Other writers
Interview with Claire Dowie by Aleks Sierz
Doing a solo show is always dangerous, says Claire Dowie, the inventor of 'stand-up theatre'. 'When I first did Easy Access, the character I play was up on stage, panicking, but I wasn't there - I must have stayed at home.' Given that the character she plays is Michael, a twentysomething male prostitute - 'too old' to be called a rent boy - it always takes Dowie a few minutes to get under his skin. When she does, the transformation is amazing.
How come? 'Well, Michael's been in my head for years,' says Dowie, 41. 'I started off as a stand-up comedian, but didn't do any 'proper' writing until I met Colin Watkeys,' her partner and director. 'I never thought of doing any writing because I'd never been to college,' she laughs.
Easy Access was first put on at London's Drill Hall in January. 'Yes, I got an Arts Council bursary to write a play - but only if I wasn't in it,' she grins. An in-yer-face piece about Michael and his relationship with his father, who sexually abused him, the play is very emotional.
Where did this story, which is full of ambiguity and hits you in the gut, come from? 'Ever since I invented Michael, he's been the victim of some sort of abuse. And because he's been with me so long, the play just wrote itself. I know it sounds wanky, but I just sat down and let him tell the story.'
At the time, 'sexual abuse of children was very much in the headlines,' Dowie says. 'I wrote the play because the thing that annoys me about the media reporting abuse is that it's all black and white.' You mean monsters and victims? 'Exactly, in reality things are much more complicated.' For example? 'Well, the usual attitude is that if you've been abused, you have to go into care. But what happens when the kid doesn't want to go into care? What happens if they still love their dad?' she asks.
Such questions are explored in Easy Access. 'I suppose what I'm saying politically is that when someone's a victim, everyone around them helps keep them a victim, telling them what they should be thinking or feeling.' In the play, Michael colludes with his abusive Dad, 'but he needs to do so for the sake of his own sanity.' Then he 'stops protecting his abuser, and starts to unravel the lie that he's weaved. So you don't have to be a victim - but don't think it's easy not to be.'
Perhaps the most dangerous moment in a shock-fest of a show is when the on-stage video shows a little girl, Becky - daughter of Michael's lover - playing in the park, with a voiceover describing a sexual fantasy. Dowie's daughter, Rachel, played Becky. 'When we filmed it, it was really horrible. Putting the words on tape was like turning her into some sort of sexual thing. Colin did the filming and was completely spooked by the whole thing,' she says. 'But, all in all, I think it was better to use my own child than to ask someone else.'
Dowie's version of Easy Access for Edinburgh is a one-person 'solo remix' of the play. Why did she rewrite it? 'Because it's cheaper,' she says bluntly. 'We applied for a grant to tour the full-scale version, but got turned down. So we decided to try it as a solo show.' But there are other reasons too. 'When I was directing the original production, I was simply itching to get on stage. Now I've got my chance.'
Easy Access is innovative in its use of video and the interplay between film and live action. 'Yes, but the main reason for using video is that you can include other actors in your show. I mean, there's only so many one-person numbers you can do.'
Dowie, who was brought up in Birmingham and whose previous shows include classics such as Why Is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? (1991) and Leaking from Every Orifice (1993), says her parents have been very supportive - 'but they still think I'm just going through a phase.'
In other interviews, she been contemptuous of 'straight gays'. Why's that? 'Look, I used to be lesbian - I suppose I'm bisexual - so I know a lot of people who aren't your normal suburban couples. But the people I like are those who have something to say, rather than those that go on about their mortgages.' Dowie has annoyed gay people by telling them they don't have to conform. 'If you're gay, you must be aware that mainstream culture is trying to brainwash you - I really don't see why gay people should want to fit into society.'
How does it feel to play a gay man? 'I don't think it matters that I'm female - after the first few minutes on stage, the character just takes over.' So, has she any plans for Michael? 'Not really. After I wrote the play, the character just disappeared. He'd been living with me for years and years, and I thought: "That's it; he's gone; I'm quite sad."' Now, playing Michael every day at the Edinburgh festival, it's time for Dowie to renew her acquaintance with her 'imaginary friend'. If you see the show, just remember: 'For the first few minutes what you see is Claire Dowie, then Michael takes over.'
