Writer James Graham talks to Andrew Rawnsley about his TV drama Coalition: ‘I love humanising politics’

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/22/james-graham-interview-coalition-x-y-finding-neverland

Version 0 of 1.

James Graham got his first theatrical break at the age of 10 when he was cast in a primary school production of Oliver!. As which character? “As Oliver, obviously,” he laughs. “I was this tiny little child with a small face. I loved acting. But unfortunately, I couldn’t sing so someone had to sing for me, which was really embarrassing. I remember having to sit on the stage while this other kid came on and sang for me.”

Thank God for that. Had he not had a lousy voice, he might have missed his true calling and the rest of us would not be enjoying the work of this prodigiously gifted stage and screen writer. He’s also a fabulously prolific talent. On Saturday night, Channel 4 will screen Coalition, his gripping dramatisation of the five frenzied days in May 2010 that led to the formation of the current government. He scripted the musical adaption of Finding Neverland, which has just opened in New York on Broadway. X+Y, the story of a young maths wizard with autism and Graham’s first script for a feature film, is in all good cinemas now. On election night and during the build-up to it, the Donmar will stage The Vote, his real-time drama set in a polling station.

Whether the subject is coalition-making or how Peter became Pan, all of his work is powered by compelling narrative. “My belief is that it’s all about story and that’s not shared by other writers necessarily.” Certainly isn’t. “Story is the best vehicle to understand anything and that’s what makes human beings unique. We make sense of the world by telling stories. I’ve become firmly of the belief that plotting and the narrative is primary and then anything else – style, tone, dialogue – comes second.”

Related: X+y review – heartwarming and funny story of maths prodigy

So to make sense of this softly spoken and self-deprecating 32-year-old we’ll begin with his beginnings. He grew up in Annesley, a Nottinghamshire village which was still feeling the aftershocks of the miners’ epic struggle with Margaret Thatcher. “I remember growing up in a time when it was tough because mines were closing. We had four pits in our village and they all closed in the early 90s.”

Mum did a variety of jobs, including “working pubs at night” before eventually becoming a school secretary. Dad worked for Nottingham city council. They divorced, but it was not a typical separation. “They did this quite weird thing.” Even though he was only four, he says he can remember the conversation on the family sofa when his parents explained to their children that they were going to move into separate houses on the same street. “You know, classic mining town terraced houses. I lived with my mum and my twin sister. There were two neighbours. Then my dad lived with my brother. And we sort of rotate round and round and round. I look back and think that was a generous thing for my parents to have done.”

They “didn’t express their politics very vividly”, but looking for sparks that ignited his fascination with politics we find one when his parents took opposing sides in the 1992 election. One of them supported Labour and the other backed the Tories.

“My dad was going to vote a different way to my mum. I found that really interesting, given that those were the days when there was a huge ideological divide between left and right. And I was curious. Two people who once loved each other, how could they have such different views of the way they wanted society to go? I was only 10 years old, but I really remember quizzing my mum on her choice, not really understanding it. How can two people from the same world think differently about things?”

A fault line ran through Annesley, “a strange kind of town, like a border town” with “a strange kind of politics.” Just to the north was Yorkshire, whose miners had followed Arthur Scargill into his doomed battle with Margaret Thatcher. Most of the Nottinghamshire miners did not strike.

“It wasn’t as cut and dried as striking or non-striking, left or right, pro or against. I’ve always enjoyed the greyness, the complicatedness of things.”

A memory suddenly hits him. “God, I’d forgotten about this. I’d just got back from university. So I think it was 20 years after the strike. On my uncle’s street, there was a guy who had struck and a guy who had hadn’t struck. And the disagreement between them for 20 years resulted in one guy going to the house of the other guy and he shot him in the head with a crossbow.”

And killed him?

“And killed him.”

They weren’t “a theatre-going family”. Anything he saw on the stage was through school. “It was all Shakespeare.” Acting in school plays was a way of finding himself, during his time at his enormous comprehensive. “I was a little bit shy, a little bit lacking in self-esteem and also not really knowing who I was. To walk on stage as a character, it was liberating. It surprised me that I was able to walk on stage in front of my peers and make them laugh.”

