It can feel frightening and intimidating for younger writers to take on big political subjects, write big political plays. You sort of feel like you’re stepping into a well-established club of bigger, brighter, older, more qualified writers, and asking, shyly, to have a pop at it yourself. For me, though, that fear has always sort of been the point. After all, that famous gothic building that stands there on the north side of the Thames, jutting upward with its chest puffed out, giving it the ‘big I am’ – that can seem frightening, and impenetrable. As can politics in general. As can history. Part of the journey of this play was to square up to that stuff. To demystify it. Not in a cynical way, not to bring it down – in fact, quite the opposite. I have a deep admiration for our democracy, an affection for the building that houses it, a belief in what it could be. That’s why I wanted to pull the curtain back and expose its soft underbelly. Its vulnerability. Its potential …
I’d been increasingly obsessed with the hung Parliament of 1974–79 long before the General Election of 2010 gave me a handy modern comparison. Having become a Writer in Residence at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2005, and with the encouragement of Artistic Director Neil McPherson (who couldn’t give a toss about what’s considered ‘fashionable’ or ‘trendy’ on the new writing circuit – of which political histories certainly weren’t), I’d been tackling subject matters that I was probably considered too young to achieve (I was twenty-two), areas that were too ambitious or big. The atomic bomb, the Suez Canal crisis, Margaret Thatcher (all this in a tiny space above a pub where casting more than five actors can mean that someone’s getting changed in the toilet, and where, in between rewrites, you’re hammering props together and helping to paint the set).
I’d tackled the Winter of Discontent – which features as something of an end point in this story – in a play about family and masculinity called Sons of York; and I had started to get a sense of the fascinating social, political, economic triggers in the years preceding it. In researching Thatcher for a play called Little Madam, I’d also come across the sad tale of Dr Alfred Broughton, the sick Labour MP who played a key role (or perhaps more accurately, didn’t) in Thatcher’s rise to power. This is the kind of stuff that properly excites me about history – those ‘what if’ moments, prompted by a twist of fate or little accident, where seismic changes in the political landscape can be traced back to very personal stories of human frailties, desires, or mistakes. Or, to quote Alan Bennett (something of an inspiration in all this) in The History Boys, those moments when history ‘rattles over the points’.
The research is the fun part for me. The overnight stay in Canterbury as I plundered University archives for a whip’s private papers; the train up to Sheffield to sit and have a pork pie with a former Labour whip, chatting about old times and looking at photographs; and countless, countless, trips to the House of Commons itself, having tea with lords, a drink in the bars, wandering the corridors, poking around. I confess, I thought it might be simpler. I thought, for example, that there might be one, single resource in the House that listed what Members of Parliament died of, when, and how. Perhaps documents that chronicled the exact statistical nature of how the government kept, lost, regained, lost again its majority in parliament, which members were responsible, when, and how. There (to be the best of my knowledge) isn’t. I was a magpie, using the help and wisdom of those who know better, to pool all this information together. But then when I had it – what to do with it? How to tell the story? All a dramatist has are choices. How big, how small? What to show, and how long for? Who to include, who to exclude? What should the style be, the tone? The form?
And then, with works of fiction inspired by fact, there’s the perennial question about ‘truth’, and the responsibility towards it. To what extent can, or should, a playwright adapt real events, reinterpret people’s actions, re-imagine possibilities? I don’t pretend to know the answer except to say that, of course, when it comes to those individuals represented here, I felt a huge responsibility to be fair and accurate where possible.
When I was studying drama at Hull University, I was fortunate enough to be part of a discussion workshop with the late Anthony Minghella – himself a Hull graduate. He described his process of adapting novels for the stage or screen as being the following: he would read the work in question three times over, making copious notes. Then he would go off somewhere to write, leaving the original work behind him. Just taking his scribbles. It’s an important psychological shift – taking with you not the specific details but the essence of that story, the elements that leapt out and inspired you, but then deliberately distancing yourself from the original, taking ownership of it yourself. Your version. Your truth.
I think, in a roundabout way, that’s how I approach dramatising the recent past. I learn as much as I can, but then there has to be a point when I take ownership of it as something separate: ask what the story is I want to tell, and what it should say, and begin assembling it together to meet that end. Of course I’m making the process sound much simpler and more linear that it was. In truth, I kept returning to the facts again and again, even as rehearsals began, to keep topping myself up, taking in more, immersing myself within it.
Why? Because the truth of what happened in the Parliament of 1974–79 is just so incredible. My only fear in that adding the necessary warning – ‘This is a dramatisation inspired by real events’ – might lead an audience to think I had changed more than I have. The whips on the Labour side did experience this intense, unprecedented battle for survival. The Members who either die, or abscond, or desert, did just that. What happened to the building itself, including the famous clock, did happen, when it happened (imagine my pleasure when I discovered that). And in particular, the good relationship between Labour whip Walter Harrison and Conservative whip Jack Weatherill, and the dilemma they face together at the very end, is, if anything, more touching and wonderful even than I have presented here.
The main ‘artistic licence’ I suppose comes with the conflation of characters. The offices of the whips may sometimes contain up to sixteen members, senior and junior, and of course here I am only presenting four or five. This is for focus, and to allow an audience to become invested in our protagonists. So Ann Taylor, I confess, did not join the whips office from the very beginning of the Parliament; Fred Silvester wasn’t there until the end. Which also means there were individuals who served valiantly during this time who are not mentioned here (but who very often, kindly, helped with my research into this play).
I set myself certain goals in the writing of This House from the off. In finding a form, I wanted to try and avoid narration, or audience address – nothing against that convention, I’ve used it myself. But I wanted to see if I could tell the story of an entire five-year parliament through action and interaction alone; showing, never telling. I wanted to avoid including the ‘big names’ of the period, spending time instead with those people behind the scenes, the unsung heroes. I wanted to write something that was realistic, but theatrical – hence the Members’ Chorus, the convention of the Speaker announcing characters, the musical interludes, and so on. Finally, even though the drama is specific to a particular period in our recent past, I never wanted it to be a museum piece. Instead I hoped to use the period to create something more timeless than that, something more universal, about parliament and democracy. How well I achieved these targets is up to you to decide.
James Graham
2012