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.
Education, Education? – Labour now proposes two instead of three
Presumably having run out of coal, Peter Mandelson yesterday announced his gift to Higher Education in 2010. Mandelson made a decision to reduce spending from £7.8 billion to £7.3 billion and has lots of ideas for how this might be implemented. One of the suggested measures is the reduction of degree courses from three to two years.
“2010 for education is becoming a buzzword for reassessment and belt-tightening”
The National Union of Students has raised its objections, arguing that any cuts lack foresight and will have unforeseen economic ramifications. But recession perhaps forces leaders to assess the pragmatic solutions to the current situation, rather than continuing to spend in the hope that it will eventually solve itself. As with every area of public service, 2010 for education is becoming a buzzword for reassessment and belt-tightening. The government’s ability – and inclination – to accept this necessity is something which should be appreciated, if not exactly celebrated. However, it is the suggested modes of implementation which make this already bitter pill a little bit harder to swallow. The idea that these cuts in spending should lead to a reduction or dilution of the current situation seems to lack insight into the problem and feels somewhat like putting plasters on a flesh wound.
“The government perhaps needs to look back to dividing higher education into vocational and academic courses, and to adequately fund and reward both halves”
It seems to stem from the same idea which led to the consolidation of universities and polytechnics in 1992. If everyone could be said to go to university, this could be seen as extending its capabilities, rather than giving it unnecessary and inappropriate burdens. Abolishing polytechnics meant getting rid of schools of higher education which were directly designed to serve industry, thus diluting their service and purpose in the act of ‘elevating’ them to universities. In addition, the way in which universities encourage students to move away from home – as was much less common with local polytechnics – the move increased the financial burden on universities from the outset. In a similar way, limiting any university courses to two years (particularly those that the intellectually arrogant refer to as ‘lower-value’ courses) would be a failure to the other end of the higher education spectrum. Rather than continuing to extend the traditional forms of higher education, and this leading to a dilution of quality of the intellectual experience, the government perhaps needs to look back to dividing higher education into vocational and academic courses, and to adequately fund and reward both halves – albeit differently.
“The suggestion of limiting university to two years is also to undermine its social and psychological impact”
But as much as it appears to be misunderstanding the relationship between education and our economic future, it also lacks comprehension of the purpose of higher education. Of course, the central issue (as it should remain) is that being given two years to complete a degree does not give time to either cover the amount of academic ground necessary, nor to allow the change in ways of research and presentation which have been the distinguishing features of university level education. But without wishing to summon up visions of Kukui on a Tuesday night, the suggestion of limiting university to two years is also to undermine its social and psychological impact. Many argue that a shortening would be impossible because it takes the first year to bring students to the level which A-levels previously ensured. But it also takes some of the first year to bring about the emotional maturity which is just as crucial to success at university as is passing the exams. Just as university is not entirely about getting drunk, so it is not entirely about academic pursuit; there is a balance which is both desirable and necessary to retain sanity, particularly if not exclusively at places like Oxford.
As I see it, shortening university would lead to under-prepared and under-educated 20 year olds being forced to compete for jobs in the global market, a fact which doesn’t just scare me because I’m a 21-year old second-year. In an economic climate in which graduates are desperately trying to extend their time at university in order not to have to enter the battlefield of job applications, Mandelson’s substitution of a shortening rather than a complete overhaul of tertiary education feels entirely baffling.