Jack Thorne is a little frustrated. At only 34, as the award-winning writer of edgy teen drama Skins, co-writer with Shane Meadows of This Is England ’86 and creator of the criminally short-lived dark fantasy series The Fades, he has accomplished an impressive amount. But when it comes to writing for the stage, he’s chafing at what he sees as his limitations.
While his TV shows bristle with multiple characters and plotlines, his plays tend to focus on only a couple of people (sometimes, as in Stacy, just one person), gradually peeling back the layers of their lives. When, on a wet Tuesday in a no-nonsense boozer next to Mansion House, I ask him why this is, he grapples with his answer for a while.
“When I’m writing, I need to see. Do you know what I mean?” he asks. On The Fades, the location manager became an “integral part of the storytelling because he found all these amazing places which I then rewrote the script for.” That’s why, on stage, without this spur of “cut to, cut to, cut to”, Thorne says he has largely stuck to the single-room format: “because if it’s in a room I can see it.”
“That’s just my limitation as a theatre writer at the moment,” he continues. “I’m actually trying to write bigger plays.” He smiles wryly as he brings up his co-written attempt from last year, the National’s coolly received global warming parable Greenland. “It didn’t go so well. But actually that was really important to me in terms of working out how to write bigger. Do you know what I mean?”
“Do you know what I mean?” is a recurring beat with Thorne. Cumulatively – if unintentionally – it’s a deflection that reflects his discomfort with being asked to analyse his work. He’s friendly and likeable, but it’s hard to get him to talk about writing in the abstract. His words come in a compulsive rush or dry up entirely. “It’s very easy to sound pretentious about this shit, and I don’t want to sound pretentious,” he says apologetically.
His aversion to “pretentiousness” is part of what makes Thorne – swamped in a baggy hoodie, hair unruly, when we meet – such a good writer. His creative world isn’t polished; his characters don’t moralise or fit neatly into categories. And limitation or not, in his best plays, his tight focus on a small number of people puts human life under a lens in a way that feels honest and grippingly real.
Unsurprisingly, he shrinks from my praise of the messy naturalism of his dialogue. “It’s good that you think that, but I don’t really have anything intelligent to say apart from that,” he replies, before adding: “But, yeah, thanks!” However, he cautiously admits to being proud of his latest play, Mydidae, which opens in Soho Theatre’s Soho Upstairs space tomorrow. “I think it might be the best thing I’ve written. I could be entirely wrong. But the rehearsal room is really thrilling. I’m having a lovely time.”
Mydidae is another two-hander, but this time the set-up was determined by new-writing theatre company DryWrite. “They work by provocation,” Thorne explains. “And their provocation to me, with this, was to write something set entirely in a bathroom.” Keen not to spoil the plot, all he’ll reveal is that the play is “about a couple going through a very difficult day.”
The title, Latin for ‘Midas Fly’, gestures at the couple’s claustrophobia as they work through their shared sense of guilt and anger over a recent tragedy while in the uncomfortably intimate space of their bathroom. “That feeling of people who are stuck in this place, like trapped flies” is the sensation that Thorne hopes he has captured.
This mundane, almost defiantly un-dramatic simile exists in the same world as the fraying suburbia of Skins, or the partied-out landscape of This Is England ‘86. Everyday life, in all of its bleak and sometimes grimly funny detail, fires Thorne up. Whatever his doubts on the theatre front, it’s this that keeps writing “the best thing in my life, by some degree.”
Whether by looking inward – “when I’m upset, writing helps me to process stuff” – or, inThis Is England ’86, working out “the people Shane’s characters had become” since the end of Meadows’s film This Is England (set a few years earlier) that spawned the series, making the adults and teenagers he writes feel real is Thorne’s overriding goal. “Telling their truthful story is the all-important thing,” he says.
It’s this that connects shows like This Is England ‘86 with The Fades, which beds its tale of an ordinary teenager with special powers (Ian de Caestecker) in a humdrum, familiar world. Thorne is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan, but he was inspired by Susan Cooper’sThe Dark is Rising sequence of novels to write The Fades as much by its Basingstoke setting as anything else.
