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The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I would go-go dance in a shower then work on sonnets!' Ncuti Gatwa's sexy new Shakespearean drama
'I think of it as a very sexy, dangerous game of Elizabethan cat and mouse.' Ncuti Gatwa is describing his new project with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a two-hander about William Shakespeare and fellow playwright Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe. In Born With Teeth, Will and Kit collaborate on a play about Henry VI – for 'collaborate', read flirt, fight and ruminate betrayal. Gatwa plays Marlowe and Shakespeare is Edward Bluemel; the pair last worked together on TV's Sex Education. Bluemel followed that series about horny teens with playing a vampire (A Discovery of Witches), an MI6 agent (Killing Eve) and a brooding lord (My Lady Jane), while Gatwa was cast as one of the Kens in the Barbie movie and starred in a little thing called Doctor Who. Sitting on a sofa just before rehearsals begin, they make amiable, nicely contrasted figures. Gatwa with cropped hair and tight white T-shirt, his bangle and ring shining gold. Tousle-haired Bluemel in black, silver rings in ear and on finger. He's eager and chatty; Gatwa seems more guarded, until his laugh explodes seemingly out of nowhere. A note from playwright Liz Duffy Adams in the Born With Teeth script says that the actors' ages or looks don't matter, 'as long as they are wildly charismatic'. I have to ask: do they feel well cast? They guffaw, and Bluemel leans forward. 'I'm here to break it to everyone that you, Ncuti, are wildly charismatic.' So who are these characters? 'It's fascinating to dig into these men who were more than likely queer in different ways,' says Bluemel. 'Marlowe wears his heart on his sleeve – plays like Edward II are brazen and brave depictions of queer love. Shakespeare is scared – he wants to talk about things, but via ancient Rome or picturesque Ephesus.' In the play, Will avers, 'I want to hide in my work, like an outlaw in the forest.' Kit derides his colleague as 'careful Will, who won't'. Marlowe, Gatwa declares, 'dances with danger'. The play leans into his supposed career as an agent of Elizabethan spymasters, and the peril that brings for everyone in his orbit. Mistrust lends the dialogue an erotic shimmer – and neither knows who is being played. 'How sincere is a snog?' grins Bluemel. 'A question I ask myself after every snog …' Drama thrives in history's gaps. Adams has Kit scorn research for their Henry VI play: 'Sources? Are we to take direction from historians?' Gatwa doesn't share that sentiment himself, but mentions a note from Daniel Evans, their director: 'All that research is not going to teach you how to act the characters.' Even so, they enjoyed a research week, 'getting under the skin of that world, which doesn't feel too different from the world we're in now.' It's certainly a rollicking read. 'It starts fast, and they're deep into each other's lives, unpicking each other,' Gatwa says. 'When we first read the play there was a lift-off, it's so human – their attraction to each other, their jealousy and insecurities.' Adams drops 'some real deep cuts, lots of Easter eggs' for the drama nerds, says Bluemel. 'There's some beautiful passages. If you set yourself the challenge of writing dialogue for Marlowe and Shakespeare, you've got to write pretty gorgeous stuff, which Liz has. The play is rooted in history, but so much is exciting, fun conjecture – where we as actors can really enjoy ourselves.' Enjoying themselves on stage is what these actors signed up for – they'd both originally imagined theatre careers ('then TV got its greasy mitts on you,' teases Bluemel). Shuddering, Gatwa summons his training for screen acting. 'Do you remember the first time you saw yourself on camera? Horrible.' Bluemel, who dreamed of 'performing Shakespeare in a National Trust garden', still feels 'much more comfortable on stage – maybe because I can't watch myself'. He hasn't performed in Shakespeare since a student attempt in Cardiff as Leontes in The Winter's Tale, though 'I always have my ears pricked up to do some Shakespeare'. Gatwa followed Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet in Manchester with Emma Rice's riotous A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare's Globe. A more recent retooled classic was the National Theatre's audacious The Importance of Being Earnest. 'It was chaos every single night,' he beams. 'Delicious, delicious chaos.' Rather like Born With Teeth, he says, the show brandished a queer subtext that was hiding in plain sight. 'In academic conversations, there's a tendency to play that stuff down. It was nice to bring it out to the forefront.' Kit and Will were provincial lads who flourished in London. How about the actors playing them? Gatwa would travel up for auditions on the overnight bus from Glasgow ('Thirty quid!'). He waxes nostalgic: 'Megabus Gold, I loved it. You sleep all night, get into Victoria Station, brush your teeth and head off to your audition.' He tried out for a role in Shakespeare in Love in the West End just after being attacked by three strangers on his way home from a nightclub. 