Interview with playwright Alistair McDowall

Article published: Tuesday, October 19th 2010

Alistair McDowall’s newest play, Plain Jane, is set to open at the Royal Exchange Theatre on October 19 and runs until October 23. MULE caught up with the playwright for a chat about bullying, male-centric society and  his influences.

Plain Jane centres on a new pupil at a boarding school for girls. It will be performed by Cheap Seats Theatre Co, of which Alistair McDowall is a founder and is his first association with the Royal Exchange Theatre.

MULE: Plain Jane is your first play at the Royal Exchange Theatre. Did you expect the attention and press coverage that Plain Jane has received?

AM: It’s always slightly surreal having people wanting to talk to you, and publish it. The last show that we did, 5:30 won a couple of awards and we got a fair bit of press attention then. The show we did just after that, Some Stories, also got quite a bit of media notice so it’s not sort of completely surreal. I think it’s stepped up because of the affiliation with the Exchange Theatre and them taking us on so I guess the frequency of it has stepped up.

MULE: You have used personal experience in weaving a story, such as in 5:30. Though the protagonist is female, was there any element of personal experience drawn upon and used in writing Plain Jane?

AM:  I think anything you write is always going to be vaguely based either on aspects of yourself or things that you think about or might have experienced. There’s no direct event that Plain Jane is based on, or anything that happened to me or anyone that I knew really, that I was going to write about. 5:30 was sort of an anomaly in that sense and I don’t usually do that. Plain Jane was the end result of my reading and thinking of what I was interested in at the time, which was the different types of bullying that will go on between girls rather than between boys. It can be just as vicious and even more so but there are very different rules and scenarios as well as hugely different things at stake.

I was particularly interested in that and also that I think girls are made quite aware at an early age of what’s expected of them in male-centric aspect of society, how you must be submissive to a man, how you must marry, how you must want to have sex with men frequently and this how you must dress and look and all those things that are perpetuated by magazines, films, newspapers and music. This is all thrown at girls at a very young age and I think that’s interesting, especially in an environment where the play is set, at a girl’s school, where there is almost no male presence and this is all still a factor.

MULE: Was there any difficulty in writing a play about bullying, which is a sensitive issue for many, for the stage especially when your previous plays are centred on situations and occurrences, which bring pain and other emotions to the fore?

AM: There is some uncomfortable stuff in there, which I’ve never found very difficult to write but there are certain things which are more uncomfortable to write than others so there are some nasty things that happen. I think what’s interesting is the play is less about why this happens even although it’s a big part of it, more of its how this happens and another big part of it is the language, it’s very rhythmic and staccato. There’s also the element of the girls using each other and the environment to attack each other and the play examines the dynamic of this situation, how it progresses and accelerates, as it’s just one room across the whole play. All I wanted to do was tell a good story and I hope it’s believable as I’m not a teenage girl and didn’t go to a girl’s boarding school!

MULE: A lot of your previous plays have ended with unforeseeable twists. Was there the urge to do the same again with Plain Jane?

AM: I guess the last couple has had twists, that’s not intentional though. I think if you sit down and go ‘oh I want to write something with a twist’ you’re fucked from the start really. I think you should start with your characters and your story and go from there. I wouldn’t say there’s a traditional twist in this one but there’s quite a lot of surprises in there. Whenever I’m writing I have a very short attention span and the one way to keep focused is to you know, surprise myself and it’s very fun to imagine how we can trick the audience. I do like misleading the audience and I think they like it too, like with Eighteen Stupid Reasons Why I love You Lots And Lots all the promotional material was very colourful, fun and fluffy but the actual play had a lot of darkness in it.

Plain Jane will run from 19 October – 23 October at the Royal Exchange Theatre. St Ann’s Square, Manchester

For further information and tickets, see http://www.royalexchangetheatre.org.uk/event.aspx?id=343

Mohsin Iqbal

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More: Culture, Manchester, Stage

Comments

1. Please be a bit more careful in spelling of name in title. My grandson spells his name in the same way as I do!!
   Otherwise an interesting interview

   Comment by Ian McDowall on October 25, 2010 at 9:48 am

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