Bryony Lavery talks to the NS about her new play, based on the Kursk submarine disaster

What is a playwright? Is it someone slaving away alone in their garret at a story they want to tell about the world? That’s the default in British theatre, where the dramatist is auteur-in-chief and his plays (more often than not it’s a him) are mere vehicles for his ideas. “For the Establishment,” says Bryony Lavery, “it’s easy to understand that the playwright is the king and everybody else is a subject or a courtier.”

But as Lavery’s work proves, the dramatist’s role is changing. Playwriting is usually seen as a thing apart from the new forms of theatre – devised, physical, collaborative – that have made such a difference to theatre in Britain these past 20 years. Lavery disagrees. “Writing a play is always collaborative,” she says. “It just depends where you collaborate.” Lavery, who is 61, has written more than 25 plays since the 1970s. Frozen (1998), about the murder of a ten-year-old girl, won the Theatrical Management Association’s Best New Play award and ended up on Broadway. And now, relatively late in her career, she has become scriptwriter of choice for a clutch of young companies.

Lavery’s latest play, staged at the Young Vic, is based on the horrific sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in August 2000. She is working with Sound and Fury, a company that makes aural theatre, and whose previous shows (including the 2002 Moby Dick adaptation The Watery Part of the World) have taken place largely in the dark. True to collaborative form, the initial vision wasn’t Lavery’s. “Left to my own devices,” she says, “I was never going to think, ‘Ooh, I’d like to do something about a submarine.’ But to write about things you know nothing about is a great discovery.” According to Lavery’s method, a play is the expression of discoveries made while writing it, rather than opinions formed before putting pen to paper in the first place.

Kursk has been in development since 2004, and identifying its authorship now is an inexact science. It was Sound and Fury’s idea to depict not life aboard the Kursk itself, but aboard a British sub pursuing the Russian vessel at the time of its sinking. Sound and Fury is responsible for simulating the sensory and technical aspects of submarine life, while Lavery focuses on story and character. So, the authorship is shared – but Lavery has no doubt that the play expresses her sentiments about “the madness of people making submarines, and of playing war games that suddenly become dangerous”.

Whether Lavery is devising or writing, her predilection for extreme dramatic scenarios will out. “Exploring big, horrid, dark areas is great for theatre. It’s keeping at bay the darkness. We don’t want to go to the theatre for a quiet little time, do we?” But it’s not the harshness of her subject matter that has denied Lavery the credit she deserves among theatre’s powers that be. That’s more to do with her being uncategorisable (part deviser, part writer, she has also made feminist theatre, gay-issue theatre and children’s theatre to boot), and because it’s taking time to dawn on the mainstream that collaborative work can be as coherent and compelling as, say, a new play by David Hare.

“I once saw Hare described as ‘our leading playwright’,” says Lavery at the mention of his name. “And I thought: ‘Are we in a competition suddenly? And if he’s out in front, then what race are we running?’” Rather than competing with the big names of British theatre, Lavery tends to adopt an inquisitive, ego-free method. “The way I choose my work is that if my heart lifts, I do it,” she says. “And if not, I don’t. I don’t think it matters where the idea comes from.”

Kursk runs at the Young Vic, London SE1, until 27 June

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website