So you keep your head down and get on with your own work. Are the same opportunities there for young aspiring playwrights as they were for you? If you want to put on a play, then get on and do it. I know that there are young writers coming through. Where are you at your most creative? In a rehearsal room. I feel completely at home there.
Have you got a novel in you? No, not at all. How did your background as a teacher benefit your playwriting? I think a play is a conversation with a group of people, and the best teaching is a conversation with a group of people. Which fellow playwright has inspired you most in your work? I think the work can be quite dry. She has a fantastic ear for dialogue. She wrote a play two years ago and won an award. John Godber. Godber has won five Edinburgh Fringe First Awards for his plays.
The play was subsequently made into a film. Godber devised the BBC series 'Chalkface' about teachers. Successfully auditioned for a part in 'The Full Monty' but Godber turned it down to work on his first film, 'Up 'n' Under'.
Reckoned to be the third most frequently performed British playwright after Shakespeare and Ayckbourn. Godber is best known as the brains behind the Hull Truck Theatre Company which he joined as Artistic Director in He's also produced some of the most popular stage plays of the last 20 years including 'Bouncers', 'Teechers' and 'Up 'n' Under', all of which draw on his Yorkshire roots.
A new TV programme called 'A Picture of Hull' explores John Godber's relationship with the city where he lives and works, and looks at how it has inspired his work over the last 20 years. John came to the theatre at a time when it was struggling financially, and it was on the brink of closure.
I wanted to have as wide an audience as possible. Godber transformed the traditional company into a local community theatre, performing plays which reflected ordinary people's lives, from bouncers and teachers to waitresses and coal-board workers. Since then the company has established itself as one of the best contemporary theatre groups in Britain, often performing Godber's own plays. In some ways John Godber is 'the voice of Hull', and, although it sounds strange, many people in the city only go to see his plays.
But if he produces one of his own plays, there is guaranteed to be a packed house. It's a sign that his work really connects with local audiences. Godber's work appeals across the board - he's loved by a very diverse audience, from bus drivers and barristers to dinner ladies and dockers. John Godber has always sought inspiration from the people and places of Yorkshire and Humberside. Godber's plays have a strong sense of place, and are well known for their use of northern accents and dialect.
The play creates a vivid picture of the relentless hedonism of northern night life with its raw energy, flashing disco lights, and raucous lads and lasses out on the town. Most people think the play was written about Hull, partly because it has played in the city an amazing 17 times. In fact 'Bouncers' was originally inspired by Kiko's in Pontefract, a Polynesian style night club with fake palm trees.
Forget 'Look Back in Anger', let's get out there - let's get pissed up," says Godber. As it says in the opening of the play, "all human life is here" - it's "a midnight circus". Hull has been a rich source for many of Godber's characters and stories. Godber openly admits to the huge influence that the city has had on his work, saying that, "I'd be a different writer if I hadn't come to Hull".
John likes to do much of his creative thinking in waterside locations such as the city's riverside, marina, and docks.
He is particularly keen on Hull Docks, "There's lots of space, involving a lot of sky and it's a great place for me to think here". Godber has written three plays inspired by the coming and going of ferries to the docks. Written by John Godber. April in Paris is a delicately wrought comedy filled with raucous indelicate dialogue.
Al and Bet are a married couple, living a monochrome life. Left half-broke by Al's continuing unemployment, the couple bicker about everything from Bouncers s Remix. Bouncers by John Godber shows a night on the tiles from the point of view of the men on the door.
It is a funny, energetic piece of highly theatrical storytelling where the men are at once themselves, and every character they happen to meet Christmas Crackers. Crown Prince. Happy Families. In his introduction, Godber describes Happy Families as 'a much more lyrical play than either Bouncers or Shakers. It is autobiographical, sentimental, domestic and insular, and yet it is quite theatrical at the same time. The narrator John Happy Jack. Jack Munroe was born in , the only son of Amanda Munroe, and lived all of his life in Upton, a small mining village in West Yorkshire.
His wife Liz was born Elizabeth Cooper. They were the same age, lived down the same street, went Lucky Sods. Morris bought the ticket and picked the numbers, but Jean changed one at the last minute. They sat, they watched, they won, it happened to them. Our House. May is moving out. After forty-five years in the same house, age — and the racket from next door — have finally driven her away from the home she made for herself and her family.
Her son Jack comes round to help Passion Killers. Amid the sun, sea, sex and sangria of the Mediterranean, Andy and Tom find themselves torn between sexual promise and commitments back home. Or rather, Tom is torn, finding himself drawn to the self-deprecating Trish, but having to dash off
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