'I had just gotten jumped, and had big problems with my mouth,' he says, recalling the swelling that went on to explode during his meeting. 'I was in the audition for flipping Sonia Friedman [the leading impresario] and it popped. I left in the worst mood, but got the job.' In Gatwa's words, 'the best actors are all working at McDonald's'. The line between making it and not can feel arbitrary. 'A lot of right place, right time, and parts that lend themselves to you as an actor,' Bluemel confirms. 'I always think: if I was the casting director, would I cast me in this? Sometimes the stars align.' The Time Lord in the room is, of course, Doctor Who, the role that Gatwa has just relinquished after two not-uncontroversial seasons. Few roles are such magnets for unfiltered opinion – has he managed to tune out the chatter? 'I'm quite good at shutting the noise out,' he says. 'It's loud. But it's very cool and exciting to be in the middle of this huge thing – there's haters, there's lovers, it's all going on. It is an absolute gift of a job, and a gift of a community. The Whovians are so deeply in my heart, I can't tell you.' Quite apart from the challenge of making the character your own, is there any coaching for the attention around the series? 'Yes, there was, but I don't think it can ever prepare you for what it feels like. They put security outside my mum's house, my brother's house, and I would say: what could possibly be the need? And then the need comes.' Only someone who has stood at the eye of this storm can understand it. 'I was just at Glastonbury and bumped into Matt Smith in a club,' he adds, 'and we had great, deep chats about that job and how there'll never be another like it in our lifetimes. We'll never work that hard again. Never be as stimulated and stretched. It's also very exhausting, so it's lovely to delve into other projects.' Bluemel's roles too attract a fair degree of attention. So is there an ideal level of fame: offering opportunities but protecting you from intrusion? 'My ideal is to work on good stuff and make a living from it,' says Bluemel. 'Some of those big jobs, from a professional point of view, might be amazing, but at what cost? It changes people's lives irrevocably.' As a student, Gatwa was a go-go dancer at one of Glasgow's 'pivotal gay clubs. They had these shower cubicles that were open to the club. I would dance in the showers in a pair of hot pants and next morning wake up and work on sonnets.' Is dancing good for confidence? 'You need a lot of front – or a lot of shots! Yes, it was good for confidence, chatting to different people every night. Go-go dancing sets you up for life!' Born With Teeth may not require hot pants, but it has required both actors to let go of some inhibitions. Movement director Ira Mandela Siobhan prescribed some initial trust exercises. 'When someone's falling into your arms, lifting you up, throwing you around, a trust builds,' Gatwa says. 'There's all sorts of push and pull,' adds Bluemel – the performance will involve 'a high adrenaline vulnerability'. Gatwa needs the bathroom, so we wrap up, giving Bluemel the last word on Born With Teeth. 'It feels modern and current,' he says. 'A clash of ambitions, jealousy, romance – ultimately, two very complicated people who can't decide what they think of each other. I hope it feels like a horny Elizabethan whirlwind.' Born With Teeth is at Wyndham's theatre, London, 13 August until 1 November
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I would go-go dance in a shower then work on sonnets!' Ncuti Gatwa's sexy new Shakespearean drama
'I think of it as a very sexy, dangerous game of Elizabethan cat and mouse.' Ncuti Gatwa is describing his new project with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a two-hander about William Shakespeare and fellow playwright Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe. In Born With Teeth, Will and Kit collaborate on a play about Henry VI – for 'collaborate', read flirt, fight and ruminate betrayal. Gatwa plays Marlowe and Shakespeare is Edward Bluemel; the pair last worked together on TV's Sex Education. Bluemel followed that series about horny teens with playing a vampire (A Discovery of Witches), an MI6 agent (Killing Eve) and a brooding lord (My Lady Jane), while Gatwa was cast as one of the Kens in the Barbie movie and starred in a little thing called Doctor Who. Sitting on a sofa just before rehearsals begin, they make amiable, nicely contrasted figures. Gatwa with cropped hair and tight white T-shirt, his bangle and ring shining gold. Tousle-haired Bluemel in black, silver rings in ear and on finger. He's eager and chatty; Gatwa seems more guarded, until his laugh explodes seemingly out of nowhere. A note from playwright Liz Duffy Adams in the Born With Teeth script says that the actors' ages or looks don't matter, 'as long as they are wildly charismatic'. I have to ask: do they feel well cast? They guffaw, and Bluemel leans forward. 