HAS Interview

The Hampstead Authors' Society

Rattling the Skeletons –
the Process from Dinner Party to Play

Zsuzsanna Ardó in conversation with Alan Franks about his play, Augusta.

Zsuzsanna Ardó: What triggered the idea of writing of Augusta?

Alan Franks: Hard to say exactly. Lots of things. I wanted to write something on the relationship between a biographer and his subject. It seemed like a fruitful area of inquiry. In general the biographer is on the side of the person he/she is writing about, and if there is a relationship of any kind between the two, it usually means that it’s an official biography, in other words a project that has the approval of the person being written about.

That is apparently the case in Augusta, which starts with a conversation between the biographer Patrick Hammond and the man he is writing about, Alfredo Pereira. But this doesn’t, or shouldn’t, mean that the author of the book is going to be a complete pushover, presenting only the life that the subject wants the readers to see. As the research goes on, and as the two begin to know each other better, the likelihood is that hidden, problematic areas of the life will begin to declare themselves. The biographer might want to speak to friends of his subject. The subject might bridle at this, particularly if they are old friends who are no longer quite the friends they were, and more particularly still if these former friends know where the bodies are buried.

So, it’s a potentially rich, deceptive emotional landscape. I set my foot in it from time to time by meeting people to write about them for The Times. Some are tremendously forthcoming, to the point of indiscretion and beyond, while others chest their cards and develop a rather formal, worked-out line on their personal histories. When articles about the famous and (often but not always) talented are properly done, they can be as rewarding as compressed biographies. Having said all this, I don’t have the talent, nor fortunately the wish, to be a biographer myself. I always want to move onto something or someone else and could never devote the months and years which are needed to do such things conscientiously.

One evening, about two and a half years ago, I met a woman at a dinner party who started talking about having been kidnapped in South America when she was young. She wasn’t showing off; she just dropped it into the conversation because the talk had turned to travel, and children of student age, and South America. It’s a region I’ve always been interested in as my mother was born in Bahia, on the Brazilian coast, and I have many relatives who have lived both there and in Britain. I cautiously asked this woman what her kidnappers were after, and the answer was passports. As you’ll know if you’ve seen Augusta, a similar story is at the heart of past experiences which the present evening unearths.

Then, apart from all that, I just wanted to see where the characters – Augusta, her son, his godfather (the biographer) and the questionable entrepreneur Alfredo – would take me. The first location they took me too, if only in my imagination, was Cambio Wechsel. This tiny country doesn’t exist, although a few people have nodded knowingly at its mention. You used to see exchange dealers in every High Street, with the words Cambio and Wechsel written above each other: the German and the Italian for change. Cambio Wechsel; it sounded as if it could be the name of a country to which Italians and Germans had migrated after the war to reconstruct their lives away from the scrutiny of Europe.

Finally, I felt like writing a play. This sounds like too obvious a motive to mention, yet it’s always the most vital one. I wanted to get these people negotiating with each other, claiming and counter-claiming, disputing versions of events which have been of crucial importance in bringing them to the place where they now find themselves.

ZA: How did then the idea for a play turn into the writing process itself?

AF: Well, that’s it. The writing process is listening to what they have to say; always with you (that is, me in this case) as some kind of facilitator. Chair? Enabler? Arbiter? Pick your own word. As long as it contains elements of both incitement and attention, I’d probably accept it.

The other thing I do – and this is definitely not peculiar to me – is try and make them speak in an actual, audible sense, shouting and crying if necessary. It sometimes means I find myself walking down the road going “I’m not having That!” to no-one, and then having to pretend I’m on the phone when I’m spotted. Too late to change now.

