BEAN PLAYS TWO

Richard Bean

PLAYS TWO

TOAST
MR ENGLAND
SMACK FAMILY ROBINSON
HONEYMOON SUITE

Introduction by Jack Bradley

OBERONBOOKS

LONDON

First published in this collection in 2006 by Oberon Books Ltd Electronic edition published in 2012

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Toast first published in 1999; Mr England first published in 2000; Smack Family Robinson and Honeymoon Suite first published in 2003; all by Oberon Books.

Copyright © Richard Bean 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007

Richard Bean is hereby identifed as author of these plays in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

Introduction copyright © Jack Bradley 2007

All rights whatsoever in these plays are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before rehearsal to United Agents, 12-26 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LE (info@unitedagents.co.uk). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the plays without prior written consent.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

PB ISBN: 978-1-84002-662-7
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-669-4

Cover painting by Karen Douglas

Printed, bound and converted in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd., Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

TOAST

MR ENGLAND

SMACK FAMILY ROBINSON

HONEYMOON SUITE

Introduction

by Jack Bradley

EVERYONE LOVES a fairy-tale success story. Whether it is the slush-pile novelist who walks away with the Pulitzer, the chorus-liner who steps in at the eleventh hour to steal Broadway hearts, or the frst-time playwright who wows critics and audience alike with an utterly original voice, the unexpected discovery of real talent is, for most of us, an unalloyed joy. Of course, some of the more hard-bitten occasionally suspect there are other factors in getting that frst crucial break. The cynical have an array of explanations: it is as simple as knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time; and, if not that, then it must be that fckle but nebulous thing good fortune - or even downright fuke - that should take the credit. One can disprove undue infuence fairly easily, but the denial of the arbitrary in the process is harder to discount. After all, the self-effacingly successful often pinpoint a moment when Lady Luck looked down kindly upon them, just as the long abandoned look to the skies in disbelief.

The emergence of Richard Bean as a talent seems to fy in the face of such received assumptions about the road to success. Yes, he knew someone. In fact, my assistant at the National kept score for the cricket team Richard played for on Sunday afternoons. So when he frst wrote Toast, all he had to do was pass her a script during tea and hope she might read the play during a slow spell in the bowling. But she proved scrupulous to a fault and, despite reading and enjoying it enormously, felt the play should be given an independent assessment. Therefore, along with countless other submissions that month, Toast went into the black hole known as the ‘reading system’ at the National. Four weeks later the play came back to our readers’ meeting, where the ever-animated Will Kerley* gushed about a play about a bakery set in Hull in 1975. Less bubbly by nature, I sought a third opinion. My senior reader effervesced about it. I read the play and concurred. It didn’t seem to matter who Richard Bean knew; his play fzzed.

But had Richard found himself in the right place at the right time? As it happens, no. Though we all admired the play enormously, it had arrived at a particularly challenging time for us on the South Bank. It was early 1997. Richard Eyre was in his fnal season and Trevor Nunn planning his frst. Such times are periods of great activity, as the outgoing director is keen to complete his vision whilst the incoming AD is equally keen to make his mark. There were promises to keep, commissions to fulfl. Quite simply, for Richard Bean, this time round there was to be no room at the inn! Not for the frst time, I found myself wishing us a fourth auditorium, so that this play we all loved could see the light of day.

It was not to be. But then neither, I suspected, was this likely to be the end of the story and, sure enough, within weeks a lively independent production company had expressed an interest and organised a reading at a reputable fringe venue. It was a great success, not just for the audience but for Richard who, though realising it worked as a play, was not deterred from cutting and refning the text. Its success seemed assured.

But, as too often happens in theatre, the roller-coaster inexplicably seemed to slow. Cheers of acclaim turned to murmurs of approval. Yes, noises were being made - very nice noises - and by all the right people, but those noises had yet to include the sound of nib on cheque-book. A play needing seven actors by an unknown? Hardly ideal for any West End producer looking to start a play in Shaftesbury Avenue and probably too large for any of the smaller subsidised theatres dedicated to new writing. For almost a year nothing happened. Suddenly there was a danger the play would not be produced. Moreover, like my colleagues, I was occupied with new challenges and current problems, not the ancient history of what might have been twelve months ago.