'I'm here to break it to everyone that you, Ncuti, are wildly charismatic.' So who are these characters? 'It's fascinating to dig into these men who were more than likely queer in different ways,' says Bluemel. 'Marlowe wears his heart on his sleeve – plays like Edward II are brazen and brave depictions of queer love. Shakespeare is scared – he wants to talk about things, but via ancient Rome or picturesque Ephesus.' In the play, Will avers, 'I want to hide in my work, like an outlaw in the forest.' Kit derides his colleague as 'careful Will, who won't'. Marlowe, Gatwa declares, 'dances with danger'. The play leans into his supposed career as an agent of Elizabethan spymasters, and the peril that brings for everyone in his orbit. Mistrust lends the dialogue an erotic shimmer – and neither knows who is being played. 'How sincere is a snog?' grins Bluemel. 'A question I ask myself after every snog …' Drama thrives in history's gaps. Adams has Kit scorn research for their Henry VI play: 'Sources? Are we to take direction from historians?' Gatwa doesn't share that sentiment himself, but mentions a note from Daniel Evans, their director: 'All that research is not going to teach you how to act the characters.' Even so, they enjoyed a research week, 'getting under the skin of that world, which doesn't feel too different from the world we're in now.' It's certainly a rollicking read. 'It starts fast, and they're deep into each other's lives, unpicking each other,' Gatwa says. 'When we first read the play there was a lift-off, it's so human – their attraction to each other, their jealousy and insecurities.' Adams drops 'some real deep cuts, lots of Easter eggs' for the drama nerds, says Bluemel. 'There's some beautiful passages. If you set yourself the challenge of writing dialogue for Marlowe and Shakespeare, you've got to write pretty gorgeous stuff, which Liz has. The play is rooted in history, but so much is exciting, fun conjecture – where we as actors can really enjoy ourselves.' Enjoying themselves on stage is what these actors signed up for – they'd both originally imagined theatre careers ('then TV got its greasy mitts on you,' teases Bluemel). Shuddering, Gatwa summons his training for screen acting. 'Do you remember the first time you saw yourself on camera? Horrible.' Bluemel, who dreamed of 'performing Shakespeare in a National Trust garden', still feels 'much more comfortable on stage – maybe because I can't watch myself'. He hasn't performed in Shakespeare since a student attempt in Cardiff as Leontes in The Winter's Tale, though 'I always have my ears pricked up to do some Shakespeare'. Gatwa followed Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet in Manchester with Emma Rice's riotous A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare's Globe. A more recent retooled classic was the National Theatre's audacious The Importance of Being Earnest. 'It was chaos every single night,' he beams. 'Delicious, delicious chaos.' Rather like Born With Teeth, he says, the show brandished a queer subtext that was hiding in plain sight. 'In academic conversations, there's a tendency to play that stuff down. It was nice to bring it out to the forefront.' Kit and Will were provincial lads who flourished in London. How about the actors playing them? Gatwa would travel up for auditions on the overnight bus from Glasgow ('Thirty quid!'). He waxes nostalgic: 'Megabus Gold, I loved it. You sleep all night, get into Victoria Station, brush your teeth and head off to your audition.' He tried out for a role in Shakespeare in Love in the West End just after being attacked by three strangers on his way home from a nightclub. 'I had just gotten jumped, and had big problems with my mouth,' he says, recalling the swelling that went on to explode during his meeting. 'I was in the audition for flipping Sonia Friedman [the leading impresario] and it popped. I left in the worst mood, but got the job.' In Gatwa's words, 'the best actors are all working at McDonald's'. The line between making it and not can feel arbitrary. 'A lot of right place, right time, and parts that lend themselves to you as an actor,' Bluemel confirms. 'I always think: if I was the casting director, would I cast me in this? Sometimes the stars align.' The Time Lord in the room is, of course, Doctor Who, the role that Gatwa has just relinquished after two not-uncontroversial seasons. Few roles are such magnets for unfiltered opinion – has he managed to tune out the chatter? 'I'm quite good at shutting the noise out,' he says. 'It's loud. But it's very cool and exciting to be in the middle of this huge thing – there's haters, there's lovers, it's all going on. It is an absolute gift of a job, and a gift of a community. The Whovians are so deeply in my heart, I can't tell you.' Quite apart from the challenge of making the character your own, is there any coaching for the attention around the series? 'Yes, there was, but I don't think it can ever prepare you for what it feels like. They put security outside my mum's house, my brother's house, and I would say: what could possibly be the need? And then the need comes.' Only someone who has stood at the eye of this storm can understand it. 