Writing in the round

In April, playwright Richard Hurford was commissioned by Sheffield Theatres to write a new play. The brief: to celebrate the Crucible’s 40th birthday and to launch a new community ensemble, Sheffield People’s Theatre. In a conversation with the dramatist (see below) about the role of collaboration in creating ‘Lives in Art’ on the eve of the show’s first night, Elizabeth found herself questioning whether writers really are the solitary figures of popular imagination.
How different would Sheffield be from the city it is today had the Crucible had never been built? That was the first question playwright Richard Hurford and Andrew Loretto, the executive producer of ‘Lives in Art’, asked when they began work on a new show that is the centre-piece of the theatre’s 40th birthday celebrations.
“The fact that the play has been created at a time of cuts in arts funding has made the central conflict of the play, between art and no art, a particularly relevant one,” explains Richard. “Such a huge theme has to be debated, and debated hard. My job has been to give voice to the ideas which have emerged and been refined over a period of months. We wouldn’t have the play we have now if I had been sitting working on the script alone, no matter how clear the brief.”
Although the Crucible is one England’s leading regional theatres, debate about whether to build it at all, and what kind of theatre it should be, continued throughout the 1960s. The voices in opposing the plans for a thrust stage were particularly loud. In the end, the innovators won out, championed amongst others by Lawrence Olivier, who lauded the classical roots of theatre-in-the-round. Lives in Art gives audiences the opportunity to reassess the value of art in their own lives, in the life of the city and in the wider community.
How does a writer work from such a broad a central idea, developing plot and building characters, especially when there is a community cast keen to be on stage and under the spotlight? “I was involved in every one of the 350 auditions for the new ensemble and that has helped me enormously with the script,” says Richard. “I’ve had the time to think through how to give every one of the 55 people who are now members of Sheffield People’s Theatre a moment when the audience’s attention is focussed on them – but without compromising the artistic integrity of the piece. From very early on, I thought in terms of groups, not of individual characters. As soon as Andrew Dunn (the actor from Dinner Ladies who plays the role of Crucible caretaker Battersby) joined rehearsals, we could see it was going to work as we had envisaged.”
While not every playwright is asked to work with a community ensemble, all have to collaborate with a director, producer, and set and lighting designers – and possibly a composer too. I wondered whether the process of collaboration erodes a writer’s sense of ownership of the finished script. Richard certainly doesn’t take this view of ‘Lives in Art’, describing the joy of writing, debating with the creative team and ensemble, and re-writing. “I feel absolutely that I am the play’s author,” he says. “I fought for every word. There were many, many suggestions for additions, deletions and changes as the work developed. Some have found their place on stage, many more haven’t.”
It would be easy to assume that dramatists are unique amongst creative writers in writing collaboratively, and that poets, novelists and writers of short stories are distinguished from them in writing in isolation. I’m not sure now this is the case. Perhaps we should distinguish more clearly between the act of writing (usually solitary) and the craft of writing (often collective). Many aspects of all forms of creative writing involve others, as witting or unwitting aid and inspiration: observation, interviewing and research, keeping a common-place book, collecting objects and artefacts.
Even the act of writing itself is not always solitary. Jane Austen famously wrote in the corner of the drawing room at Chawton, amidst the tea-drinking and chatter of Napoleonic-era Portsmouth. Swedish detective fiction-writing husband and wife team Maj Sjőwall and Per Wahlőő wrote a chapter each of their books round the dining-room table in the evening after their children had gone to bed.
Public writing is experiencing a renaissance, with online forums opening up opportunities for anyone and everyone to make their views known. Laptops and iPads have made writing an accepted sight for visitors to parks, pubs and coffee shops. Even in these public locations, though, the screen remains a private space. So we don’t know just what is being written against the backdrop of scraping chair legs, clinking glasses and shouting children. Emails? Blog entries? Facebook posts? All of those, no doubt. But why not first drafts of novels, short story plot summaries and revisions to stanzas of narrative poetry too?
‘Lives in Art’ is at Sheffield’s Crucible theatre until 12 November.

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