Playwrights From England

"[E]xtreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery."

"Give me a Girl, if one I needs must meet, Or in her nuptial, or her Winding-sheet; I know but two good Hours that Women have, One in the Bed, another in the Grave, Thus of the whole Sex all I would desire, Is to enjoy their Ashes or their Fire."

"She who to Heaven more heaven doth annex, Whose lowest Thought was above all our Sex, Accounted nothing Death but t’be Repriv’d, And dyed as free from sickness as she liv’d. Others are dragg’d away, or must be driven, She only saw her time and stept to Heaven."

"There are two Births, the one when Light First strikes the new awak’ned sense; The Other when two Souls unite; And we must count our life from thence: When you lov’d me, and I lov’d you, Then both of us were born anew.Love then to us did new Souls give, And in those Souls did plant new pow’rs; Since when another life we live, The Breath we breathe is his, not ours; Love makes those young, whom Age doth Chill, And whom he finds young, keeps young still."

"I can hear thee curse, yet chase thee; Drink thy tears, yet still embrace thee. Easie riches is no treasure; She that’s willing, spoils the pleasure. Love bids learn the restless fight, Pull and struggle whilst ye twine: Let me use my force to night, The next conquest shall be thine."

"Her mouth, which a smile, Devoid of all guile, Half opens to view, Is the bud of the rose In the morning that blows, Impearl’d with the dew.More fragrant her breath Than the flow’r-scented heath At the dawning of day; The hawthorn in bloom, The lily’s perfume, Or the blossoms of may."

"[M]y folly was to believe movies were like plays; that you can fight for your vision. Forget it. A movie doesn't belong to you at all."

"[Estimating the proportion of the script for Reds that he wrote] I'd say 45 per cent. My first draft was 320 pages. The second involved co-writing with [[w:Warren Beatty|[Warren] Beatty]]. The third I had nothing to do with."

"[On his grandmother] She was blind and her legs went gangrenous, but she was the most important woman I've ever known, untutored and very strong."

"'Strategic penetrations' is a phrase I use a lot for the work of socialists and Marxists in bourgeois cultures ... I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television. That they can write for the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and only that, seems to me a wilful self-delusion about the nature of theatre in a bourgeois culture now ... It's just thunderingly exciting to be able top talk to large numbers of people in the working class, and I can't understand why everybody doesn't want to do it."

"Nick Griffin and many viewers, I’m sure, would have wanted, even expected, me to come across as an abrasive, point-scoring, shouty, finger-pointing black woman. That would have played into Griffin’s game plan, because that is the view of his party. The BNP portrayed me as a "black history fabricator" on its website. There was no way that I was going to live up to any negative mental pictures that it would have had about me, or of any other black woman. Even at the risk of looking "ineffective"."

"Too often, America - the Atlantic model - is cited in policymaking for black Britain. Aside from our similar racial origins, however, black America and black Britain have less in common than meets the eye. Black America is largely monolithic and our roots tend to be Southern Baptist and rural. We have roughly the same accent as a result of segregation and its consequent restriction of movement. We have lived continuously on American soil, most of that time in slavery, for more than half a millennium. (These, by the way, are some of the elements that make Barack Obama seem alien to many black Americans.) Black Britain, on the other hand, is international. It is urban. It has no rural history in this country. Within the living experience and memory of all black Britons are other countries, other cultures. And ironically, because of the impact of biraciality, the term "black" may not define black Britain in the future at all. Therefore, black Britain should concentrate on life as lived here."

"[On the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York City.] It was 1982 when we figured that something was really wrong. It was terrible — a kind of plague. I was 33 and the average age of the guys I knew was 36. Between 1979 and 84, about 35 of them died. All in the most horrific way. What was so awful was that everyone thought it was contagious, so they weren’t allowed in the hospital. People stopped shaking hands or kissing when they saw each other. Ivan got ill in 1983. That’s when the lesions started showing up on his face and people would run from us in the street."

"The last time I saw him was at the Columbia medical centre. I walked past this room and saw a guy who looked about 75 and really sick — all shrivelled up, with no hair or teeth. It took me a moment to realise it was Ivan. His body looked lifeless, like there was no blood or sweat in him. But even when he was this bag of bones that could hardly move, he still said that all he needed was rehabilitation and he would get better. Inside I was screaming and thinking: "How could this happen?" But on the outside I was saying: "Yeah, we’ll see what we can do." After the funeral I left for London. The theatre scene in New York had been decimated, and with so many people dying around me I felt it was important that I made the most of my life. I needed to escape the shadow of death."

"War is hell, and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time."

"What do you mean, funny? Funny-peculiar or funny ha-ha?"