Now, if our story is to fulfl the expectations raised in the opening paragraph, there should be a moment of good fortune about now, a transformation scene that whisks the hapless playwright from garret to Garrick, from obscurity to limelight. If such a turning point occurred, it was when the Head of the NT Studio, Sue Higginson, and Ian Rickson, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, had tea together that summer in 1998. As it happened, both had a gripe to share. Both had been busy commissioning and developing playwrights throughout the nineties and now both felt they had a cluster of plays worth doing. It was proving increasingly frustrating not to be able to do anything about it. A few years before, in 1994/5 the two organisations had combined resources to co-produce a swathe of new writers: Joe Penhall, Nick Grosso, Sarah Kane among them. The venture had been deemed a success all round. Might it not be a good idea to do it again?

Of course, as ever, there were more plays than production slots; collaboration meant compromise, and compromise would mean disappointment for some. Each party agreed to retire and come back with a handful of scripts to discuss. So began a long summer of meetings and readings. Needless to say, the decision-making was not straightforward. It was not simply a case of choosing half a dozen plays we liked from the twenty or so on the table; there was also an implicit understanding that the selected plays would need to offer a varied season, a cross-section of work refecting the concerns of contemporary playwrights. Among our shortlist was a still-unproduced play by Richard Bean and we were, if the critics were to be believed, the Capital of In-Yer-Face Theatre. Suddenly, subject matter, tone, genre all came into sharp focus. This was a play about a bakery in Hull set in 1975. What would my colleagues at Sloane Square say? Would they not expect a bedsit mise en scène? Buggery and broken beer bottles? There was nothing to be done: a rehearsed reading was called for…

I need not have worried. Indeed, history was made at that reading. Before it was fnished - in fact, by the interval - we were all convinced that Toast had to be done and that Richard Bean was a talent to reckon with. My only regret: that it would be February 1999, almost two years since I’d read the frst draft, before the play would open at the New Ambassadors Theatre.

But what was it at that reading that persuaded us? After all, Richard was undoubtedly swimming against the tide. Toast was not the familiar urban, contemporary dystopic vision that captures the barely articulated hopes and fears of millennial Britain, the subliminal zeitgeist that haunts the modern soul. So what does it do? In many ways, it belongs to an honourable tradition, that of the work play. Without wishing to sound like Mark Twain, it seems we love watching people work, particularly from the comfort of the theatre stalls; however, as John Byrne and David Storey had discovered before Richard, whilst there is a certain pleasure in being introduced to the mysteries of a particular trade, the real fascination in a work play lies in unearthing the undisclosed hierarchies, the latent power struggles, the petty - and not so petty - jealousies and rivalries. Moreover, the nature of the work play lends itself to a satisfying dramatic structure. More often than not, the play is set in a single location, the place of work or, as in this case, the restroom/canteen. Usually, it occurs over a given time, a work shift, and is focused upon a single event, an action which singles out this particular shift from any other. In other words, Richard had chosen for his frst stage play a thoroughly traditional structure. It may be conventional, but it is deceptively diffcult to achieve. Moreover, by introducing seven characters, he had effectively created an ensemble piece, again something more easily dreamt of than attained.

But structure isn’t everything and the appeal is as much in the characterisation and quality of the observation. At its very simplest, the play understands the collective psychology of male night-workers. By and large, they are consciously or unconsciously preoccupied with sex. Whether it is Dezzie’s desire to get home to his freshly bathed young wife or the homo-erotic hi-jinks of Cecil and Peter’s bollock-grabbing, the play is infused with a sense of how unnatural it is for a company of men to fnd themselves together at night. Of course, it seems on the surface mere light comic relief, but it sits comfortably with a larger, more serious theme. The play is about identity and sense of self. Or lack of it. Dezzie explicitly says he no longer feels himself - he is utterly at sea because he now works on land. Lance, likewise, talks of looking in the mirror and seeing nothing. Ironically, the play implies that they defne themselves, not only by what they do, i.e. bake bread together, but by how much they care for doing this. When the oven breaks down or, more crucially, a fellow worker is thought to be in danger, they forget all resentments and pull together to save the situation. Of course, this is not a company of angels, nor is Richard sentimental about such work in bygone times. These are men shaped by what they do, their options limited by the choices before them.

