During a rehearsal break for his current production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, I am lucky enough to grab an interview with Max Stafford-Clark, the longest serving artistic director at the Royal Court and founder of touring company Out of Joint. The play, a 20th century masterpiece, has not been performed in the last ten years. I ask him about the experience of directing the same play again, after having commissioned and directed its world premiere for the Royal Court in 1982.

‘Top Girls is a historical play, but it concerns itself with recent history. Re-staging this play now amounts to re-excavating a period of history.’ The major difference is that the audience today, unlike the 1982 audience, is not necessarily familiar with Margaret Thatcher’s England.

‘This is the beginning of a historical period led by a conservative government,’ he says, ‘Top Girls is very much prompted by the political presence of a woman Prime Minister. Unlike the controversial film The Iron Lady, Top Girls does not present Margaret Thatcher and her policies empathetically. Top Girls could equally have been called Bottom Girls, i.e. a picture of Angie, the girl who doesn’t make it.

’Max Stafford-Clark has always promoted, commissioned and directed new writing, and has nurtured many of the country’s leading writers, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, David Hare, and Caryl Churchill.  ‘I believe the job of any artist is to reflect the time they’re living in’, Stafford-Clark says. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, our conversation then turns to the current government’s giant funding cuts in the artistic sector. In a time when David Cameron is encouraging the theatre and film industries to become more ‘mainstream’, he ironically comments, the Arts Council has cut Out of Joint’s yearly funding by over £130,000 ­– nearly a 30% budget cut, the consequences of which are already affecting the company’s output. This year the company will only be able to stage one production, instead of two. ‘It also means that the actors will have to live in horrible digs instead of hotels.

’Changing the subject a little, I was surprised to discover that the playwright usually stays with Stafford-Clark in rehearsal from the first to the last day, and so I quiz him further on such a close writer-director relationship. ‘When you enter a rehearsal room and are there with the writer, it is like designing an aeroplane and not knowing until the end whether or not it will take off. It is an adventure with the unknown.’ Here he is keen to stress the differences between British and continental theatre. When he speaks with German and French directors, they invariably ask him how long he allows the writer to stay with him in the rehearsal room. They do not allow the writer to witness the rehearsals for ‘more than two or three days.

’Finally, I could not refrain from asking such an acclaimed director to define for me the essence of directing. Again, he refers to the British theatrical tradition and compares it with the continental one. ‘In this country, you start with the play. In Germany, you start with the concept of the play. Moreover, I believe that most plays depend on a company. It would be useless to stage Hamlet if there was no one to act as Hamlet. With most plays I undertake, the director has the responsibility of creating an ensemble, and clearly understanding and explaining the play. A director should also nurture the atmosphere. Plays are called plays for a reason, and as such they should be playful.’

Having flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, etched and inked for adverts and featured in decorative periodicals such as Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, The Studio, and Jugend, it feels only fitting that an exhibition of Art Nouveau works is being held on the commercial shop-floor of Sanders, Oxford High Street’s fine print shop.  These lithographs, embellished in the boldest of colours and lines, bring together art, advertising and industry in a manner as smooth as the curves and flicks they feature.

Works such as William Nicholson’s ‘Beefeater’ advertisement for a Harper Magazine of 1896 witness the marriage of cultures past and present, experimental and traditional. It features an arresting and almost illusory image of the titular subject, depicted by bold black strokes streaking through a field of scarlet.  The theme of commercial art is continued in pieces such as Meunier’s lithograph for Concert Ysaye, with popping primary colours used within an extremely serene scene, centred on a singular star above a night-time lake and a solitary female figure.  Grasset’s advert for La Meillure de Toutes les Encres, on the other hand, is a piece brimming with energy, filled with swirls of hair and flurries of ink and paper, centred around the contorted figure of a woman, whose shape embodies the ‘whiplash’ form so characteristic of Art Nouveau images. Perhaps the standout work of advertising, however, is Gorguet & Orazi’s ‘Theodora’ – a lithograph designed for and featuring the actress Sarah Bernhardt as the Byzantine empress. Described by Maindron as ‘une affiche parfaite’, its mosaic-like aesthetic is married with a storytelling montage of images reminiscent of the serials and “penny dreadfuls” of nineteenth-century Europe.  The whole piece is bedecked with swathes of shining gold, giving a suitably bold, byzantine finish.