Easy Access (for the Boys) was at the Pleasance, Edinburgh, 6-31 August
© An earlier version of this article appeared as 'Rachel papers' in the Guardian on 12 August 1998
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Jonathan
Harvey by Aleks Sierz
Dominic Dromgoole, in his new book, The
Full Room, says that the first preview of Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful
Thing at the Bush theatre in 1993
'felt as if some large hand had taken hold of the little black box theatre
and chucked it high up into the stars, where it floated around for a couple
of hours, exhilarated by the view'.
Characteristically, Harvey remembers things differently. His parents went to a 'pre-theatre supper' at the Pizza Hut in London's Goldhawk Road, and when his dad was rude to a waitress, his mum said, 'It's all right, we're from Liverpool'. Mum and dad liked the show. 'But not the swearing,' he says. '"You didn't get that from us."'
A comic writer who sometimes uses bad language to hilarious effect, Harvey is well behaved with his folks. 'I've never said "cunt" in front of them, and probably never will,' he says. 'When I took my dad to see Beautiful Thing after it transferred to the West End, he shivered every time that word was used on stage.'
Since 1993, Harvey's career as gay playwright with crossover appeal has really taken off. Although Beautiful Thing was criticised for showing young gay love as rosily sentimental, his subsequent plays - such as Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club (1995), Guiding Star (1998) and Hushabye Mountain (1999) - proved that he could lace softness with bleakness and mix tragedy with comedy.
Now, as his new play, Out in the Open, premieres in London, he points out that 'although it's a comedy, it's not a gag-fest'. 'It's about a group of friends who are keeping a secret from one of them - and over the course of a weekend, the secret comes out.' Is the secret about sex? 'Yeah,' he says, grinning mischievously.
Born in Liverpool in June 1968, Harvey retains a mild Scouse accent. He was brought up by 'slightly left of centre' parents: his dad was a social worker, his mum a nurse. His interest in drama began early - he used to go to youth drama club on Saturday mornings.
'It was a way of showing off,' he says. 'But when I was 13 I got really bad acne, so I didn't want people looking at me, but I still loved all things showbizzy.' At school, he starred in As You Like It, but 'only because I was the only person prepared to sing "Oh, ninny nonny",' he says with a campy laugh.
In 1987, while he was doing his A-levels, Harvey wrote The Cherry Blossom Tree for the Liverpool Playhouse young writers festival, and it was put on in the studio. While he was at Hull university, it was suggested that he should write for the Royal Court - he thought it was the Liverpool venue, 'Ken Dodd's second home'.
Despite the occasional mistake - his 1990 show Catch used real fish, which rotted and stank out the theatre - his career has gone from strength to strength. After an apprenticeship at young writers festivals, he's followed in the footsteps of the great Liverpudlian playwrights.
'My great ambition,' he says, 'was to get something on in London, and that happened quite quickly.' But, before his break, he tried to follow in the family tradition of the caring professions by working as a special needs teacher in a south London comprehensive. Much to his hardworking parents' horror, he left this 'proper job' to take up a residency at the National Studio in London.
After Beautiful Thing hit the West End in 1994, he was shocked that it provoked a media storm - a 'plague of pink plays' thundered the populist Evening Standard. But while it 'doesn't bother' him to be labelled a gay playwright, he resented the 'typical homophobia' of some sections of the media.
'I realise now it was just some stupid journalist with a page to fill, who wrote some absolute and utter nonsense - the choice of the word plague was offensive, and it was hilarious because there were only two plays involved.' His and Kevin Eliot's My Night with Reg.
Since then, Harvey has worked on the film version of Beautiful Thing, has had some six plays produced, and has written two series of Gimme Gimme Gimme for BBC2. He has several film projects on the go, and his Pet Shop Boys musical, Closer to Heaven, opens in May at the Arts Theatre.
