Promises Promises - entertainment listings

Promises Promises Neil Cooper

© The Herald

Almost a decade ago, Douglas Maxwell appeared in the sort of glossy spread the weekend broadsheets put out to predict the best of popular culture as we know it. Here, apparently, was the future of British theatre, all lined up in the sort of group pose designed to define a new generation who’d moved beyond the in-yer-face set of the Nineties.

As the Ayrshire-born playwright –who’d just made his name on the back of his first two plays, Our Bad Magnet at The Tron and the swing park set Decky Does A Bronco for Grid Iron – looked around at his peers, Maxwell thought he’d arrived. He couldn’t resist a trademark piece of self-deprecation, and suggested to fellow writer Roy Williams that in 10 years if the published picture was dredged up, Maxwell would be the only unfamiliar name on the list, ripe for a where are they now feature.

Maxwell didn’t meet Williams again until both were invited to teach at an Arvon Foundation creative writing course. Maxwell remembered his prophecy. Sure enough, in his eyes, “Everyone in the picture had become massively successful except me,” he laughs.

In fact, Maxwell has done alright and developed an intelligent populist canon littered with lost boys and terminal adolescents who’ve made growing up in public his trademark in plays like Helmet, If Destroyed True and Mancub.

As he prepares for one of his busiest years to date, Maxwell is still being described on the National Theatre of Scotland website as “The writer who refuses to grow up”. Despite the fact the Maxwell of today is married and a dad, and that the Morrissey-style quiff of old he once sported was traded in for a Chekhovian beard that makes him look “like Gandalf’s geography teacher” some considerable time ago. Even this can’t disguise Maxwell’s enthusiasm for his two new plays which open next month, followed by a summer revival of Decky Does A (touring June to September) and several other projects over the coming months.

The Miracle Man, which opens in March as part of an NTS season of new work for young people, sounds like classic Maxwell fare. Taking as its starting point the fundamentalist Christian fetish of virginity rings as a lifestyle accessory for hormone- popping teens, the play looks at life and death through a group of bucket-mouthed school kids finding something to believe in.

Before The Miracle Man comes Promises Promises, a monologue penned for the Random Accomplice company. Promises Promises may also be set in a school classroom, but here Maxwell subverts his own oeuvre via some utterly grown-up stuff involving an ageing alcoholic supply teacher and the six-year-old Somalian girl put in her care.

“It came from a story a friend of mine told me,” Maxwell explains of the play’s roots, “about a Somalian girl who was mute and had witch doctors coming into the classroom to exorcise her because they declared she was possessed by demons. That’s the true bit, but because a lot of my family and friends are teachers, it struck me that if there was a capable teacher in charge, this wouldn’t happen. So I brought in this disgraced older teacher who’s lost power, and is quite unreliable and a bit of a mess.”

Promises Promises isn’t Maxwell’s first monologue. A piece called Backpacker Blues previously demonstrated his facility with the form and was dramatic in a way that leaves many one-person shows looking like little more than prose pieces lifted off the page. In truth, by putting narrators at the heart of the action, Maxwell has been writing monologues from the start of his career.

“There’s something there about the Scottish tradition of entertainment and theatre going back to what was happening in the Sixties and Seventies,” Maxwell admits. “But that way of telling a story through direct address, looking you in the eye, goes right back to the caves. In a way it’s a holiday in prose as well, because you can describe things in the way you can’t in dialogue. Someone coming on and saying once upon a time is great, but you have to keep that going. So Promises Promises isn’t that different to stuff I’ve written in the past, but it is different from stuff that’s worked and has gone on.”

In contrast, The Miracle Man (Tron Theatre March 18-20, then touring) may be “surface led” as Maxwell styles it, but it still takes kids’ stuff seriously in a way that suggests he’s moved on from being the cheeky chappie playing to the gallery.

The change, says Maxwell, came after Variety, the large-scale collaboration with Grid Iron that was the flagship of the 2002 Edinburgh International Festival drama programme. While nowhere near as disastrous as some critics made this dark homage to Scotland’s music hall tradition out to be, the hostile response bruised its author. It made him aware of how he was misusing his talent by revelling in what were nominal glories as an ingenue playwright without putting in the graft to take it further.

Maxwell’s honeymoon period as the young pretender was over, and Variety had given him a wake-up call.

“I made so many horrific mistakes because I thought I was amazing,” Maxwell says. “I swanned about drunk, putting everybody’s back up like this kind of Keith Richards character. I was more of a danger to actresses in the Tron bar than laryngitis, so having humility thrust upon me was good. At the time I had this little office and read all these great writers I’d managed to offend and realised Our Bad Magnet had a superficial resemblance to John Byrne’s play, Still Life, which I’d read five years before and conveniently forgot about, and that my so-called linguistic genius in Variety wasn’t a patch on someone like Chris Hannan.

“Through that, I got to be a much nicer guy, but the chance to be the big west end writer that I thought I should be had gone. That doesn’t bother me now because I think things turned out the right way. I know who I am and I know why I write, and that’s the main thing.”

Given the changes in Maxwell’s life and work over the last decade, revisiting Decky Does A Bronco should be fascinating. Maxwell doesn’t recognise the invincible 22-year-old who wrote the play. “I’ve always felt distant from the person who wrote Decky,” Maxwell says, “which is strange because it’s very personal and written directly from life.”

It must be stranger still, Maxwell reckons, for the then rookie actors who made up Decky’s cast and found themselves exposed to the elements in what was a tough gig that, as with Maxwell’s own career, turned them into men.

“It’s a little bit like soldiers returning from Vietnam,” Maxwell jokes. “When actors get together in the pub and find out they were all in Decky, they gaze into the distance looking troubled, but knowing they got through it to tell the tale.”