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Interviews
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Blake Morrison - A Man with a Number of Gaffers Peter Lathan talks to Blake Morrison - poet, novelist and playwright who is currently working with Northern Broadsides. On 26th August The Man With Two Gaffers, Blake Morrison's Yorkshire-set version of Goldoni's The Servant With Two Masters, opened at York's Theatre Royal in a co-production between the theatre and Northern Broadsides. How did a writer who began as a poet end up writing for the stage? His first "day job" was for the Times Literary Supplement, which gave him experience of editing and journalism while he was, as he puts it, "scribbling away". Since then he has expanded into fiction and non-fiction writing, screenplays, documentaries and theatre. "Well, you know what they say about Jack of All Trades?" he laughs. "It surprises me. For years I had quite a narrow scope, writing poetry apart from doing a bit of book reviewing, and then one poem about the Yorkshire Ripper led on to other things." That was the beginning of his relationship with Barrie Rutter and Northern Broadsides. "He read the poem and heard about a translation of a German play I'd done for the National Theatre, that was just gathering dust." Rutter thought that, with a bit more work and the use of the Yorkshire dialect which Morrison had used in the Ripper poem, there may be a future for the play. This became The Cracked Pot, a translation of Kleist's Der Zerbrochener Krug, which Northern Broadsides co-produced with the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The poem also led to his working with composer Gavin Bryars, another Yorkshireman, on an opera Dr Ox's Experiment, which was performed at the Coliseum by English National Opera - eleven years later! "I still thought of myself all of thsoe years as a poet," he says. This was not his only experience of opera or of working with Byars. He wrote the libretto for another opera, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, commissioned to be performed in Gutenberg's home town, which was then translated into German and only ever performed in Germany. He found the transition to writing for the stage quite difficult, but was, he thinks, fortunate in working with Rutter and Bryars who were looking for a heightened form of speech, not naturalism, and that tied in with the poetry. "But, of course, as a poet, you don't do dialogue, and I found that quite difficult. I'd hate to read the first draft of my translation of the Kleist now! "What I had to learn was that even when you are writing a slightly heightened idiom, it has to be something that actors can stand up and speak. Two of the things I've done with Barrie have been set in the nineteenth century, in dialect, and two have been classical (Antigone and Oedipus), which need the heightened speech." It helps, he thinks, to work with a director like Rutter who has a strong ideas and a company which has their own style. "I feel as though I'm writing for them, that I'm producing a text for actors to work with." The text, he says, changes significantly when it gets on the floor with the actors. "Every single time," he says, "and this time Barrie was happier with early drafts and we thought we'd have less to do, but the minute I came to the read-through and sat in on a couple of rehearsals, immediately you start seeing things that you haven't noticed. The preview for this play is tomorrow night and yesterday morning I texted Barrie a rewrite because they weren't happy with a particular line - and at this afternoon's dress rehearsal, it's quite possible there'll be another tiny tinkering!" His only other experience of working in theatre was with Robert LePage who had the idea of doing of musical theatre peiece based on Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. "Initially I wrote some new translations of the songs but then I ended up producing a text . I went to see him in Quebec and he had a very strong vision of the characters and how they would interact, and so I came away and wrote the text. Very different from working with Barrie!" How did they decide on the Goldoni? Having done a comedy, followed by two tragedies, they thought they should do another comedy and discussed possibilities for some time. "Then somebody came up with the Goldoni, which I didn't know, and when I read it I thought yes, I could see this working." It's no accident, he says, that the two comedies are set in small town Yorkshire and even the tragedies have something of the feeling of the Dales about them. They feel as much Yorkshire as Greek in their idiom and their territory," he says. "Being brought up in a small village where there are only eighteen in your primary school, and then going to the 'big school', the grammar school in Skipton, it seemed like going to the big city." The natural landscapes with which he grew up are very important to him and find an outlet in his writing, not just the poetry but also the work he does with Northern Broadsides. There is another possible libretto in prospect. There is a possibility of him writing for a piece built around the Elephant and Castle, the builkding and what it represents, for the Aldburgh Festival. "If that sounds a bit vague it's because it is. It's earl days yet and that might involve me in producing some text." He still continues with his own work: not so much poetry nowadays but he has a novel, which he's been working on for a couple of years, coming out next year. What of future theatre projects? "Barrie and I are definitely looking at doing Lysistrata next year. I've got a definite idea for it. It will be a contemporary setting but it'll still be a northern version of the play."
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