Douglas
Maxwell is talking about his generation. More specifically, the Ayrshire-born
playwright is talking about the influence pop culture from a few decades
earlier has had on his generation and ones beyond.
“When
I was wee growing up on a housing estate in Girvan, once The Jam happened, it
seemed like everyone became a mod,” Maxwell remembers of the post-punk late
1970s mod revival. “Before that, The Who was my dad’s favourite band. On May Day
Bank Holiday, the scooter clubs would come out, and this was on the back of the
film of The Who’s Quadrophenia, and they’d have fights like the original mods
and rockers had, except now it was kind of a pantomime.
“It
feels like there’s always been a bit of mod around, but it’s been put through a
filter. One minute you couldn’t find the clothes, then Modern Life is Rubbish
by Blur came out, and suddenly it was everywhere again. I could never be fully
into it, but it’s always been there. Fashion is for young men now, but you
still get this Paul Weller, Gallagher brothers thing going on with some men’s
hair. Young people today don’t have that sense of being part of a tribe in that
way. They can pick and choose from all over the place.”
Maxwell
has channelled his first-hand observations into I Can Go Anywhere, his new
two-fisted play that opened this week at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. The
play focuses on an asylum seeker in Brighton called Jimmy, who embraces mod culture
in all its parka-clad, pork-pie-hatted and Union Jacked glory. Taking its title
from a lyric in The Who’s 1965 call-and-response single, Anyway, Anyhow,
Anywhere, Maxwell’s play has Jimmy name himself after the teenage wannabe
played by Phil Daniels in Franc Roddam’s 1979 big-screen take on Quadrophenia,
Who guitarist Pete Townshend’s mod era identity crisis rock opera, released by
the band as a double album in 1973.
Jimmy’s
self-made 60s obsessive encounters jaded academic Stevie, who once wrote a book
on youth culture in the UK. In the spirit of old-school cross-generational
plays such as Barrie Keeffe’s street-smart 1970s classroom-set drama, Gotcha, Jimmy’s
commitment to an identity in such a wholesale fashion makes for quite a meeting
of minds.
“Jimmy
only wants to be seen as a mod,” says Maxwell, “It’s his entire identity, and
he’s got this book about youth culture that he uses as a reference, and the
writer of this book tells him that the mod thing isn’t going to work. It’s a
play about not just being someone from somewhere, but also having somewhere to
go.”
With
just two people on stage arguing the toss, the epic nature of Maxwell’s writing
in previous plays has been deliberately honed here in a studio piece full of
big ideas.
“I
wanted to write a boxing match of a play,” he says. “And I wanted to build up
to this idea of cultural gate-keepers. Jimmy is someone who wants to come in,
and wants to be part of something, but he’s being asked to show his
credentials. It’s interesting as well, because the original mod movement
happened in post-war Britain, when there was this feeling of optimism and
looking forward. Mod was all about looking forward, and now, having that sort
of identity gives you a sense of strength and belonging, and it’s a nostalgia for
something that you’ve never lived through. At one point in the play Stevie says
to Jimmy he’s like the National Trust.”
The
debate Maxwell sets up couldn’t arrive at a better – or worse – time, and not
because it just happens to coincide with the release of The Who’s first album
of new material in thirteen years.
“The
context of the play is important in terms of what’s happening in the world
around us just now,” says Maxwell. “Obviously, there are so many things in mod
that are about Britishness, and which gives it glamour and cool. But there’s an
internationalist element to mod as well, that’s about Italian clothes and
French films and all these great things that come out of Europe and America.
“So,
on one level, mod has become this emblem of tribal Britishness, and in the
play, you get someone coming here for who it means something more. Jimmy sees
something fantastic in Britain through being a mod, and he wants to be part of
that. The play’s using that as a particular allegory, but it’s on the night of
the General Election, so you can’t ignore that context either. It’s a play about
national identity, and who has a claim on it.”
In
some respects, Maxwell’s play sounds like a mash-up of real life pop culture
theorist Dick Hebdige’s 1979 book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which
looked at the various signs and signifiers of youth tribes; and the series of
1970s youthsploitation novels by Richard Allen, one of the pen-names of pulp fiction
writer James Moffat.
While
Hebdige’s analysis appeared in a post-punk climate that chimed with the mod
revival, Allan/Moffatt’s series began with Skinhead and ended with Mod Rule,
with the likes of Suedehead, Boot Boys and Punk Rock inbetween written in a
similarly punchy tabloid style. For Jimmy and Stevie in I Can Go Anywhere, however,
things aren’t so black and white these days.
“I
think, with this play, by fictionalising Jimmy’s experience, I think you can go
a little bit deeper,” says Maxwell. “He’s only young, and when you’re young you
get a lot of strength from books and music and youth culture. The Smiths told
you what books to read and what films to watch. The Jam did the same. But the
question in the play as far as Jimmy is concerned is whether this is an
identity or armour, the same as Dumbo’s feather, which Dumbo believed helped him
fly, or whether he’d be like that anyway. The big question then is about who we
are, where we are going, and how culture is valued in different communities.
That’s the battleground of the play.”
I Can
Go Anywhere, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until December 21.
The Herald, December 12th 2019
ends
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