Despite his high profile, Harvey is more likely to be wearing a Kangol top and Nike trainers than a shirt and tie. 'I only have one suit,' he laughs. His face reminds you of his plays, a mixture of the serious and playful, of anger and humour. He is amiable and helpful; he makes you laugh. Yet, he also has a darker side.
In his work, however warmhearted, the themes of death and loss constantly appear. 'The best comedy,' he says, 'always comes from pain, and the comedies I love always have that element of darkness.' Where does that come from? 'When I reached 18 and came out,' he says, 'the gay community was being decimated by AIDS, so as a young person I had to confront death at the time I was reaching sexual maturity.'
He remembers the 1980s AIDS panic as 'scary', and, as a writer, he 'saw the world as a place in which you had to get used to death early on'. Nor has his success been painless. In rehearsals for Babies, his ill-starred follow up to Beautiful Thing, there were rumours that his refusal to rewrite had hobbled the show.
Since then, he's adapted well to the practicalities of being a writer. In the crucible of TV comedy, he's learnt to 'rewrite on the spot. It's relentless - everyone from the cameraman to the cleaner has an opinion.' Now he can 'take criticism like a man'.
Like his inspirations, Mike Leigh and Alan Bleasdale, Harvey is sometimes accused of taking the mickey out of the working class. He disagrees. 'I don't patronise the working class. I have a laff about it all, but never from an angle of piss-taking.'
How does it feel to be so successful? 'I feel I'm at the stage when I'm established,' he says with typical modesty. 'When people come to see one of my plays, they know what they are getting.' And success? 'I don't know really,' he says, 'I'm busy.'
Harvey's trips to Hollywood include pitching for a Bette Midler vehicle and for Disney's musical version of Sleeping Beauty. He mimics a studio mogul: 'Daya know, Jonathan, sleeping is a very passive activity, so let's keep that to a minimum.'
Despite all the jetsetting, he is Mr Stability, living in London with his longterm partner Richard Foord, 'who stops my head from getting too big', and 'who really loves travelling'. So, after a heavy stint of work, Harvey's favourite relaxation is 'to go and lie on a beach'.
Yet his northern roots are important. Like his parents, Harvey is a lefty. He feels 'a bit let down by New Labour, but I'm prepared to give them another go'. In his work, there are constant echoes of Liverpool. A title such as Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club inevitably conjures up the name of the iconic LP by fellow Liverpudlians, The Beatles.
Despite his rootedness, he's never been a Liverpool football fan. 'I've never really interested in football because it used to cause terrible family arguments.' But Guiding Star, his play about the Hillsborough disaster, shows how local feeling can motivate him.
In that play, the scene in which a dingy drifts out to sea 'really happened to me', he says. 'I was only about six and we had to be air-sea rescued. I didn't realise the enormity of it at the time.' On stage, 'my mum couldn't watch that scene - and I can see why.'
Harvey comes across as a good bloke who has been canny enough to use his comic gift, to learn from past mistakes and who hasn't let success turn his head (at least, not lately). Not so much a Scouse git as a Scouse hit.
Jonathan Harvey : a summary
1968 : Born in Liverpool.
1987 : Studies at Hull university; Cherry Blossom Tree at the Liverpool Playhouse.
1988: Mohair opens at the Royal Court young writers festival.
1992 : Wildfire, directed by Ian Rickson, opens at the Royal Court.
1993 : Beautiful Thing opens at the Bush theatre, and transfers to the West End in 1994.
1994 : Babies opens at the Royal Court.
1995 : Boom Bang-a-Bang opens at the Bush.
1995-6 : Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club tours.
1996 : Beautiful Thing released as a film.
1998 : Guiding Star opens at the National Theatre.
1999-2000 : Two series of Gimme Gimme Gimme on BBC2.
1999 : Hushabye Mountain opens at Hampstead Theatre.
2001 : Out in the Open opens at Hampstead Theatre.
