Let’s talk about me and Mine, shall we?
Oh boy, critiquing one of my own plays. You may have noticed that the articles analysing our radio plays stopped at “Voices” a few weeks back. This is why. Talking about my work feels like driving nails into my feet. But long-time followers of the blog know it is supposed to be a reflective journal. Self-critique is a way to improve my writing by thinking about writing. So, I can’t get out of this one. What was right, what was wrong, and what was interesting about Mine?
Just in case you haven’t listened to it yet, here’s the audio link, the iTunes link, and the YouTube version with subtitles. Thorough, aren’t we? This article has mega spoilers for Mine, so I’ll see you after the break.
[EMBEDS]
https://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/little-wonder-radio-plays/id1408132317?l=en&mt=2#
Why did I write Mine and what was it about?
I didn’t set off to write about Brexit (bloody thing just has a way of sneaking up on you.) In fact, I started from a factlet I discovered in a book about radio plays. One of the very first radio plays broadcast by the BBC was the story of miners trapped underground. They invited listeners to turn out the lights and share in a unique new experience.
How wonderful. Then I got to thinking about the miners trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, and what it would be like trapped underground with someone, say a close friend, but a friend from whom you’ve kept secrets, a friend that would never have been your friend if you’d honestly shared how you feel about one another. Sexual jealousy, murder and explosions naturally sprang from there. Well, it felt natural to me.
The writing lesson here is start from something interesting (trapped in a mine! Awesome!) and then let your brain wonder. You’re gonna write the play you’re gonna write. So, don’t start from deep emotional preachy statements. Start from something physically interesting. Rich metaphors will be mined as if by accident (see what I did there?).
What about the politics? [This will get rude]
If you’re as sick of politics as every other Brit (and most Americans), the TL; DR version is “I’m upset how Brexit has given an excuse to everyone to be racist, and how this has highlighted how classist and backward looking my beloved England has become.” You may now skip the next three paragraphs, unless you like a good old sweary rant, read on.
Something that constantly strikes me is how fucking racist and classist my home country is. If you come from a poor background in England you’re damned right to be carrying a chip on your shoulder. If your white, then you’re probably either poor or buying into the fallacy that your middle class and pretending you aren’t poor. If you’re non-white than a near certainty. We live in a country that has a constant hard-on for anything aristocratic. For the vast majority of us that means keep your nose in the dirt while they take away your healthcare, your dentistry, your wages, your contract protection, your human rights.
Since Brexit, my word hasn’t the resentment boiled to the surface? And where is it directed? The same place as the last time we had a major financial crisis (studying this cycle was part of my PhD, although I focused more on the financial side), when the brown shirts marched the streets and decried the Jewish plague and the floods of immigrants. We, the people, those of us born without trust funds, are our own worst enemy. The banks fuck it up (well, I say fuck it up, but look how much profit they made), we take the hit, then we turn on one another while blathering on about how great Kate Middleton looks. You see, one of us (sort of) got raised to royalty, so everything must be right, if we could just get rid of the damned Pakis.
And so, Sid and Toby were born. Sid is absolutely his own worst enemy. His resentment and frustration boil up into violence against his wife and ultimately the murder of his best friend. But let’s not miss out the bit where Toby is an utter cunt. He patronises Sid, rubbing his nose in what he supposes is his inferiority–due to his lesser education, due to his race – sleeping with the man’s wife then lying to his face about it. As we grasp and struggle to keep hold of what’s mine, mine, mine, we forget we are in the shit together. Don’t feel too sorry for Toby. Or Sid either. They got what was coming to them.
Does it work? Sympathy, Antipathy and Arseholes.
I took a few goes to get this play anywhere near right. To start it was all too easy. Sid was crazy, and Toby was a victim. I had to keep working to make things harder, to make them worse (the characters and the situation). It had to make sense. Why were they in the mine? Why would the owner co-operate in blowing it up?
Before we continue, here’s a quick writer’s 101 we’ve talked about elsewhere. The audience must have sympathy with the characters. That doesn’t mean they have to like them. It just means they must give a shit. If they don’t give a shit they will stop reading. You need to establish sympathy in the first few pages (paragraphs ideally!), Here are some of the classic techniques:
- Make them funny
- Have them do something cool/show amazing skills
- Make them kind/really care about others/some other.
- Have them suffer something horrible or experience tremendous peril.
- Give them a pet.
The last one is mostly a joke that writers throw at each other when they know their characters aren’t sympathetic (although it, erm, totally works, rather depressingly.) All your characters should have something that makes them sympathetic. If they aren’t sympathetic, they are boring. Best of all, if they’re sympathetic, you can sneakily make them awful as well–and take your reader to truly interesting places. The best villains are sympathetic (Silva in Skyfall was betrayed by MI6 and left horribly scarred, Commodus in Gladiator is cursed by an uncaring father he desperately wants to please and is in love with his own sister.) If your hero isn’t sympathetic, you may as well go home now because the reader won’t pass page 10.
In Mine, the situation was inherently dramatic – trapped beneath crumbling rock, time and air running out, no way to escape, one of them the killer. That drama, which automatically builds sympathy with the characters, gave me space to make Sid and Toby darker. And that was what needed to happen. I don’t know if I went far enough: Sid and Toby maybe should have been worse than they were. Hang on, one was an adulterer and the other a murderer. Anyway.
