Edinburgh hit ‘Wingman’ is set for its next stint at the Soho Theatre; E.L. Hardy interviews writer & actor Richard Marsh.
The Pleasance has been, as ever, an undeniable deliverer of superb theatre at the year’s festival. PostScript writers have awarded a pantheon of stars to the shows on offer. 4 to The Curing Room, 4.5 to Travesti, 5 to Lorraine and Alan… the list goes on. With 62 reviews written by us alone over 25 days (and 49,497 performances of 3,193 shows at the Fringe overall), it’s hard to imagine any particular shows lingering with anyone for long. You’re out of one and into the next with very little time to contemplate. However, there were one or two shows that did quietly rumble my creative imagination, dizzying about with me for days, and now weeks after. Richard Marsh’s Wingman – a poetic comedy about reconciliation – was one of these rare gems. With knowledge of Wingman’s forthcoming tour, I felt compelled to learn a little more. And so I had a chat with writer and actor Richard about the past, present and future of Wingman on this our last day, just moments before its final performance at the Fringe.
“I started writing when I was at University. I’d always written birthday cards, very bad ones with obvious rhymes for my friends. So, for example…
Happy Birthday, Emily, Well done on your show.
It got all two star reviews, but you gave it a go!” for example.”
Impressive.
“That would be the speed and ease at which I was very bad. And then there was a fresher’s drama competition. I wrote a pantomime in rhyming couplets called Cinderella and the Beanstalk, which was what you would now call a MashUp. That was my first play and it won best comedy in the competition. I was seduced by audience laughter and also realised that the worse the couplet the bigger the laugh you got. But you can’t do that too often.”
“I’d read and enjoyed Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which is written entirely in sonnets. I loved that. I was so very much into rhyme. But having written this Panto, I tried to be a playwright and write plays without the poetry – dialogue ones. You see, the people I admired were Arthur Miller and Timberlake Wertenbaker, so I tried to write like them for quite a long time. But that wasn’t really me. Gradually, I started to work out who I was, which is someone who likes to make people laugh, and move them as well. I like writing about the fine grain and detail of human relationships, observing things from life, and stories with a strong arc – with characters who change during the story.”
He is true to his word with Wingman, a story about a single man (Richard) who was let down by his father as a child. His unwelcome dad re-enters his life at the hospital in which Richard’s mother is dying of cancer. Despite later becoming a father himself, Richard struggles to reconcile with his dad, who eagerly tries to repair the trust broken so many years earlier.
The rhyming pattern that Richard Marsh employs has the effect of both drawing us in and cracking us up – it is hypnotic and hilarious. But what I like about Richard’s use of poetry, in particular, is the childlike associations and resonances that it carries. The simple, playful abcb rhyme pattern is reminiscent of Dahl’s revolting rhymes, for example, and consequently steeps the protagonist in childhood, in a regressed state – stuck at the moment in time when his father disappointed him – unable to move on. The character of Dad (Len), played by Jerome Wright does not speak in Richard’s verse until the two characters start to see eye to eye. In the manner that Shakespeare’s characters switch from prose to poetry, Richard and his Dad are reconnected by their lexicon.
Considering its remarkable emotional depth, I had assumed that Wingman was autobiographical. However, it seems that this may not be the case. Saying that, Richard is particularly enigmatic on the subject, assuming a degree of mystery and never giving too much away.
“All my characters, whoever I’m writing, I find something human in them. I draw details from my life, but also my friend’s lives, my family’s lives, and people I see on the tube, in restaurants. I accumulate little bits of human behaviour. And then I change all of the details before putting it onstage. Because I call the characters I play Richard, people ask questions. I like that ambiguity.”
Is it helpful for the writing process, being the one onstage to take the impact -directly absorbing the audience reaction as you speak your own lines?
