Sitting in Belfast’s first (deserted) Argentine café on a cold Friday morning just before Christmas, I wonder what to expect of Lucy Caldwell – the playwright whose rather impressive résumé I have been studying for a couple of weeks. Caldwell has two full-length, three short and two radio plays to her name, among them Leaves, which was awarded the 2006 George Devine Award and short-listed for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She also wrote a Dylan Thomas Prize and Waverton Good Read short-listed novel as well as a novella, short stories and articles for The Independent. This is no mean feat, especially for a person still in their twenties. Lucy, however, is very honest and open about her success.
She is particularly insistent about her debt to playwright Chris Hannan (the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Drama Fellow during her second year at Cambridge). ‘He was so encouraging and he would think nothing of sitting for hours in Café Nero going through your script with you. He was brilliant,’ she tells me, describing her first ‘poor attempts at a play’. Given that her first novel, Where They Were Missed, was entirely written during her university years, her modesty seems a little unnecessary. ‘I started to write a story for the May Anthologies…and it just didn’t stop and about 10,000 words in I suddenly thought – oh my goodness, I’m writing a novel,’ she explains. It’s almost as if, at times, she takes herself by surprise.
This is not to say it has all been plain sailing. Lucy may
have enjoyed success others her age can only dream of but, when asked what she attributes this to, her response is instantaneous – ‘hard work’. Then she quotes Chekhov, one of her favourite dramatists, ‘I used to think it was fame that matters, but I’ve realised that all that matters is the ability to endure.’ The public nature of theatre makes writing for the stage particularly terrifying. She says, ‘It’s horrible actually. It’s really, really horrible. You are so powerless. You’re just sitting there and watching people review your work; it’s the most naked feeling.’ Her advice to the winners of the New Writing Festival, who will go through this for the first time in the seventh week of Hilary is to ‘have a good stiff whisky lined up for afterwards – maybe a couple before as well.’
Another thing which always takes her by surprise is her readers’/audiences’ desire to label her work as autobiographical. ‘To you that’s a sort of silly question because of course it isn’t, but people do assume all sorts of things.’ She does admit there ‘has to be some middle ground where you connect, I think, or [the characters] won’t live. Anne Enright has a lovely way of putting it – she says that her characters are ‘the sloughed skins of a snake’ – the people she wasn’t, the paths she didn’t take.’
Her approach to the production of her own plays is not overly possessive. ‘Some writers can happily direct their own work but I just can’t.’ Caldwell prefers to be involved at the casting and workshopping stages before giving the actors time to experiment. ‘My French translator has a lovely way of putting it – she says the actors need to incorporate the words, to literally take them into their own bodies and make the parts theirs.’ She acknowledges she’s ‘been really lucky to work with directors who [she] get[s] on with.’ For Caldwell, unlike some of her playwright friends, the ‘drama has been limited to the stage.’
One thing which strikes me is Lucy’s incredible versatility as a writer – not only in the variety of forms she works with, but even within her dramatic output. The writers she identifies as most influential are certainly diverse – apart from Chekhov, there is Brian Friel, Caryl Churchill, Tennessee Williams, Marina Carr and Mike Bartlett. Lucy’s plays include Carnival, a spectacular circus tent affair, as well as several pieces written for the radio. I ask her if it is the aural or visual aspects of theatre which she finds most important. ‘Well, personally, aural. I played a lot of music when I was younger and I always hear the rhythms of things.’ She once worked with an actress who could tell her whether a line needed to gain or lose syllables to let it ‘zing’. ‘I’m very good at being able to pick up on the rhythms or the patterns of someone’s speech. I always find that getting a hold on the way someone speaks is the key to making them come to life as a character.’
The variety of her creative work is perhaps key to Lucy’s productivity, ‘After finishing a novel you feel exhausted and drained and the thought of starting another novel is impossible but the thought of starting another play, bizarrely, isn’t. It’s a different kind of energy – a different kind of work. I think each form has its own limitations and abilities. And you have to be very much in control of your own form and know what you can do and you can’t do.’ In England she finds that her status as a novelist/playwright is viewed as something of an anomaly, ‘I get that a lot more in England than here. I think, in Ireland, people can be both – Edna O’Brien, Sebastian Barry or Beckett. Writers will work confidently across a lot of mediums, whereas in England you get a few – Michael Frayn for example – but it seems a lot more divided.’
It is in the tradition of an Irish storyteller which Lucy seems to find herself, ‘It was only when I left that I started considering myself as Irish. I suddenly felt that I wasn’t British or English. I only discovered that when I was with English people. I started saying I was Irish and I started writing about Ireland and, at the beginning, slightly resenting that I was setting my novel in Belfast, as if it was being set in Belfast without my consent. I think once you leave home you suddenly have this dynamic about home – what it is, whether you can return.’ Lucy now spends most of her time in London but says she feels ‘very torn’. The Belfast theatrical scene still has need for a lot of improvement, ‘It’ll be fantastic when the new Lyric opens [Belfast’s Lyric Theatre has been undergoing extensive renovation] and we have plays on; we need to have a big theatre that can stand up to the Abbey [in Dublin] or to the best regional theatres.’
Yet, aside from the Irish tradition, Lucy is also a part of the ‘explosion’ of new writing for stage the last decade has enjoyed. Jack Thorne and Ben Musgrave (both now successful playwrights) were also under Chris Hannan’s tutelage at Cambridge and Lucy has been involved with the Royal Court’s Young Writers’ Programme (a centre for new drama), ‘The Royal Court’s programme, especially the Young Writers’ programme, is absolutely fantastic. I can’t rave about it enough. It’s open for anyone under the age of 26 and there’s a negligible fee for an eight week course.’ For Lucy, good writing is key for the continuing success of the theatre, ‘now there’s a lot of devised theatre, collaborative theatre but I, personally, feel that nothing can ever unseat the writer. I think writing is the most important thing…but then I would say that.’
I ask if she has any advice for those considering a career in writing for the stage, ‘What’s particularly hard at the start is showing people your work for the first time – trust who you give your work to.’ She admits that, despite her success, ‘in a weird way it doesn’t get any easier’ but, with a draft of her second novel nearing completion, a new play at the Birmingham Rep next year and commissions to attend to, it doesn’t look like Lucy Caldwell will be stopping any time soon. ‘Putting one word in front of another is all you can ever do,’ she concludes.
