Simon Stephens on musical cravings, new ways of tackling theatre and life’s disappointments

Following his Tonys victory, playwright Simon Stephens is indulging his love for soulful songs, he tells Henry Hitchings, with a new play about musical obsession  
Face the music: Simon Stephens, whose adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won five Tonys
Daniel Hambury
Henry Hitchings28 August 2015

When I arrive to interview Simon Stephens at Shoreditch House, I’m embarrassingly bedraggled. He leaps up, abandoning his breakfast (eggs and avocado), to fetch me a towel — and we joke that the sight of a critic with sodden trousers would cheer quite a few theatre folk. Perhaps, he suggests, he should share it with fellow playwrights via the Periscope app on his phone.

Immediately there’s a healthy frisson, and over the hour that follows I’m struck by the mixture of vigour and good humour that colours his talk of everything from Manchester United and his three children to London’s housing crisis. At the same time, though, there are flickers of a darker sensibility, as in his observation that “we live in a time of profound safety but with a deeply troubling sense that something awful is about to happen”.

The past few years have cemented the 44-year-old Stephens’s status as a bankable playwright. His adaptation of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time bagged seven Olivier awards and five Tonys, including Best Play. But he retains a grungy devotion to playwriting’s grassroots and is an articulate advocate of subsidy in the arts.

What most excites him about working in the theatre is the opportunity to collaborate. Instead of trying all the time to dredge up ideas from within himself, he’s invigorated by joining forces with directors and other writers. Though infatuated with the “liveness” of theatre, he’s increasingly open to new ways of accessing it, and even mentions being attracted to the possibility of writing the libretto for an opera.

Stephens’s new play for the Young Vic, Song From Far Away, isn’t that, but it does attest to his musical cravings. It’s his second venture with Mark Eitzel, the mournful, open-hearted songwriter probably best known as the frontman of San Francisco band American Music Club. The pair met in 2002 after Stephens, a long-time admirer, contacted Eitzel via his personal website and sent him his plays Bluebird and Christmas. Expecting a polite automated response (“Mark thanks you for your email”), he was thrilled when Eitzel replied at length. They hatched a plan to meet up in London, and a four-hour conversation over coffee revealed a wealth of shared enthusiasms.

Stephens has had a music career of his own, playing bass guitar in Country Teasers, which he describes as a “dislocated post-punk country band — like if Johnny Cash was singing with The Fall and the lyrics were written by Chris Morris”. Their album titles can be read as foretastes of Stephens’s playwriting — for instance, Satan Is Real Again, or Feeling Good About Bad Thoughts.

Although Stephens, who is due to feature in next month’s Evening Standard Progress 1000, has put aside the bass (just about), an ardent appreciation of barbed lyrics and majestic riffs runs through all he does. His conversation is peppered with references to favourite bands. The first play he wrote, Frank’s Wild Years, was inspired by a Tom Waits song of that name, and everything since has shimmered with musical allusions.

Eitzel for his part used to nurse ambitions of writing for the stage, and as their friendship deepened, shaped by “a reciprocal sense of a yearning for one another’s artform”, collaboration became inevitable. Its first fruit was Marine Parade, which premiered at the Brighton Festival in 2010. Stephens explains that it took a long time to write, as both of them grappled with the conventions of musical theatre.

Marine Parade offered a wistful portrait of unpredictable romances. Song From Far Away shares its melancholy interest in missed connections but is more sharp-edged. It’s also the first time an original play by Stephens has been produced at the Young Vic, though he’s had three adaptations staged there — notably a crisp, modern take on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which transferred to the West End and then Broadway.

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The new piece is a monologue delivered by Willem, a Dutchman who has recently been working in the US. The death o f his brother obliges him to return to Amsterdam, and in a series of letters Willem conjures up an elegy for their relationship that is also a chastening vision of grief and solitude.

There’s actually only one Mark Eitzel song in the 75-minute production but Stephens is eager to stress its quality, remarking that “for someone who’s made a career out of being morose, he’s written a hell of an ear worm” — the sort of number that burrows into the imagination and refuses to be dislodged. That’s certainly how Willem feels. He hears the song in a bar, and the play charts his attempts to repeat it. Willem’s fitful efforts to perform the song seem like symptoms of life’s elusiveness, and there’s a particularly soulful moment when he claims that “we exist in the gaps between the sounds that we make”.

The project brings Stephens together with visionary director Ivo van Hove, who for the last 14 years has led the company Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Stephens has admired van Hove since 2009 when he saw The Roman Tragedies, a six-hour distillation of three Shakespeare plays. Since then van Hove has scored mainstream success with a production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge — starring Mark Strong and Nicola Walker — that began at the Young Vic and moved into the West End. Stephens salutes him as a “profoundly significant artist, as significant as there is in any form at the moment”.

Van Hove has chosen one of his favourite actors, Eelco Smits, to play Willem. Stephens talks tantalisingly about Smits’s ability to command the stage while still conveying an unusual shyness. Theatregoers can expect wit and rage but also a disquieting intimacy.

As in all of Stephens’s work, at the play’s heart there’s a nagging concern with the notion of “home” — with leaving one’s origins behind and also with returning to them. He says this preoccupation comes from having quit his own home town of Stockport when he was 18 and not having gone back. It’s striking that for many of his characters journeys offer temporary catharsis but no long-term salvation. Meanwhile, music promises to allow them to strap on new identities yet also links them to their losses.

Abandonment and disconnection are recurrent themes of Stephens’s writing. They certainly dominate 2003’s One Minute, which is currently being revived by the young theatre company Delirium in the Vaults below Waterloo station. Written in response to the abduction of Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler, the play still feels like an eloquently unorthodox spin on the detective story. It’s also a vivid picture of London at its most disorientating, and our discussion of the play prompts Stephens to mention that he has recently been thinking, perhaps with a nod to Iain Sinclair, about an “excavation” of some of London’s supernatural elements.

Having dangled this in front of me and begun to riff about the “brutality and darkness and difficulty of this city”, he stops himself. Keen to sound a more positive note, he reflects that “theatre is predicated on the assumption that we can make something together that is better than what we could make on our own.” No matter how toxic life’s disappointments seem, collaborating with other artists makes him feel passionately hopeful.

Song From Far Away is at the Young Vic, SE1 (020 7922 2922, youngvic.org) from Sept 2 until Sept 19

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