“Will half an hour be long enough for
this?” an affable Douglas Maxwell asks the Herald's photographer
following a mid-afternoon interview in the foyer of the Citizens
Theatre in Glasgow, where one of his two new plays, Fever Dream:
Southside, opens this week. “It's just that the schools are off and
it's a nightmare for childcare just now.”
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The Herald, April 21st 2015
If this incident alone suggests that
Maxwell's world has changed since his work last graced our stages,
the subjects of these new pieces confirms it. Maxwell's early works
such as Decky Does A Bronco, staged in a swing-park in 2000 by the
Grid Iron company, and Our Bad Magnet, which appeared at the Tron
Theatre in Glasgow the same year, looked at small town boys,
outsiders and terminal adolescents undergoing some kind of rites of
passage, usually brought on by tragedy.
These themes continued in the computer
game based Helmet, Mancub and the epic If Destroyed True, but they
were all more than a decade ago now, and more recent works, such as
Promises Promise and A Respectable Widow Takes to Vulgarity, have
seen Maxwell move into more grown-up territory.
With Fever Dream: Southside, however,
and to a lesser extent with Yer Granny, an audacious-sounding
adaptation of an Argentinian comedy produced with an all star cast
led by Gregor Fisher for the National Theatre of Scotland, Maxwell
seems to have taken another leap. His embrace of a new sense of
responsibilities is as clear in the way he talks as much as in the
work which has resulted from it.
“The play's been in the works for
seven years,” says Maxwell. “It was written first of all when my
oldest daughter was born, and we were living on the Southside, and
the area round there was starting to change. It was written at a
point where I was experiencing sleeplessness as a young father,
panic, because my dad had just died, so there was a worry about a
lack of father figure as well as being a father figure living in an
area that was kind of wobbly.
“There was a wave of immigrants that
had come in, we had a homeless hostel at the bottom of our street, so
we had a lot of characters on our street, and things weren't
particularly matching up to my idea of what being a dad was, because
I didn't know what being a dad was. So it was written in the middle
of all that madness.”
Maxwell was approached by the Royal
Conservatoire of Scotland, where a one-act version of the play was
performed by students. This was seen by Guy Hollands of the Citz, who
suggested Maxwell write a second act. Maxwell wasn't sure he had one.
“Things had changed,” he says, “or
maybe it was just me that had changed. The area had calmed down, the
hostel had changed its criteria and is just a back-packing hostel
now, citizens had become motivated and more active. They'd cleaned
the street up, the Southside had done its thing with immigration,
which it's been doing since the Irish came, in that it takes a bit of
time, but in they go and they're all Glaswegian now. That had
happened, and I felt like I wasn't telling the right story. That
first half that the students did was bleak and full of fear.
“The play is a thriller, and there's
a lot of threat in that first half. There's a lot of talk of
monsters, and people being scared of where they are. I knew the
second half had to tell the other half of the story, which is a rise
to activism, and which asks the question what point do you get
involved? Naturally I don't get involved. I'm not a joiner-in-er. I
don't sign petitions or anything like that, but I thought, I'm gonna'
have to. I can't just sit and moan about everything, so I had to work
out who do I fight?, what do I say?, where do I stand?, and how do I
become that father figure? The play's full of that. It's about the
fear of a community on the one hand, and the need for a community on
the other.”
While his quiff of old may have been
tamed and his beard is less flamboyant, for all his apparent growing
up in public, Maxwell nevertheless retains a sense of the
fantastical. This element of his work, sired as much in music hall as
contemporary pop culture, comes to the fore in Yer Granny.
Based on Argentinian writer Roberto
Cossa's outrageous hit play, La Nona, Yer Granny focuses on a
diabolical 100 year old grandmother who is literally eating her
family out of house and home, to the extent that the family chip shop
has been bankrupted and the shelves are starting to look increasingly
bare.
“This woman is a monster,” says
Maxwell of a character played onstage by Rab C Nesbitt actor Gregor
Fisher alongside the cream of popular theatre and TV. “She just has
this one instinct, which is to eat. It's a comedy, but with a dark
heart.
“Graham McLaren, who's directing it,
came to me with the whole package, and we talked about a version Les
Dawson did on television, and we talked about David Kane's play,
Dumbstruck, and about Joe Orton. Gregor Fisher keeps asking what the
play means, and I don't think there's an easy answer to that. Graham
thinks it's about the state, but I'm not sure. I think there's
something going on there about a more personal form of selfishness.”
For all Yer Granny's ridiculousness,
then, it too reflects Maxwell's new set of priorities, rooted in
old-fashioned values which his work is starting to reflect more and
more. In Fever Dream: Southside, Maxwell is talking about a sense of
community, not in some rabble-rousing party political way, but in a
smaller, more localised shift in collective consciousness.
In this respect, while Maxwell seems to
have found a reinvigorated sense of purpose in life as much as art,
there's ambition too.
“It feels different for me,”
Maxwell says of Fever Dream: Southside. “It feels bigger, like
there's a lot at stake. I want to challenge myself to write something
bigger and better.”
He takes a rare pause. “To see if I
can get into Europe,” he laughs, the whip-smart, pop music and
football-referencing adolescent once again. “To see if I can get
into the top four.”
Fever Dream: Southside, Citizens
Theatre, Glasgow, April 23-May 9; Yer Granny, Beacon Arts Centre,
Greenock, May 19-21, King's Theatre, Glasgow, May 26-30, then
touring.
www.citz.co.ukwww.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The Herald, April 21st 2015
ends
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