'I was just at Glastonbury and bumped into Matt Smith in a club,' he adds, 'and we had great, deep chats about that job and how there'll never be another like it in our lifetimes. We'll never work that hard again. Never be as stimulated and stretched. It's also very exhausting, so it's lovely to delve into other projects.' Bluemel's roles too attract a fair degree of attention. So is there an ideal level of fame: offering opportunities but protecting you from intrusion? 'My ideal is to work on good stuff and make a living from it,' says Bluemel. 'Some of those big jobs, from a professional point of view, might be amazing, but at what cost? It changes people's lives irrevocably.' As a student, Gatwa was a go-go dancer at one of Glasgow's 'pivotal gay clubs. They had these shower cubicles that were open to the club. I would dance in the showers in a pair of hot pants and next morning wake up and work on sonnets.' Is dancing good for confidence? 'You need a lot of front – or a lot of shots! Yes, it was good for confidence, chatting to different people every night. Go-go dancing sets you up for life!' Born With Teeth may not require hot pants, but it has required both actors to let go of some inhibitions. Movement director Ira Mandela Siobhan prescribed some initial trust exercises. 'When someone's falling into your arms, lifting you up, throwing you around, a trust builds,' Gatwa says. 'There's all sorts of push and pull,' adds Bluemel – the performance will involve 'a high adrenaline vulnerability'. Gatwa needs the bathroom, so we wrap up, giving Bluemel the last word on Born With Teeth. 'It feels modern and current,' he says. 'A clash of ambitions, jealousy, romance – ultimately, two very complicated people who can't decide what they think of each other. I hope it feels like a horny Elizabethan whirlwind.' Born With Teeth is at Wyndham's theatre, London, 13 August until 1 November
Chicago Tribune
13-07-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Upcoming Chicago budget ‘grimmest picture of all' for Mayor Brandon Johnson, aldermen
On a warm, late June morning at Truman College in Uptown, Mayor Brandon Johnson welcomed attendees to the first of several budget roundtables. He hit on a familiar litany of positive developments, touting a drop in crime, expanded mental and behavioral health services, and youth employment opportunities. 'Let's continue to expand and find innovative ways that we can bring true collaboration into the budgeting process to ensure that all of our residents are heard and that their needs are met,' Johnson said. 'I'm truly honored that you are all here to help guide this budget process. It will not be easy, but nothing ever worth fighting for ever is.' It was the only allusion Johnson made to the disorder in Chicago's fiscal house that threatens the improvements and investments he's fought for: a more than $1 billion anticipated deficit for 2026, a major pending union contract, a fractious City Council resistant to both new revenues and cuts, federal threats to cancel grants to local governments and a school district long overdue on a promised pension payback. Two days after that roundtable, Johnson's finance team would disclose the city ended 2024 with a $161 million deficit, emptying one of its key emergency funds. Adding to the bad tidings last week was a final $7 billion estimate for the cost of a state bill boosting benefits for police and fire pensioners through 2055. That zeroed out 'unallocated' reserve balance is even lower than the depths of the 2008 recession, when it held just $226,000, according to the city's annual financial reports. It represents a serious financial alarm for the cash-strapped city, according to Justin Marlowe, the director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago 'I don't think we can overstate how important that is,' Marlowe said. 'It is the single most closely watched number in all of municipal finance.' Given that the costs that drove that drawdown — the failure of Chicago Public Schools to pay back the city for a $175 million pension payment and a shortfall in state income tax revenues — were not surprises, that figure is likely to result in a rebuke or threat of a downgrade from ratings agencies, he predicted. 'It's not crossing the Rubicon, but it definitely draws a lot of attention to just how little flexibility the city has,' Marlowe said. City policy is to have enough money in reserves to cover at least two months of general operating expenses. In a statement, budget spokeswoman LaKesha Gage-Woodard said the city is 'on track to rebuild fund balance levels' and adhere to its policy, thanks to overperforming revenues and lower expenditures so far this year. Despite that inflexibility, shortly after revealing the deficit, Johnson expressed his staunch opposition to cuts that would detract from his stated mission to make Chicago the safest and most affordable big city in America. New regressive revenues or reductions to violence prevention efforts, he suggested, would be