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Interviews
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Peter Flannery - Returning to the Stage Peter Lathan talks to the writer of Our Friends in the North as his first full-length stage play since 1989 goes into rehearsal. Peter Flannery's career as a playwright began in a way most other writers would envy. In 1975 his Heartbreak Hotel was produced by Manchester's Contact Theatre, then two years later he was writing for Nottingham Playhouse (Are You With Me?) and a year after that he had two produced by the RSC (The Adventures of Awful Knawful and Savage Amusement). In between there were plays for RAT Theatre in Manchester, Contact again, Sidewalk Theatre, and then more work with the RSC, including Our Friends in the North and Singer (revived last year by the Oxford Stage Company). And yet after 1983 (Silence on My Radio for the RSC Fringe in Newcastle), he only wrote one piece for the stage, one of the Twelve Tales from Tyneside for Newcastle's Live Theatre. Why? Because his focus had moved from the stage to TV and film. It began with the series for which he is still best known, Our Friends in the North. It was his first work for TV and, although it took a long time to reach the small screen (1996), it opened new doors for him, including the 1988 series Blind Justice with Helena Kennedy. "I honestly didn't think it was a good idea to convert Our Friends from the stage to TV," he says. He is attracted to epic pieces and, he adds, there was room on TV in those days for work on an epic scale. It was possible then to put "big 'state of the nation' pieces in front of millions of people." "You can do things bigger on TV than on stage. The problem with epic plays on stage is that they never get done again. Friends has never returned to the stage." Every time a new director took over the RSC or the National, he adds, they took him for lunch to try to persuade him to write something for them. "The big companies want you to write epic pieces for them, but then they neglect them. I just ceased to think of myself as a playwright." And, of course, the big advantage of TV and film for a writer is that there is no financial risk. I suggested that his best work had always been political but he qualified that. "I'm interested in tying the personal and political together. I am unlikely to write a play which is purely domestic or purely political." And what about anger? There is a lot of anger in his three major political pieces. Has that gone? "No, there is still a lot of political concern in my work but it doesn't shout as much as it used to. Now it is much more focused and controlled. The anger of a young man is not always well considered." And yet his latest play (The Bodies, based on Zola's Thérèse Raquin, which is due to open at Newacstle's Live Theatre later this month) is not political, so what led him to it as the subject for a play? "It's very odd. I had a dream that I adapted Thérèse Raquin for the stage, and yet I'd never read it. I knew the story, of course, but I have no idea what inspired that dream. "There is no reason on earth why it has to be set in Paris: it could be in any Victorian city with a river running through it, and the concerns of the play are universal: greed and lust. It will appeal on a visceral level. I didn't have any desire to bring it up to date and set it in Blair's England, but it rings all sort of bells today. "Zola was bound, as any writer is, why what was deemed admissable in his time, although he duid push back the boundaries. I hope that I am honouring what he might have written today." As Writer Emeritus for Live Theatre, he is contracted to write two plays over a period of two years. He intends the second piece to be a collaboration with other writers, as Twelve Tales from Tyneside (1997) was. "I see it as a version of La Ronde, a kind of dawn to dusk to dawn in Newcastle. There will be a mixture, I hope, of old and new writers and hopefully it will coincide with the opening of the new part of Live's Quayside building." Peter Flannery's new play The Bodies runs from 16th June to 30th July, with a press night on 22nd.
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