Jack Thorne writes a new play for our times
Writer Jack Thorne emerges from limbo with a new play at the National
Jack Thorne is sitting with his baby son, Elliott, on Deal Beach in Kent. Elliott is just learning to crawl, but for some reason, in that mysterious way that certain babies do, he finds it is easier to go backwards. As Thorne watches, Elliot starts to bum-shuffle his way down the short, steep pebble beach until he is almost at the sea, a look of pure joy on his face — the pleasure of learning this new thing. Thorne is grinning, too, watching his son’s exhilaration, and realising, in that moment, that parenting is not about any of the things he had expected it would be.
If he had to pick just one memory to relive for eternity, this is the one that Thorne, the 42-year-old screenwriter and playwright, whose past works include the Bafta-Award-winning Channel 4 mini-series National Treasure, and the Tony-Award-winning stage play Harry Potter and The Cursed Child, would choose. This very dilemma — of which moment to pick — also happens to be one that he puts to the characters in his new play, After Life, which is currently running at London’s National Theatre.
Conceived by Thorne with the production designer Bunny Christie and Jeremy Herrin, artistic director of the theatre company Headlong, After Life is adapted from the 1998 film of the same name by the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. It imagines a version of limbo in which the recently deceased find themselves at a mysterious bureau, where they are interviewed about their past lives, before having to select a single memory; the bureau’s employees then fastidiously recreate the memory as a short film for the dead soul to watch. Forever.
“That question of what moment I would take has sort of haunted me since I saw the film,” says Thorne, talking on the phone while walking from his home in Islington to the National Theatre on the South Bank, where the cast of After Life have just entered the first week of rehearsals. Already they’ve gone deep. “I actually cried the other day, which is a first for me as I’m dead inside,” he tells me cheerfully. “We’re discussing quite big things. Like, huge things. It’s always weird, being in a rehearsal room, because you go from nought to 60 really quickly in terms of, ‘I don’t know these people… Oh, I’ve just told them stuff that I haven’t told my wife.’”
After Life should have opened last year, but of course, as Thorne puts it, “the wheels fell off the world”, and like everything else, it was put on hold. “We went back to the script, actually,
and did what I think was better work,” he says, “so in some ways it helped us.” It’s arguable that a play in which characters reflect on the value and meaning of their lives has an unexpected relevance during the coronavirus era, when we found ourselves — somewhat compulsively — doing exactly that. Even social distancing has proved peculiarly useful, says Thorne: “Jeremy’s trying to make that part of the aesthetic, actually. It works well; this isn’t one of those plays where you’re like, ‘Why aren’t they touching each other?’ That they’re sitting in a sort of contemplative space is quite good.”
Like many of us, Thorne spent lockdown at home with his wife, Rachel, juggling work and the home-schooling of Elliott, now five. “We did lots of drawing together,” he says of his teaching shifts, “and a lot of dress-up, and not enough of anything else.” However, unlike many of us, he does actually have quite a bit to show for it. (It’s worth mentioning that Thorne is not just productive but phenomenally so: there are 42 writing credits on his IMDB entry, from his breakthrough work on Skins and the TV iterations of Shane Meadows’ This is England, to his Netflix series, The Eddy, centred on a Parisian jazz club, and his feature film, Enola Holmes, about Sherlock’s spirited little sister, both of which were released last year.)
During the last few months, as well as working on After Life, he wrote Help, a one-off drama for Channel 4 starring Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham, about the devastating effect of Covid on care homes, due later in the year. He also found time to write or co-write four episodes of the third series of His Dark Materials, the BBC’s lavish adaptation of Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy; the new series is based on the final book, The Amber Spyglass.
Was it nice to work on something escapist and immersive during lockdown? “Yes, though series three is rather dark. Amber is all about death in lots of ways. There’s death running all the way through it, basically. And ends of things.”
So a cheery slate of projects all round, then. “Exactly!” he says. “Can’t complain.”
Despite his achievements, and the fact that the demand for his work has continued unabated, Thorne is not the type to blow his own trumpet. In fact, after talking to him, it seems more likely that he’d take his trumpet, tie a knot in it, then jump up and down on it until it was completely flat. I ask if he makes a conscious attempt to rotate the various creative forms he works in. His answer: “No, I’m far too desperate for that!”
What about directing? Would he ever give that a go? “I’m not confident enough to direct. It requires an inner steel that I don’t have; hiding behind a computer screen is what suits me.” (You want to shake him by the shoulders a bit, but it does make him a charming, relatable interviewee.)
Born in Bristol, Thorne studied politics at Cambridge, where he started writing plays, though a period of illness — Thorne suffers from cholinergic urticaria, an intense bodily reaction to heat — caused him for a time to have to put his studies on hold. That experience has proved formative. “I was a disabled person,” he says, “and I still consider myself a member of the disabled community.” He has consistently either written for, or encouraged the casting of, disabled actors in his work, including in After Life, as well as promoting the work of other disabled writers and directors.
For all his talk of a lack of inner steel, it’s clear that Thorne is nonetheless driven by… something. Often, his scripts and plays bring awareness to social or legal injustices; National Treasure, to give just one example, which starred Robbie Coltrane as a comedian charged with historic sexual abuse, was inspired by the Jimmy Savile case and Operation Yewtree.
“The notion of ‘is there a point to this beyond just entertainment’ does matter to me. Which sounds up myself, but it really does,” he says. “Particularly with telly, it’s such an important medium. You’ve got this empathy weapon, and if you’re not using it to really challenge something, then I sort of think you should be.”
He pauses for a split-second. True to his calling, he wants to get the wording just right. “Or at least I think I should be. No, I don’t think everyone should be. I think it’s fine that some people don’t want to do that. But to me, I’ve always got that thing in my ear: if you’re not doing good, then what the hell are you doing?”
○ After Life runs from now until 24 July at the National Theatre, London SE1; nationaltheatre.org.uk