All writers have a creative ritual, and Richard Bean’s involves a shed and a kettle. The dramatist writes in a wooden hut in his garden and, if he comes up with a line or plot idea that particularly pleases him, allows himself to go back to the house to make a cup of tea.
At the moment, the playwright may be at risk of Typhoo-poisoning, because six scripts featuring just such moments have been produced this summer and autumn. Great Britain, his drama about newspaper phone-hacking, transferred from the National to London’s West End last week, where it will soon be joined by his dialogue and plot (what Broadway calls “the book”) for the musical version of Made in Dagenham. The historical drama Pitcairn has just moved from Chichester to Shakespeare’s Globe and a revival of Toast, his 1999 stage-writing debut, recently played at the Park Theatre in north London. A version of Molière’s The Hypochondriac opens in Bath this month, while One Man, Two Guvnors – the farce that has been a National, West End and Broadway hit – is still touring the UK.
“And your question is: has it made me happy? No,” Bean says, with a timing and pessimistic shtick that survive from his past as a standup comedian. We are in the office of Nicholas Hytner, the National’s outgoing artistic director, who worked with Bean on England People Very Nice, One Man, Two Guvnors and Great Britain. Although Toast and Great Britain are separated by more than a decade, they are linked by having both been potentially too dangerous to stage.
Toast was Bean’s “first scrape with lawyers in theatre”. The play was originally called Wonderloaf, the brand-name of a supermarket staple of the time, which the writer had spent a year making in a factory in his native Hull. Following objections from the breadmaker’s lawyers, the play was renamed Toast just before opening night. “I still actually have a ticket with Wonderloaf printed on it,” Bean says.
But those legal precautions were mild compared with those attending Great Britain, the only play in National Theatre history to have been rehearsed in secret and opened at a few days’ notice – publicised only after the conclusion of the Old Bailey trial relating to phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News International group. Because public previews were impossible, there were half a dozen secret performances for 60-70 friends of the cast. “To this day,” says Bean, “I don’t know how it didn’t get out what we were doing. But, before those performances, Nick [Hytner] scared the life out of the audience by saying they weren’t allowed to talk about what they’d seen. They were so frightened they didn’t laugh at all, and I was saying, ‘This play isn’t working.’”
The secrecy, Bean insists, was not from fear of being sued by any of the defendants (including Rebekah Brooks, who was acquitted) but rather that the project might be regarded as contempt of court. Tension increased because the proceedings lasted longer than expected, continuing beyond the dates reserved at the Lyttelton theatre for the mystery play. “Yes,” says Bean, “the trial went on two weeks too long. Another week and Nick might have been answering to his board about why he had a 1,000-seat theatre sitting empty. He was getting pretty nervous by the end.”
If Great Britain was cleared by lawyers, it has been convicted – in common with much of Bean’s work – by liberals. One of the main characters is Sully Kassam, a fictional first Asian Metropolitan Police commissioner, who is a buffoon and closet homosexual. In his standup days, Bean was once booed off for an alleged sexist joke. And – after England People Very Nice, a comedy about immigration, and The Heretic, which featured scientists falsifying climate-change statistics – Bean’s useless copper can be seen as further baiting of liberal thought-policing. “Yes, it’s possibly a weakness in me. I just don’t accept that all idiots have to be white. So I suppose the worst of me decided to make him Asian and then the even worse part made him a gay Asian. I definitely left my shed laughing then. God, I’m going to get murdered for this.”
I wonder if any cast member has ever refused to deliver a Bean line on ideological grounds. The playwright says that there has never been a boycott, but one Asian actor did refuse a role in England People Very Nice because “it was not respectful enough of his culture”. Bean was then amused to see the performer in the jihadist comedy film Four Lions.
So does he ever ask actors if they’re comfortable with the racial implications of a line? “I accept that it is a huge question whether or not you can write outside of your own culture. I’m always doing it, because if you are writing a state-of-England play now, you are going to have to write lines for, say, a second-generation Pakistani and a new immigrant Somali. Otherwise, no one would be able to write about the whole nation.”
Bean admits, however, to fretting over the linguistic ethics of Pitcairn, which picks up from the historical naval overthrow depicted in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. “I had to write 18th-century Polynesian dialogue and, when they are speaking to the sailors, they are speaking a sort of pidgin English. So, writing that, I did have a couple of politically correct professors sitting on my shoulders going, ‘Is it OK to have relatively powerless individuals also speaking pidgin, which infantalises them?’ But because the women in the play do achieve some power and take over the island – which isn’t a spoiler – I felt OK. I do accept that these are sensitive areas. But don’t forget that my background is as a standup, where the first thing you learn is that you can make jokes about anything, and the audience kind of want you to.”
Has Made in Dagenham confirmed the common view that musicals are the hardest shows to get right? “It’s certainly different. I’ve come to learn that there are my plays – my kind of stuff – and then there’s product, which is made by producers. But, at the end of the day, it’s got your name on it and you try to do it well. If the director says, ‘We’re going to have to cut that scene because we can’t get the set from the previous scene off stage in time’, you just have to do it. But everyone’s working their socks off and I’m not going to let them down by throwing my toys out of the pram.” Would he ever work on another musical? “I wouldn’t choose to. And let’s face it, if the show goes down in history, it wouldn’t be because of the book. Everyone else will be Lennon & McCartney and I’ll be Ringo on drums.”
Between rewrites, Bean has been contemplating his next plays: first a comedy about snooker that will immediately follow the 2016 World Championship on to the stage of the Sheffield Crucible; and then two scripts for Hull’s celebrations as City of Culture in 2017. The Hypocrite is a serious farce set during the English civil war, when the city was the first place to close its gates on Charles I; and there will be a “response play” to a 1970s script by a well-known northern dramatist, which Bean asks me to keep vague “because I haven’t written to ask his permission yet”.
Those seem likely to continue his prolific and successful run, but theatre is an unpredictable medium. Two weeks before One Man, Two Guvnors opened at the National in 2011, I happened to meet a cast member who gloomily confided that the show had the feel of an impending disaster. It went on to become one of the most successful plays of all time. So you just never know? “Yes,” Bean says. “Made in Dagenham could run for 10 years or be off in two weeks. I think we’re supposed to say that’s the beauty of it. It wouldn’t be so much fun if hits were predictable.”