That he might write plays simply did not occur to him. “Cos I didn’t know that people could write. I didn’t know that, I didn’t know what that was.”

Two people sowed the seed. His mum bought him a typewriter when he was five or six. While other lads were “hanging out on street corners”, he’d sit at the typewriter “just imagining scenarios and picturing stories”. Inspiration came from Mr Humphrey, his drama teacher, who “forced me out of myself” and “kept thrusting me on stage”. As a thank you, he gave the name Mr Humphrey to the teacher played by Rafe Spall in X+Y.

He went to the University of Hull to read drama and it was there that he had his “first shot” at playwriting with Coal Not Dole! which he took to the Edinburgh festival. “It was quite Godberish. I could hear Willy Russell and John Godber and Jim Cartwright, those northern playwrights, in that. That was a brilliant experience. For the first time sitting at the back of an auditorium and having an audience respond to your work. It sounds superficial, but it’s not. You’re connecting some truth with people you’ve never met.”

He conveys a passion for theatre which is intense and infectious. “If aliens ever landed here, the one thing they really wouldn’t understand is why thousands of people get in this dark room and pretend something is real when it’s not in order to make sense of the world. I love that.”

We talk in a dressing room during breaks in the final rehearsals for Finding Neverland. The theatre crackles with that cocktail of exhilaration and nerves when a production is about to be exposed to its first paying customers. Until that moment of truth, there “is a vital component missing which is the audience”. On the production team “there are a lot of voices saying: ‘Is this working? Should we make some cuts?’ As the writer, you have to hold your nerve. I keep having to persuade people that we’re missing half of our instruments because the audience are going to feed into the rhythm of it.”

Once he has an audience, he shapes the script to their responses.

I will be brutal on my script. Even if there’s something I think is hilarious, if it’s not working, it will go

“I will be brutal on myself and my script. Even if there’s something that I think is beautiful, that I think is hilarious, if it’s not working, it will go. I will kill it.” The show stars Kelsey Grammer and Matthew Morrison. Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy wrote the score. The producer is Harvey Weinstein. “Harvey would be the first to say that he demands a lot from his writers. You have to be on your game.” He will be “very honest with me about what he thinks should go”.

“It’s a democratic process, theatre. They vote with their voices and they vote with their applause and they vote with their feet.”

He first began to make his mark many miles from Broadway at the Finborough, a 50-seat theatre above a pub in Earls Court. He found a kindred spirit in the theatre’s artistic director, Neil McPherson. Both were tired of clunkingly polemical “angry, angsty plays set in flats” and wanted to do political drama in a fresh way. Graham developed his playwriting muscles with a series of works. Sons of York was set in the Winter of Discontent. Tory Boyz was about gay Tories. Little Madam charted Margaret Thatcher’s childhood. Eden’s Empire grappled with the Suez crisis. It is the texture and humanity of his work that stands out for me. A lot of political drama has only one voice: cynicism. Television typically portrays politicians as Machiavellian monsters: Kevin Spacey as the murderous Frank Underwood in House of Cards. Or they are pathetic pygmies: the gibbering fools of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Wonderful satire which I hugely enjoy. But I’ve long been frustrated by the absence of drama that portrays politicians as more complex, more interesting creatures. So has Graham. “No one gets up every day and goes: ‘How can I fuck up the world today?’” His politicians aren’t cartoon villains. Nor are they the over-idealised types that populated Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. With Graham’s politicians, you get the warts – but you also get the all.

“People may think I am too nice to be a political playwright and that I don’t go for people’s scalps. I try to empathise and understand them. You’re right, that’s not fashionable. I just think it’s the easiest thing in the world to be cynical. It’s lazy. It’s unfair. It’s really boring.”

There’s no heavy didacticism in his work. Privacy, staged at the Donmar last year, which explored the digital age and the surveillance state, posed a lot of acute questions. Some critics complained that it didn’t answer them by conveying a strong point of view. “If you have one opinion and your purpose of telling this story is to convince the audience that you’re right, then that’s just shit drama. There’s nothing there. There’s no conflict, there’s nothing to wrestle with.”

