Dawn King is feeling pretty jet-lagged. The writer of spy thriller,
Ciphers, which tours to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre this week in a
co-production between Out of Joint, the Northcott Theatre, Exeter and
The Bush flew out of Portland, Oregon the afternoon before, only to
find it was still lunch-time when she arrived back in London.
King was in Portland to see a new production of her début
full-length play, Foxfinder, a dystopian rural parable with a Gothic
bent that was a London hit in 2011 after winning the Papatango
playwriting competition as well as a clutch of other accolades. She
was in Sweden earlier in the year to see one there as well, and is
off to Reykjavik next week to see how it works in Icelandic. There
have also been productions of Foxfinder in Australia and Greece.
If such a jet-setting lifestyle sounds like something straight out of
a film, it's also testament to King's expansive vision, which imbues
an investigative depth into popular forms. For Ciphers, King has
looked to a real-life incident to tell a story about spies, double
agents, secret identities and what is described on the play's
publicity material as the 'opaqueness of the soul.'
“I was sort of inspired by the real case of Gareth Williams,”
King says, referring to the GCHQ employee who was seconded to MI6
before being found dead in his London flat in 2010. The fact that he
was discovered in a bag, padlocked from the outside and left in his
bath-tub may have suggested foul play, but no fingerprints or any
signs of forced entry were evident, and to date no-one has ever been
charged for a death which the coroner decreed was 'unnatural and
likely to have been criminally meditated. “It became known as the
spy in the bath-tub case, and was very strange. Weird things were
being said about him, which for me sounded very sad, because
obviously he had a family who were grieving and wondering what
happened to him.”
In Ciphers, this translates into the story of a woman investigating
how her sister died, and who subsequently uncovers a labyrinthine
world of subterfuge, secrets and lies that could infiltrate an
episode of Spooks or Alias without batting an eyelid.
“It is a spy thriller,” King says of her play. “It definitely
has that structure and all the twists and turns that go with it, but
I hope it's about something bigger than that as well. It's about
whether you can really ever get close to someone if they're living a
lie.
“Like anything I do dramatically, I'm always trying to get bigger
things into something that's accessible. It has to work on that
level, or nobody's going to be interested. As well as looking at
bigger things, it's also part of my job to entertain.”
In terms of research, while avoiding watching any episodes of Spooks
lest she be unduly influenced, King read a lot of books on the spying
game, many of which somewhat predictably contradicted themselves. She
also looked to the real MI5, who, as it turns out, have a very good
website.
“It was really useful,” she says. “and tells you all the
different jobs they do. Obviously given that the Secret Service is
secret, there's only so far you can go, and you can't get any closer.
That's what I like about this job, the ambiguity of it.”
There is an entire scene in Ciphers, King points out, which is lifted
directly from the MI5 website, which somewhat intriguingly involves
“someone eating toast.”
While the acclaim for Foxfinder suggested that King was something of
an overnight success, she has actually been writing seriously for
more than a decade after falling in love with theatre while growing
up in Stroud in Gloucestershire.
“I was really into theatre as a kid,” she says, “but because I
didn't want ton be an actor, after I'd done my A levels I thought
that was it, and went off to study for a media degree.”
King moved to London, where she was “really unhappy, so I thought
I'd better do do something creative.”
king went to a writing workshop at Soho Theatre, and was offered a
place at the theatre's young writer's group.
“Someone dropped out,” King says, “and I was next in line.”
King was also invited to join the Royal Court Young Writers group,
and in 2004 took an M.A.. in playwriting at Goldsmith's.
“I was fully committed to it by that time,” King recalls, “so I
thought I'd better go off and learn how to do this thing I was going
to spend the rest of my life doing.”
After assorted apprentice pieces, King wrote Foxfinder without a
commission, but “just to find out what would happen with it, get it
on somewhere and get it reviewed so I could feel like a real writer.
I certainly didn't expect it to happen in the way it did, but there
seems to be something about that story that crosses borders.”
Whether something similar happens with Ciphers remains to be seen,
but beyond it, King is going on attachment with the National Theatre
Studio, where she will be allowed to develop new ideas and “figure
out what my next play is about,” in an environment which gives
theatre artists space to explore. There are also TV and film ideas in
development, as well as more radio work likely.
“I hope that will happen,” King says, “and I think it's
possible to do them all, but I still want to work in theatre. That's
where my secret heart lies, and I wouldn't want to chase TV work to
the extent that I couldn't do theatre. I look at one of my writing
heroes, Dennis Kelly,” she says of the man behind Matilda the
musical, BBC 3 sitcom, Pulling, and even an episode of Spooks while
still writing plays for the Royal Court, Paines Plough and others,
“and I think, well, if he can do it...”
In whatever medium her work ends up in, King's work is possessed with
the same forensic desire to find out what happens next.
!I get an idea, get obsessed and then have to write about it,” she
says. “That's what drives me. Obsession.”
Ciphers, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, November 12th-16th
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Dawn King – A Life in Letters
Dawn King took a media degree before taking part in a playwriting
workshop at Soho Theatre, where she became part of the theatre's
Young Writers Group. Her early play, Garlic, received a reading there
in 2002, with another play, Arrival With Baggage, receiving a reading
at the Royal Court, where she was invited to join the theatre's Young
Writers programme. The same year, King contributed to the early
stages of Filter's show, Faster, seen at Battersea Arts Centre.
Other early short plays include How To Live Forever (2004) , What
Happens At The Zoo (2005), Early One Morning As the Sun Set (2005),
The Bitches Ball (2006), Doghead Boy and Sharkmouth Go To Ikea
(2006), Little Deaths (2006), Worms (2006), Face Value (2007) and
Water Sculptures (2007).
Foxfinder won the Papatango writing competition in 2011 and was
produced at the Finborough Theatre, where King was a Pearson writer
in residence in 2012. Foxfinder went on to win King the Most
Promising Playwright award at the OffWestEnd Awards 2012, and she was
a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, as well as being
shortlisted for the inaugural James Tate Black Prize for Drama.
King is currently participating in the Channel Four television
writing scheme, 4 Screenwriting 2013. She writes regularly for BBC
Radio, and her latest work, an adaptation of a New Testament parable,
was heard on BBC Radio 3 in December 2012. Her feature film script,
The Squatter’s Handbook, won the UK Film Council’s 25 Words or
Less pitching competition in 2005, and her short film, The Karman
Line, is in post production.
The Herald, November 12th 2013
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