Alec Tiffou is a student playwright for Matchbox Productions. His past two plays, Daddy Longlegs and Moth, have ran sold-out shows at the Michael Pilch Studio.
Cherwell: Where does your writing process start? Where do you generally get inspiration for your plays?
Alec: I think it’s difficult to say it comes from one place. So far, it’s probably come from people that I shouldn’t like, but I do – meeting a person who’s a bit strange, that I feel suspicious of but interested in, and then forming a life that I imagine around them.
I’m not Christian, but for the first play, Daddy Longlegs, I lived in a monastery for a while. Every day I would go to confession, and one of the monks I would confess to would always want to know a little bit too much about my personal life. I think he’d always lived in the monastery and saw me as a peephole into the outside world, in a strange way. It made me feel really uncomfortable, and at the same time, I completely understood him.
So in my own time, I built a life around him, and I imagined what his childhood would be like, and that’s basically how the play started. It was similar for the next play, where I would meet someone, who I knew I shouldn’t like, but I did empathise with, and then I somehow created a world around them.
Also, in terms of inspiration: in my parent’s car, we have one disc, and that’s Lou Reed’s Berlin. Everything about that album is how I wish I wrote – he says really demented things in such a composed, casual way. You almost want to replay it because you think you must have heard it wrong. There’s a song called ‘The Kids’, and it’s basically about the police taking away a woman’s children, only he sings it like it’s a bed-time lullaby. It’s a complete severance between the tone of the song and the content, and I love it when plays do that.
In terms of playwrights that inspire: Alexander Zeldin. His first three plays are amazing, and I think he devises the dialogue, but it feels like it’s a conversation you overheard on the bus. It’s completely vulnerable, but never confessional.
Cherwell: With that idea of picking out specific people that are outside of our norms, what do you think draws you to those kinds of characters, and do you think plays as a medium are particularly suited to those kinds of characters?
Alec: I think so. I just like to give an audience a character that you’ll see – maybe they’re narcissistic, maybe they’re hyper-masculine, or something like that – and you feel like you should immediately hate them, but then the layers are peeled back a bit, and then there’s something loveable about them. You kind of hate yourself for loving them, but you do, and then you kind of feel uncomfortable with yourself as a result. I love going to a play and feeling guilty that I liked someone that I shouldn’t. Maybe that’s because that person lives a completely different life to me, but at the same time there are small aspects that are relevant to my life, or relatable, so I can’t help feeling empathy.
Cherwell: I know that with a lot of Matchbox’s productions before Moth, there’s been a lot of technical innovation. What informed the decision to strip back those elements for Moth, and have it as something that’s ‘just a play’?
Alec: It was scary, but there’s something about just seeing raw events happening that I really like. I love technical innovation in theatre, but there’s something really nice when it’s just stripped back and it’s just events as you see them. I think it allows for a more direct interaction between audience and story.
I remember being in Arkansas, and for some reason, I decided to go into a Pentecostal service. Again, I’m not Christian, but there was a pastor just screaming and yelling, and the audience was just going wild – speaking in tongues, falling on the floor, dancing, foaming at the mouth. I think if a play can have even a fraction of the effect on the audience as a Pentecostal service, then I think it’s worth it. There’s something about having a play without technical innovation, that just has that directness with the audience.
Another thing is, for some reason, I’ve really been into WWE videos recently, and seeing those completely oiled-up, spandex-ed men, and how happy it makes an audience member – that’s somehow exactly what I want to do. I think there’s something about how there’s no veil of technical innovation when it’s just the audience and the action happening, that allows for that a bit better. There’s this amazing thing when you see a really good play, and you know that it’s good just because of the action – it’s bodily and unintellectual, and I love when I see a play and it’s like that.
Cherwell: A lot of the articles on Daddy Longlegs and Moth have pointed out that both are your first forays into playwriting. How do you hone that skill in writing?
Alec: The thing is, I have no idea really how narrative works, or how exposition should be done, or how to time a beginning, middle and end. I bought a book on it, and I got half a page through, and they had this diagram, and I got scared so I closed the book.
A few things helped. I’ve always written, just before, it was really bad poetry, and I wrote an awful book when I was 12 that I’m not going to say the name of, it’s just too embarrassing. But more than anything, when I was a kid, I was a really good liar. I lied all the time to my friends. I would tell them that after school, I had this amazing life where my dad was a gun-slinging cowboy who travelled around the world robbing banks. The lies would get more and more complex, and you’d have to expand your narrative out, so that when a friend came over to your house and saw that your dad was a normal guy, you’d have to be like “Oh, that’s because my actual dad has hired a stand-in while he’s on the run from the police who are searching for him”.
I think that meant that actually starting playwriting felt quite natural. My parents definitely sat me down and the whole pathological liar thing was drawn out of me, but there’s still that tendency in a play where it feels like a complexifying web of lies that you have to detail more and more and more. So even though I’d never written a play before Daddy Longlegs, it felt like quite a natural thing to do, despite not really knowing all the infrastructure that goes into it.
Cherwell: Did you feel like things like pacing, those elements you mentioned, were things that you were conscious of as you were writing? Or did it just feel like a much more natural process?