"Viner's pursuit of the Tortoise deal has been absurd and deranged [...] It represents a failure of duty of care to her staff, and crass mismanagement. To value the Observer brand at £1 is craven. And [[w:James Harding (journalist)|[James] Harding's]] Tortoise deal doesn't stack up."

"Viner likes to deny it but there are antisemites on the daily's staff and she has not had the courage to face them down. For years now I have made a point of sending her a back channel email each time the Guardian has published another outrage. It will be a joy to know that I'm not a part of that anymore."

"When she was appointed the first female [Guardian] Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women's issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence."

"I once asked if a friend, a teacher from Huddersfield, could cook for him so that she could put it on her CV – "cooked for Alan Rickman" (it made sense at the time). He not only said yes, but acted as her sous-chef and rustled up a top politician and a Hollywood actor as fellow guests. When asked recently about his proudest Royal Court moment, his answer was not about him: he said it was when he took Rachel Corrie’s parents outside the front of the theatre to show them their late daughter’s name in neon lights."

"[B]ack in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England. As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns. I took the story to the Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled "Islamophobic"."

"Youth crime is an obsession for today's politicians, but in a small town in the 1980s there didn't seem to be much about. I came across drugs only when I met some wild boys from the exotic metropolis that is Thirsk. The violent crime I heard about, meanwhile, was largely distant and always terrifying: at primary school I was petrified of the Yorkshire Ripper until he was caught in 1981; later I was deeply troubled by the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh in 1986. The crimes the young people I knew were committing were the taping of the Top 20 from the radio (which was made especially glamorous because of the urban myth that someone from Leeds had gone to jail for it), underage drinking and smoking dope. No one I knew was arrested. However, my diary held a pleasing reminder that even a goody-two-shoes high-achiever like me got into trouble with the law. Our school, a Yorkshire state school, had made it to the London finals of a debating competition, previously the preserve of top public schools. The team was Simon, my political enemy (he was Tory, I was Labour; today he is a New Labour councillor), and me. We won, and to celebrate Simon and I and our supporters took over a flat in Fleet Street to which someone had the key, drank until the sun came up and were visited by the police at 5am, just as a fellow pupil was demonstrating how to wear an elephant-trunk thong he had bought earlier. Who could complain about the youth of today?"

"The second low point, I remember very clearly, was on February 9. I was way behind schedule, so took a day's holiday from work with the aim of reading three novels - one each in the morning, afternoon and evening. The first book was Anne Tyler's fabulous The Amateur Marriage, which was about mistakes and regret and which I found deeply affecting. I cried in my local cafe. The second book was Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, a superb but cruel book about terrible things. I sobbed the entire time I was reading it. This was in a different cafe. That evening, at home, I read Stella Duffy's devastating novel about terminal cancer and death, and how it is worse to die than be left behind, and, well, I could hardly walk. The trouble with really good novels is that they make you engage, make you experience the emotions of the characters as if they were your own. It was a terrible day, and yet these remained three favourites for me throughout the judging process."

"[On preparing the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie with Alan Rickman] But the quantity of the material left us with a series of questions. How much of Rachel’s life before she went to Gaza should we include? And should we quote other people? The trend in political theatre, from David Hare’s The Permanent Way to Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo, is journalistic: the use of testimony, of interviews and on-the-record material rather than invention. But for us there could be no re-interviewing to fill in the gaps. We had a finite amount of words to work with, as Rachel was dead. I was very keen to use some of the emails that Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig, sent to their daughter while she was in Gaza. They are full of the kind of worries any parent might have if their child was in a dangerous situation, but because Rachel never came home, they have a devastating poignancy. ... And what about the voices of Rachel’s friends? I interviewed many fellow ISM activists, most of whom have been deported from Israel since her death. We watched tapes of two of the moving memorial services: one in Gaza, which was shot at by the Israeli army, another in Olympia. We viewed documentaries on the subject, most notably Sandra Jordan’s powerful The Killing Zone, and considered using video grabs. But in the end the power of Rachel’s writing meant that, apart from a few short passages quoting her parents and an eye witness report of her death, her words were strong enough to stand alone."

"Say no to the mutilation of your flesh with knives, vacuum suction and poison, and that means you are irresponsible."

"I must respect myself; after all, I wash my hair with Fructis. Similar justifications lie behind the rise in cosmetic surgery (up 50% in the past five years in Britain): that it makes women feel better about themselves, complete, free from their flaws. While women flock to surgeons to have gruesome operations with often calamitous consequences, while cosy Boots the chemist offers injections of poison to paralyse expression muscles in the face, the surgery spin meisters sell it as a quasi-feminist act to take control of your body."