© An earlier
version of this article appeared as 'Rewriting the rules' in The
Stage newspaper on 24 May 2001
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Interview with Charlotte Jones by Aleks Sierz
Over the past 10 years, the National Theatre has done its bit to break down the Berlin Wall between art and science. Since CP Snow first voiced the idea of 'two cultures' in 1959, this division has become a cultural cliche which, like Frankenstein's monster, refuses to die. But despite that, plays such as Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, both staged by the National, have appealed equally to bards and boffins.
Charlotte Jones, whose new comedy about a suicidal astrophysicist, Humble Boy, opens there this week, says that the play began with an image of 'a man pottering around a garden like a bumble bee' - she'd also heard the theory that, 'according to the laws of physics, the body shape of the bumble bee should make flight impossible.' While she admits that the story is 'probably apocryphal', hearing about it was one of those 'Eureka moments' when several different ideas seem to gel in one image.
Similarly, her character, Felix Humble (played by Simon Russell Beale) searches for a 'scientific Eureka moment', trying to work out 'a unified field theory which will reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics'. At the same time, 'Felix is also trying to bring his mother, who's having an affair, and his father, who's died, back together in his mind.' In this metaphor-rich universe, his mother 'is a black hole, warping him out of shape, and his father is just microscopic, fizzing away in the corner of his mind.'
Aware of how difficult science can be, Jones uses a simple device to convey Humble's astrophysics. 'He talks about string theory to a local woman in a charity shop so he has to use understandable language.' What attracted Jones to string theory 'was the theological language used to describe it: all about dwelling in possibility and questing after the unknowable, living in between doubt and fear.'
Such metaphors suggest one reason why plays about science are so engaging - they're all about language. Michael Frayn says, 'Heisenberg (who appears in Copenhagen) took the view that science is based on conversation, and so are most plays.' Indeed, Steven Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun (1996) was criticised by scientists because his boffins talked gobbledygook rather than real science.
But Copenhagen was memorable not only for its discussions but also for its staging. 'The set was part of the message. It was in the shape of a circular lecture theatre,' says Frayn, 'which was meant to suggest a practical demonstration, a moral forum, and - since the play is about understanding ourselves by looking at other people - the idea was to keep the audience in full view of one another.'
However good their research, most playwrights are attracted to science for humanistic reasons. Tom Stoppard used images such as jam being stirred into a rice pudding to demonstrate entropy and chaos theory in his 1993 play, Arcadia. 'My interest in chaos mathematics is an artist's interest, not a scientist's,' he said at the time.
Theatre is good at wordless stage pictures which make ideas tangible - at the end of Arcadia, two couples from different historical epochs dance across the stage, creating a sense of cosmic harmony. In The Far Side of the Moon (which visited the National in July), Robert Lepage uses a mirror to give the illusion that his character is floating in space - finally free of his past.
Jack Bradley, the National's literary manager, says: 'There is an enduring interest in science because theatre can simplify something, such as the uncertainty principle in Copenhagen, which we often think is beyond us.' And, while books tend to be abstract, 'a single visual image can make ideas corporeal.' Scientists, says Bradley, 'are modern heroes - they work at the edge of the unknown.'And because it's on the frontiers of knowledge, 'science offers an opportunity for moral debate. Theatre is best at being a public arena where people discuss issues.'
Science is itself the stuff of drama. 'The more I read about it,' says Jones, 'the more conscious I am of its conflicts and drama.' Frayn agrees: 'Science is an extremely demanding activity and people in any demanding activity become very emotional, very worked up, fixated, competitive.' In the end, the reason that science works well on stage is that playwrights use it to explore emotions - and we're all interested in those.
Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy opened at the National on 9 August
© An earlier version of this article appeared as 'There's a suicidal astrophysicist at the National. Best place for him' in Independent on Sunday on 5 August 2001
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Interview
with Debbie Tucker Green by Aleks Sierz
Why are young
British playwrights attracted to agony? Over the past decade, for every
quiet play about family life, there've been 10 stories of anguish, humiliation
and violence on sarf London council estates. You'd think most Brits live
on the edge of some metropolitan abyss. And, as the films of Mike Leigh
and Ken Loach prove, dirty realism is still hip.
