The British Theatre Guide: Interview with William Nicholson

Interviews

William Nicholson

Rivka Jacobson talks to the author of Shadowlands

"... this world that seems to us so substantial is no more than the shadowlands." (Act One, Shadowlands by William Nicholson).

I met Nicholson in his quaint 1760s London house. "It was once a shop," he explains. The present exclusivity of the place leaves hardly any shadow of its working class past. It is almost within walking distance of theatreland, where his play Shadowlands, with Charles Dance and Janie Dee in the lead roles, is enjoying a great run at the Novello Theatre.

Fantasy, novels, plays and screenplays

Nicholson confesses that his "perennial obsession" is the question of life after death. His writing is an unfolding attempt to make sense of this life. He is a prolific writer, with a wide range of repertoire, including fantasy books for children (and adults), novels, plays and film scripts.

I wondered if there are boundaries in the writer's thinking processes which segregate the different forms of writing.

Nicholson smiles and explains, "Films and plays are obvious. Plays are for stage, films are films and they're also very different in the process of writing them. A play I write myself and I hope that somebody will put it on: films are a collaborative business. I only write a film script if people ask me to and I write it accepting their input. In other words, they can ask me to change it because they pay me so that's another difference. The books I write for myself and the way that I want them and I divide them into fantasy and the others which I call novels, as a convenient way of distinguishing the ones that I write for children and the ones I write for adults but really there isn't such a clear line. My fantasy books happen in worlds that I imagine myself in, so I can create any rules I want. The novels I've written, that aren't fantasy novels, actually have a lot in common with the fantasy novels but they obey the rules of the world we know, so I suppose that's another difference"

And which do you enjoy writing most?

"Probably books." He ponders for a brief while and adds, "I don't know whether books or plays ... both books and plays because I write them out of my own obsessions while films which I also like writing very much, I write mostly to make a little money."

Nicholson, born in 1948, will be celebrating his 60th birthday this year. Many younger writers may take a leaf from his book. He looks fit and youthful. He emanates a childlike sparkle of curiosity and interest.

His parents converted to Catholicism when he was seven. When reading English Literature at Christ's College, Cambridge he still regarded himself a practicing Catholic. There he also tasted the first joys and pains of love: "Why love if losing hurts so much?" (Shadowlands) may reflect something of his feeling at the time. He gradually grew out of Catholicism and when he reached 21 it was behind him.

His double-first degree from Cambridge no doubt helped to open the BBC doors to this young bright graduate. The BBC employed him as a documentary film maker.

Shadowlands

"Your writing career started with Shadowlands, didn't it?" I asked.

"In a way, yes; I had been writing for twenty years before that - but unsuccessfully, and it was Shadowlands, which I wrote first as a screenplay, which was my first success. I had written the television play Martin Luther before that. It was well received but nothing special."

I mentioned Brian Sibley's book Shadowlands and wondered which came first, his TV screenplay or Sibley's book. Nicholson graciously explains, "He (Sibley) had the original idea to do this story, he also knew much more about C. S. Lewis than me. He's a person with real knowledge of C.S. Lewis, much more than me, as a researcher and writer". However, Nicholson, who had been at the time working for the BBC, was asked by the corporation to write the screenplay. "The name and the script is all mine". The BBC offered Sibley the rights for a book bearing the same title.

"The title Shadowlands comes from C.S. Lewis himself," Nicholson explains, "in one of the Narnia books where he says, 'we are in the Shadowlands', and I liked the phrase, and of course the play is in part an exploration of fate and so that seemed to be a good one… because its also a play about pain and grief and the word Shadowlands seems to encompasses both of these.

"It's got a lot of the shadowy dark feeling that we're going into a realm of pain and grief, but as understood by C.S. Lewis. Saying this is the Shadowlands is in the context of contrast to the true light, which is in the next life. So to talk about the Shadowlands is to affirm the notion that there is a life to come where the true light shines".

Nicholson does not believe in a life to come, yet he says, "I don't reject it as impossibility but I think I'"s unlikely. I used to, based on ignorance. How can we know what happens after we die? It seems to me that it's plausible to claim that the energy that forms us will never die, but I don't find that much of a consolation because my self-consciousness I think will die. I don't believe that after death, what I think of as I will continue to be aware of myself. I do think that the energy that has gone into the making of me, even now keeping me alive, that energy will be recycled. It doesn't vanish."

When asked to elaborate, he adds, "Energy never dies, it just changes. If you burn a house down, the energy remains in that house. Everything is made of energy… the energy just shifts state. The house turns into ash and continues. Nothing is ever lost: you can't remove something in its totality.

"But I'm talking here about physics. My body, the electrical systems in my body, will all continue in some form, all of that literal energy will continue. But I as a self, will I continue? Will I, after death, carry on thinking? It seems to me the answer is no but we shall see."

What about living on through your writings?

"There is nothing special about being a writer. I don't think that writers are any more special than plumbers, for example, but perhaps when you write you encapsulate everything into the words so the words perpetuate. But I mean anyone who writes a letter can last in the same way. Have your reputation live on, or a memory living on, is not life after death. That's something very pleasant to contemplate, but once you're dead, you're dead. But people who believe in a life after death believe that they will be aware after death of their reputation, or their memory or whatever which is quite different. There is no fun for me after I am dead, because I"m dead. I"m dead, I"m not there to have any fun".