"The classic example of such a coloniser was Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed's seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical things to say on the "mind of the Oriental". But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam treated women. It was Islam's degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was the "fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation," he said. The Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilised" by disposing of the veil. And what did this forward-thinking, feminist-sounding veil-burner do when he got home to Britain? He founded and presided over the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, which tried, by any means possible, to stop women getting the vote. Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian mores represented the pinnacle of civilisation, and set about implementing this model wherever they went - with women in their rightful, subservient place, of course. They wanted merely to replace eastern misogyny with western misogyny."

"Being open can bring you great scoops, too. My favourite example of this was during the 2009 London protests against the G20 meeting, when our reporter, Paul Lewis, was investigating what happened to a newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who had collapsed and died while walking through the protests. The pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. We were searching for eyewitnesses. We put callouts on Twitter and on the Guardian site, and within hours Paul was contacted by a Guardian reader in the US. This man was an investment fund manager who had been in London on business; he'd slipped out of his meetings to have a look at the protests, and film them on his smartphone. On reading our callout at his home in New York, he looked back at his footage, and discovered very clear images showing Ian Tomlinson being shoved to the ground by a policeman. As you can imagine, it was a big scoop. Although the police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, he was later dismissed for gross misconduct. The pathologist has been struck off. In August the police settled a civil action by the Tomlinson family by issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay compensation. None of this would have happened if the Guardian hadn't been open to the web, with international reach."

"So, there's a total disconnect now between the ruling group and the masses and the masses have got to show some stomach for once, and they've got to be prepared to vote for radical people who will clear out New Labour. Here in the north, in the south, in the east and the west outside England, within Britain and elsewhere. Clear them out! And the Tories will do no good either. You’ve got to clear them out. The Liberals are just a bloc in between the two that give the other two their ideas, all the sort of destructive ideas that Phillips is in favor of and that I talked about earlier. You've got to clear them out as well. There needs to be a new start! And it won’t be UKIP and it won’t be the Greens, even though there are good ideas which are Green and the idea of leaving the European Union (the UKIP option) is an attractive one that should be supported. But there is only really one option for this country and that is to vote for a party that is patriotic, which is British, which is elitist, which is nationalistic, which believes that the only socialism or the only social concern that really is validated by history, by genetics, by identity is patriotism."

"The danger of the ideology of the victim, which I don't really subscribe to except as a tactic on occasion, is that you begin to think like a victim, and you begin to act like a victim. Many of our people now are almost asking for a whipping, asking for a collective beating, asking to be forgiven for the past, asking to be forgiven for sins and crimes of the past which they never committed, which they’re hardly aware of, which can be reconstrued as episodes of heroic cruelty or glorious vanguardism that don't even need to be apologised for in the past or in the present."

"[[Germaine Greer|[Germaine] Greer]]'s new book is an exciting reminder of how discrimination against women stops them, physically, from being 'the whole woman'. 'Your cellulite is you,' she says. It might sound obvious; but what a thrill to talk about owning our bodies, about being who we are. This is where the equality-seekers get it wrong, and liberationists like Greer get it right. Because how we feel about our bodies has an impact on whether we get paid the same. Of course we'll never get equal status if we're spending all our time and energy worrying about our thighs. Of course we'll never get equal pay if we ask for it wearing a baby-doll slip. What has equality legislation done for women anyway? The Equal Pay Act came into force 29 years ago and yet a woman still earns 79p for every £1 a man earns doing the same job. Women may be entering the workforce in record numbers, but with little pay and no security. Saying we should concentrate only on equal pay doesn't even get you equal pay."

"The point of the New Right is to support all discourses that portend to inequality. If the Right believes in anything it believes in the moral goodness of inequality in all forms, and therefore we support discourse that manifests inegalitarianism and inequality."

"This mantle of the heroic whereby Right-wing existentialists like Captain America fight against the extreme Right in accordance with democratic values is one of the interesting tricks that’s played with the nature of the heroic... They’ve always known this. Michael Moorcock, amongst others, speaks of the danger of subliminal Rightism in much fantasy writing where you can slip into an unknowing, uncritical ultra-Right and uncritical attitude towards the masculine, towards the heroic, towards the vanquishing of forces you don’t like, towards self-transcendence, for example."

"The scandal of the medicalisation of birth is not new; from the 1960s, activists such as Ina May Gaskin and Sheila Kitzinger have fought against the interventionist tide that sees birth as an illness, rather than part of a woman's "wellness cycle". But it is a scandal that has reached extraordinary proportions: in 30 years, the Caesarean rate in Britain has more than trebled; one baby in five is now delivered this way. (The US figure varies from 50% for healthy, middle-class women in their 30s and 40s in private hospitals, to between 1% and 15% for those in public hospitals.) Of course, Britain is different from America in that the market does not rule healthcare - US hospitals get a $1,000 bonus for every epidural requested. But the story is absolutely relevant here, with doctors under increasing pressure to avoid litigation, a severe shortage of midwives, the increasing popularity of elective Caesareans for women who are constantly told that vaginal childbirth is traumatic and terrible, and the threats of private interests entering the health service."