As if to prove the point, Debbie Tucker Green's powerful debut, Dirty Butterfly - which was staged in February - ended with a harrowing in-yer-face image of domestic violence, but is there more to this young writer than just shock tactics? As her second play, Born Bad, opens at the Hampstead Theatre, I asked her about the show.
"Born Bad came out already walking, talking," says Tucker Green. Unlike her first, which she "spat out and then had to kick into life". She's still "a baby at the game" of playwriting and hasn't "found a proper way of doing it yet". Born Bad is marketed as "a high-voltage drama in which two generations of one family confront the truth about their past". Yes, it's about abuse.
But what distinguishes it from other plays about domestic misery is its structure. Instead of being a realistic drama set in a squalid flat, it's a series of fragmentary, freefloating poetic dialogues. The characters, who are on stage all the time, might as easily be in purgatory as in a counselling session.
Reviewers of Tucker Green's debut called her distinctive voice an "angrily plaintive polyphony" and "secret whispers", although one Daily Telegraph critic attacked her "pseudo urban verbals" and "Ali G-style patois". So how would she describe her voice? "It's a whole heap of things. I don't want to define myself."
But Tucker Green laughs in recognition when I call her style obsessive. "That's how people speak," she says. "Listen to a group of kids: just repeat and repeat and repeat." Then she improvises a dialogue around a simple phrase: "It's hot outside; it's really hot, innit? I bet it's really hot." So "suddenly you've got half a page of dialogue".
She loves playing with language, and - while she worked as a stage manager for 10 years - wrote poems before she tried plays. Her influences range from black writers such as Ntozake Shange and Louise Bennett to Bob Marley and Beverley Knight. What about Sarah Kane, another playwright who had the same visceral, no-holds-barred approach ?
"I know her work but the language is completely different." Like Kane, Tucker Green had to watch walkouts from her debut. "If you hate the show, at least you have passion," she shrugs. "Touch wood, you ain't indifferent." She says that one person even had a seizure in Dirty Butterfly.
What draws her to extremes? "To start with, both plays are quite mundane. Then they just get darker. I'm interested in normal situations that become dark. I find it intriguing; it's all out there. Somebody who beats on his wife might be the nicest workmate you can have. In Born Bad, I was interested in betrayal, in women betraying women, which is the point of the play."
But the question at the heart of the play is: what did mother know? "You sometimes hear in trials of abusers that the mother said she didn't know. And you ask yourself: how come?" In the text, there are also suggestions of the victim's complicity. "There's a whole heap of psychology going on and I'm not in a position to even go there. The play is about subjective truth. Each character has a version of the truth that is real to them."
Tucker Green is wary of interviews. She won't say how old she is, or where she lives. "I've got Jamaican blood in me but I don't talk about my family." It's the work, and only the work, that matters. She despises journalistic cliches, although her tough-talking attitude may just hide the vulnerability of a newcomer.
Her talent has certainly been noticed. Born Bad is directed by Kathy Burke (star of Gimme Gimme Gimme and Harry Enfield), who now sees directing rather than acting as her "first job". The theatre "sent me a few plays and Born Bad stood out as the most original. Debbie's unique. She uses her own voice, and once I got into its rhythm, I just flew with it. It really gripped me and a lot of it made me laugh out loud. I liked the cruelty - people venting what they really feel."
For Burke, the play is less about abuse than about "truth, denial and unconditional love". She relishes the challenge of directing Born Bad: "I just love the way it's written and I love the fact that it is going to be tricky to make work on stage."
Jenny Topper, Hampstead's artistic director, sums up Tucker Green's qualities: "She has the three essential elements of a new voice: she is concerned with ideas, she is concerned with form, and she has the courage to stay true to her intuition and let her own linguistic invention come through."