Elsewhere, the collection demonstrates the more demure side of Art Nouveau. Armand Rassenfosse’s ‘Danse’ captures a delicately drawn image of a classical figure in desaturated shades.  Guinier’s ‘Nuit Douce’ is a sketched study of a young woman’s profile in a style reminiscent of Rossetti, and Grasset’s Froideur is suggestive of a more domestic element to his work, in both its conservative colours and content, and its miniature-like dimensions.Drama and wit are brought to the exhibition in a collection of prints by Aubrey Beardsley.  An artist for the infamous and scandalous ‘yellow books’ of the age, Beardsley’s brave works engage his audience with both darkly dramatic compositions such as ‘Salome’s Toilette’ and ‘The Kiss of Judas’ – monochromatic contortions reminiscent of troubled Freudian dreamscapes – as well as a sense of humour; A Poster incorporates a square of blank space that constitutes nearly half the work. Elsewhere, a cover designed for Pierrot magazine depicts a pierrot clown in a library. It is this awareness of and engagement with the intersection of forms so often constituted in Art Nouveau works that makes Beardsley a master of the style, and a highlight of this sensuous and sensational exhibition. 

This past December proved a sad one for the world of letters, which lost essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel – playwright and the first president of the Czech republic – and George Whitman, the 98-year champion of the Parisian staple bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. 

This past December proved a sad one for the world of letters, which lost essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel – playwright and the first president of the Czech republic – and George Whitman, the 98-year champion of the Parisian staple bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. 

Thanks to Whitman’s legacy, Shakespeare & Co first opened in 1951 under the name Le Mistral, and has become a haunt for young literary pilgrims and Beat-wannabes. Tradition allows people to be given a place to sleep while volunteering in the shop and soaking up the Left Bank atmosphere. Though not the original Shakespeare & Co frequented by the infamous members of the Lost Generation – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and Joyce – it does take its name from it. Whitman was a friend and admirer of Sylvia Beach, the owner of the original shop, and named his daughter after her. Ms Whitman formally took over ownership of the ‘new’ Shakespeare & Co in 2003.

I visited the bookshop for the first time just before the New Year and arrived before the shop opened, taking a few moments to ask loitering booksellers about Whitman. They were three young men, all returning booksellers: the first, a Cambridge student, looked like Buddy Holly; the second smoked insouciantly; and the third was a slightly older American who had just finished his first novel and was working on his second.

George Whitman was a bunch of contradictions, said Buddy Holly. Eccentric, said the Smoker. If he was irascible, it was because he was theatrical, switching salt and sugar bowls at one of his Sunday tea parties, or teasingly throwing a book at you. The Novelist called Whitman generous.When I asked if all bookstore workers were writers, the three agreed that though only a small percentage of people are actually working on a book while they work at the shop, the majority of them nurture aspirations of writing, keep journals, or at the very least are ‘appreciators of literature’.

If  you visit Shakespeare & Co, just across the street from Notre Dame, you can see the tributes to Whitman. Obituaries are fastened to the windows; a large banner with his picture wishes him farewell. These signs salute not only the ‘Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter’, a man who championed young writers, but the fact that bookshops are not yet a thing of the past, still functioning as hives of activity and aspiration.

What were you doing at the time you wrote your first novel, The Opium Clerk?

I was a marketing faculty member at McGill University in Canada. The Opium Clerk was published soon after I started at the Saïd Business School as an academic.

What drew you to the historical novel as a genre?

