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Jan Goodey talks to Willy
Russell, Britain's most sanguine playwright
 It's fair testament to the
quality of a playwright's work that it is seen regularly by a
wide range of the paying public. After Shakespeare, Ayckbourn
and Godber, Willy Russell is the fourth most performed English
dramatist.
Over the last 25 years he has
written more than 20 plays, musicals and television
productions, including award winners like Blood Brothers and
Educating Rita. Russell mines a rich seam by championing the
underdog, be it Shirley Valentine and her moonlight flit to
Greece, or Rita and her struggle for acceptance at university.
These characters' quest for self fulfilment are followed in an
almost epic style with an accompanying unerring eye for
detail.
The compassionate core of
Russell's work and it's sheer unpretentiousness is one of its
strengths but also one of its flaws, depending on how you take
your theatre: lite or deeply symbolic. Detractors find
musicals like Blood Brothers coarse, vulgar and lacking in
nuance of thought and action, whereas supporters revel in the
roughly hewn characters, the spit and sawdust settings -
integral to the roller coaster ride Russell takes you on.
The critics have hurt him in the past. An introduction to a
student edition of Educating Rita he wrote in 1983, reads,
"Amongst those who pass judgement on writing there is an
awful belief that something which is easily understood and
communicated is somehow inferior to that which requires
profound analysis and explanation. I hope that you will find
Educating Rita understandable without lengthy analysis and
hope that you will not think me lowbrow, unsound or inferior
when I tell you that when making Educating Rita I tried very
hard to write a love story. I hope I did." With quotes
like this you're left wondering whether his whole writing
career hasn't just been one long test to prove his own self
worth.
Russell, 54, was brought up in
Knowsley, a working class, semi-urban suburb of Liverpool, not
particularly rough. "For my sins, having failed
spectacularly at school and not really wanting to do anything
except stay in The Cavern and watch The Beatles day and night,
I was persuaded to go into lady's hairdressing," he
explains in a voice which is mix of teacher and nighclub
bouncer. "It sounded like a bit of a wheeze, and I stuck
it for a number of years and then got out and did a number of
jobs including a spell in Burbrand as a stocking stacker, and
as a girder cleaner at Fords for a while. That was while
getting money together to try and get back into education to
do O and A-levels because nobody would give me a grant. Then I
did teacher training for three years."
It was at the prompting of his
first girlfriend Annie (now his wife) that he became
interested in theatre and studied drama at teachers' college,
where he also began writing plays. He later joined the
Liverpool Everyman Theatre and while there was asked to
rewrite a Manchester written documentary about The Beatles. He
said he would do it on the condition that he could write his
own piece on them, and thus was born his first big hit, John,
Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert (1974) which quickly
transferred to the West End, was awarded Best New Musical and
ran for a year.
He never looked back and there
followed a string of stage plays: Breezeblock Park (1975), One
for the Road (1978), Stags and Hens (filmed as Dancing Through
the Dark) (1978), Educating Rita (1980 Society of the West End
Theatre Award as Comedy of the Year) and Shirley Valentine
(1986). In 1983 he wrote two musicals, Blood Brothers (voted
Best New Musical by London critics) and Our Day Out. The
latter is based on his 1977 television play of the same name.
Other television credits include One Summer (1983), King of
the Castle (1973), Break In (1974), Death of a Young Man
(1974), Boy with the Transistor Radio and The Daughters of
Albion (1979) and Terraces (1993).
Having Liverpool as background
- he lives and works there and has a flat in London - can only
have helped with this prolific output. After all where else
but this crucible of creative eccentricity would you expect to
find the late great Bill Shankly, who had one of the best runs
in Liverpool FC's history and the Merseybeat poets who've sold
more than a million copies of their books since the late
Sixties. Leading member Adrian Henri who died recently was a
great friend of Russell's.
"We all did a show
together for a number of years called Words on the Run
[Gardner Arts three years ago] which was grand but'll never be
done again now that Ade has departed." When I mention
Paul McCartney in passing, I get the distinct impression
Russell'd rather just brush it under the carpet. Here's too
proud a man to be thought of as feeding off someone else's
fame, "Yeah, yeah, yeah I've just done some work recently
with Paul McCartney - a poetry reading with him in March. I
know him quite well." So I don't suppose Macca will be
collaborating with Russell on his latest project - an album.
"Not a chance, not going anywhere near that one, it's not
high profile at all. I'm simply writing an album of songs and
performing them with another dramatist composer Tim Firth (of
TV's Preston Front fame). Not rock, we just want to write
songs people want to listen to."
Talk to him about his younger
days and he's not quite so taciturn - he'll even regale you
with anecdotes from The Cavern days, "Back then I was 14
and The Beatles were about 19. I remember once standing at the
little coffee bar in the corner of The Cavern. John Lennon
accidentally split a bottle of coke over me and I
apologised."
Bearing all this in mind - the
collaborations, the fame, the fortune - from where does he see
the popularity of his work springing? "Haven't got a
clue. There's no way I can answer that. No I'll leave that one
for others, commentators and critics really. And you can't
have that kind of monkey on your back anyway. You've just got
to be true to whatever it is you're writing at a particular
time.You can't think of it in terms of outwardly wordly appeal
or success - you wouldn't be able to write. It's both. It's
sweet and sour. Whenever you write something new you're going
into territory you've never been in before so you don't know
if you're going to be able to fly."
His influences are easier to
fathom. "I have thousands and thousands. Ibsen always,
Shakespeare, Jim Cartwright - I'm always open to influence;
good work just inspires me in music painting theatre, poetry,
whatever. The thrill reminds you why you're trying to do this
bloody crazy thing." Brecht was one of first writers to
hold sway over him when he was involved in productions of
Brecht's plays at the Everyman, although not, as Russell is
keen to point out, "the black-drapes-East-German Brecht,
this was Brecht shot through with John Littlewood: Brecht with
fun which is what true Brecht should be anyway. I cut my teeth
in that sort of sprawling epic, where it was just the most
natural thing in the world to have songs in the show and a
band."
Currently he's enamoured with
Lee Hall, the writer of hit film Billy Elliot, which may have
something to do with the fact that Russell's writing the
follow up to his own book. "I've just bought a copy of a
clutch of radio plays by him - lovely writer. He did an
adaptation of Brecht that was considered unperformable, called
Mr Pontillo and His Man Matty. It was exquisite. Theatre de
Complicité did it."
Russell's strong views on the
working classes and the difficulties they face getting access
to middle-class culture come into play here. He argues that
the working-classes are labelled philistines, while at the
same time there is concerted effort to withhold culture from
them. He makes the distinction between literature which is an
invention by the middle-classes for their own benefit and
literacy which the working-classes haven't accepted yet. This
is why according to Russell it is so difficult teaching
working-class kids whose traditions are in the spoken word.
And in a way it's to them,
their parents and grandparents he owes a debt because apart
from the innate quality of imagination, ultimately the genesis
of his characters has come from people like this, people he's
lived alongside, people who have struggled with failure,
foiled dreams and raged against a bitter and divided sense of
injustice. He's paying them off gradually with "a story,
like a song [which] can transcend barriers of language, class
and race," his quote from the very same 1983 introduction
to Educating Rita.
Willy Russell's Blood
Brothers is on at Theatre Royal, New Road from July 9-21,
tickets on 01273 328488.
copyright New Insight 2000
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