Without giving away any spoilers, what is the story of Under Three Moons?

Daniel: “Broadly speaking it’s the story of a friendship, following two kids through their adulthood and into fatherhood. The play spans thirty years but is set over just three nights, the three nights they share a bed; a school excursion, a surfing trip, a Christmas holiday. But it’s not so much the story of what happens to them as how their relationships changes and how that change affects them”.

What inspired you to write a play about male friendship and specifically male mental health?

Daniel: “A few things happened all at once. Some serious, some not so much. I became a father, two friends had what they described as mental health episodes and I went on a terrifyingly macho stag-do. To be honest the first two events probably just got me thinking and discussing the ideas that later went into the play, but it was the stag do that formed the idea for me, seeing all these decades old friendships butt up against each other, it was funny and stupid and sweet and all a bit much all at once”.

Masculinity is a very broad term – how have you interpreted it in this play?

Daniel: “I was focusing more on the expectations of some men and the expectations that are made of them than on any theory of maleness. If I ever wrote about how I perceive masculinity it quickly began feeling like Under Three Moons the Ted talk more than a play. And no one wants to see that. Though I suppose the focus on the character’s expectations is how this play approaches masculinity, looking at the gap between how men perceive themselves and how they feel they’re perceived, and how they try and deal with that gap”.

What are the characters like?

Daniel: “I’ve seen lots of plays I really like by authors I adore writing the big male plays. But in most all of them the characters are cruel or conniving or craven. The one thing I wanted is for these guys to be well meaning, even when they’re spectacularly wrong, they want to be decent. They’re also emotionally inarticulate. They have the words to express themselves, and sometimes the compulsion to do so, but not necessarily the understanding of their own feelings to know what they want or need to share. Aside from that I think they’re also a little funny”.

Did you draw on your own life when creating the characters, and if so in what way?

Daniel: “Not really. I’m not really worth writing a play about. So I wrote about people I find much more interesting than myself. I did steal certain traits or ways of speaking from some friends and acquaintances but only to flesh the characters out. Both of the men are very much themselves and came about from just writing and writing and writing these voices till they became clearer”.

Are you involved in the casting of your plays?

Daniel: “Not always. But I have been this time and it’s been great. I can’t lie, it’s just fun seeing all these fantastic actors reading your stuff and making it sound better than what you’ve written, but particularly with this play it’s also genuinely invaluable. The play’s not a plot heavy genre piece, it’s all about the feel of the relationship, so seeing how the actors read together key. Everyone I saw was great, but one of the reasons I’m so excited to get into rehearsals is to see Darren and Kyle work. As soon as we saw them read together it felt real and alive. Though I think that was pretty obvious to everyone in the room so maybe I’m wrong and I didn’t need to be there at all. Still, I’m glad I was”.

If you could influence people’s views on male mental health, what would be one thing you would change?

Daniel: “The most important thing, the oft quoted truism, is we need to remove the stigma from mental health. It’s okay to be struggling, it’s alright to ask for help, coping and being strong is not a panacea, things only get better when we start talking to someone. The shame and guilt about initially admitting you need care is the most unhelpful difficult first hurdle. I think people often revert to that truism because mental health isn’t like other kinds of health. After that it’s very hard to give one uniformly useful piece of advice to sufferers.  One person’s grief is rarely like another person’s, depression can be different for anyone. Which is partly why finding help can feel so hard a process to start”.

Why does the play have an age recommendation of 14 plus?

Daniel: “There’s some adult language. And some adult subjects touched upon. Nothing too traumatising is staged but perhaps the play might raise conversations afterwards that some parents won’t want to have with their children if they’re much younger than 14 or so”.

What do you want people to leave the theatre thinking about?

Daniel: “It feels odd to say this having talked about mental health so much, but I hope people leave having had a really fun night out. It’s a fun play, honest. But I guess I’d also want them to think about the people in their life to whom they need to reach out, either to ask for or to offer help. It’s ultimately a play about intimacy so I suppose so I’d want people to feel closer, or at least want to feel closer, to the people that matter to them”.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about the play?

Daniel: “If it sounds up your street, come see it, you’ll love it. If it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, it’s nothing like what I’ve made it sound like, come and see it anyway, you’ll still love it”. 

Under Three Moons produced by Box of Tricks opens at The Lowry, Salford Quays from the 24-28 September 2019 and then tours until the 2 November 2019.

