There is no plan

Richard Crane explains how he came to write The Quiz

They were dressed for death in long white gowns with pointed hoods and long floppy sleeves. The prisoners burst out laughing: “How ridiculous we must look in these clown’s shirts!” Then the first three were led down the steps, their gowns flapping in the wind. They were placed against three posts, their arms pulled behind, their long sleeves tied. A voice shouted: “Load!” Dostoyevsky waited, in his clown’s shirt, ready to follow in the next group. There was a rattle of guns loading, then a pause for half a minute. Suddenly across the parade-ground, a horseman came galloping. A sealed packet was handed to the commanding officer. The three men were untied. The death sentences had been commuted.

The comedy of waiting for death runs through all the great books that Dostoyevsky wrote after his own mock execution. That 30 second pause when he knew he was going to die became a moment he would revisit and recreate again and again, stretching it into dream time, or suspending it so that the present encroaches on the future, or making it last agonizingly through the night.

Thus Dmitry in Brothers Karamazov, before his trial for murder, imagines riding in a cart towards the scaffold, extending the journey across a limitless wasteland where the only sound is a baby crying. Stavrogin’s hidden crime in The Possessed is that he waited, deliberately spinning out the moment beyond the point when he could have prevented the suicide of a child. And in The Grand Inquisitor, the story within the story at the heart of Brothers Karamazov, the judge spends the night with the victim in the condemned cell, justifying the sentence that will be carried out tomorrow even though the victim is Christ and the judge is head of the church.

Dostoyevsky wrote no plays but there are plays in all his books. He had a lifelong love of theatre and was a natural dramatist. In Omsk Prison following the commuting of his death sentence, he assembled his fellow inmates and approached the irascible governor to let him direct them in a season of comedies and pantomimes. Such audacity was unheard of, but the governor who was also soft-hearted when drunk, and was often drunk, permitted it.

The theatre was a military barracks, divided by a curtain sewn together from scraps of horsecloth and old clothes. The seating was rough benches; the lighting was stubs of candles. The criminal audience, “whose eyes at another time gleamed with a terrible fire and whose faces usually looked gloomy and morose”, now reflected a “pure, joyful childishness”. In the lowest, degraded corners, through the medium of theatre, human goodness had been found.

Much later, Dostoyevsky took to performing monologues from his novels. Less barnstorming than Dickens, his voice was light but crystal clear. He could create “deathly stillness” in an auditorium, “complete absorption of a huge crowd in the moods of one man… When Dostoyevsky recited, the audience… completely lost its ‘self’, under the hypnotic power of this emaciated, plain old man, with his penetrating stare…”

When I came to root around for a play in Dostoyevsky’s storehouse of dramas, certain settings and themes cried out to be staged. Confined prison-like spaces, the extended present moment before catastrophe, eternal certainties undermined by the tiniest worm of doubt, the little absurdities and stupidities that release a laugh in the face of a terrible unknown, it was these that set the tone and governed the process of the writing, whether the approach was to be epic, as with Yuri Lyubimov’s The Possessed, for which I wrote the English version, or minimalist, as with Brothers Karamazov, which Faynia Williams directed.

The one was a circus-like, nightmare show built around gestures and banners. Ordinary people had gone mad, out of fear of terrorist cells, and were hurtling like swine over a cliff. Yet within the broad canvas, behind the masks, there were moments of raw and personal humanity shown in close-up, when the theme of the power of nightmares became suddenly very modern.

Conversely, in Karamazov, huge matters of life and death, world government and the pursuit of happiness were framed within the murderous intentions of a family and their dreams of impossible love. Four actors played the four brothers who all played their own father at different stages of his degradation, and also their spiritual ‘father’ who veered from the dying Father Superior in the monastery, through the Grand Inquisitor, to the Devil. This was a close-harmony quartet, a new brotherhood emerging from a long night of oppression and having to learn to live in a new world.

This production toured Europe through the period of the break-up of the Soviet Union. When it played in Romania in 1991, Ceausescu’s death was fresh in the memory.

And with each of these plays real life, as it did with Dostoyevsky, brought its own comedy and terror and merged with the vertigo and raw sweat of real theatre. Being led to the scaffold, trying to extend the present moment, not knowing what will happen next, yet knowing something will happen, because what you believe will be, was a real experience on both shows.

With Karamazov, commissioned for the main programme of the Edinburgh Festival, all the tickets for the entire run were sold out before I had written one word of the play. With The Possessed it was the opposite. The whole production was plotted down to the last lighting cue and every word (in Russian) sealed into the script before I was engaged to write the script.

