Richard Bean: How & why he writes Pt 1

For Post 34 of Dream, create and make money in the arts I thought I would pop up my notes on a very successful creative, award winning playwright Richard Bean who refuses to define himself into a genre of writing.

This is Part One of the highlights of a Q&A with Richard Bean whose plays include Toast, England People Very Nice and  One Man Two Guvnors. He is now working on the book of ‘Made In Dagenham the Musical‘ and was in conversation with Chris Campbell, literary manager of the Royal Court and questions by us fellow actors at the Actors Centre.

On ‘One Man Two Guvnors’  RICHARD BEAN can divide his life into before & after this play. A genuine international hit changes things but then he got drawn into writing for film. He prefers writing for the stage as the amount of writers on a film project makes it complicated.

Richard Bean’s wiki

Here are some highlights from the pre-One Man Two Guvnors section, Part Two will cover afterwards and I will publish on Monday.

Richard Bean worked in the night shift in a mass production Wonderloaf bread factory when he was 18-19 & his first play Toast was about a group of men in a bread factory, full of laughs and with an uplifting ending. Richard Bean Wilson of Victor Meldrew fame was in it. He had intended to call it Wonderloaf but even though the brand is no longer made, the manufacturers wouldn’t let him use the name.  It was a co-production between the National Theatre & the Royal Court.

It felt fabulous that his first play was produced at the Royal Court especially as by day he was then working as a typist for a stamp shop, a job he carried on for a while after Toast.

He wrote Toast as a work play, naturalistic & in real time with the interval having a 6 hour jump. It was all set in the canteen, he had seen David Storey’s The Changing Room and been influenced by that & the 1970s Blood & Spunk type plays.  He couldn’t get The Changing Room out of his head for a month & then he had an epiphany &  realised he could write bakery stories.  He wrote about very specific characters he knew in the factory.

The English Game was about the Sun’s cricket team. It was like portrait painting.

Richard Bean then wrote Honeymoon Suite, 6 actors – a couple at 18,43 & then in their 60s, all sharing the same stage & hotel room. A lot of writers can quote bad reviews  Eg a critic once said Richard Bean should stay out of the bedroom. This idea that Richard Bean should stick to working men’s plays, or political ones.  Honeymoon Suite was very different & he was nervous beforehand. It was about feminisation of the work place, women became Eurocrats while husband became unemployed.

Richard Bean is very concerned about Europe and  asked who in the room knew who their MEP (euro MP) was.

Thinks European Parliament is a lot like Stalinism and he has no love for Cameron & Osbourne’s England.

He is an unusual playwright, he is shocked when he is called Right Wing – he wrote a sex farce that ridicules The EU.

‘The catastrophe was his response to global warming idea and the incorrect stats from the Al Gore ‘an inconvenient truth’

In truth he feels like an old fashioned community socialist. He is a storyteller.

Question  Do you write plays to communicate an idea?

Answer  Some say I put an idea into a play & then it’s falsely ascribed. But the reasons I write a play are varied

Heretic, I was angry about the green vote I had been wasting – though he recycles a lot.

His university training was in science & scepticism

Global warning we don’t know – its so über alarmist that he wanted to challenge the extremism so he writes the play

It is fabulous fun to get your teeth into a subject eg Al Gore, Richard Bean would get a magnifying glass up against his big tv screen to see the statistics. You can see that the X Y axis would be the wrong way around.

A Reading lorry driver wrote to his MP to say there were 33 scientific errors in the film thus helping stop it being shown in schools.

He finds it fabulous fun finding stuff that’s wrong such as Watergate.

At the National Theatre the stage got invaded during a Q&A on ‘England People Very Nice’, people chanting that he was a racist.  However each act starts with a barmaid says ‘f****** XX’.  As each act was the immigration of the French, the Irish, the Jews, the Bangladeshis and it was about as each new community got settled they then became racist about the new incoming people. It actually had a 5th act originally with the Climate change people in with some Pacific Islanders coming in who wore Penis Sheaths & the final image was a naked penis sheath wearing man next to a lady in a burkas but Nicholas Hytner was not liking that act so it got cut.

He remembers a comment from the Q&A where a man stood up and said ‘Richard Bean says Bangladeshis marry our cousins, but that’s not us, it’s the Pakistanis’ again proving this divide.  He usually writes to commission but this he wanted to write. Nick Hytner saw the title & Chris C said to Nick Hytner -‘just read the first line of each act ‘ and the play was accepted on the basis of that.

It’s a theatre point of view – about how we ignore actually what happens on stage & focus on what is being ‘represented’. Our England had the biggest multinational cast & audience that National Theatre had had to that date.

Part 2

About this series – Becoming a Successful Creative – The Business of Creativity covering all the angles and issues of putting on a show, exhibition or event to showcase your art
This is a series of daily blogs for you on how to dream up, build, market and sell a creative event, gig, festival, book launch, cabaret night, exhibition of rude plastic cupcakes or whatever creatively inspires you. It is time to create and put on that play about your family, a series of drawings about hedgehogs, the album you have talked about making or the short film you always wanted to write and make. You can read the series in order  Part One or just pick and choose a topic that interests you.