The writing of course is never really finished. Didn’t Auden say (of poems) that they’re never finished, only abandoned? Same with plays. Just because you get into rehearsals, maybe even into the run itself, that doesn’t mean you’re done. Augusta went through six quite substantially changing drafts. It was hard at the time; it always is. Sub-editing your own dialogue is taxing and perilous, because there is always the fear that in trying to improve it you might end up damaging healthy tissue. I sit and think about the changes for ages and then figuratively take a deep breath before trying to implement them.
But looking back, I realise these changes were vital to the play, its character, plausibility, speed, everything. We don’t really have a tradition of professional dramaturges as they do in Europe. Your best bet is to have a good director who also happens to be a red-hot script editor. I got this person in the shape of Chrys Salt, who kept on seeing where the script could be improved and then improved again, and I’m really grateful for this. With re-writing, which is a core element of play-making, I always think “Oh damn.” But then, after I’ve absorbed the suggestions and accepted the need for them, I usually manage to move on and even embrace to the chance of improving the script. That sounds a bit West Coast, I know, a bit like “Learn to Love Your Deadline”, but they’re both true, damn them.

ZA: How long did it take from the idea to the final product – the premier?

AF: In this case, as I say, about two and a half years. That’s the span between (working backwards) now, the rehearsals, the auditions, the last draft, the earlier ones, the first one, the rough synopsis, the chats with Chrys, the notes, the scribbled bits of dialogue, the dinner I was mentioning. It can take much less time and much more. The play before this one (Previous Convictions at the Orange Tree, Richmond) was written and produced all within about a year. I’ve got other stuff knocking around, and the clock is still ticking. Twenty years, twenty-ones, twe….you get the idea.

ZA: Could you tell us about the nitty-gritty details of your writing process?

AF: More knit than grit. Trying to make lines of speech, character, thought etc. mesh in with each other and create some sort of pattern, even if that pattern looks random and undersigned. Trying to weigh passages, stretches, pages “by hand” as a good butcher can weigh meat. If your people are garrulous, go with them, unless they’re taking the mickey and hogging it. If they’re silent, don’t cajole them into saying something you’ll both regret later.

As for routine, I don’t always have one. Sometimes I will write very early in the morning. This assumes I’m awake. I have a day job so for most of the time I have to fit in other writing around that. But there’s the tube journey into town. Not to be knocked. It’s a great, largely untapped reserve of time. Lunch, weekends, holidays. I haven’t got any tricks here, nor any secrets. I just think if you want to do a thing enough, you’ll find the time and space to give yourself a chance. I hate it sometimes, and would rather not do it. But then I enjoy the having done it, so inaction isn’t an answer.

People can get so precious about writing though. Really it’s like a lot of other, less romanticised things. It’s work and it can be hard, but not in the league of being a scaffolder, a doctor, a boxer, a politician, you name it.

ZA: How do you structure your days?

AF: I don’t. They tend to be structured for me by what I have to do.

ZA: To what degree do you as the author like to participate in the casting and staging/design process?

AF: Casting, yes. It’s good to hear and see the people who might be turning your notional character into the flesh-and-blood representation. It can even be rather exhilarating, when you see that the collision between your words and this person before you, with all the stuff that he/she is bringing to the party, can result in something else again, something stranger and more unguessable than the sum of the parts.

Staging and design; no, that’s when I find myself accepting that there is a division of labour, and that these are skills I don’t have. I’ve never wanted to be a director. If I had harboured such an ambition, I’d probably have given it a go by now, and I think everyone has benefited by my not. Plenty of writers like going and sitting in at rehearsals. Some want to be there from the start to the finish. Not me.

The crucial thing is that the director has got a sense of what’s going on, what the play is about, what it’s up to. Those opinions don’t have to be identical to yours, any more than the actors have to speak their lines as you would. It’s a co-operative venture, and that’s the pleasure of it. By not being at all the rehearsals, I hope I can hang on to some objectivity (always a tall order for the writer), and be surprised, or pleased, or alarmed, by how it has developed.

I have a job, and so the mere notion of spending days in rehearsal is slightly academic. Even if the director is doing a really good job (as Chrys has in Augusta), for me rehearsals are slightly reminiscent of page proofs in a book. You see the spreads, the alterations get made, but then the next time you look it seems remarkably familiar. The more so, the longer the process continues. Dead writers have the answer. If the director is scratching his head over a particularly cryptic line in Peer Gynt, he can’t turn to his assistant and say “Could you give Henrik a bell.” I don’t want to further my career by getting dead, please don’t misunderstand me. But nor do I want to haunt rehearsal rooms in my living condition.

ZA: To what degree are the characters in Augusta are based on people you know?