As a young reader I was fascinated by history and historical novels written in my mother tongue, Bengali, as well as those from world literature.  Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoy and Bankimchandra had instilled a taste for intricate human stories enacted against the backdrop of great social change. They fed my curiosity for unfamiliar worlds.  The reading of history as such opened up a treasure trove, full of shadowy characters, incomplete tales, and tantalising possibilities.

Do you see business studies and literature as being connected at all, and if so, how?

I have never sought to connect my professional pursuit of business academia with my passion for writing.  Life is full of disjunctions, and I’ve left it as such.  What one does for a living should be done well.  But the rest of life is still spacious enough to house a grand passion or two.   

How do you divide your time between academic, professional and creative pursuits?

Through extreme forms of jugglery.  Academic and creative pursuits are jealous masters and demand extraordinary commitment.  Over the last ten years I’ve written five books of fiction and copious amounts of academic articles.  Everything else has suffered: holidays, socialising and sleep.  I don’t divide time strategically, but follow a rule of thumb — to do well, to do what’s most inspiring at the moment.   

T.S. Eliot  said that had he not worked at a bank while he wrote poetry, he wouldn’t have written as he did. Do you wish you wrote full-time?

Unlike T.S., I don’t see any similar effects that come from working in a business school.  There is no direct or obverse inspiration that I draw from it into my fiction.  I have never considered setting a novel in the corporate world, and there’s no secret corridor that connects these two lives of mine.  I am a full time writer by my estimation.  It’s simply that I have doubled the time to do everything I have to do by cutting out the inessentials.

Now that you have published four novels, did you find the process of writing The Yellow Emperor’s Cure to be different?

Despite all being historical novels, they’ve been different in scope, architecture, and method.  I’ve had to rediscover myself as an author each time, which brings great excitement to my writing life.  For Emperor, for example, I’ve had to write about the Europeans and the Chinese from their respective perspectives, treating history as the instrument of discord.   

 

I love Peep Show. I think it’s the best thing since Fawlty Towers. In fact, (and I don’t say this lightly), I would argue that on a scale of belly-aching laughter Mark Corrigan beats Basil Fawlty. It hardly needs to be said that as star of Peep Show, David Mitchell is my fantasy hero; I therefore had serious concerns about meeting him in the flesh. His character, Mark, is so gut-wrenchingly funny that I feared the actor behind the creation was bound to be a let-down.

 The story of Mitchell’s rise from nerdy undergraduate obscurity to household fame reads like a fairy tale. With his partner in comedy, Robert Webb, he cut his teeth in Cambridge University’s Footlights following in the shimmering wake of some of Britain’s finest comedians: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.  Meeting in a pantomime production of Cinderella, Mitchell and Robert Webb became close friends and after graduating went on to live and work together. They did their time as impoverished writers working on various comedy shows; Mitchell recalls his parents’ loaded reminder that ‘the civil service has a tremendous history of recruiting amateur dramatics’. There followed the inevitable series of pilot shows that never got developed, before they finally won their lucky break, starring as (you guessed it) a couple of juvenile best friends living together in the post-university world as depicted in Peep Show. 

With such a superb background story and with my own towering expectations, I approached the interview with some trepidation. Fortunately, Mitchell is exactly as you would wish him: smart, a little old fashioned, deeply likeable and very, very funny,  from the self-deprecating jokes about his newly-grown beard to the tortured metaphors he employs to describe just about everything. David Mitchell is, in short, only slightly less bumbling and even more amusing than his character Mark Corrigan. So how much of the character is the actor? Mitchell considers: ‘Unfortunately on a physical level he is 100% me. And in small-minded conservatism and anal-ness he is me; it was definitely a part written with me in mind. As Rob [Robert Webb] always says, they wouldn’t have cast us the other way around. But I console myself with the fact that Mark Corrigan has a very different life from me; he is an unemployed loan manager and I am a comedian. And now I have a beard.’