unacceptable. Instead, the firm Ernst & Young is probing city procurement, benefits, real estate and fines and fees to find efficiencies, and Johnson convened a budget working group to make initial proposals by August. But the mayor's major options for finding new, significant money are limited without state approval, again raising the possibility of a property tax hike, this time even closer to reelection for him and the City Council that roundly rejected such an increase last fall. Other possibilities also face political headwinds. Many aldermen are flatly opposed to replacing the outgoing state grocery tax with a city grocery tax as they pressure the mayor to instead make spending cuts. Their unwillingness to vote to bring in more money ties Chicago's hands in a critical moment, argued Ald. William Hall, 6th, tasked by Johnson with leading aldermen in identifying more revenue. 'What we're facing is more difficult when you have obstructionists who don't provide solutions,' Hall said. 'The political headline budgeting is dangerous, because people are very desperate right now.' Ald. Nicole Lee, 11th, said she is already preparing constituents for 'what I believe is going to be a very, very difficult budget process' that 'will likely include a property tax levy.' 'I don't think any politician in their right mind would ever want to have to have to be in this position' this close to the 2027 election, said Lee, who voted against Johnson's last budget and said she and colleagues might not be willing to raise the tax again. 'But here we are, and this is the job. We don't really have a choice in that matter. It's got to be dealt with.' Last week, the city also disclosed that one good piece of news from its 2024 year-end report — a slight boost in the funding levels of its four pension funds — would likely be short-lived. A complete actuarial analysis of a new pension sweetener bill that passed the state legislature late last session found the change 'would increase the City's pension liabilities by more than $11 billion across the Police and Fire funds,' the city's financial office said, dropping the funding levels of both down to less than 18%. Those funds had only 25% of the money necessary to pay out future retirees at the end of 2024, but were slowly improving. That bill awaits Gov. JB Pritzker's signature. 'Given the scale of the impact on the City's long-term pension obligations, changes of this magnitude should have involved broader stakeholder engagement and a more transparent public process,' said Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski. The change, sponsored by state Sen. Rob Martwick, would add an extra $60 million to the $1.5 billion pension tab owed for those two funds in 2027, the city's analysis found, and grow to more than $753 million for 2055. It would represent a major setback to the city's efforts to right its pension ship. The retirement funds for city workers are among the worst-funded in the country. Under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the city in 2023 began setting aside reserve funds to make steady, supplemental payments into its four pension funds. Those payments helped cut billions from the city's future liability, finance officials said, and convinced ratings agencies that Chicago's leaders were serious about tackling debts. In a statement, the city's finance office said it had every intention of keeping that policy intact and expects the 2026 payment to be more modest. But with reserve funds back to pre-pandemic levels and underperforming casino revenues, the city will likely need to find supplemental pension money elsewhere in the budget. Already, some aldermen are bristling at Johnson's efforts to even maintain the relatively modest 1% grocery tax that the governor terminated in his 2025 budget. It was a progressive victory for Pritzker but also forced municipal leaders to either take up their own equivalent or lose out on a key revenue source. The tax costs the average household $50 to $66 a year. Without it, the city would miss out on an estimated $80 million next year. Voting to keep it, Johnson's team argues, would not equate to a tax hike. But many residents are unlikely to see a council vote to establish a city-level grocery tax as anything other than a new cost being foisted on them by City Hall. The city must decide its fate by the end of September so that the state's Department of Revenue can continue collecting and remitting it. Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2 is also rounding out the fourth year of its battle for a new collective bargaining agreement, which is currently in arbitration. The delay means retroactive contract costs continue to pile up on top of likely raises and other costly union demands, including the addition of new ambulances to the Chicago Fire Department fleet to respond to medical emergencies. Despite the city's expectations, Chicago Public Schools didn't make its once-promised $175 million payment to cover a share of nonteacher employees in the municipal pension fund, helping contribute to the city's $161 million deficit at the end of 2024. It seems the city will have to eat that cost. Interim CPS CEO Macqueline King tacked on the $175 million pension payment when announcing the district's roughly $730 million deficit, suggesting that the district planned only one pension payment in this year's CPS budget, which must be passed by the end of August. Gage-Woodard said the city 'is actively working with CPS leadership on their budget needs.' The fate of the CPS pension payment is just one more financial straw on the camel's back as Johnson and aldermen head into the summer doldrums, then straight into the budget. While he said he dreads every budget, Ald. Nick Sposato, 38th, said this year's 'seems to be the grimmest picture of all, looking forward.' The dissension in the City Council will only the make the process of agreeing on solutions to close the gap — potential new taxes, fees, service cuts or furloughs — politically tougher. 'I'm not suggesting this, but if everybody supported the grocery tax, it would be like, 'Well, I guess they had to do it,'' Sposato said. But if 30 supported it and 20 didn't, 'then it's just like, 'John Smith stood up (to the mayor) but Nick didn't, he's a jerk, we've got to vote him out.' That's how people think.' 'Somebody's going to have to support something,' Sposato said. 'Pick your poison.'
The Herald Scotland
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Val McDermid's new play has been 40 years in the making
The crime writer's long-time ambition to tackle the unsolved mystery over the death of 16th century English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe is about to be realised at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which has just been taken over by the Perthshire-born actor. Read more: McDermid sent Cumming her unperformed script for 'And Midnight Never Come' after plans to bring it to the stage of one of Edinburgh's best-known theatres were abandoned due to a lack of funding. However the play has been rebooted by Cumming in his first year as artistic director at Pitlochry, after agreeing to stage a special 'script-in-hand reading' ahead of his first season of full-scale productions in 2026. Alan Cumming is helping to bring Val McDermid's new play to the stage. (Image: Supplied) McDermid is working with director Philip Howard, former artistic director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, to bring to life her script, which will be performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival the night after its Pitlochry premiere. And Midnight Never Come will focus on the run-up to the death of Marlowe, who was said to have been fatally stabbed in a guest house in Kent on May 30, 1593. Crime writer Val McDermid has sold more than 19 million books to date. (Image: PA) There have been centuries of debate and conflicting theories over Marlowe's death, including claims that he may have been killed over an involvement with espionage, was assassinated on the orders of Queen Elizabeth I, was targeted for his religious beliefs or was murdered by a former lover. McDermid, from Kirkcaldy in Fife, initially pursued a career as a journalist after studying English at Oxford University. She said: 'I was captivated by Marlowe as a writer when I was an undergraduate student. When I read up on what is known about his life I found it fascinating. "The more I read and discovered the more the version of his death seemed to be implausible. 'I came up with my own theory about what happened to him and that's what underpins the play, although I don't want to say any more about that theory. People will have to come and see it for themselves. 'When you are writing something that is rooted in the past you know certain things. It's about trying to come up with a story that makes sense with the facts that we know. That's what I've done with Marlowe. "My first attempts at this were more than 40 years ago. I just couldn't work out how to do it structurally and tell the story that I had in my head. I went back to it time and again over the years." McDermid has sold more than 19 million books and seen her work translated into more than 40 different languages since her first attempt at a novel when she was working as a trainee journalist in Devon. She recalled: 'My first attempt at a book was full of tortured relationships and all the big emotions – grief, rage, jealousy and love. It was truly terrible although I did finish it. 'But I also sent it to a friend of mine who was an actor and she said to me: 'I don't know much about books, but I think this would make a really good play.' 'I thought: 'That's easy. I'll just cross out the descriptions and leave in the speaking bits.' That's essentially what I did.' 'I wrote some extra scenes to cover the bits I'd crossed out and went to the local theatre. The director was very excited about it and said it would be perfect for a season of new plays. 'Completely by accident, I was a professionally performed playwright by the age of 23. 