Alistair McDowall’s new play The Glow transports its audience back to the 1860s where Mrs Lyall, a spiritualist medium, is visiting an asylum, searching for someone to act as an assistant. There she finds a strange, nameless, voiceless woman and takes her home, only to discover that the woman herself has powers.
The premise is not wholly unfamiliar but McDowall is concerned as much with English myth and Arthurian legend as he is with the supernatural: how the past remains with us in the present and how we fictionalise history to make sense of ourselves. McDowall set out to write a fairytale “that had actual consequences”, taking something that appears to reside in the realm of the fantastic and grounding it in the real world “for there to be cost and emotional heft”.
The Glow is intended to catch people off-guard, he explains over Zoom from Manchester, where he sits surrounded by boxes, having moved house the day before. Presenting audiences with something that looks familiar and then unravelling it is something McDowall is good at: his plays have a way of playing with your expectations. This can make them difficult to write about without revealing too much. X, from 2016, is a good example: it is set on a research base on Pluto that has lost contact with Earth. The clocks start going backwards. There is a glitch in time. But it is, at heart, a play about loss.
Time has played a key role in a lot of McDowall’s work. “To not consider time as a proper element within the writing of the play,” he says, “would be like not considering character or scene structure.” Nonetheless, like JB Priestley, he has several works that could be described as “time plays” and 2011’s Brilliant Adventures even contains an actual time machine.
More recently, All of It, a 45-minute rattle through one woman’s life, was performed by Kate O’Flynn at London’s Royal Court last year. It was directed – like X and The Glow – by Vicky Featherstone. “I tend to write work that’s quite high-concept,” he says. “There’s always a danger of someone getting fixated on the concept and making something flashy.” But Featherstone, he says, is very rooted. Despite X’s off-world location, she understood that the “story was actually quite simple.”
Growing up in Great Broughton, North Yorkshire, McDowall’s interest in theatre was sparked, in part, by a drama teacher. At school, he read a vast amount and started stealing books “which I’ve since posted back out of guilt”. He finds the decline of drama in schools upsetting, not just because it means that potential writers or actors won’t have their eyes opened in the way his were, but also because drama can “temporally erode all the divisions that can build up at school”.
Interested in film to begin with, he couldn’t afford a camera but found he could pressure his friends to be in his plays, many of which were “variations on The Breakfast Club”. By this he means a lot of people sitting in a room, talking. “That’s what I thought a play was.” But then he got into Beckett and Sarah Kane, Laurie Anderson and Sam Shepard, and began to discover the potential of theatre. “I am a theatre nerd,” he laughs.
Originally commissioned by Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, before playing London’s Orange Tree theatre, his 2014 play Pomona – a mix of dystopian thriller and Lovecraftian horror – feels like the antithesis of a Breakfast Club play. After a wobbly first preview, he remembers thinking: “Oh God, I’ve written a real stinker.” It’s a bleak play, nightmarish in places, but it became a cult hit, transferring to the National Theatre’s temporary Shed space. It’s his most performed play to date and has been staged all over the world, something that still seems to surprise him.
Reading an early draft of The Glow brings to mind everything from Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Critics often comment on the deft way McDowall uses genre tropes, but he is surprised theatre doesn’t do this more often. After all, he says, “a research base on Pluto is just as fake as a drawing room in Victorian London”.
McDowall is energised by the idea of people being able to come together in an auditorium once again. This is why, he says, theatre will always be his home: there’s a magic there you can’t find elsewhere. “You can put people in a room with some actors and you can go wherever.”
The Glow is at the Royal Court, London, 24 January-5 March.