"If people with our sorts of values ruled modernity, everything about this society would be at one level the same, and in every other respect completely different. People would still drive contemporary cars, there'd still be jets, and there'd still be supercomputers and so on, but the texture and the nature of life would be different in every respect. How so? Firstly, cultures would be mono-ethnic. Secondly, there would be a respect for the past glories of our civilisation. Thirdly, we would not preface every attempt to be strong by saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for what we have done..." We're not sorry! And we've stepped over the prospect of being sorry."

"We have become subordinate to the United States, and those in our clerisy, our elite, who think that the United States isn't the answer, want to get closer to Europe as an alternative model. In other words, whatever model they choose, Britain isn't in the middle or the first port of call, because they believe that Britain is over. They believe they can rule over the ruins, but it's the culture of the ruins that ruins the culture."

"What do we think should be done with the murderers of Baby P? Yes, we should hang them until they are dead, and we should let the masses see it, and we should televise it and put it on before Question Time."

"But the truth of the matter is the more English you become through remembrance and historicism and identification, the more British you are. And the more British you are, the more European you are. And by European, I mean White. Nothing to do with an endorsement of the politics of the European Union. And the more you esteem and value yourself the more you will be interested in the culture of your own people and what they have achieved."

"People are unequal! 75% of it's genetic and biological. Partly criminality's biological; predispositions to drug addictions are biological; intelligence is biological; beauty is biological; ferocity or a predisposition to it is biological; intellect is biological. You can do a bit, but you're born to be what you are, and we should celebrate what we were born to be."

"Everything is ideological. Every BBC news broadcast is totally ideological, and is in some respects a soft form of Communism, which is what liberalism is... If I was running the BBC, it would be slightly different from what's on tonight."

"Liberalism is moral syphilis, and I'm stepping over it!"

"This is where you wind up when you view this conflict in monochrome, as a clash of right v wrong. Because the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land. So, this is not a football game. It has no need for spectators who root for one team against the other, goading their chosen side to go to ever further extremes. This is not a game, for one grimly obvious reason. There are no winners – only never-ending loss."

"Yes, some in Hamas say they want political negotiations, but past experience suggests if there's a chance of an agreement that entails any outcome other than the annihilation of Israel, then the maximalists of Hamas will veto it with violence. Israel has its own saboteurs, its own maximalists. Several of them are inside Netanyahu's ultra-right government, ministers sharing their macabre fantasies of a flattened Gaza on social media, the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, men apparently determined to deepen the current violence by ensuring it spreads to the West Bank and inside Israel itself."

"[[Keir Starmer|[Keir] Starmer]]'s message was that he knew the country had put Labour in chiefly to get the Tories out – but that he hoped that he might, through a spell of solid governance, secure the public's trust. It is an unusual kind of political logic – having won an election, he now hopes to win over the people – but it fits the times. Britons are exhausted, wary and sceptical. They have seen the big promises, charismatic performers and grand schemes – Brexit, levelling up – all come to nothing."

"But Hamas can enjoy a wicked smile of satisfaction: it laid a deadly trap – and Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel right into it."

"Some have taken this episode as a cue to assert that no one knows more about racism than Jews, that no one has suffered more than we have. This is to play Abbott's game, to assert that there is a "hierarchy of racism", and that my pain trumps yours. But this is not a competition; and if it is, it's not one any of us would want to win. Instead, we should join hands with those who, like us, have endured racism and hatred for a long time. Jews, black Britons, Asian Britons, Muslims, Irish people, Travellers – we have one big, sad thing in common. Those who hate one of us tend to hate us all."

"When it comes to Diane Abbott, two important things need to be said first. One is that as the first black woman elected to parliament, she will always have an important place in the political history of this country. The other is that, according to one study, she receives more abuse, both racist and sexist, than any other woman in parliament, and by some distance. Yet both of those facts only make her letter all the more dispiriting, even baffling. How could someone with such direct experience of racism show such little understanding of how it works for people who are not the same as her?"

"The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory."

"The Republican party’s shift away from democratic norms is no longer confined to one man, even if he embodies it and accelerates it. It is embedded in the ethos of the party now. Reversing that trend is a daunting prospect because of another shift, one that has been apparent for a while but which is taking especially vivid form in these midterm elections. It is the polarisation of information, so that Americans now exist in two distinct spheres of knowledge, each one barely touching the other."

"[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ... The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [[Margaret Hodge|[Margaret] Hodge]], it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war."