Mr England, as the title suggests, tells of a very different world. Stephen is Mondeo-Man, living the sales rep life in Barratt-Home heaven, so why should he come down in the middle of the night and take a crap on the living-room shag pile? He has different values from the kind of person that could possibly do that. He believes in England, the heroism of our war-dead, the success of capitalism and free enterprise. But, like Cecil at the bakery, he’s ‘not getting much’; in fact he hasn’t slept with his wife Judith since the twins were born. No wonder she fnds herself susceptible to the attentions of neighbouring teenager Andrew who, it is believed, was saved in a boating accident by Stephen. But Andrew is more than just a cuckoo in the nest. Inexplicably he sets out to destroy Stephen and does successfully evict him from hearth and home, before utterly usurping him in the affections of Judith. In this fnale, there is an almost Pinteresque cruelty, the survival of the fttest in the suburban jungle. Stephen is surprisingly docile, but that, in part, is because he feels somewhat to blame. He is not the hero he needed to be and so, by his Middle England values, deserves everything that comes to him.

If Mr England is a departure in terms of its minimalist, non-naturalistic staging - after the realism of the bakery canteen, the presence of a six-foot sculpture of a vagina onstage does signify something of a stylistic leap - then Honeymoon Suite brings us back to the instantly recognisable single-set play. Or does it? Well, not quite. On this occasion, Richard gives us a triptych in time, inter-cutting three scenes in the lives of a single couple: their wedding night, their 25th wedding anniversary and a fnal meeting between them 24 years later. We watch Irene and Eddie grow and evolve from idealised young lovers into the disenchanted wife and adulterer and crooked businessman, Izzy and Tits; and fnally into a successful female public fgure and a man who is paradoxically resigned and calmly suicidal. We see the germ of what they will become, so we detect how the future comes out of the past, just as we see how earlier decisions prompt later consequences: Eddie’s ambition to please Irene as her father did shows the seed of ruthlessness that will eventually alienate her. However, if there is a strong sense of the need to make amends in the play, Richard is not moralistic. In the middle section, Eddie (aka Tits) is an arsonist and killer at one remove, but it is Irene (aka Izzy) who has the savvy to get him off the hook when things go wrong. These are not good people, but they did not set out to be evil. Sometimes ill is done for what is perceived by them as good reason: self-improvement, success in business and, believe it or not, love.

There is no such moral ambiguity in Smack Family Robinson. The Robinsons are drug-dealers, so we know how we feel about them, don’t we? We disapprove. They deal drugs, providing whiz and blow according to need. But Richard will not have it quite so simple. They might slouch about in their velour tracksuits on their John Lewis three-piece suites swigging non-vintage Chardonnay watching I’m a Celebrity, but they are a race apart from the rest of us, surely? He makes them seem ordinary to us; but then, to distance them, makes them grotesquely funny, larger than life, and in doing so, renders them harmless. Unconsciously, we think they are simple caricatures. He even gives us Cora, an eighteen year old who wants to do catering at college rather than shift class A coke at conferences. In her we spot the chance that their lives may be redeemed. But gradually the plot itself turns serious. Sean has out-sourced debt collection to incoming Russian drug barons who are not as old-school as the Robinsons. Things are going from bad to worse. Suddenly the parochial values of the community drug dealer are under threat. The mores of ruthless foreign dealers are about to take hold and the quiet of sleepy Whitley Bay is at risk. In a brilliant satirical coup, Richard delivers a comic fnale which argues for a world turned upside down, a society where drugs are legalised and policed because it is far safer than allowing a ruthless, clandestine criminalised market to do so.

As such, Smack Family Robinson is Richard’s most contemporary play. Each of the others is either set in or has, to some degree, a preoccupation with the past and how it colours the present. What they all share is a fascination with form and how it can serve its subject. But most of all, they are all very, very funny. As I write this, I am aware that Richard has already written enough material for a third volume of collected plays. We may have kept him waiting two years for that frst production, but thankfully, it did not deter him. He has realised he is in the right place at the right time now and is making the most of it by continuing to write funny and provocative plays. No doubt you’ll see them in a theatre near you soon. In the meantime, relish these!

Jack Bradley
Literary Manager, National Theatre, 19z95-2006

* Will later went on to direct The God Botherers by Richard at the Bush Theatre. See Richard Bean, Plays One.