Part of what makes the series so delicious is that Peep Show explores the deepest taboos and anxieties of British society. Following great comic traditions, it seems to specialise particularly in discomfort about sex (Fawlty Towers) and an obsession with class (remember the Monty Python sketch ‘The Upper Class Twit of the Year’ where Vivian Smith-Symthe-Smith, with an O-level in kennel hygiene, competes for the title with Gervaise Brook-Hamster, who is used as a waste-paper basket by his father). Mitchell maintains that class is as relevant today as it ever was. ‘My character is obsessed with class; his self-esteem is very much rooted in being a manager, a respectable member of the middle class. Jeremy [Webb’s character] would probably count himself as outside the class system, but he too is actually very aware of it.’ Mitchell notes that in British society it is only the middle class who care about class: ‘People who are very posh just aren’t so interested in it – and neither are people at the other end of the scale’. The irony of his own discomfort – his inability to say ‘working class’ – is not lost on either of us.

Another characteristic of British humour perfected by Peep Show is that ever-present sense of tragedy lurking in the shadows (think The Office). The episode where Jeremy and the love of his life Nancy have a threesome epitomises the sadness that pervades the series. Jeremy tries to see the situation as sophisticated: ‘This is good, this is like watching a porno,’ before admitting, ‘But I can’t see anything, I haven’t got a hard-on, and I want to cry.’ As Mark observes, ‘Sure an orgy sounds great, but you’re basically just multiplying the number of people you’re not going to be able to look in the eye afterwards.’ Mitchell maintains that all comedy is essentially tragic. ‘Anything comic is necessarily infused with the fearful human condition. The brilliant thing about The Simpsons is that it so glancingly touches on the futility of people’s lives. Comedy at its best can say more about sadness than tragedy can.

’At school Mitchell had always been ‘funny’ but it was not until university that he began to consider comedy as a career. Even then it seemed unlikely: ‘Footlights was incredibly unfashionable when I was in it … and not just because I was in it. It was exactly the wrong time; after Fry and Laurie left people thought no one funny would ever come from there again. When I graduated I felt that I should keep quiet about Footlights. And I had a 2.2 from Cambridge, which was worse than nothing’. He got a job as an usher at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, under the misapprehension that it would lead to a job as a playwright. He and Webb then began writing various shows that never got made, supporting themselves by writing jokes for TV comedians. So, was the civil service never a temptation? ‘Not really. After a few years Rob and I realised we were treading water with proposals that never got made. We both wrote a bit and eventually I realised that I was making a decent living from the writing – but I wasn’t “making it”.’ 

Just as they’d resigned themselves to no more than a ‘decent living’, Mitchell and Webb were asked to do the pilot for Peep Show. Seven series and eight years later Mitchell still has trouble defining his profession. ‘I’m not quite a proper comedian and I’m not quite a proper actor’ he says, and he has mixed views about each role. ‘I find an actor’s need to pretend weirder than a comedian’s need to show off.’ He doesn’t get much pleasure from watching other comedians: ‘it feels like work. What I look for in a comedian is diverting mediocrity: if they’re dreadful, I’m furious they’ve got this far, and if they’re brilliant I wish they didn’t exist’. 

Whatever his own misgivings, Mitchell certainly appears to be living the dream; as well as Peep Show and his brilliant BBC sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look (check out ‘Brain Surgery’, ‘Diana Assassination’ or ‘Posh Dancing’ on YouTube) Mitchell writes a column for The Observer, hosts his own Radio 4 comedy show, The Unbelievable Truth, and also makes regular appearances on Stephen Fry’s QI, Have I Got News For You, and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Still, even with the fairy-tale career, it must be exhausting to be David Mitchell. After our interview he gives a talk to the undergrads of St Peter’s College. As he stands in front of a packed JCR every sentence he utters provokes uproarious laughter – even when he’s being serious. This blind adulation must be irksome for a man who so subtly observes and finely hones his jokes. But perhaps that’s the price of ‘happily ever after’.