Playwright David Eldridge: The only way is Essex (original) (raw)

Over the last 15 years, David Eldridge has had plays staged at the National, Royal Court, Donmar Warehouse, Bush and Hampstead theatres. It's an impressive list, and one that might lead rivals to view the 38-year-old as a darling of artistic directors – but Eldridge has experienced spectacular knockbacks.

Last year's The Stock Da'Wa, a response to concerns about terrorism, was staged at Hampstead because the National, Eldridge says, "hated and rejected it", as did the Royal Court. The Court had staged his Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness (2005), which explores the consequences of a murder, but only after having cancelled another production when the then artistic director, Ian Rickson, and the literary manager, Graham Whybrow, heard a reading and lost confidence in the script.

Theatrical gossip has suggested that the absence of another Eldridge play in the Royal Court schedules until now (outgoing artistic director Dominic Cooke will direct his new play, In Basildon) resulted from that on-off production, with a reconciliation possible only under a new artistic regime. The playwright, who considers each question with the fixed-eyed concentration of a tennis player receiving serve and a thoughtful pause before replying, says this rumour is untrue: "I was annoyed with the Court at the time. But I never fell out with them. Ian Rickson's a great mate of mine. I was a bit peed off at first, but you just have to be sanguine about these things. The world is full of rejection for writers. They put the play on eventually." The staged text was scarcely changed from the one that had caused cold feet, and Eldridge insists there was no falling out. "I was asked to write another play for the Court but I was working on Market Boy for the National."

Eldridge has travelled from Lancashire, where he now lives, to rehearsals in south London, though he and his latest play – which turns on tensions between three generations of a working-class family over two decades – strongly retain the accent of Romford in Essex, where he grew up; these are his roots. Several times he says: "I don't want to write plays for the cognoscenti."

Eldridge expands on this in the preface to Plays 2, an anthology of his recent work published this week. (Edward Bond was an early literary hero, and the playwrights share a fondness for combative book introductions.) Eldridge's new collection includes Market Boy, a panorama of the Thatcher era set around Romford market in the 80s, which Nicholas Hytner commissioned and directed for the National's Olivier stage (its largest) in 2006. In his introduction, the playwright explains that he wanted to write "an anti-National theatre play ... to swing a wrecking ball into the pre-existing and complacent notions of what made an Olivier play or a state-of-the-nation play at that time." He set out to write the opposite of that sort of drama, "most likely written by David Hare", with its "soothing Guardian editorial-style moral message to the liberal theatregoing cognoscenti".

Did he admit this mission to Hytner? "Yes, I pretty much did tell him." And did he admit that it was an anti-David Hare play? "Oh, no, no. It wasn't. I was just giving him as an example of the state-of-nation plays that had gone before. I have no problem with David at all." Yet, despite this diplomatic gloss, there seems to me a clear and fierce argument, in his comments about Hare and elsewhere, with the class bias of English theatre.

"Yes," Eldridge accepts. "I do have an argument with that. It was really, really important to me to hear people speaking like me on the Olivier stage. If you're saying a theatre is a national theatre, you need to make it as national as you possibly can. The point about Market Boy – and, to an extent, In Basildon as well – is that these kind of people had always been under-represented on the stage." He was pleased when research revealed that 30% of Market Boy's audience were NT first-timers and, from the postcodes given by online bookers, that "there were a large number from Basildon".

Rather more than a third of Eldridge's own literary sensibility comes from Romford. In Basildon takes Chekhovian elements – the sale of a house, the consequences of a will, an aspiring playwright in the family – and replants them amid the soil and voices of Essex. The West Ham anthem I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles is sung at a crucial point; the 1992 Tory victory in Basildon, which signalled John Major's unexpected election victory, is also significant. Property, and the possibilities of social mobility it brings, is the binding theme.

"On the one hand, I'm the only Guardian reader in the family," Eldridge explains. "And I can often feel ambivalent about the politics and part of the world I come from. But, on the other hand, it's where I come from, and I love those people and I want to protect and celebrate them, too. Because of my education and my work in the theatre, there's always going to be that contradiction in my life. But I think it's great for a play to come from an unresolved question. In one way, the play is asking: why am I still so knotted up about this after all these years?"

The class radar that pings and blips through Eldridge's writing is complicated by the fact that he was technically a public schoolboy. With the help of a scholarship, he attended the 500-year-old Brentwood School in Essex, where, as he notes, he followed "Jack Straw, Noel Edmonds and Frank Lampard". Was class an issue there? "It was for me. I felt I stuck out. I realised recently that I've always disliked cricket because, although I got my school uniform for free, my mum and dad had to pay for sports kit. And that wasn't too bad in the winter terms: Michaelmas and Lent. But, in the summer, cricket takes so much kit. Even at the age of 12, I could feel the arguments about money on my back. And I've never been able to shake off my hatred of the game."

At Brentwood, he took GCSE Drama "because, frankly, I thought it would be a bit of a doss", but was enthused by a sixth-form trip to John Wood's King Lear at the Barbican. "To be honest, I was dreading it, thinking: fucking Shakespeare. And we'd read it was an uncut production, so, four hours. But just before the lights went down, a bloke whispered to me, 'Someone gets his eyes pulled out in this.' I surfaced later and couldn't believe what I'd seen. There's a thing in John Osborne about wanting to give the audience a 'lesson in feeling'. I had a lesson in feeling that night, and that's what I suppose I really aspire to: that really big emotional experience."

Eldridge believes – and most critics would agree – that he fulfilled that ambition last year, with The Knot of the Heart, in which Lisa Dillon played a middle-class heroin addict whose mother, desperate not to lose her, pays for and sources the drug. (The play won the Offie, or Off West End Theatre award, for best play last Sunday.) A graphic drug-taking scene left some theatre-goers reeling. "Every other night, for the whole run, someone fainted – and they didn't even see her inject."

Eldridge had begun to stand out from the crowd of younger dramatists with Under the Blue Sky (2005), which, unusually for a play of such recent vintage, has already been revived, including a 2008 West End run starring Catherine Tate. It established what has become his signature style of gripping story told through daring form: each of the three acts is set in a different location and year, and features two separate characters who are all teachers but apparently unconnected. Even this play, though, was part of Eldridge's impressive record of rejections. "Mike Bradwell, at the Bush, absolutely hated it. I put it in a drawer, didn't do anything to it. Nine months later, the Royal Court read it and accepted it."

Beyond Essex, the other key location in Eldridge's career so far has been Scandanavia: he has adpated Ibsen's plays The Wild Duck, John Gabriel Borkman and The Lady and the Sea; this spring, the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester will stage his reworking of Strindberg's Miss Julie. Just as The Knot of the Heart was written specifically for Lisa Dillon, his Miss Julie has been inspired by the actor playing the Swedish hot-blood, Maxine Peake. "We knew Maxine was doing it; that was a great help, thinking of Maxine's sensuality: she's got a great neck, great shoulders. And, once I was able to think of Miss Julie in that way, I kind of was off."

Tom Stoppard recently commented that he "doesn't have a Twitter machine". Eldridge has; he recently using it to reveal the birth of his first child, Bertie. Would he use it to engage with theatregoers about a play? "No. It's a part of modern discourse. I've had arguments on Twitter and blogs about other people's work, or the culture in general. But I think you're on a hiding to nothing getting involved in a fight on Twitter with some random stranger who hasn't liked your play. So I'd avoid it."

The playwright's biggest arguments are with himself – class, the past, the place from which he comes. In Basildon should leave theatre-goers hoping, in the nicest possible way, that David Eldridge never fully resolves them.