Screenplay to stage

The original BBC film which starred Joss Ackland as Lewis with Claire Bloom as his lover and wife Joy Gresham, won the BAFTA Awards in 1986 for Best Play and Best Actress (Bloom).

The transition from TV screen to stage production was seamless. In 1988 Nicholson adapted the play for the stage. It opened at the Queen's Theatre, London, in October 1989. Directed by Elijah Moshinsky, it starred Nigel Hawthorne as Lewis with Jane Lapotaire as lover and wife. The play ran for eleven months.

Nigel Hawthorne took the role of Lewis to Broadway where he co-starred with Jane Alexander at New York's Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The New York Times slated the production and that affected its commercial success, yet it was a success as it scooped three Tony awards nominations, winning the 1991 Tony Award for Best Actor.

One play: two directors

I wondered if Nicholson could comment and compare Moshinsky"s direction of the play with Michael Barker-Carven's present direction with Charles Dance as C. S. Lewis and Janie Dee as Joy Gresham.

"In both cases I was present in rehearsals. In the first production, as Moshinsky, a very good director, was working on it, I had to make changes. It was the first stage play I have ever written. He would say to me, for example, "I cannot get these people off stage that quickly, give him a few more words while I am doing this." So I built the play through rehearsals. So, it was a different experience.

"The main difference is the cast. Nigel Hawthorne was cast as C. S. Lewis. He was known as a comedian from Yes Minister. Here he was asked to play straight. He was extremely good at that, but his comic training meant that about six month into its run it had become a longer play. He found more and more ways to get laughs. He would stretch things out. So it would be delightful, but there can come a point when too much laughter overbalances the play. The play was meant to be funny but it was also intended to be tragic. In this production Charles Dance is not a comic actor but a dramatic actor. So that problem is gone away. I think this production is more moving and more powerful. I am very struck by these two actors, Charles Dance and Janie Dee, who are both delivering extraordinary performances. They hit peaks of motions night after night."

Nicholson points out that Charles Dance is an attractive man and looks like a professor. The physical attraction between the characters is crucial for the play to succeed.

"I think this production is more powerful, the balance is better. In this production I am very struck by these two actors. The physical attraction between them is very believable. Janie Dee is attractive and that helps a lot. In the brief period in the play, when Lewis and Joy are together, when they touch each other, it is more believable and therefore the pain of Joy's death is more moving. The play needs strong actors who can reach into their feelings; I don't know how they can do it every night".

In 1993 Nicholson was asked to write the screenplay.

Shadowlands on the big screen

It had to succeed, after enjoying a successful run on BBC TV, an overall fifteen months of successfully staged productions in London and on Broadway, and now a transition to the wider screen and wider audience. It attracted a dream team consisting of the great director Richard Attenborough and the actors Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger co-starring. The film secured Nicholson and Winger Oscar nominations. Many critics regarded Hopkins' C. S. Lewis as is his finest performance to date.

Nicholson wrote and adopted Shadowlands for all three media. "It is very different writing a stage play from screenplay. In the stage play you have words and actors. The medium of speech dominates." And for this very reason he loves writing plays.

"While a film it is not a medium of speech, it is a show where any speech more than a few lines might be trickier. In the stage play there is a long speech, like five minutes long, and I love that; I love the fact that the main character can come on and address the audience as if it is a lecture and it actually establishes all the themes of the play, and then, at the beginning of Act II, he comes again but the lecture is beginning to crack, and at the end of the play, the third time he speaks it, all changes now. The same lines, but it has all changed and that's the kind of thing you could do on stage. I could never do that in a film; people would fall asleep. In a film I had to bring in more characters, more plots, make it more complex, write shorter scenes. There is a lot of difference".

The audience factor

"Television permits much more speech: it is less intensely a visual medium and TV really enjoys close-up, enjoys people's faces talking. In film, if you do that too much, it becomes boring. Perhaps if you think of what is quintessentially television, like soap opera, they are two people talking to each other, close-ups of their faces. TV is very good at that, somehow it fits the way we watch it from the corner of our living room. So when I write TV films I feel able to be more verbally and intellectually demanding; not as demanding as I can in a stage play.

"It is all about how people watch. With a play you choose to go to the theatre and you pay close attention. You want to hear and to see and to know what is going on. You are very committed. With TV you are not committed at all, you are sitting and thinking 'I may turn it off, I may go to another channel', so television has to keep seducing you in. With films, the main problem is that they are so expensive to produce; all the time they are thinking how can we get million of people to see this? With theatre, if you get hundreds of people to come, it is a success: with films, if you get hundreds of people to come it is a failure, so the strategy is different, the material is different and the approach is different."

Nicholson adds that he thinks, though he accepts that he may be wrong, that a lot of people go to the theatre consciously wanting to be stretched and challenged and made to think things they did not think before, to learn things they did not know before, while on the whole people go to the cinema to be entertained. It is a big difference.

"It was not always that way. There was a time when most of the theatre was pure escapism; musicals still are. I love musicals. Straight theatre, non-musical, has kind of turned to something that people want to turn to highbrow. I don't know when that happened and how. It is an exception to go to the straight theatre just to have a laugh with superb acting. Boeing-Boeing is delightful musical. Mamma Mia! is dazzling. I love operas. I love anything that brings me to life."

Philip Fisher reviewed "Shadowlands" at Wyndham's Theatre

Interviews Index