“He doesn’t want an audience to get too comfortable” – interview with Michael Cabot, Artistic Director of London Classic Theatre.

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Just over 200 years later, this forgotten hero of free speech, and likely first investigative journalist, is centre stage again in a new play by satirists Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, Trial By Laughter.

Quays Life meets the writers to find out more.

How would you sum up the premise of Trial By Laughter?

Nick: It’s a story about press freedom and free speech and a battle for freedom and free speech. It’s the story of a trial in 1817 – the trial of a man called William Hone, who was a sort of shy bookseller and publisher of cartoons and satirical pamphlets. He was taken to court by the Regency government to try and stifle jokes about the monarchy. That’s essentially what it’s about.

Ian: It’s exactly that. It’s a courtroom thriller but it’s a historical courtroom thriller with jokes, which means it’s three different genres in one for just one ticket price.

Nick: I think we’d describe it as The Madness Of King George meets A Few Good Men…

Ian: Meets Crown Court.

What was the original inspiration for the radio play?

Nick: We’d just finished doing The Wipers Times for BBC2, when we did the film of it, and the head of BBC2, Janice Hadlow sent us an email asking if we’d heard of William Hone. Janice is an expert on Regency history and has written books about it. We both said ‘Who?’ which is often a very good starting point for a story because we think ‘Well, if we don’t know anything about it let’s find out’. We started doing research and suddenly out came this amazing story about this amazing man – a complete nobody really but who took on the might of the government in a landmark case.

Ian: It’s incredible. He had his moment when history beckoned and then fell into obscurity, to our shame really. I’m the editor of Private Eye and Nick’s a cartoonist yet we didn’t know about him, but again that makes for a much better story because you’re telling people something new.

From researching the tale what were you most surprised or interested to learn about Hone?

Ian: Without giving spoilers, it’s incredible that they tried him three times in three days. At the end of each day when the jury found him innocent they just tried him again the next morning until there were 20,000 people outside the Guildhall and they thought ‘We’re going to have a riot now’. This was only a couple of decades after the French Revolution.

Nick: And a year before the Peterloo Massacre so tensions were incredibly high. The Crown was very worried about the possibility of revolution and there were failed harvests and a lot of famine, squalor and whatnot. Meanwhile the Prince Regent was being portrayed in cartoons and in pamphlets as this libertine voluptuary who was scoffing vast quantities of food while people were hanging outside the windows. The other thing we discovered about Hone as we did more research is what a remarkable man he was because he wasn’t just a satirist, which was our first interest and his friendship with the cartoonist Cruikshank interested me as a cartoonist myself. Their working relationship was also a natural thing for us to explore and Hone was also probably our first investigative journalist. He was a witness to the execution of a young serving girl, a maid called Eliza Fenning, and he was absolutely appalled by it. He did a lot of research into her case and basically proved that it was a miscarriage of justice. We also learned he was an amazing philanthropist and he took a terrific interest in the lunatic asylums and campaigned for better conditions. There was the reform of juries, which he campaigned for and won. He never stopped working.

Ian: And he believed in universal suffrage, which at the time was a good 100 years away. If you look at his range of interests, they are pretty extraordinary.

What changes have you made in preparing the play for the stage?

Ian: It’s completely different. The thing about radio is that it has to be very words-driven, which is fine because there are lots of bits about speeches and whatever, but to get it to the stage we have to make it more dramatic. There’s a lot more about the role of his wife and we’ve set more of it in pubs.

Nick: It’s a matter of fact that Hone and Cruikshank devised their strategy for the case in all the pubs and coffee houses of London so it’s a very rich milieu in which they were working. Hone was admired at the time by his literary colleagues, even though he was always bankrupt and had schemes which lost him money, and one of his admirers was William Hazlitt, who was one of the most caustic critics of the era. The only person Hazlitt seemed to like was William Hone so we’ve put Hazlitt in the story as well, which is great for the colour.

What do you feel makes Hone’s story a great subject for a play?

Ian: Hone’s tactic in the trial was to appeal to the jury so his whole way of winning was to make it accessible to an ordinary… I’d hate to say viewer but that’s sort of how he approached it. Courtrooms are great theatre on the whole and Hone and Cruikshank, in devising the strategy as it were, realised that playing to the gallery is not a bad thing in a big trial – it’s what you need to do because you need to get them on your side. That’s exactly what happens in the theatre.