“The play has changed since we got to Edinburgh. We’ve changed three scenes from what we published in the play text. For me, the process of writing is never finished. I write very fast but then I edit loads, changing things time and time again. I love trialling my work in front of an audience, seeing and feeling what works and what doesn’t. But, being the actor also makes it harder; I’m doing a day of rehearsals as an actor and then going home and doing all the work of the writer overnight for the next day. I’m writing a musical at the moment for the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton and we did a workshop at the beginning of July which was luxurious for me. I was sat at table with my laptop, hearing these amazing actors singing away, typing and printing changes as we went. At the end of the day, I could finish work. I like it both ways.
I also try a lot of my work out at poetry nights. It’s very nourishing when you’re doing a job that can be very lonely – sat at home with a computer. I also love collaborating. I wrote Dirty Great Love story with Katie Bonna and I obviously work with composers on my musicals. It’s exciting. It keeps it interesting.”
Deliriously tired and slightly intimidated by Richard’s ease of language (impressive for the last day of the Fringe), I phrased my next question so poorly that even I struggled to understand what on earth I was asking. My ability to construct coherent sentences shut down somewhere a few sips into that enormous coffee but, fortunately for me, charming Richard sympathetically translated my babbling, working out that I was simply enquiring about his overall 2014 Fringe experience – how he felt the play had been received.
“It has been a really good fringe. We’ve had nice reviews and a really warm audience reception. We’ve been full for basically the last three weeks. I think it helped – having done Skittles and Dirty Great Love Story – because a lot of the people I gave flyers to said that they’d seen one of these previous shows. It’s a funny place, the Fringe, isn’t it? People want to see things that are new, but they also want something reputable or that they know they will like. I suppose it’s understandable. People spend a lot of money on tickets. It’s hard to imagine until you get here how many shows there are to see – how many people put flyers into your hands.”
Staying on the subject of money, Richard and I discuss the simplicity of Wingman. There isn’t a single prop and no set either. I was interested to know if this was a case of Richard being sensible, choosing to write shows that are realistically producible, or whether it was a happy accident that his plays, aside from being brilliant, entertaining and funny, are also quite cheap to put on.
“Don’t forget the two chairs, Emily. Chairs aren’t always easy to come by.”
We were both delirious now.
“No, when I did Skittles, I had a few props, including a bowl of skittles. Essential. Dirty Great Love Story was originally a ten minute poem, and because it grew out of that, the play was a prop-less environment. Actually, there was quite a bit of debate about whether it should be a chair or a stall that we sat on but, after much deliberation, a stall suited our needs much better. I conceived Wingman with two chairs in mind, but urged the director Justin Audibert to stage the play as he saw fit. He decided that he wanted to keep it bare. My guess is that this is the last one of these sort of plays, you know, where I’m called Richard and there’s only two chairs.”
This last statement took me by surprise a little; there’s something so admirable and powerful about Richard’s style that this seems, to me, to be a shame. Naturally, there’s a lot of simple storytelling at the Fringe, but Wingman stood out as the simplest piece of theatre that I saw during my month there. Other companies used story telling techniques such as sound effects, representational props and signifiers, but none of that was necessary here. Without visual distractions, tricks or devises, Wingman is an uncomplicated breath of fresh air, drawing our attention to the things that matter.
Richard makes space in his comic poetry for fleeting touches of sensory imagery that, never distracting from the story itself, enrich it, feeding the vivid audience imagination. Additionally, the use of mime in this two man show is so consistently and cleverly used that I struggled to remember if there had in fact been props onstage, or if I’d just imagined them. This undeniable stimulation of my imagination meant that I came out of Wingman knowing exactly what everything looked like, even though there was nothing there – nothing other than the words, and the two chairs of course.
There are some slight changes to be made before putting Wingman into the Soho Theatre but, with the script now set in stone, Wingman need only ride in with confidence on the back of its critically successful Edinburgh run.
Richard’s Wingman demonstrates that if you have a story and the power of language at your fingertips then nothing else is necessary. There are many different styles of theatre – each as valid as the next, but Richard Marsh has brought poetry back to the stage, and not only is it transformative, it is moving, entertaining and brimming with truth.
To find out more about Richard Marsh visit his website.
Originally published in Fourthwall Magazine, London.
