Playwright Douglas Maxwell tells us about 10 things that changed his life...
1. A Face at the Window
WE didn’t have a car, so our messages were brought round by a guy in a van. After my mum unpacked them, I would take the cardboard box into the garden and play with it.
I was flying an X-Wing. I was driving K.I.T.
One day I saw a face at a window, watching me. We were in a row of four terraced council houses, with another row directly behind and a row to the side. Loads of windows. Loads of faces that might be looking out.
I couldn’t play anymore. It wasn’t an X-Wing. It wasn’t Knight Rider. It was just a box. And I was just sitting in it.
2. Oliver
WHEN you were in the school show, you got a week off normal classes to rehearse. I realised that the people in those rehearsals were my favourite people in the entire building.
Not just the people who were desperate to perform, but the people who were petrified of performance but were drawn to it anyway. The musicians, the artists, the technicians, the folk who were there just for the daft laugh and the skive.
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I met people in that show who are still my best pals now. We played in bands, we organised discos. We shared every cool book, film or TV show that excited us.
In a small town, that kind of tribe spans the age groups. We were drawn together by our desire for culture – not that we would say it like that.
We didn’t have the culture we wanted in Girvan back then. So we made it up.
3. Stirling University
I CARRIED that small-town DIY attitude to Stirling. My friend and I started a theatre company. We started the Musical Society. I started bands. I organised comedy nights.
I acted in plays. I directed plays. I produced plays. And then, finally, I wrote a play.
4. The Performing Arts Lab 1998
I’D been writing plays for years, with little to show for it.
I was working in a computer games shop and sleeping in my friend’s kitchen in Mount Florida. I was on the verge of chucking it all when I was chosen to go down to Kent for a residential writing workshop about making theatre for younger audiences.
On the first night they read out the play that I’d submitted, Decky Does a Bronco. I wrote Helmet there over the next week and planned out Our Bad Magnet. I got an agent.
On the train back to Scotland, I knew for a fact, that after all this time, I was starting [my life].
5. Variety
BETWEEN 2000 and 2002, I’d had three hit plays, two revivals and five commissions. I’d been on the front of The Guardian magazine and had a BBC documentary made about me.
I was lost. My ego was a monster. I was drinking and swaggering and terrified and behaving badly.
The reason was I had no idea how I wrote those plays. So, in the absence of craft or any sure idea of why I was writing in the first place, I guessed. Which doesn’t work.
Variety was a tedious, pretentious, messy, unstageable, shallow script.
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Fine. It happens. Except it was also the main play of the Edinburgh International Festival.
The critics went to town. The theatre world openly rejoiced. All my commissions were taken back. Two shows that had been scheduled for production, quietly disappeared. I was a punchline. The only person in theatre-land who contacted me over the next six months was a photographer who was worried I was going to kill myself. I was 27.
So I started again. Sending out scripts in envelopes. But this time only plays that I thought were true. Only plays I would fight for. Plays that meant everything to me.
And I ditched the ego.
6. Caroline
WE’VE been married now for 18 years. We’ve raised two amazing kids. She’s my favourite person and it’s a truly happy marriage. However, the downside of a happy marriage is that you can’t talk about it in public cos it makes people sick.
So I’ll wheesht.
7. My Dad Dying
THIS should really be “My Dad Living”. He was 59 when he died – only months before my first daughter Ellis was born. In theatre we’d say that they passed each other in the wings.
He and Ellis taught me how to be a father. Try to be kind. Empathetic. Passionate. Wry. Interested. Encouraging. Patient. Soulful.
Try, in other words, to be like my mother.
8. A Moment of Cruelty in a Writer’s Workshop
IN the midst of all this, I was teaching at a writing workshop down in England. A lady had written a farce that I didn’t quite know what to do with, so instead of working on the text like all the others, I got everyone to read it out loud. I spoofed it. And in doing so, I dismissed it. Everybody laughed.
Later on I saw that woman sitting on the steps outside and she was crying.
Seeing her cry changed the way I taught playwriting. It changed the way I talked about plays. Teaching, mentoring and encouraging writers is a big part of my working life and the way I go about it now started with that awful pang of guilt and realisation.
I realised that this work is our heart and soul. Laugh if you want, but it’s our lives right there on the page. I don’t think of myself as a craftsman or a hack or a gun for hire.
I think of myself as an artist. And I think of that woman on the steps as an artist too.
9. Springsteen/Morrissey
THEY’RE not equal. Springsteen (above) occupies a God Space in my life. Morrissey is altogether more human. But I can’t possibly put into words how these two songwriters have changed my life, over and over again.
They are the poles of my musical planet. Between them are all the continents and oceans of my taste. (It’s quite a small planet.) By the way, the equator in this awful, extended metaphor, is REM. My third favourite band. And life changers in their own right.
10. Gardening
ABOUT six years ago we bought a house. Our first, after a life in flats. To begin with, in my ignorance, I went at the garden like a Blue Peter vandal.
Nature raised an eyebrow and said: “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
And I started to learn. I’ve gone from a guy who wasn’t 100% sure what season he was into a guy who can stare at a fern for 20 minutes straight.
I adore gardening. I’m still a fool in the face of it all, but my God, the beauty, the peace, the magic of the garden. Every single day it heals me and keeps me going.
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