the existing tradition of contemporary British playwriting. Why did I do this? I think in part because I’d observed that English audiences would cling onto place names or products – think Batley, think Bovril – as comfort blankets, and I wanted to take those comfort blankets away. And because I suppose I sensed that for the young characters in my

play being part of the narrative of nationhood or history played very little part in their lives. But this didn’t come from any theory. I’d been too busy doing a portfolio of badly paid jobs to read any Fukuyama, at least until the profits from being a West End playwright rolled in. I don’t think the director of the play, Max Sta»ord-Clark, ever really saw this absence of reference in the play as anything other than a weakness. Max had a huge, and almost entirely beneficial, influence on the development of the play through the various drafts I worked on once his Out of Joint Company committed to the production of the play. From my very first meeting with him through to the last week of rehearsals, he would push and push for something more ‘specif ’, as we jokingly called it. Where were these characters born? Where were they living now? What were their surnames? (I didn’t even want to give them first names but got round this by naming the characters after early 1990s popsters, Take That). I remember once, in complete exasperation at one of our meetings, Max threw down his script and said: ‘Look you’ve got to put in some more specif stu» – otherwise they’ll do this play in Germany and it’ll all be Expressionist and they’ll all have Mohicans. Do you want that?’ I remarked glibly that I believed the royalties from German productions were rather good. (They are and I’m sure a production not unlike Max’s nightmare has taken place in a stadttheater somewhere.) It was a glib response because I couldn’t really rationalise at the time why a geographical or historical reference in the play was wrong. I was flying on instinct but I strongly resisted putting any of those references in the play. Looking at it now I would say Shopping and Fucking mostly works inside the language of ‘social realism’; it just selects slightly di»erent bits of the social and the real to define its world than those things that Max was used to with his long and illustrious work directing new British plays. I’d been partly inspired to write in this way by the plays and essays of David Mamet. An American o»ered the way forward. Mamet had a huge influence on a significant group of the new British playwrights of the 1990s, as I discovered when Patrick Marber, Joe Penhall and myself got together to discuss Mamet’s Edmond for a programme article to accompany the National Theatre’s revival of the play. You can trace it through Marber’s career, from his first play Dealer’s Choice (Mamet is an advocate of poker), his performance in Mamet’s Speed The Plow (picked up for revival by a West End management after Penhall directed a reading at the Royal Court), Marber’s direction of Mamet’s The Old Neighbourhood, which may in turn have led Marber to the world of his most recent play Howard Katz. I think maybe we were drawn to Mamet for a number of reasons. He o»ered a clear definition of masculinity, at a time when masculinity was supposedly in crisis. (Is it still? Was it ever?) But also he o»ered a strict set of aesthetic disciplines at a time when we didn’t feel inspired by an older generation of British playwrights. What Mamet stresses time and time again in his essays is that the play should be stripped o» all extraneous detail until just the story, which he defines as just the protagonist in pursuit of their objective, is left. Mamet insists that the dramatist can’t make the play say anything beyond this or on top of this, that the meaning of the play is this story. In some ways it’s the old Hemingway adage of ‘cut out the good writing’ applied to the play but it’s certainly worked for David Mamet. His work from American Buffalo through to The Old Neighbourhood (charitably ignoring Boston Marriage) is as impressive a body of work as that of any dramatist alive. And in some ways, through his absorption in the narrative purity of Aristotelian poetics,

Mamet was bringing us in touch with a European tradition which the British theatre had never fully absorbed. (British playwrights from Shakespeare to Churchill have preferred to disrupt and transgress the Aristotelian rules.) What Mamet was arguing for was a theatre free of ideology in which the audience would undergo a profound experience by projecting themselves into the uninflected protagonist. This is the idea that lies at the heart of Mamet’s aesthetic. Of course you can spot a more superficial influence of Mamet on the development of dialogue, the repetitive masculine drive of his characters’ language echoed in a lot of British new writing of the 1990s. But more profoundly it is the stripping away of detail and opinion, the emphasis on narrative, where Mamet’s influence can be felt on Marber, Penhall, Neilson, McDonagh et al. (He was very definitely a role model for emerging male writers rather than women.) In one of his essays, Mamet talks about the decor of American Jewish homes, of its wish to be tasteful and to be acceptable, not to give too much away, not to be too Jewish. Recently in his writing and