AF: Not at all (Franks told the court.) But then again, completely. Everything comes from somewhere. For a start I wouldn’t have started writing about a Brazilian without having had my own family connections with that country. As I result I spend a lot of my childhood listening to conversations held in Brazilian and English and all sorts of other languages, all at the same time. It hardly means Augusta is a cousin, or parent, or acquaintance. I would accept that her speech patterns are probably influenced by what I heard, but I couldn’t go any further that.

With Patrick, well, I share a lot with him in terms of background, occupation and more besides, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say he is based on me. As I was saying earlier, they all have to go “through the chair,” i.e. through me to a greater or lesser extent. Here I have to fall back onto the writer’s usual answer to this question: they (the characters) will become as they will become. It’s down to them as much as you. Some people’s response to such an answer is that it is tricksy, or evasive, or claiming too much for their trade in the way of strange alchemy; boasting in the guise of modesty.

All I know is that by the end of the writing process, whatever that is, a character is liable to be completely different from the one you had in mind when you started out. In that respect the relationship between a supposed influence and the outcome is like the one between a map and an unmade journey. It turns out to be nothing like what you expected.

ZA: Rattling the skeletons seems to be a recurring theme in several of your plays.

AF: If you say so. And I can see why you do. I hope I’m not too obsessed with the past. I do like the past, but I grow suspicious of myself whenever I feel claimed by nostalgia. The thing about the past is that it’s in the present whether we like it or not. It’s here in the consequences of actions, not all of them our own; in the physical fabric of the word and the genetic inheritance of us all. It would be unrealistic to ignore it.

ZA: Poetry, songs, plays, music, journalism… the range of genres and fields your creativity has found expression in is wide. How does ‘genre-hopping’ across the field works in practical terms? How do they impact on one another?

AF: I don’t know. Maybe not at all. It’s all writing, isn’t it? All I can say is that some things suggest plays; others suggest lyrics, and so on. I really don’t know how that works. It’s probably quite straightforward; you can hear words falling into dialogue, or lines or sentences and then you find yourself going down that route.

One impact I can detect between them is definitely very simple. It’s to do with deadlines. With journalism you have to get the stuff in on time, whether you want to or not. In the main that’s a good thing because it means that any impulses to put it off get nipped in the bud. There are definitely times, particularly with play re-writes, when I’ve given myself a deadline for the work. Rigorous but reasonable, that’s the thing. Not: make sure you do three thousand words before dinner, but more: get the scene redrafted by the end of the week. I’ve got a lot of rather half-baked opinions about genres – too many to go into here – and why certain material can make you gravitate to certain ones. To me they’re all exacting, journalism as much as any.

ZA: Augusta is a successful model-turned-painter – but also a manipulator, and a victim. Judging by the title, she is the protagonist of the play. But is she really?

AF: That’s a good one. One has to be careful about titles. I’m not sure that Uncle Vanya is the protagonist of Chekhov’s play, nor Antonio of The Merchant of Venice. She is perhaps the central subject, though. This is one of those questions which I have to pass on, like a parcel, to the one sitting next to me in the audience. He/she is as qualified as I am to answer it. But you’re asking me, and my own view is that it is Patrick. At least, he thinks he is the protagonist, and he really does seem to be fulfilling that role for three-quarters of the play, until he gets overtaken by the events which he set in train. After that, I think that he is almost inviting Augusta to be the protagonist herself. But by the time that possibility has emerged, the play’s over. It’s just meant to be a snapshot, a real-time glimpse into the lives of these four people, with a long past stretching out behind them, or three of them, and a long future ahead.

ZA: There is a strong sense of ambiguity about the resolution of the climax. We are left wondering what really happened back then in Paraguay, in that shed.

Who is really telling the truth/s? Are there different facets of truths, shaped by the memory and the emotional colouring of the experience? Did these people really meet back then? What went on between them? Then again, they don’t seem to recognize each other for quite a while…
Could you elaborate some of these issues embedded in your play?