Alec: In terms of pacing, a lot of it happens in the rehearsal rooms. In the first read-through, you’re all reading, and it goes on for two hours, and you’re melting in embarrassment, because you can clearly see that everyone thinks it’s too long, or that things should be cut, or things should be added, and it’s not a nice process. But I love editing the script through rehearsing by asking what the actors want to keep and don’t want to keep. I would love to work on a play just by not having written anything, and just devising it from that.
A lot of the pacing came from just seeing how the actors interacted with the work. But in terms of trying to get the pacing right when it’s on the page, I attribute it to people like Lou Reed. His music is this kind of monologue, but at the same time it has this rhythm to it. I think my pacing probably comes from wanting to recreate those musical influences that I have.
Cherwell: That also links in with the idea of a collaborative process. I know that throughout Matchbox, you’re developed quite a close relationship with Sonya Luchanskaya and Orli Wilkins – what does that kind of collaborative process look like for you guys?
Alec: First of all, I love them, they’re some of my closest friends. Our collaborative process is basically us meeting up with the pretense of it being play-related, then we do that for about five minutes and then basically just talk about everything else. It’s pretty un-work related – the amount of work that we do happens in very small, intense bursts.
In those bursts, a large part of the process is disagreeing on a lot of things. On casting, on blocking, if some of the lines work, if some don’t. We’ve had actual arguments in front of the whole cast about decisions, and everyone quietens down, and it’s like we’re the actors for a second, being watched by the cast. But it’s so nice, because we care about each other, so much more than we care about a play. And it’s always funny in hindsight.
Also just in terms of them individually, Sonya and Orli can just see a play being performed in ways that I can never understand. Like with Moth, I really wanted the play to end by releasing real-life moths into the theatre, which would spin around the light, and I had this idea of catching moths and training them so they would do that. I was convinced it would work, and they just shut that idea down, and thank god, because there would have just been hundreds of moths running wild.
I think it’s a lot of that – a lot of having ideas, and then, because we’re close enough to feel comfortable with each other shutting down the ideas, it doesn’t feel awkward or cruel or anything.
Cherwell: Is it more of an artistic collaboration, or do you think you three are drawn together by your friendship and closeness to each other?
Alec: In terms of taste, our taste in art is quite dissimilar. From what I understand, Sonya quite likes Sarah Kane and those kinds of plays, which I love, but I don’t think are my favourite. Orli and I don’t exactly have the same taste in films, or plays, or things like that, but I think we have a closeness in our relationship that means any criticism that’s play-related will never feel personal. Because it’s not one person making decisions, nothing is tyrannical, or just one person’s perspective, and we can just feed off each other in a really nice way. At the end of every show, the three of us just hug, and it’s the nicest part of the show, because we just understood each other’s stress. So to answer your question, I think it’s more personally-driven than artistic-vision-driven.
Cherwell: Is there any interaction between what you study and your more creative pursuits? Does one feed into the other, or do you see them as very distinct?
Alec: I studied MathsPhil in first year, then I realised I was really bad at maths, so I changed to Philosophy and Theology. I find philosophy sometimes difficult, because you’ll read a paper, and I find that it uses really big words to cover up quite small ideas, whereas plays can use really small words to uncover big ideas. That’s what I see as their difference, and why I kind of struggle sometimes in my philosophy degree. The truth is, I’ve never read a philosophy paper and been like oh damn, maybe I need to change my life based on that, whereas I have come out of plays and just felt I experienced an epileptic shock – that I’m just so overwhelmed, and that it has affected the length of my life. So I don’t know if they’re that inter-related, but I think I see them as quite separate spheres in my life.
But I do love the philosophy in my life, I don’t want to hate on it. Occasionally you do get someone who’s not ultra-dogmatic in their views, and that’s much nicer – like I studied Wittgenstein recently, and I think he has a tendency to articulate a thought experiment, and not necessarily derive some kind of dogmatic conclusion at the end of it, and I think that’s more in line with theatre. Whereas you have someone like Plato, who might hide behind the fact it’s a dialogue, when really it’s just Socrates being like ‘ah, justice is this’, and his interactor being like ‘you’re so clever, Socrates, of course it is’.
Cherwell: Theology, or religion, seems to have a big through-line in your life. Do you think there’s something in particular that draws you to those ideas?
Alec: I always think about this, and I feel like it’s a lot of coincidences. Like I always go to Quaker meetings, because I love Quaker meetings, and they have the best tea and biscuits at the end of it. And there’s also something just really dramatic about a Quaker meeting, that it’s 95% silence, but then in one moment someone can say something which has such weight, that it has all the emotional intensity of a two-hour play. I feel like if there is a relationship between theatre and theology, in the context where I’ve been in a religious environment – in a monastery, or a Pentecostal service, or a Quaker meeting – I think there’s just an inherent drama to it. I don’t like the words ‘religious experience’, but in a really good play, you can have an experience which is somewhat similar to a religious experience. So maybe it’s that. And maybe I’m a little bit jealous that I’m maybe too atheistic in my views – maybe that’s what draws me.