When I ask Tucker Green about accusations of sensationalism, she has a one-word answer: "Bullshit." She has certainly brought danger back to the British stage, at a time when many new plays feel a bit jaded in style and content. I guess she's attracted by agony because it seems both authentic and passionate, but her unique mix of poetry and emotion lifts her work above the banalities of dirty realism.
Born Bad was at the Hampstead Theatre in April/May 2003.
© An earlier version of this article appeared as "If you hate the show, at least you have passion" in Independent on Sunday on 27 April 2003
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Tanika Gupta by Aleks Sierz
Tanika Gupta is a prolific and award-winning playwright whose work has been staged at the best venues in London and beyond. She's a bilingual British Bengali, a good-humoured personality and a professional at the top of her game. In fact, the only way to irritate her is to label her an Asian playwright.
"I'm so fed up with being called an Asian playwright," she says. "You would never describe Tom Stoppard as a white playwright, or say that a play had an all-white cast, like they say 'with an all-Asian cast'."
Whatever you call her, Gupta's had a cracking year. Her adaptation of the classic Hobson's Choice - set in an Asian tailor's shop owned by Hari Hobson - is opening at the Young Vic, one of London's hottest venues, and in the past 12 months her Sanctuary was staged at the National, Inside Out toured for Clean Break, and Fragile Land opened the new Hampstead theatre's education space.
To cap it all, she's just won the Asian Woman of Achievement Award for arts and culture. "It was a big do at the Hilton," she laughs. "With all these New Labour women dressed in saris. Hysterical. It looked like they'd all gone to the loo together and put on the same bindi." Still, Cherie Blair's sari was given the thumbs up by Eastern Eye newspaper. Oh well.
When Gupta was interviewed at the event, she keep being prompted to say what a struggle it had been for her as an Asian writer. "Actually, it hasn't been such a struggle. Of course, it's difficult being a writer, but my background hasn't made it more difficult. I've had more rapid success than some white male writers I know. We all struggle."
Another typical question is whether the stud she wears in her nose has any cultural significance. "Yes," she always answers, "if I take it out, my trousers fall down!" In fact, she's defined less by her colour and more by her parents' enthusiasm for culture.
Born in Chiswick, Gupta grew up in an arty environment. "My mum is an Indian classically trained dancer and my dad was the most amazing singer and story teller," she says. "They were into Bengali literature and Rabindranath Tagore. They met and fell in love at Tagore's ashram at Santiniketan. The artistic side of things was just breed into me - I didn't even notice it."
For several years, they lived in Hastings, where racism was overt. "When I was eight, a kid in my class called me a wog, and I went to the teacher, who said, 'Well, you are one.' And I was bullied. I couldn't tell my parents I was being picked on. I didn't want to upset them. As a kid, I wrote as a form of self-therapy."
When the family moved back to London the bullying stopped. By then, Gupta had got the writing bug. "I wrote short stories from an early age, so it has always been a bit of an obsession. I've written diaries or little stories, or brief plays for school."
She then went to Oxford University, read modern history, and "tried writing a novel, but it was hopeless. Somebody read it and said, 'The dialogue's really good but the description's awful - have you ever tried writing a play?"
As well as confirming her talent for dialogue, Gupta also met her future husband at university. "I met my bloke [David Archer, now head of international education at Action Aid] on a demonstration," she says, adding that university politicised her.
After Oxford, her political commitment found expression in her work for an Asian women's refuge in Manchester. After marriage in 1988, the couple moved to London, and Gupta was a community worker in Islington, writing in her spare time.
"The first thing I had produced [her radio play Asha] was three months after my father died in 1991," she says. "I also had my first baby so it was a strange time." She now has three kids, aged 12, 10 and three. So how does she manage?
"Because I was writing when I had my first child I've never had any other experience except being a working mother. The only time it's difficult is when you have deadlines and one of the kids is ill. I've had brilliant support from my mum and in-laws." Having children means she has to be a "fiercely disciplined writer" with "an iron will".