AF: Well, I have my views, but again I do mean it when I say that mine shouldn’t carry any more value than anyone else’s. Augusta and her then boyfriend Paulo had travelled over the border from Brazil. I’ve given, I suppose, a set of clues, and I have certainly left the possibility that not all the accounts and memories are reliable ones. To say the least. So Alfredo’s version, that she was complicit, just might not be rubbish, liar though he is. As for her own recall, who honestly knows how selective it is? She might not even know this herself. I would love to know what goes on between Daniel and Alfredo, first on the terrace and second when they have, with Augusta’s agreement (not quite blessing) gone out for a drink together. But that’s all for somewhere else, later, another phase of the four’s relationship. I don’t want to second-guess the outcome of that. For a start, I can’t, and besides, it would take the attention away from what we do know by having witnessed it – that is, the events in the play.

Did they recognise each other? At some level I would say, Yes. I think I’ve passed my lack of complete certainty about this onto Patrick, who says he hoped that her initial sighting of Alfredo might trigger something in her visual sense. It’s a sense that she describes at some length when she describes her painting process to Alfred – how she takes the data in but doesn’t process it for a while.

ZA: Suddenly finding one’s father is quite a skeleton to face. Yet Daniel seems to be remarkably calm and collected. Although by far the youngest, arguably he is the most mature and wise character in the play.

AF: Yes, you’re right, Daniel is those things. Quite a few people have said he’s the nicest of the four. Fair enough. I’ve a soft spot for the other three as well, but I would say that, wouldn’t I. The difference is that they’ve been hardened by their experiences, fallen into styles and roles, developed devices for the management of troublesome emotions, whereas he hasn’t had the need to acquire such ways. He’s vain all right, but a little self-aware, I hope. Also, he’s the future, and I definitely wanted to show that for all the defects and absorptions of his mother and godfather, he’s been rather brilliantly brought up. It does happen, and thank goodness.

ZA: The skeletons rattled are the most profound… short of murder. Facing a former rapist, finding one’s father are revelations in the magnitude of Greek tragedy. Yet the conflict management of the characters is almost overly civilized and subdued. Is the emotional authenticity curtailed or are they (we) all terminally repressed?

AF: Loads of repression going on. That’s the coping strategy for both Patrick and Augusta, and who’s to say that it might not qualify as common ground if their relationship does develop into something more than it is now. Not just repression, but busyness, life, work. It would be rather harsh to describe what they get up to in their own lives as displacement activity, but there is a sense in which their activities, focussing as they do on other people, have kept them from themselves.

Overly civilised and subdued, you say. Probably so. Except when it is not. She does explode actually. And then so does he. He even manages to make himself say “Fuck you,” which must be considered a departure from form. And there is no going back from those explosions. Nor should there be.

But again, we’re not going to see the effects in all their fullness because… the play’s over!

ZA: Patrick, the biographer, pulls the strings, sets the traps, sparkles, investigates, ruminates… and apologises for his declaration of love. The idea of the ‘Englishman’ is satirized, but the poking is rather gentle. Ultimately, he is the most active of the characters, the most in control of other people’s life – although not quite that much of his own. How did you build this character?

AF: Yes, I think it’s on the gentle side. Some have said they find him sinister, and I can see why. People mediating their feelings through elaborate social constraints are frightening in the way an unexploded bomb is. All that hoarded power. It does look as if he is in control of other people’s lives, but I would hate to think that this impression survives the entirety of the play. He’s ultimately in control of nothing, and I happen to believe him when he goes on about the size of the risk he was taking. He really was, and perhaps that itself is evidence of the extent to which he was fed up with being the public face of Patrick that he offers in such a polished way to the world. None of them is in control of their life – not him, not Augusta (though she tried), and not Alfredo, who thought, much more than Patrick was able to, that things were going handsomely for him.

ZA: Isn’t he really more of the protagonist than Augusta, who is more of a passive participant, with less to say and do?

Maybe they’re all protagonists. Is Augusta passive? This is a straight question, to which, yet again, I don’t have the answer. Might her mode not be termed passive-aggressive these days? Has she hit on a victim role for herself, privately and covertly, and got on with playing it? If I were you, I’d be doing exactly as you are, and asking the writer. I frequently have, and been unconvinced by the answer that he/she really can’t be of any further help. So I can only hope you believe me, and don’t decide that I’ve been basing Alfredo on my fundamentally dishonest self.

Bear in mind that the people we’ve been talking about don’t even exist.