Episode 11 - The Day Job and the Play Job

One woman, two lives

Hello. I’m Gillian Richmond. I’ve spent more than thirty years writing for UK stage, TV and radio. People often ask me how I got started. This is the story.

Previously on This Writer’s Journey…

No longer working in fringe theatre, I’m teaching full-time in a Hackney primary school. I’ve finished a new play and have asked my partner David to read it. He’s taken it off to a cafe. He’s been gone a very long time.

All stories need conflict, right?

There’s lots of conflict at school.

When we return after the half-term break, a line of buses are waiting outside the school gate. Asbestos has been found in the school and we’re not allowed inside. No internet or mobile phones back then, and the management hasn’t been able to contact most of the families. It’s raining. The playground is chaos. Kids, parents, teachers, support staff, cleaners, caretaker, all shouting to be heard.

The children are somehow herded into lines, and we are addressed by megaphone. We are to be taken to a new school in the buses and will be brought back here for hometime at 3.30.

The Head, Mr M, a well-meaning man who likes to be liked, stands in the doorway and gives the teaching staff a sad shrug. He cannot allow us into our classrooms to collect lesson plans, children’s work, progress records, pens, pencils, paper and so on.

Is he seriously expecting us to arrive empty-handed at the new premises, with hundreds of unsettled children?

Mr M mumbles that he’s doing his best to arrange some teaching resources for the end of the week. The end of the week? How are we supposed to manage until then? He won’t meet us in the eye. He’ll ask the authorities if they can let us have some paper and pencils. With luck, they might turn up this afternoon. Or tomorrow. Hopefully.

He claps his hands. Chop chop everyone, time to go.

The kids file haphazardly onto the buses. Some are timid, some are nervous, some are excited. Caroline is angry.

It’s going to be all right, I tell her.

You don’t know that, she says. You’re just saying that.

Disruption on this scale would be damaging to the education of any child, anywhere. But for Caroline and many of the kids in my class, the only routine they can depend on is rooted in the structure that school provides. With that framework removed, her reaction is to lash out. I can’t blame her.

It’s safe to say that my teaching life is not easy.

My writing life, though, is edging forward.

Cut to David in the cafe, reading the first draft of my play Ellen.

The play is about an elderly working-class Welsh woman who grows so fed up of being ignored that she stops speaking. An idea like that could only ever have been written on spec. There’s no way - at that time or at any time after - that I could have pitched it to a theatre/TV/radio management and expected a commission. A female protagonist? Over sixty? Working class? Passive? Who’d ever want to watch that?

As I wait for David to return, my doubts grow. I wish I’d never shown him the play. I wish I’d thrown it in the bin.

He returns from the cafe. He stands in the hallway. I like it, he says. He suggests showing the script to a director he knows.

I head off to the print shop to make some copies, return to my classroom. To the chaos, the asbestos, to Caroline, and the lingering fears that Gaynor is being abused.

I’m still too new at the school to be told much, but from what I’ve gleaned, the dinner ladies have spotted signs of sexual precocity that have rung alarm bells. The school management have asked me to keep an eye on her.

As far as I can see she’s the same child she’s been since the first day I met her. Quiet, clever, funny, friends with Caroline.

There are days though that she doesn’t make it onto the asbestos bus.

In my other life, the director gets in touch and asks to meet.

Michele Frankel lives in a basement flat in Notting Hill. She has worked with many of the theatre companies I admire and is a compelling presence. With a thoughtful manner, she is smart and serious. I like her straightaway. She asks astute questions about the character motivations in the play and makes me want to sharpen up the script.

I make time to work up a new draft.

Michele proposes we do a couple of rehearsed readings.

For those unfamiliar with a rehearsed reading, it’s exactly what it says. A director and a group of actors spend a few days interrogating and rehearsing a script and then perform it in front of an audience, scripts in hand. Sometimes they move about, sometimes they perform seated. Either way, it’s an excellent way of identifying what works in a piece.

And – crucially – what doesn’t.

Michele arranges a two-night run at the Riverside Studios, a former TV studio now used as a theatre and arts centre. It sits beside the River Thames, in the shadow of Hammersmith Bridge. She assembles a phenomenal cast prepared to work for no money.

I can’t speak for other dramatists, but when I’m working on a new script, I’m writing for me and for the characters in my head. When I hand the script over to someone to read, I have to let go of the intimacy, but my main concern is still the integrity of the piece. At every stage of the editing and development process I’m asking myself - is the story the best I can make it for my characters? I very rarely think of an audience.

But now I’ve handed Ellen over to Michele and her cast - and they’re about to share it with an audience. And I am terrified.

Why? Haven’t I been here before with In the Groove at the Bubble Theatre?

Well. Yes, and no. You’ll remember that my first draft of that piece was put aside and the company improvised the show around my characters and scenario. By the time an audience was involved, there was a wide gap between my original script and what was on the stage.

This time though, every word has come from my pen.

Shouldn’t I be excited? Isn’t this what I’ve been working towards for years? Sharing the inside of my head with an audience? All the nights at home at my desk, all the scribbling in corners, all the teasing and ridicule (what? you want to be a writer?). Hasn’t it all been about this very thing?

It’s going to be all right, I tell myself. It’ll be fine.

I don’t believe myself any more than Caroline did.

The names of the children mentioned in this piece have been changed.

Many thanks to those people who donated so generously to the tip jar at the end of last year. All contributions have now been passed on to the UK charity Crisis.