'I thought it was the start of something big and that I was going to be the new Harold Pinter, but it didn't work out that way.' Although McDermid's debut was adapted by the BBC, her career as a playwright was halted when was dropped by her agent 'after a couple of years of not making him any money.' The writer recalled: 'I just couldn't write any more plays because I didn't understand what I'd done right. The ambition and desire were there, but unfortunately skills and ability were not. Nowadays you can go off on a course and learn the nuts and bolts of your craft. But that wasn't really available back then. 'I just didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. I thought I should go off and do something that I understood how it worked. I had read a lot of crime fiction since I was about nine years old, so I thought I could maybe have a crack at a crime novel. 'At the time, in the early 1980s, the only British crime fiction that was around were village mysteries and police procedurals. I felt I didn't know enough about the police to write a convincing police procedural novel, so I got a bit stuck. 'What finally got me moving was when a friend of mine who had moved to America sent me a copy of Sara Paretsky's first novel, one of the early iterations of so-called new-wave feminist crime fiction. 'Her private eye character was a woman who had a brain and a sense of humour. She didn't rely on the guys to do the heavy lifting. When the going got tough she just got tougher. What I also liked about her novel was its strong sense of place. There was a sense that the story arose from the city of Chicago. It had a sense of social politics as well. That book really inspired me to get started.' McDermid's debut novel, Report for Murder, was published in 1987 and kick-started a career which has seen her write more than 50 books to date, and develop five separate series. One of the most recent, focusing on the detective Karen Pirie, is about to return to ITV for a second series this month, with Lauren Lyle returning to the lead role. McDermid's return to theatre work has emerged seven years after a foray into the lunchtime drama series A Play, A Pie and A Pint, with political comedy Margaret Saves Scotland, about a Yorkshire schoolgirl who returns from a holiday filled with a burning desire for Scottish independence. The experience of working on that show with director Marilyn Imrie persuaded McDermid to return to the idea of a play about the Marlowe mystery several decades after she had first started to work on it. McDermid's play, which depicts the last day of Marlowe's life as well as key events in his life, was snapped up by the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and went into development for a full production, which was shelved after the theatre decided it was unaffordable. McDermid was in talks over a possible performance of her script at last year's book festival, which did not go ahead due to a programme organised to mark 200 years of James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Within weeks, though, Cumming had been unveiled as Pitlochry Festival Theatre's new artistic director. McDermid said: 'When Alan took over at Pitlochry I thought: 'I'll let Alan take a look at it.' 'He got very excited about it and said: 'This is fantastic, I love it, we must talk about it.' 'He said would talk to me about it at the Winter Words book festival earlier this year. 'The weekend went on and nothing had happened. I said to my partner: 'I think he was just being nice.' 'After the final event at the festival, he collared me and said: 'We have to talk now!' 'He told me he wanted to do a rehearsed reading of it. I said that the Edinburgh book festival had talked about doing that, but it hadn't actually happened. He suggested that it was done as a joint project. Two days later we were all in a Zoom call to sort out the details. It was amazing. 'My main hope now is that people out and enjoy it. I also hope that a producing theatre will have someone in the audience who thinks: 'We should be putting this on stage.' 'I know theatres have timetables, schedules and budgets. I'm not putting any pressure on anyone to do it. 'But I would love it if it was on at Pitlochry because there is such a great team there and it's a place where you can have a real day out. They've got a wonderful restaurant, you can eat in the restaurant and then go and see a play. 'Alan is a man of great passions, his work-rate is phenomenal, and he just makes things happen for people. He's the kind of person we need working in the arts at the moment.' McDermid's Marlowe play will finally see the light of day in Pitlochry and Edinburgh in the wake of her book interpreting the story of Lady Macbeth. She said: 'My idea of the perfect novel is one where you don't have to do any research at all because you already know everything you need to know. But that never happens. 'With historical stuff, it's a case of digging down, looking at all the available sources and working your way through them. It just takes a bit longer before you can get started on the writing. 'It does create more work when you write historical books, but when an idea roots itself in your head the only way you can get rid of it is to write it."
