James Robson
Mail Order Bride by James Robson
Royal Theatre Northampton, 1997
Mail Order Bride author James Robson is a Yorkshireman born and bred. He still lives in the area, and draws inspiration from the people and places he knows best. On the occasion of this revival of his latest play, Robin Seavill spoke to him about his life as a professional author.
RS How important are your roots as a writer?
JR They’re very important to me because I write close to home a lot of the time. I don’t think you can write without an atmosphere, and my atmosphere is North Yorkshire.
RS Is Mail Order Bride specifically a Yorkshire piece, or would it work equally well set elsewhere?
JR I think it could work anywhere. They had mail order brides in Scandinavia and Ireland. I’d be quite happy for people to change the accents, the place names, everything.
RS In this instance the idea was brought to you by a pair of documentary film makers. Was it unusual for you to be approached with an idea like this?
JR Yes, but it was a nice change. I met David Jones and Peter Cannon who did the excellent documentary about them than then I went down and talked to some Filipino women in London. And up until that point I thought this was just going to be a piece of work, but when I heard of the way they were treated I got quite angry, and that gave me the power to write the play. The thing I love about it is the contrast between Yorkshire and this exotic place.
RS Before the premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse the play went through various revisions and rewrites. Do you think the text is now fixed or is there still room for it to develop further?
JR I think it’s pretty fixed. A play has a life, and certainly writing a play has a time. I wouldn’t want to mess about with it a lot. It was the original director Jude Kelly who kept me working on it. I was quite happy to let it go, like most writers, but she kept prodding me into more rewrites, which were all to the good. And she’s so astute that I couldn’t argue with them or think “Oh Lord, I don’t want to do this anymore.” But every rewrite I did turned out to improve the play, and you can’t argue with that.
RS The theme of individuality, being your own person, is obviously a key to this play. Do you find this an abiding theme in your work as whole, or does each play try to explore new territory?
JR I think they’re all pretty different. People say they’re unusually different for a writer. I mean, this is a fairly banal situation, but the hope is that the writing transcends it. The title is a cliché. You look at it and you think, “Well, we know what this is going to be like,” but hopefully the writing steps beyond that.
RS What reactions have you had to the play since it opened?
JR It’s been uniformly good. There’s been a lot of interest in it, and all the usual talk about the West End. But I certainly think it ought to do well in the regions and practically anywhere. It is a very accessible play.
RS You started with a novel, Budgie Bill in 1968. Why did you switch to playwriting?
JR I think novels are too much hard work actually, they’re too long! No, I’m a dramatist I think. Maybe I’ll do more novels when I’m a bit older.
RS Were you inspired by the fact that in the novel you were more successful in the dialogue sections than in the descriptive passages?
JR Yes. One critic said of Budgie Bill that it was raw and young and so on, but that the writer had a very potent sense of dramatic form, which I took to heart. It leapt out of the page, and I thought, that’s it.
RS How interested were you in the theatre before you started writing for it?
JR I always liked the theatre and at that time I was with a group who were all calling themselves poets and playwrights anyway. So it was quite fashionable.
RS Who are your favourite writers?
JR I love Arthur Miller, he’s my man. I think he’s wonderful sinewy, muscular… like what I am!
RS Let’s look at the radio work. Were you a fan of soaps like The Archers before you were asked to write for them?
JR Well, I listened to The Archers as a kid so that was nice, something good to do. But it’s surprising what an advance can do, you can suddenly get interested in something. That is part of the skill, to take it on. I can’t write for things that I don’t have some feeling for.
RS What differences in technique are there in writing for an established cast of characters as opposed to writing for your own original creations?
JR One’s very easy because the characters and format are all there, they’re all established. You’ve just got to take that on and fit into it. I mean, you can’t mess about with the characters, If you look at Emmerdale now, these characters have been ripped apart compared to what they were when I was on it. I think it’s something to do with trying to get a younger audience and also younger writers on.
RS Do you see them as a good seed bed for future talent?
JR Yes. When I said I was going to go on the soaps my agent threw up his hands and said “This isn’t you, you’re too good for this.” But it didn’t do me any harm, I don’t think. It taught me to plot, and it taught me to be disciplined. I think as long as you don’t stay on it forever it’s a good thing. Having said that, it’s very hard to get off, because the money’s there.
RS Do you make a conscious effort to try and write your own work away from the soaps?
JR I write anything I can get because I need the cash. But if an idea comes along like Mail Order Bride you’ve just got to go with it. It’s very hard to do your own stuff if you get on a major soap or a major serial because it comes around so quicky again. You think “I’ll do it in between”, but the time is so short. With The Archers it’s a bit like writing a 75-minute radio play every month. It’s pretty exhausting even if you’ve got good stories. And it’s hell if you haven’t. It can be a hell of a treadmill.
RS Do you find there’s a kind of prejudice between the north and the south in terms of writing?
JR I don’t know to be honest. I think good work will make its way. But I do know it’s extremely hard to get a play on anywhere in the mainstream theatre. And when you do get one you can be jumping all over the furniture with joy because, you know, it might not happen again for a few years.
PS
The trouble was that the theatre had asked me to interview the author of that week’s play for the programme and I had never heard of the gentleman before. These days you’d simply fire up IMDb or Wikipedia and find out immediately that, for instance, he’d written over thirty episodes of Emmerdale while it was still a Farm. I’ve never watched that show either, any more than I’ve ever listened to The Archers (is it still “an everyday story of country folk”? Was it still being called that back in 1997?) so I wouldn’t have been able to meet him halfway even on the stuff he’d spent time on. But at least it might have been a good place to start.
As it was, I went into this interview cold, primed with just the barest biographical details from the theatre, and it probably shows. My questions indicate I haven’t got a clue what his baileywick is, and I haven’t had the interest (or, frankly, the means) to find out, so I can only hope I didn’t come across to him as dull and uninterested as my questions make me sound.
Another disappointing thing about this, reading it back now, is the amount of questions I asked in relation to the amount of answers he gave. Decades ago I spent a bit of time as a TEFL teacher and during the minimal training period they warned us about this thing called TTT, ‘teacher talking time’. Keep it to a minimum, they said, get the kids talking because once they get you started, they’ll happily sit back and listen to you burble the whole lesson away. I made a bad teacher and would have been an even worse talk show host, there’s too much of me and not enough of the interviewee.
And since I’m in a mood of self-flagellation, when I came to reread this piece I realised that a conversational tic I’ve only recently become aware of must have been present and correct for decades. Instead of just asking an open question, I will often ask a closed question and then offer the other person a choice of two replies: “Do you find this an abiding theme in your work as whole, or does each play try to explore new territory?” It strikes me now as an unpleasant and bullying way of conducting a conversation. The world is not binary, there are many approaches to take, and assuming your interlocutor has naturally adopted only one or other of the potential courses you offer them shows both lack of imagination and a dearth of politeness. So I humbly apologise now to anyone I’ve ever engaged in intercourse with, and solemnly undertake to improve my ways and try not to be so verbally manipulative going forward. (Going forward. That’s another phrase I intend to blast from my vocabulary forthwith. Useful corrective, rereading this old stuff.)