Either way, the writer’s nightmare was very real. You imagine turning up to the first rehearsal and, despite your cheerful promises and lies, there is nothing on the page. It usually happens after you’ve had success and people think you know the formula and you bluff along with them because you need a continuing career, but in the pit of your stomach, you haven’t a clue how it was done. You may have studied techniques and taught ‘genre’ and ‘story structure’ in many universities, for many years, but the horrible secret is: There Is No Plan. There is nothing you can rely on. Everything is permitted. Suicide is not only possible, it is compulsory. Then suddenly, like the kiss at the end of the Grand Inquisitor, or the vision of bliss at the end of Stavrogin’s confession, all reason fades away and there is a moment of pure light. And you extend that moment for as long as it takes to write the play.

The pure light that glowed for the writing of The Quiz was a naked flame. It was the first play I’d written for 13 years and I felt any moment the flame might fizzle out and I’d left in utter dark darkness. But it was also a signal that I wanted to write the most singular, simple and concentrated of shows. And also the cheapest.

If cost was a major factor in getting your play put on, then this one would cost just a candle and a box of matches. There would be the smell of hot wax and the mesmerizing delicacy and solemnity of candles lit by the faithful in church, or carried by acolytes. The length of the candle would be the length of the show (just as the acts of Restoration plays were apparently a particular length because that was how long the candles burned). The candle, traditionally the metaphor for life, would become the life, and would die. The actor, traditionally portraying a life, would be his own life and, if like Tommy Cooper, he died on stage, the merger of life and art would then be complete, and death after all would be a comedy because the audience would laugh; as they did with Cooper, who couldn’t be moved when they brought the curtain in and had to stay there bulging behind the next front-cloth act, with his feet visible.

In this simple living light I wanted to do two things: to restore the actor to the front line of the stage and to rehabilitate Dostoyevsky.

There seems to be a law in theatre: the more you spend on technology, the brighter, the shinier, the more heavenly your show will be – and the less anyone will be touched. The actor will not die and may not even break sweat. The audience will not be troubled. As they leave, they will step over the destitute, and go home happy and secure. At least there was no audience participation. At least no one forgot their lines. But what if tonight, there is a real-life drama on the stage? What if the audience is drawn into the catastrophe and has to join with the actor in finding a way out.

Years ago I saw Albert Finney’s Hamlet at the National on a night when the technology failed. Peter Hall came on and said the show would go ahead, but without lights and sound. Suddenly we were all participants in a unique night in the theatre. Everything depended on the actors and their acting. There was a huge sense of release.

Theatre is a present tense medium and also an unrepentant jackdaw when it comes to stories and characters. In the extended present moment, anything can happen and with the wealth of fiction, history and myth in our own and other cultures, any out-of-copyright story or character is there for the taking. And for me, this is where Dostoyevsky comes in. Many still think of him as a Russian door-stopper, or a yard of dusty tomes that you don’t admit to having read yet. For Graham Whybrow, former literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, he was the example of the sort of writing (adaptation of classics) that the Royal Court would never consider.

Fair enough, but his characters and stories have ways of creeping in, other than through adaptation (see Katie Mitchell’s new version of The Idiot at the National). These characters are so human and the stories so modern and dramatic, you want to take them and work them into the grain of today’s news. Then suddenly you find personal stories are mixing with world themes and it’s mad but no longer impossible to link the Grand Inquisitor to Tommy Cooper.

You spend many hours with your director and producer, trying to rationalise exactly what is happening and in what time-frame, and worrying whether any actor of note will agree to appear to forget his lines, and to have had a few sherries before the show.

Then David Bradley accepts the role and you realize you wrote the play specially for him and you sit back, in a writer’s dream, imagining the play and all the ad-libs are entirely his, and there’s a chuckle rippling through the audience. Until he dries, and the ground opens. And for an extended moment, in the deathly silence, you see him waiting, alone, on the scaffold, in floppy sleeves.

David Bradley in The Quiz

© Richard Crane 2008

The Quiz on tour:

• 28-30 May Rose Kingston

• 3-4 June Norwich Playhouse

• 9-11 June Devonshire Park Eastbourne

• 13-14 June Ustinov Bath

• 17-28 June Trafalgar Studio 2, London

• 3-5 July Yvonne Arnaud Guildford.

Article published: 27.05.08