Boston Globe
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘The Garbologists' is a comic drama with two stars, a lot of trash, and a destination in mind
The answer turns out to be yes in Lindsay Joelle's 'The Garbologists.' While her two-hander, now at Gloucester Stage Company, does indeed spin its wheels about halfway through, Noelle knows where she's going. So does Rebecca Bradshaw, Gloucester Stage's producing artistic director, who's at the helm of production. So, for that matter, do Paul Melendy and Thomika Marie Bridwell, the estimable duo charged with taking the audience on trash-collection trips through the streets of Manhattan during winter time. The payoff, emotionally speaking, is substantial when we arrive at the play's destination. Melendy plays Danny, a white, voluble, 41-year-old man with nearly a decade of trash-collecting under his belt. Bridwell is his new partner, Marlowe, a Black woman in her late 30s who is initially as terse as Danny is talkative. Advertisement Structurally, 'The Garbologists' combines the archetypal odd-couple pairing with the scorpions-in-a-bottle atmosphere that often ensues when mismatched people are locked within a confined space — in this case, a garbage truck. 'Do people ever tell you they want to strangle you?' asks an exasperated Marlowe. Without missing a beat, Danny replies: 'All the time.' We believe it. Danny and Marlowe are both nursing wounds — one much more severe than the other. Advertisement Bradshaw and her creative team, especially set designer Kristin Loeffler, nail the specifics of garbage collection, up to and including the garbage truck in which Marlowe and Danny sit. Joelle wanted it to look like Danny and Marlowe are doing actual work as they hoist trash bags into that truck, and it does. We get a sense of the wide variety of objects trash collectors have to handle: Stuffed animals, sports trophies, a box of … let's call them erotic aids. We also learn a few things about the hidden dangers of trash collection, as when Danny abruptly pulls Marlowe away from the back of the truck and vehemently cautions her about dangerous substances, such as hydrochloric acid, that can 'eat your lungs, burn you from the inside. Closed casket at your funeral' if the truck's hopper blade comes down on a bag containing that acid. By one of those weird art-imitating-life coincidences noted by Bradshaw in pre-show remarks at Sunday's performance, 'The Garbologists' has taken the stage at a time when Gloucester, along with a number of other communities, has been coping with a strike by trash collectors. In the realm of fictional drama and comedy, the occupation of trash collection has sometimes been woven into the story, but seldom with as much respect and as little condescension as in 'The Garbologists.' Remember how Tony Soprano always claimed to be in 'the waste management business'? Or the episode on the NBC sitcom ' Advertisement Marlowe has a degree in art history from an Ivy League college, and the fact that she has chosen to be a sanitation worker is a source of bewilderment to Danny, and to us in the audience as well for much of the play. Bit by bit, they start to confide aspects of their personal lives. Anyone who has seen Melendy in action over the last decade knows what an exceptionally agile comic performer he is. While he overdoes the dese-dems-dose stuff in the early going, it's not long before he's adding layers to his portrayal of Danny and smoothly navigating the play's tonal shifts. As he proved three years ago by playing nearly 20 characters in He doesn't need to in 'The Garbologists.' Bridwell has been a busy and welcome presence on Boston stages in recent years, with indelible turns in Advertisement Its flaws notwithstanding, 'The Garbologists' is a worthy addition in the American theater's ever-growing roster of comic dramas. Indeed, the guiding principle of that genre can't be better stated than it is in a note by Joelle on her script: 'This play is a comedy for as long as possible.' THE GARBOLOGISTS Play by Lindsay Joelle. Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw. Presented by Gloucester Stage Company, Gloucester. Through July 26. Tickets $64-$72. At 978-281-4433 or Don Aucoin can be reached at