“Cooper is all about bringing fantasy, or whatever you want to call it, into reality,” Thorne says. “That always got me as a kid. I was always more into that than Peter Parker.” The Fades, the story of an utterly average boy in extraordinary circumstances, was his antidote to the comic book fantasy of Spider Man. “I wanted to ask: what if you genuinely didn’t want to be a hero?”
Just as Thorne looks to the world off the page to give his work authenticity, he does the same with the actors he writes for. “All casts are authors too,” he stresses. “When I write Woody in This is England, I’m writing for Joe Gilgun.” His face lights up when he talks about actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who he knew would be in Mydidae when he started the script. “There’s a rhythm to her that’s extraordinary. We’re so lucky with this cast in general.”
For Thorne, these personal connections are a source both of creative inspiration and lasting friendships. He’s now written five roles for Joe Dempsie, starting with Chris inSkins and since including Higgy in This is England ’86 and bad guy John in The Fades. When we meet, he’s just text-congratulated Ian De Caestecker on securing a part inS.H.I.E.L.D., the TV spinoff from Joss Whedon’s blockbuster movie The Avengers.
“The reason we don’t write novels,” Thorne argues, talking about playwrights and screenwriters, “is because we want to work with other people. I like working with people. Every time I try to do something on my own, others tend to get involved and become authors as well.” And they’ve sent his career in some successful if unpredictable directions.
“I wrote a play called When You Cure Me, which [Skins’ co-creator] Brian Elsley came to see and hired me as a result. It was a very hard-hitting piece about someone being a victim of rape. Brian saw it and told me I had a future in comedy drama.”
Thorne’s conversation teems with people, from actors he likes to writers he admires and envies in equal measure. He strongly believes that his generation of Royal Court Young Writers are coming into their own now, apart from Laura Wade (Posh), who he affectionately describes as “sort of a freak” because “she flew straight away.” He’s particularly impressed by James Graham and Nick Payne, whose playConstellations triumphed at the recent Evening Standard Awards.
“They’ve got a lot to write about, and they do it beautifully. It’s really exciting for me seeing the people I care about grow and suddenly just go ‘pow’.”
This is accompanied by an acute sense that these writers have strengths he lacks. Perhaps as a result, he’s been pushing himself, adapting Nick Hornby’s dark comedy A Long Way Down into a film – “that was so far out of my comfort zone it wasn’t true, but I really enjoyed it” – and turning best-selling vampire novel Let The Right One In into a play for the National Theatre of Scotland.
In a way, Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s update of the vampire myth to a bleak modern apartment block in which loner Oskar befriends Eli, a mysterious (and bloodthirsty) girl, is a natural fit with Thorne. “The only way I can be truthful is to put myself somewhere near a story. With Oscar, I found more of myself than I was expecting,” he says. (Later he tells me, jokingly, that Meadows cast him as Carrot Bum inThis Is England ’86 because he “couldn’t find any other person lonely or weird enough to play him.”) And the story’s desolate urban setting is chillingly recognisable.
But the range of locations and different characters in Let The Right One In has challenged Thorne into broadening his theatrical horizons beyond a single room. His aim is for this to have a lasting effect on his style and approach. “With something like an adaptation, it’s a lot easier to write big. But I’m hoping that doing this will make me better when it comes to original stuff.”
Further ahead, “there might be a TV series, there might be a film.” With a BAFTA under his belt for The Fades, Thorne’s career is going well. But my observation that he’s flying pretty high these days makes him awkward. “I don’t think that’s strictly where it is,” he says hesitantly. “I mean, it’s nice, and I like it, the BAFTA thing, but I’m just really grateful, to be honest.”
Once we’ve said our goodbyes and he has headed off into the night to work on a script, two things have become clear to me. Firstly, Thorne is a hugely talented, sincerely self-deprecating writer whose concern about his creative limits demonstrates his commitment to his craft. Secondly, he could do with giving himself a bit of a break once in a while.
Mydidae is at Soho Upstairs, Soho Theatre, from 5th December – 22nd December; A Long Way Down is awaiting a release date; Let The Right One In will premiere at the Dundee Rep Theatre from 6th – 29th June 2013.
First published by Exeunt Magazine
Posted in: Interviews