in his life he has explored his identity as a Jew in a way that he never publicly did in the 1970s and 1980s. It struck me reading the essay that as well as describing the decor of Jewish homes he was pretty much describing his own aesthetic as a playwright. Was his desire to strip a play of wasteful detail, to present a central protagonist who can be defined by the pursuit of their objective, what Jewish writers for Hollywood and Broadway have been doing for the whole century? Was the aesthetic purity of all this making sure that the little guy at the centre of their stories could stand for an American Everyman and not a Jew? It struck me that it was and I’m sure Mamet, a writer who thinks very deeply about his work, will have been struck by this too. For the group of writers starting o» their careers in the 1990s, Mamet’s influence allowed us to break free of the existing dominant discourse of British theatre – the discourse about Britishness and the attack on the bad Father (I’m talking of course about an impulse that was largely unconscious and rarely discussed, these weren’t a group of playwrights who ever discussed a movement or came up with a manifesto, many of them have never met each other to this day). So, I wrote Shopping and Fucking. It was a commercial and critical success here, the Out of Joint production toured internationally with the support of the British Council, and the play was quickly translated into many languages and produced all over the world. From being part of the British new writing scene I had become a global commodity. Ironically, though in much of the world the play was received at least as well as it was at home, the place where the play did least well was in New York where the play was universally loathed by the critics – ‘Mr Ravenhill belongs to a long line of whingeing Brits from John Osborne to Caryl Churchill’ and ‘Mr Ravenhill should go home and learn how to write a play’ – but it sold out for its allotted run. ‘I don’t get it’ said the American producer, ‘A sold-out flop!’ I was hugely excited to be produced all over the world. I would often be invited to productions of the play. The temptation was to rush to each of them, not because I wanted to see the play again and again, but because of the opportunities for free travel that were o»ered. I decided to ration myself and only go to a few of these overseas productions but I went to enough to start to suspect that I was becoming part of the global class who live out of a mini-bar and a breakfast bu»et. It’s a life I quite like. I was amused to see how many of the productions replaced the missing ‘Britishness’ of the play, the Britishness I had so carefully excluded, but this was the height of Britpop, so in Greek, Lithuanian, Danish productions I saw characters in Union Jack t-shirts with pictures of Princess

Diana pinned to their wall listening to a soundtrack of Blur and Oasis. No small part of the appeal of the play, I saw, was that it was British and if the writer hadn’t provided enough of the Old Country then the production would do the work. ‘Your writing – it’s so like Dickens, it’s Oliver Twist’ said a director in Amsterdam. At first I was completely mystified but on reflection I could see this play, which was predominantly social realist with a group of lost kids getting drawn into nefarious activity, had much more in common with Dickens, who I’d read avidly in my teenage years, than I would really like to admit. I had to confront the fact that not only would overseas productions actually emphasise, even over emphasise, the Britishness of the play, but actually maybe there was actually something essentially British about the play. Despite this Britishness, I was aware that one of the reasons the play had proved such good export material was that it wasn’t cluttered with references that would confuse foreign audiences and that the commodified world of the play was not a specifically British one. I think by the time I came to write Some Explicit Polaroids I wanted to write another play that would repeat the international success of Shopping and Fucking. I’d had a taste of the travel and the interest and some decent money and I wanted to repeat the experience. Of course this calculation is fatal to the creative process and that play was the slowest, most painful thing I’ve ever written, wrung out of me scene by scene by an incredibly patient Max Sta»ord-Clark. It was a grimly ironic experience. I wanted to write about globalisation, hence the workshop where we’d interviewed Charles Saatchi, but as a playwright I had become a global commodity, with Shopping and Fucking franchises all over the world. Now I wanted to produce a new global product that would speak to people in Johannesburg and Melbourne, Toronto and Mexico City: places I’d only been to for a couple of days and whose cultures I knew no more of than a quick tasting in a food hall. Trying to think of this global audience was so daunting that I became totally blocked, until finally I resolved to write anything that came into my head and to deliver a play that I liked even if it wasn’t performed in a single translation. And looking at Some Explicit Polaroids on opening night I thought, well, I’m proud of what I’ve come up with but this is clearly not a global play. The young characters of the play – Tim, Victor, Nadia – belong to a similar world to the young people of Shopping and Fucking but the characters of Nick and Helen, the old socialists, belong to an entirely di»erent, a very – so it seemed to me – British world. Indeed so di»erent were these two groups of characters I found it almost impossible to conceive of scenes where they would talk to each other and in the end Helen’s intrusion into Tim, Victor and Nadia’s world proved to be brief. I was wrong about Some Explicit Polaroids. It’s received almost as many productions overseas as Shopping and Fucking, far more than my other plays. And directors and actors have told me that the central generational conflict between a weary politicised older generation and a party-happy apolitical younger generation is one that is reflected in their country, in South America or in Eastern Europe. And then there’s one scene set on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament when they can really leap on the Britishness in the staging if they want to. Oddly enough, most productions choose not to. I guess the fashion for all things Cool Britannia has passed. With Polaroids I realised that the playwright could never play the game of guessing what would play with di»erent audiences; you write for yourself, maybe for the immediate culture around you and then wait and see what will travel. In 2002, I got the opportunity to spend a month writing at the Eugene O’Neill Centre

in Connecticut alongside twenty other playwrights, all of them American. I was sent by the National Theatre’s Connections programme, where I was to write a play for young people to perform in schools and youth theatres. When I flew into New York the country was preparing to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11, while also psyching itself up for the assault on Iraq, after Afghanistan hadn’t provided the ‘closure’ that was being sought for. On the train travelling up through New York state and into Connecticut I was amazed at the number of houses (in many areas the majority) that had huge Stars and Stripes flags hanging down the side of the building, many of them the full length of the houses. I was struck by how much America still had recourse to a strong narrative of national identity, of buzzwords, of rituals, of routines, that we no longer have. We called our programme Pop Idol; they called theirs American Idol. What does it say about the two cultures where one side aspires to be Pop, the other aspires to be American? Arriving at the O’Neill, it was soon obvious that no-one had heard of me or any of my plays. This was rather di»erent from the reception I’d got used to in the rest of the world but I decided it would be a very good, if rather humbling experience for me. (I’m rubbish at being humble and for most of the month I carried on like Simon Cowell but I gave it a go.) But I had to write the play, eventually called Totally Over You, while I was there. Surrounded by American voices, I found when I sat down to write I could do one of two things:write dialogue that was very self-consciously English (in a Richard Curtis, Julian Fellowes sort of a way, which has always exported very well) or in a sort of mid-Atlantic chat. I suspect that in conversation during the day I slipped between the two. It’s amazing how quickly your ear for your own culture’s rhythms go: I’d lost mine within a couple of days. But I had to write a play within four weeks and there was little time to anguish about the rhythms of my writing. I decided that the teenagers in my play, who are obsessed by celebrity culture, would have existed entirely on a diet of American television, American cinema, American music and American food. Since American actors were going to present the play to an American audience as a staged reading at the end of the month, I didn’t want to spend my time explaining a lot of British youth references to them or to expect them to perform with a north London accent. I chose to place the play in a genre – teenagers in a school adapted from a European classic (I was inspired by Molière) – that I’d enjoyed in the American teen comedies Clueless and Ten Things I Hate About You. And I had my characters talk in mid-Atlantic because I figured there were a whole generation of kids living in Camden or Bradford or Glasgow who either spoke like American teenagers or aspired to talk like American teenagers and with identical pop-culture references. Whether the young people who performed the play were always aware of the play’s critique of this Americanisation of youth experience, or whether they revelled in speaking mid-Atlantic I was never sure. But however much we may have in common, however much it’s possible to write in a demotic language that sits just as easily on the lips of kids in Harlesden as it does in Harlem, I realised there was a fundamental di»erence between the theatre cultures of the two countries. One evening during a panel discussion with the other writers at the O’Neill, I said (probably rather grandly) that I thought we should be writing plays that ‘existed at the centre of the culture’. There was little response at the time but with the session over one of my fellow playwrights, his whole body drawn tight with anger, stepped into my path. ‘How can you say that?’ he hissed. ‘How dare you come over here and say that?’