The breakthrough play that brought him to bigger audiences and garnered much critical acclaim was the superb This House at the National in 2012. It took us back to the 1970s when a minority Labour government faced a daily struggle for survival. Its focus is on the intrigues, and sometimes comradeship, between the rival teams of party whips. On the face of it, a play about parliamentary procedures during a long-gone era did not have obvious box office potential. Did that scare him?

“Every single day,” he says. “Every single day, I would look at my script and go: ‘This is about not-famous politicians not passing laws.’ Now that’s not going to hit Broadway any time soon, is it?”

It was a tremendous success. “I love humanising politics with real people.” So did the audiences who flocked to see it.

One of the sources of his success is that he does his homework. For This House, he sought out and interviewed many of the politicians of the era. He took the same approach when embarking on Coalition. His first interviewee was Paddy Ashdown; his last was Peter Mandelson, who was “excited to give me some inside lines”. Bet he was. Does he plan an interview with a view to what he wants to get out of it or is he more a trawler of the waters?

“It’s the latter. I know I’m not a journalist and I wouldn’t be a very good journalist. I wouldn’t be able to push. I’m just curious. I just want to go and listen. I want them to be able to say things to me that won’t instantly translate to a direct quote. It’s just giving me flavour and they can be completely safe in that.”

He found George Osborne one of the most rewarding interviewees.

“George Osborne invited me to Number 11 and gave me a little tour.”

Well, of course he did, I say. The spider invited you into his parlour to soften you up.

“Possibly,” he laughs.

He likes to gossip, Osborne?

“He enjoyed talking about it and he had a bit of a twinkle in his eye.”

He loves the game.

“I think he really loves the game. And he doesn’t mind people knowing that.”

What went on during those five febrile days is hotly contested. Some of those involved are going to dispute his version. Ed Balls, for one, won’t like the way he is portrayed. It is a frequent dilemma of political journalism that interviewees can give differing – sometimes completely contradictory – accounts of who said and did what. How did he deal with that?

“It wasn’t as many as I expected, actually. The bread and butter of what happened, when it happened, was pretty consistent. My job is to represent all those views.”

His starting point was sympathy for the predicament that the politicians found themselves in. “The public handed these people an impossible situation. We don’t know who we want. You’ve got five days to sort it out. I want you to compromise, but when you compromise I will consider that a betrayal and I’ll be angry. But if you don’t compromise then you’ve let the country down because you’re selfish.”

We so often see politicians being buffoons. I wanted to explore politicians who are good at being politicians

The drama is emotionally even-handed. There are moments when the audience is drawn to empathise with Nick Clegg, the outsider suddenly thrust into the role of kingmaker. “I want you to understand him. It’s just too easy to attack him with hindsight. He’s the man in the middle, he’s got the biggest decisions to make and the biggest stakes to lose. I want the audience, instead of just thinking he’s a politician, [to ask themselves] what would you have done?” There are times when the drama arouses sympathy for Gordon Brown as he comes to terms with the termination of his career. “It’s a Shakespearian story of rise and fall. Gordon’s story does move me.” As for the Tories, Graham invites us to admire the cold-eyed professionalism with which they pursued power. “They were, dare I say, impressive in how they handled themselves in that stressful situation. We so often see politicians being buffoons. I wanted to explore politicians who are good at being politicians.”

It is a terrific drama which absolutely captures the atmosphere of the time. Labour come over as farcically unprepared for a hung parliament, and they were. David Cameron is portrayed as desperate to get himself into Number 10, which he was. Nick Clegg is agonised, but essentially decided from early on that a deal with the Tories is the only way to go for the Lib Dems. That rings right, too. It smells highly authentic. But it left me with a niggling question. A lot of clever, knowing quotes are placed in the mouths of the protagonists. In one scene, Osborne explains to Cameron why a coalition with the Lib Dems will suit the Tories. “People expect us to be ruthless. They’ll be seen as traitors.” When the deal is done, Bertie Carvel, as Clegg, prophetically mutters: “The next five years are going to be letdown after U-turn. What if I’ve made a mistake?” Realising the game is up, Brown quits Number 10 and rushes to the palace to resign before sunset because “I’m not going to leave in the dark”.