In 1996, she "decided to be a full-time writer because I didn't want to become a local government manager. When I was offered this gig to adapt A Suitable Boy for Channel 4 by David Puttnam, I decided I could write full time. So I did, and then I was broke for a year!"
Her first play, Voices on the Wind, was developed by Talawa and the National's Studio, and based on an extraordinary incident in her family history. "In 1930, Dinesh Gupta, my grandfather's brother, was hanged by the British. He was only 19." A Bengal Youth Volunteer, Dinesh Gupta had been part of a suicide squad which assassinated the British inspector general of prisons.
But while his comrades killed themselves, he botched it, was healed and then executed. "In prison he wrote all these beautifully eloquent letters to his family, which I was given and used as the basis of Voices on the Wind. My family is very proud of him, and now a road in Calcutta is named after him."
She also points out that although our image of the struggle for Indian independence is dominated by Gandhi and peaceful protest, "there were also a huge number of revolutionaries who used violence - and the British used violence and torture to suppress them."
When Voices on the Wind was staged at the National Studio, "it was terrifying because people like Richard Eyre came to watch it - that was scary because I suddenly realised that other people, and not just my mates, were interested in my work."
When the BBC asked her to write for Grange Hill, "I thought it was because there was a new Asian character in the show, but actually they just liked my writing. On the one hand, it was great that there were no Asian characters, but on the other hand it was odd that this London school had no Asian kids."
It was "great fun to work on Grange Hill because we did readings and developed the scripts with the young actors. It was a good chance to re-live my schooldays - I'd also been a fan of the programme."
Gupta's critics might mutter that she writes too much, and that her work has a soapy facility, but she's unfazed by that. Although she comes across as calm, she's extremely energetic, always doing workshops, teaching and numerous projects, from 10-minute political plays to short films.
"It's good to get out, have contact with people and not disappear up your own arse." She's not a solitary garret writer. "I get bored with my own company. And I need feedback." Bad reviews only upset her when they have a racist slant. "I hate it when your race is used to beat you."
In 2000, The Waiting Room was a career highpoint, enjoyed by blue-rinses as well as by Asian audiences. "Being staged by the National is what all playwrights want - it gave me the chance to work with amazing actors like [Bollywood legend] Shabana Azmi, who's so big in India. She was mobbed every night at the stage door."
She's too tactful to moan about Nick Hytner's new regime, but when I point out that there are no women writers in his opening season, she nods. She's noticed. "Well, the jury's still out - he's only just started," she says diplomatically.
What kind of play will she write next? "One of my ideas is a play with no Asian or black characters at all. After all, Ishiguru wrote The Remains of the Day, which has no Japanese characters in it," she says. "In the end, writing is about stories - and should be universal in its appeal."
Hobson's Choice opened at the Young Vic on 2 July 2003.
Tanika Gupta - a summary
1965 : Born in Chiswick.
1983-6 : Read Modern History at Oxford University.
1987-96 : Community work at an Asian women's refuge in Manchester, and with Islington Council, London.
1991 : Her Radio 4 play, Asha, in BBC Young Playwrights Festival.
1995 : Her BBC film, The Rhythm of Raz, nominated for a Children's BAFTA. Voices on the Wind is developed by National Theatre Studio.
1996 : Her 1994 film, Bideshi, wins award at the Bombay Short Film Festival.
1996- : Writes for Grange Hill and EastEnders.
1996-98 : Writer-in Residence at the Soho Theatre, London.
1997 : A River Sutra staged at Three Mills Island, London. Skeleton staged at the Soho Theatre.
1998 : Flight, her BBC2 screenplay, wins an EMMA.
2000 : The Waiting Room, staged by the National, wins the John Whiting Award.
2002 : Sanctuary staged by the National. Inside Out produced by Clean Break.
2003: Fragile Land opens the new Hampstead Theatre's education space. She wins Asian Woman of Achievement Award. Her version of Hobson's Choice at the Young Vic.
© An earlier version of this article appeared as 'A Woman of Achievement' in The Stage on 17 July 2003
