How a growing band of playwrights are taking over TV
As Lucy Kirkwood’s ‘Chimerica’ comes to Channel 4, Dominic Cavendish explains why dramatists are now dominating television
Dennis Potter, regarded as one of the greatest TV dramatists of the postwar era, once described television as “the nearest thing we are ever likely to get to a ‘theatre of the people’”. From its infancy, playwrights have been a vital force in making it a valuable creative arena, palpably turning the humble box into what Potter envisaged: a playhouse for millions. Not for a generation, though, arguably since Potter himself became a household name in the Seventies, have our playwrights made such waves in TV drama; now they are winning plaudits and mass audiences, shaking up the art form and contributing to what can be called a golden age.
This week, Lucy Kirkwood’s
Chimerica – a hit at the Almeida in 2013 and subsequent triumph in the West End (where it won five Oliviers) – is coming to the small screen. She has expanded her fast-paced play of ideas – inspired by a defining photograph of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre (of the so-called “tank man”) and looking at the strange symbiotic relationship between China and America that has emerged since – into a four-part series for Channel 4.
She joins a growing band of playwrights who have made the leap to high-end TV. The biggest name of the moment is Phoebe Waller-bridge, whose 2013 playwriting debut Fleabag became a TV phenomenon, and who followed it up with Killing Eve, her almost equally adored adaptation of Luke Jennings’s thriller novel
Codename Villanelle. Waller-bridge is the most visible of the pack but there are plenty of high-flyers.
Jack Thorne, whose fringe plays she once appeared in, has balanced populist success as a playwright (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) with acclaimed TV one-offs, miniseries and serials that have resulted in five Baftas (most recently for 2016’s National Treasure starring Robbie Coltrane). A collaborator with
Shane Meadows on the This is England series, he has teamed up with the TV visionary again for the forthcoming four-parter The Virtues and has scripted the pending adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
Thorne doffs his cap to his peers, citing Mike Bartlett in particular as “one big reason why playwrights are now more attractive on TV, because he came from nowhere and scored the biggest hit on the BBC in 2015 with Doctor Foster.”
Bartlett followed up two seasons of that psychological thriller with a TV version of his stage hit King Charles III and last year’s Press. Fellow Royal Court writer Dennis Kelly was responsible for one of the decade’s most influential series, the dystopian Utopia (Channel 4), and Jez Butterworth – whose Jerusalem made him preeminent as a playwright – cooked up the memorably hallucinogenic Roman conquest-era series Britannia for Sky and Amazon. Then there’s James Graham, political playwright du jour, who displayed his gift for turning potentially arid politics into essential viewing in Brexit: An Uncivil War (C4). Some playwrights are working behind the scenes on adaptations – Nina Raine, for instance, whose topical plays about the NHS (Tiger Country) and rape accusations (Consent) could easily be reworked for TV, is scripting a new version of Pride and Prejudice.
For several decades, there have been obvious instances of respected playwrights – Alan Bennett, David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff – being given a berth on TV, but now there has been a significant shift. Playwright David Farr, who adapted John le Carré’s The Night Manager for the BBC in 2016 (and has just seen Amazon commission a second season of the justlaunched thriller Hanna) notes: “It was specific people in particular ways. Now it’s an industrial norm, which is really exciting.”
For Farr, 9/11 – and what flowed from it – was a crucial galvanising moment of change, pushing playwrights – and TV, too – to think big. “Look at the Nineties, and the defining shows were This Life and Cold Feet – classic lifestyle drama. We were safe and cosy and told it was the end of history, and then all that got blown out of the water. People are looking for answers. The Night Manager and Hanna come from that. The TV boom has been created by globalisation and geopolitics. We are all impacted.”
Kirkwood agrees: “I hope Chimerica gets us to think about ourselves as international citizens and stop pleading ignorance about what is happening in faraway countries, because they’re not that far away any more. All the major issues of the coming century will be international and we have a responsibility to engage with them.”
James Graham, whose stage hits include Ink, This House and Quiz, grew up in the Nineties admiring the work of northern TV writers such as Paul Abbott (Clocking Off, State of Play, Shameless), Jimmy Mcgovern (Cracker) and Alan Bleasdale (Boys From the Blackstuff, GBH). “I don’t think I ever assumed when I started you would get authored work on TV with your name across the door as you do with playwriting,” he tells me. “When I started, the two worlds felt very disconnected – and the playwrights a generation above us never really referenced it as a valid or valued medium.”
Today, though, there is a new mood of ambition, characterised by the Netflix mega-series The Crown, which partly grew out of screenwriter Peter Morgan’s 2013 play The Audience. Channel 4’s head of drama Caroline Hollick thinks that Kirkwood’s generation is driving change too. “When I started in the late Nineties I saw a lot of theatre, and really struggled with it. A lot of the work was devised, quite stylised and trying to break the rules. I really wanted a story. Then a generation emerged who were offering huge, epic stories and that gave us an incredible pool of writers. TV wants stories that are surprising and compelling and have characters you love, hate and care about – playwrights who’ve been putting big ideas on stage through characters know how to do that and that’s why they’re making the transition so well.”
What’s fascinating is detecting theatrical influences in the TV work. Doctor Foster was drawn from the story of Medea. Farr points out that the villainous Corky (Tom Hollander) in The Night Manager owed a debt to Pinter. Chimerica retains some of its prior non-naturalistic flourishes. It’s that risk-taking that explains why playwrights are so in-demand: “I feared I might get a lot of pushback but all my collaborators relished them as much as I did,” Kirkwood explains.
Cumberbatch’s brooding tocamera address in Brexit was part of a strategy, Graham says, to “constantly remind an audience this wasn’t documented fact, but art”. At the same time his busting of the fourth wall deployed a trick familiar to viewers of the Netflix political-shenanigans long-runner House of Cards, which had its antecedents in the soliloquies of Richard III. Waller-bridge did much the same thing in Fleabag, but pushed it to pioneering effect. As she has explained about the play: “The main focus was her direct relationship with her audience and how she tried to manipulate and amuse and shock them… until she eventually bares her soul. Adapting Fleabag for TV meant this same fundamental structure still applied but experiments with the audience took another interesting turn and that relationship intensified.”
It’s undeniably the case that playwrights have seldom, if ever, had it so good on TV. With the next generation having grown up watching an unprecedented volume of first-rate new drama, alongside all the best from the vaults – thanks to streaming services – it doesn’t seem fanciful to expect the creative boom to continue and be consolidated. One danger is that TV starts to poach talent from theatre so quickly that the “next Lucy Kirkwood” doesn’t fully get the chance to find her voice first. But right now both sectors are working in relative harmony and middling, wallpaper TV drama is being consigned to history.
“I hope we won’t lose our boldness,” says David Farr, assessing “this golden period” and what comes after. “In the boldness lies the health.”
‘All the major issues of the coming century will be international and we have a responsibility to engage’