These are words we might imagine coming from the mouths of these characters, but did they actually say them? These sexy quotes: are they true or made up?

“I’m glad you think they’re sexy quotes, because I can claim credit for them myself,” he smiles. “It’s dramatic interpretation. I’ve written those lines. No one has verbatim quoted them to me.”

This gets us on to the perennially tricky issue with fictionalising real events. When does the need to distil and dramatise cross the line into telling untruths to the audience? I tell him I feel cheated and get cross when historical dramas twist and traduce the truth.

“That pisses me off as well,” he responds. “But I think there has to be a difference between distorting the truth for dramatic satisfaction and being forced to interpret something because you have to, because it was something that was said privately and behind the scenes and so no one knows what happened. In Coalition, what you’re capturing is the essence of what happened and you have to apply dramatic licence. You have to write dialogue, people have to say things and that has to come from my brain.”

Or he could have just stuck to what he was certain people had said?

“But that would be terrible drama,” he comes back. “That would be really shit drama. That would be a documentary.”

He doesn’t worry that some viewers might mistake Coalition for documentary?

“No, because they are really smart. The audience understand that you’re telling a story. There is a clear distinction I make that when people are standing in front of a microphone they say verbatim what they said in that speech. And then when they walk through a door and that door closes, the audience knows that what is happening is my best interpretation.”

He won’t be drawn on how he will vote this May. “I’ve not always put a cross next to the same party.”

The Vote, which will open at the Donmar in late April and be shown live on More4 on election night, is intended as a celebration of that antique, unglamorous and yet glorious ritual when the nation troops to schools, church halls and libraries to cast its ballots. “It will run in real-time.” Some 50 actors, among them Judi Dench, will play voters. “We’re going to have all these characters come through live to vote and bring their stories.”

I remark that I rather revere the pilgrimage to the polling station to cross a box with a stubby pencil. Maybe this is an old-fashioned view, but I think of it as the holy sacrament of democracy.

He nods vigorously. “I completely agree. I love it. I find it really moving.” He makes an argument against online voting. In a digitised age when “all our choices can now be tracked and traced and stored”, that moment in the booth with “the good old HB pencil and a slip of paper” is “one of the last social functions we have all to ourselves”.

With so much acclaim for so many projects, you might expect James Graham to be a very fulfilled man. He’s not entirely. “I always struggle to – this sounds wanky – but I struggle to be in the moment and enjoy it cos I’m thinking of the next job. I need to try and enjoy it all. I don’t think I enjoy it enough.”

That restless drive is, I suspect, a product of his upbringing. He doesn’t argue with this. “I’m sort of aware that I came from a background and I was the type of younger person who didn’t hugely value themselves or imagine that they would ever be sat here on Broadway.” His ferocious work ethic is to be greatly admired, but it makes me a bit fearful for him. We don’t want such an outstanding talent to burn out. Is he a workaholic?

“Yeah.”

Does it concern him?

“Yeah, it actually really started to worry me a couple of years ago. Friends worried about me because I just wasn’t looking after myself.” Not sleeping? Not eating? “Getting really thin and exhausted and tired and unhappy.

“I worry that I’m going to burn out and I worry that I can’t give enough time to each project. So in order to give more time to each project I sacrifice more and more of my personal life.”

He’s not dating. “It’s on my to-do list.” He is trying to conquer “the need to never say no to a job”.

So what has he said no to? That’s the test.

“Exactly,” he says, and then there’s a long pause. “I have this argument all the time with my friends. They read the other day that I’d said yes to adapting Nineteen Eighty-Four. I had so many people ringing me furiously.”

“It’s interesting. This musical is about a playwright, JM Barrie, who was obsessed, haunted by time, because he thinks he’s not living well enough and fully enough and actually he’s just asking the wrong questions.”

Gently, I point out that he’s responded to a question about being a workaholic by talking about work. We both laugh.

Coalition is on Channel 4 on Saturday, 9pm. The Vote, will be broadcast live from the Donmar on 7 May