‘I feel like I’m on an ice floe’

John Nathan

THE NOTION that Wokeism may have got out of hand is well illustrated by the answer to a question put to Ryan Craig. The question is which of his plays does he think would not be staged today because of a fear they might fall foul of woke sensitivities. There are a fair few works to choose from.

Craig has written for some of the country’s most potent playhouses, including the National Theatre, The Hampstead and The Menier Chocolate Factory. His themes are often Jewish. The Glass Room was about Holocaust denial; The Holy Rosenbergs focused on an Edgware-based family of kosher caterers whose son is killed while serving in the IDF.

This complicated relationship to Israel was also explored in his earlier play What We Did To Weinstein. And although there are many more works Craig has written for stage and television, any list would not be complete without Filthy Business in which Craig confounded the tropes and assumptions that go with the dramatic archetype of the Jewish mother.

However his latest work is a book. Called Writing in Coffee Shops: Confessions of a Playwright, the work was intended as a kind of “how to” writing guide drawn from his time teaching playwriting at the National Theatre. But while he was working on it during the summer before the first lockdown, something happened.

“The fundamental shift in political ideology made me finish the book slightly differently,” says Craig. He ended up writing a book that fights back against self-censorship imposed on art by what he says is a woke agenda.

“I feel I haven’t really changed my ideology or my politics. I am a liberal, freedom-of-speech-loving, to-the-left kind of person, and everyone seems to have moved. I feel like I’m on an ice floe and everyone’s gone on a woke ship and

Filthy Business (2017): subverting stereotypes abandoned me.

“What worries me is the idea of segregating people in terms of ideology, class, race and gender. It is something that we all resisted before but now we seem to be blithely taking part in self-segregation.”

Artists and playwrights are increasingly expected to express themselves within the boundaries of their own lived experience.

“It’s great that theatre is opening up to people who were previously marginalised,” says Craig. “That’s a good thing and we have further to go. But are we going to tell someone from an Armenian community that they can only write about an Armenian community? That doesn’t make sense.”

Playwrights’ imaginations are censoring themselves to accommodate sensitivities to anything deemed politically incorrect, adds Craig.

“Your job as a writer is to allow your subconscious to rise to the surface. And that means you cannot control the language and behaviour of your characters. I worry we’re gong to be ripped out of the subconscious zone which is where good writing happens.”

Meanwhile some theatres are falling down on their responsibilities.

“A theatre’s job is to protect the writer, to find a writer they like and back them. That used to be their primary purpose and they now seem to having lots of other [societal] things that they are fixing. And I don’t think that is their job.”

All of which begs the question, which of his plays does Craig think would never have seen the light of day in today’s political climate?

“All of them,” he says. “I’m not joking!”

Writing in Coffee Shops: Confessions of a Playwright is published by Methuen Drama