‘The world’s so crazy I can’t not write about it’
With his third new drama of 2017 about to open, state-of-thenation playwright James Graham talks to Claire Allfree
Walk past the theatres in St Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden and you’ll see billboards for not one but two new plays by James Graham. Labour of Love, starring Martin Freeman, maps the ideological infighting within the Labour Party across the past 25 years, while in Ink, Bertie Carvel plays an unexpectedly sympathetic, 33-yearold Rupert Murdoch determined to give a voice to the common man with his brand-new newspaper, The Sun.
“Two of my schoolteachers are coming from Ashfield to see Labour of Love tonight,” says Graham, his soft north Midlands accent still audible despite 10 years in the capital. “And the first thing they will do is take the p--- out of me for having two shows on in the West End. How can I possibly consider myself as coming from a working-class tradition of playwriting? Talk about a complete sell-out.”
Graham, who hails from a former mining village and is still only 35, has had little choice but to reconcile himself to success. He’s a state-of-thenation playwright (although he rejects the description for being too “grandiose”) who smuggles in big themes behind smaller human dramas.
His 2012 play This House – which holds up a mirror to the precarious balance of power in Westminster in recent years by dramatising the machinations in the whips’s offices during Labour’s Seventies minority government – transferred to the West End amid a blaze of five-star reviews and next year embarks on a national tour. This month, he opens his third play of the year, Quiz, at Chichester. How does he manage to be both so prolific and persistently brilliant?
“I quite often spend Sundays thinking: I could see friends, or spend eight hours making my script sound eight hours better,” he admits ruefully. “Sometimes I wonder if I should go and see a football match. But the world at the moment is so bats--- crazy I feel I can’t not write about it.”
The efficacy or otherwise of civic institutions designed to protect ideas of freedom, justice and democracy is a hallmark concern of Graham’s plays. In The Vote, he paid tribute to the humble polling station in a Donmar theatre production that was also broadcast live on Channel 4 on the night of the 2015 election. In 2014’s Privacy, he probed the reach of government surveillance on personal privacy. In Quiz, he uses the real-life tale of Charles Ingram – the Coughing Major who, with his wife, was convicted of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in 2001 – to examine the pressures on the judiciary in an era in which the press and social media have turned public opinion into a blood sport, which Graham compares to that of an ancient Roman mob.
“I was one of the people looking at that story in the news every day, trying to get my hit from it rather than just letting justice get on and do its thing,” admits Graham. “But even those who believe Charles is guilty would have to agree there were elements of that trial that descended into knockabout farce. I feel sorry for the Ingrams [who went bankrupt and insist they are innocent]. The play looks at how essential it is for functioning societies to demand a judiciary for whom it is not unpatriotic to insist the law be enacted. It’s not about whether they are guilty or not.”
This implied neutrality is typical of Graham, who is increasingly notable for political plays that resist advocating
‘I quite often spend Sundays thinking: I could see friends or spend hours making my script sound hours better’
a political point of view. ew. In David Hare and Howard ard Brenton, Britain has a tradition of political theatre that at is conspicuously Left: does he enjoy bucking that tradition? adition?
“I’ve no problem with anyone who uses their ir platform as a form of activism for something they are re passionate about,” he e says, “but I don’t want nt to write that sort of play.
“I find the best way to look at a problem is to reverse into it from a funny angle. To play devil’s advocate and to subvert your prejudices. When we e premiered Ink, the assumption was that an Islington audience would be against the tabloid journalism of The Sun. But when I discovered that Murdoch’s reaction to Page 3 [initiated by Larry Lamb, the paper’s first editor] was one of prudish horror, it was like a glitch in the Matrix. It opens up your writer’s brain – who is this guy? Then you realise, Murdoch is human – he’s as contradictory as you or I.”
He ascribes his fascination with the “grubbier, more human” side of politics to growing up in an industrial town, Mansfield, that wa was “very political, but not with a capital capi “P”. I remember the passion in working men’s clubs as industries in were dying, so I never t thought of politics as a cerebral argument but as an emotional, human thing.”
During t the 2017 election, as it became c clear the Tories were not going t to win their landsl landslide, people were tw tweeting Graham – a m minority government ex expert thanks to This House – to ask him w what a potential hung pa parliament might m mean. He was as as astonished by the re result as anyone: Lab Labour held on to Ash Ashfield by its fing fingertips but M Mansfield turned Tory fo for the first time since
H1923. What does he think of the situation Labour finds itself in: riding high in polls on the back of a predominantly youth vote but with its popularity leaking away in the heartlands? “Traditionally, Labour couldn’t get into Downing Street without winning Mansfield and Ashfield,” he says. “There are people now saying Labour can win on the basis of support from university towns in the South, but I don’t think you should be allowed to get into power by ignoring voices of the people who are the foundation of your party.”
His view on the prospects of the Tories is even bleaker. “I don’t think by definition it’s a conservative party any more. Its appeal and function used to be that it conserved institutions and a certain way of life, but we are now faced with a Tory party that is guilty of the things it normally accuses the Left of being: unpredictable, with reckless policies and a dogmatic ideology. I have a real affection for those oldfashioned, one-nation Tories such as Bernard ‘Jack’ Weatherill [the Tory deputy chief whip who had a notable role in This House], who wanted a unified country and for policy to be driven by a sense of values and decency. There was an honour and dignity to him, even if you disagreed with him politically.”
Graham struggles to find a similar dignity in the House of Commons today. “We tend to mock anyone these days who sits in the centre, for lacking a spine. The EU referendum didn’t help by asking a false binary – either you were totally for Brexit or totally against it,” he says. “And the Labour Party has to take its fair share of the blame for this kind of oppositional language.”
Graham isn’t only interested in writing about politics: in 2014, he collaborated on the Broadway musical Finding Neverland, and wrote the screenplay for TV film X + Y, about a maths prodigy. Early next year, he will premiere another play, set in Hull, where he went to university, which offers a tongue-in-cheek view of Hull’s year as UK City of Culture 2017.
These days, he no longer has to worry about rent. Instead, he frets over whether he has inadvertently become too close to the subjects he writes about. He has bought a house in Kennington, a place where many MPS also live. “I often see Tom Watson in the curry house,” he says. “When you write about the establishment, there’s a historic precedent that you become it. Yet I’ve spent a good chunk of my life working. My mum and stepdad still work at a warehouse and they are my first port of call for honest feedback.
“Hopefully I’ll never fall into that trap, because I think being a playwright is the best possible thing a person can do with this brief bit of time.”