“I was thinking it could be about Nick Cave?”

I’m sitting with my floppy comrade Sam Rees in a Café Nero on the Unthank Road, Norwich, the day before we’re due to graduate from UEA, July 2017. Several months before, in the face of terrifying postgraduate unemployment and an unwillingness to have our psyches broken down in drama school MAs, we’d decided it would benefit literally everyone if we pooled our resources and became a company. Smashing start.

First question- what was our flagship show going to be? With what brave and different and challenging work were we going to burst onto the scene and make all our friends jealous? Moreover, what was going to be our calling card? Our house style? What were we going to do that made us different? We weren’t here to muck about. This had to be a Serious Piece of Work.

“We’ll re-work obscure Shakespeare plays!”, one of us said. “Brilliant!”, the other replied. Insert here a lengthy interval where the two of us try to read Timon of Athens. And while you can pick at the themes, how relevant one could make the play, scribble down choice lines in a notebook to your heart’s content, it’s just sort of…no good? If you aren’t really feeling it? Valuable as I’m sure it was to finally read Timon of Athens, you can’t force yourself to get worked up about something. You can’t fake a spark. You can’t trick yourself into caring when you just don’t. Serious Pieces of Work just don’t get made like that. Not good ones, anyway.

We reconvene. No banana with the Bard, sadly. It’s almost summer now. We’re both exhausted, snowed under with work and stress and the looming prospect of leaving university. We decide it’s time to make something personal, something we can genuinely get behind, with all our energy. Sam’s been to see Pub Corner Poets’ Sad Little Man and won’t shut up about it. We throw around words like “experiential” and “formally challenging” and make general noises of agreement. We agree to go back home over summer and think of moments in our lives, big moments that we want to dissect, feelings we want to live in again and examine. Unfinished emotional business, sort of thing. Sam and I are both men who like to feel things, after all, and we realise that if we wanted to make something that would really stretch us, something really different, it had to affect us as much as it (hopefully) would the audience. We wanted a big, cathartic experience.

So I went home over the summer and looked over some old diaries. I re-read an old radio play I’d written about a concussed boy falling in love with a trapeze artist. It was kind of about how love can be a destructive force, how love can totally de-stabilize your world, and how we see the divine in people we love. I listened to a lot of music, Nick Cave in particular (an artist Sam has put much effort into making me a fan of). His songs are like little novels, or little films- the guitar at the beginning of “Stranger Than Kindness” conjuring up miles of desert; the organ at the beginning of “Distant Sky” boring great holes of unspeakable loss through the listener.

And then the vaguest idea.

So I’m sitting opposite Sam Rees in Café Nero a few weeks later, my graduation suit in a bag under my chair, and I say, “I was thinking it could be about Nick Cave?”

I’m fully expecting him to laugh in my face, tell me to fuck off, but instead he leans forward and cocks an eyebrow. Are we onto something?

It can’t be The Nick Cave Story, or anything like that, not a cheesy biopic or a jukebox musical. Actually we talk a lot about what we don’t want it to be. What it actually will be remains shadowy, at best.

But we know it’s about fame, probably. It’s probably a bit about drugs, and it’s probably a bit about sadness, and it’s definitely about love. 

“I’ll go away and try writing a bit,” I say.

I come up with about ten pages in the next month or so. Scrappy and confused, a mixture of address to the audience, conversations with therapists and borrowed lines and things from that old radio play. Sam also sends me chunks of beautiful text that he’s just dreamed up, ruminations on love and evil and such, and I gleefully whack them in too. The word document for one of these chunks he sends me is entitled “You Down There and Me Up Here”, which I half jokingly suggest would be a pretty cool title for a play. It becomes instantly clear that it can’t be called anything else.

I’m very inspired by Chris Goode’s remarkable play Men in the Cities and by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s excellent Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth. I try hard to listen to Cave’s voice- the words he uses, his sentence structure, the imagery he’s working with, all blood and wild animals and naked bodies. It’s fun to write.

Then I come to a crashing halt and realise I’ve no fucking clue what I’m writing any more.

I Skype Sam and tell him I have, quite literally, lost the plot. What I’ve written is, technically, ok, I guess- it’s messy and unstructured, but it’s not (touch wood), bad, as such. But it’s not going anywhere. It’s the definition of waffle. I still don’t actually know what happens next. So Sam and I talk about themes for a bit- something that’s coming up a lot now is the question of identity, the tension between the way a person presents themselves (or the way we view a person) and who they actually are. The thesis we come up with is that the godlike way we perceive rockstars is directly comparable to the way we idolize people we fancy. This seems a pretty good jumping-off point, and I chuck the script over to Sam for him to doctor for a few weeks.

What he sends back is a play with a strict rod rammed up its back- it now has a middle and a very definite ending, plus the themes are really brought out this time. Sam’s writing is big, emotional and punchy, contrasting really nicely with my own, more fidgety style. In mid-October we got together in Norwich and read through what we’d got. It’s romantic, almost- we get a coffee, put on some John Hopkins and read the bugger. There’s a beautiful spark- the clouds momentarily clear, and we think, for an hour or so, we might really be on to something. It’s still messy as hell, but we laugh, and we get a bit emotional, and, most importantly, we care about it. I do one more redraft after that meeting, a few cuts, a few re-writes, and a few little sections of the play get whammed into one big section and put at the end. I love editing sometimes, when it feels reckless and as close to dangerous as you can get when all you’ve got is a bunch of paper and a biro.

It’s November now, and we’ve just done our first performance of a section of the work, at a scratch night hosted by The Garage in Norwich (big shout out to them, by the way), under the extraordinary direction of Ms Charli Corrigan. We did the first fifteen minutes, and it’s still a mess. A very kind audience told us so afterwards- we still need to be clearer, firmer, more structured. The characters need more definition, and we need to focus on the theses that kicked off this play. We need to stay true to our concept. There’s a lot of work to do now.

But it is our mess, and we believe in it. We are committed to getting these words right and doing justice to this story, because it’s our story. We’ve got some stuff to say, alright. We just have to make it amazing now.

Beats Timon of Athens, at any rate.