As with all my plays (it is getting better), the biggest problem is overwriting during the exposition. They spend too long talking about Brexit, particularly when they get into the bunker. I thought it would sound like they were distracting themselves, two old friends falling into old habits. Instead it sounds weird they argue about politics when half the mine has just collapsed. I could do this – I think- better now. I needed to have them say it in less words and let the audience fill in the blanks. Clearer, faster dialogue; say less and let the audience figure it out (which is fun for them). On this front Mine is only a mixed success, and I’ll get onto the reason (Sid’s plan) a little later.
Hang on, aren’t we forgetting King Arthur?
As Brexit has gone from bad to worse and looks increasingly like a it was just clever tax dodge by Nigel Farage, David Davies, Boris Johnson and that dickhead who funded Vote leave, it seems nothing can save us from hard Brexit. No sane economist thinks this will cause anything but massive poverty (Christ, the Tory government are stockpiling food and medicine). Basically, I got to thinking we need a hero. And who better than England’s first (not that there was an England to speak of back then) – King Arthur himself.
But the point, of course, is that in the myth (someone stumbles into a cave where they find a bard/harp and a sleeping King Arthur), finding King Arthur never ends well. And so, it is here. I wish there had been space in the play to introduce Harriet, who I thought about a great deal – an intelligent, wilful, restless woman who marries a man that destroys their relationship through his belief he doesn’t deserve her (and that age-old plague of expressing his anger through his fists). And that’s the point. If we English really liked ourselves, how could we let our governments do this to us?
Instead, the English are brought up to believe we don’t deserve. They tell the French they are all equal (comes as a nasty surprise later when the truth comes out and the police tear gas you for complaining). But we English keep our heads bowed because we know, in our heart of hearts, that we deserved to be born low down, that our betters are exactly that: better. Sid married his better and couldn’t deal with not being good enough for her.
So, yeah, I wrote a play about a guy trying to murder his best friend, but I consider poor old gets-hacked-to-bits-at-the-end Toby as the villain and wife-beating Sid as the victim. Even at the end, when he has found King Arthur, when King Arthur is ready to rise and give the bankers[i] and the politicians a bloody good kicking, Sid doesn’t think he deserves it. Dying is the best thing that could happen to Sid, because living was just shit.
A million and five sound effects
Editing Mine was an amazing learning experience. The voices. Audacity [https://www.audacityteam.org/] lets you do amazing of things to make voices sound like they are in different spaces. Listen to the cave getting larger as they walk into King Arthur’s tomb. Or the way Eric’s voice coming through a telephone. Basically, Audacity is brilliant, and I had fun.
There were more than 70 individual sound effects. That’s a lot of work, and a lot of thinking. The cave-in sounds were difficult. What does a cave-in sound like from the inside? How loud should I make it—should it blow the audience away or should they just know what is happening? And how do I make these sounds anyway?
I had moments of wanting to punch the author, which was terribly confusing and mildly bruising. But once done, all that sound enriches the play. So, what’s my advice as a writer? As a producer, if the play has a lot of sound work then it had better be bloody good for me to produce it. Yes, I know all your plays are bloody good. But maybe have a relationship with the production team before you ask them to put the many, many hours work a piece like this requires.
On the other hand, proper use of sound is what makes radio radio. So be brave, bold and bloody. Think about sound. Offer good sounds that add meaning to the play. It’s just as important as the writing because it is PART of the writing.
Final Verdict on Mine
Mine was a great learning experience. It has problems with pacing and may still be confusing in places. Sid’s plan is overcomplicated and falling back on “he has emotional problems” is a lame excuse, I should have come up with a better murder plan. As I mentioned earlier, this led to the over-exposition problem: over-complicated bad guy plot means more time required to explain over-complicated bad guy plot.
I didn’t like using the word “Paki”, but it’s a word I grew up hearing and I knew it was what Toby would fall back on when circumstances pulled back the curtain. It was also uncomfortable hearing the two (three) of them arguing about Harriet as their property–but then, that was the point. There are so many people we look at and just don’t see as people. I tried to use this play to excise the wound of all this blood stupid hatred. I tried to use an exciting scenario to build empathy with two people who are, in many ways, England at its worst. I’m not sure how much longer we will deserve your empathy.
Roger and Joe were magnificent, as always, and it never ceases to amaze me how a good actor can make a bad line shine (whereas good lines sound good anywhere–something for you over-precious writers out there to remember when you’re blaming the actors). Toby was an ex-military PhD who came from West-Bridgford, so anyone complaining that my accent was off should note I am an ex-military PhD who comes from West-Bridgford (via Henry Road and subsequently Beeston)! Finally, Eric Barnes was chairman of Nottingham Forest football club until 1999 – rubbish chairman but a decent, local man and a genuine fan of the club.
Thanks for listening. I had fun writing!
[i] By the by, I know lots of lovely, hard working, caring bankers, and I am a lawyer, so my constant banker-slagging-off should be considered a little tongue in cheek. Systems create failures – people are mostly just people. Besides, it annoys me that my banker mates earn so much more money than me! Hmmm… now that I’m mostly a writer, getting annoyed by people earning more money than me is probably a bad habit…
