Let's put it on: Roy Williams on Soul, his play about Marvin Gaye (original) (raw)

His life story is one of the great tragedies of Motown: the soul singer with enormous talent who was gripped by depression and addiction, and then fatally shot, aged 43, by his own father. Now, the troubled tale of Marvin Gaye is to be brought to the British stage for the first time, in a new work by award-winning playwright Roy Williams.

Soul will dramatise the final 18 days of Gaye’s life in 1984, spent in his Los Angeles home, known as “the Big House”. It was there that the singer would get into a final confrontation with his preacher father, who fetched a gun and shot Gaye twice at point-blank range, first in the heart and then the shoulder, killing him almost instantly.

The Bafta-winning Williams was first approached to write a drama about Gaye by James Dacre, the artistic director of Royal and Derngate theatre in Northampton in 2010, the same year in which his play Sucker Punch was nominated for an Olivier award.

He admits that, despite being “a huge fan” of Gaye’s music, he knew little about the dark complexities of Gaye’s life. “It was really interesting digging deep and learning much more about his whole life, particularity his complex relationship with his father,” says Williams. “It’s such a fascinating and sad but powerful story – the more I asked questions, the more the play seemed to be writing itself really. It felt like a Greek tragedy.”

Trouble man … Marvin Gaye in 1981. Photograph: Eugene Adebari/Rex Features

As well as listening to Gaye’s – often very revealing – back catalogue, Williams also travelled to New York to meet Gaye’s sisters, Jeanne and Zeola, and get their perspective on what it was like to have Marvin as a brother.

Williams says: “I wanted to avoid doing a standard biopic and play about with form a little – push myself as a writer and push the play. The play begins with his death and it works backwards, and it’s his two sisters and the ghost of his mother telling the story. It’s really about how they all dealt with having such an icon in their lives, and them trying to find their own identities and their own selves within the world of Marvin Gaye.”

The 47-year-old playwright was raised in west London. His father left for America when Williams was two, and their own difficult relationship, says Williams, was pivotal in convincing him he could relate to Gaye as a character. “Though nowhere near the same, the relationship that Marvin had with his father really resonated with me and that’s actually one of the reasons I felt I could tell the story,” says Williams. “I could get an aspect of that, and I realised then that we all could. We all have complicated relationships with our parents and I hope those things can make the play quite universal.”

Watch Death of England, a microplay written by Roy Williams Guardian

Williams’ research also revealed that Gaye’s relationship with his father, despite being characterised by abuse and tragedy, was far from pure dislike: “It was fascinating to discover how much Marvin Gaye loved his father but also resented him, and how he trod that thin line between love and hate.”

Soul is the first time that Williams has written a play about a real-life character, and he admits that he had initially felt a burden of responsibility for representing such a musical heavyweight. Eventually, however, Gaye became “just a character like any other”. The play is also the first time that a dramatisation of Gaye’s life has been given the backing of his family members. A film, Sexual Healing, chronicling Gaye’s1981 stint in Belgium, where he recorded his biggest-selling album, Midnight Love, was begun in 1998 but has yet to be finished.

Anthony Welsh and Daniel Kaluuya in Sucker Punch by Roy Williams at the Royal Court in 2010. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Dacre, the artistic director of Royal and Derngate, where the play will debut in May 2016, said that Williams’ sensitivity and “exceptional ear for dialogue” had made him the perfect playwright to take on the Gaye story. He says: “It’s a play that Roy has crafted much in the tradition of all great american family dramas. He’s used this big house that Marvin Gaye bought for his family as the pressure cooker that drives the play. It’s such a unique picture of a family that are are prepared, at all costs, to promote and protect their incredibly prodigiously talented young son. As such it’s really a parable about a family and the perils of fame, which becomes as much the story of any musical icon, from Michael Jackson to Amy Winehouse.”

Williams spent five years writing the play, returning to the script at least once a year to complete another draft, but he says that while his perspective on the Motown singer changed, his favourite Marvin Gaye song remained the same: “I think it would still have to be the first song of his that I ever heard, which was Sexual Healing,” Williams says. “It’s a great song and he wrote it when he was making a comeback. In a weird way he felt he was being reborn when he wrote that song. But I love them all.”