Nick: What was slightly unusual about their tactics is that they set out to make the jury laugh. The basic of their entire case was that Hone spoke for six-to-eight hours every day of the trials just producing more and more examples of stuff he thought would make people laugh – and they did. There are some transcripts, which admittedly were edited or written by Hone so he did beef up his own amusingness quite a lot.

Ian: A bit like Oscar Wilde writing the account of his own trial and Hone’s account is fantastic. He’s brilliant in it, unsurprisingly because he edited it.

Nick: History written by the victors…

Ian: Yes and it’s bloody funny.

How you feel the subject matter resonates for contemporary audiences?

Ian: I think it’s a reminder that this battle has to be won in every generation. We are incredibly privileged to be the beneficiaries of all those battles that were won in Britain in the 19th century but they can be lost again. History doesn’t only go one way.

Nick: And the arguments that are buzzing around now are very similar. Hone was targeted because he wrote parodies of religious text, principally The Lord’s Prayer and the Litany and The Ten Commandments, and they were the sort of stuff we’d put in Private Eye now for a bit of fun. Only the other week you had Rowan Atkinson talking about ‘Should we be allowed to make jokes about religion?’ Hone believed you should if the context is political or whatever and that’s what free speech is. On a global scale there are cartoonists in Turkey and Malaysia who are still being persecuted and there’s this amazing Malaysian cartoonist called Zunar who until recently faced 45 years in jail for seditious libel, which is basically the same charge that was levied against Hone, for making jokes about the Prime Minister and his wife. Zunar, like Hone, could have done a runner. I met him when he was over in England but he was going back to face trial because he felt this was an important case, like Hone did, that establishes what we can and can’t say about our rulers.

You’ve worked with director Caroline Leslie a few times now. What do you enjoy about the collaboration?

Ian: [Laughs] She’s very annoying because she demands you put in new scenes and change things around to try and make it better.

Nick: What’s that joke? ‘How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?’

Ian: ‘None – don’t change anything!’

Nick: That’s very much our view but Caroline forces her to make changes. We first started working with her on our first play we did, A Bunch Of Amateurs, and she was absolutely brilliant and brought all kinds of things to the script which we didn’t know were there, including a lot of music. Then she directed The Wipers Times and that’s a play that’s full of music and movement and we wrote it accordingly because we thought ‘Caroline’s very good at this so let’s make sure she has a lot of stuff to work with’.

Ian: It’s very good having a woman director, particularly in situations that are quite blokey by definition like the Army and English court in the 1800s. She makes sure that it expands beyond that and that the emotional elements are not ignored.

This is your third play to be developed by the Watermill Theatre. What do you see as its importance to the UK theatre scene?

Ian: It’s a very exciting place to work.

Nick: It’s a remarkable theatre. Apart from being a jewel in terms of its setting and the closeness to the stage you have as an audience, the standard of productions has been incredible. I first came across it when they did a production of Sweeney Todd in 2004 which transferred to the West End. They’re just brilliant at doing things, particularly with music. When we were invited to do A Bunch Of Amateurs there we knew nothing about the Watermill but we enjoyed the experience so much that if we were able to we’d always go there because the audiences are lovely and it’s a great place to do a play.

You’ve been writing together for a long time. How would you describe your collaborative process?

Ian: We write together, literally. We don’t send each other drafts and we physically work together in the same room. I suppose we try and make each other laugh; that’s the first thing. But we’ve known each other long enough to be able to say ‘That isn’t very good’ or ‘That’s a terrible suggestion’ and then just get on with it. There’s a sort of joint self-editing.

Nick: There’s always a lot of energy when it’s the two of us doing something, particularly because Ian’s time is so precious because he’s everywhere. When we get together we have to get on and do some writing. We tend to work quite fast. We both do stuff independently but to edit each other as we go is a sort of bonus. I’ve got lots of writer friends who write on their own, which I think is a very ghastly prospect. They have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite; if you look at the greats like Alan Bennett, his diaries are full of the pain of rewriting. We have to rewrite as well but it’s a bit less than if we working on our own.

Ian: Because Nick’s a cartoonist he’s always had a strong visual sense whereas I tend to be a bit more word-bound. So there’s always a point where Nick’s thinking ‘What would look great is this…’ which I usually haven’t thought of. I’m thinking ‘This bit I’ve just written would be really clever’ when actually if might be terribly boring and getting something across visually is what it’s all about. That’s another reason we really enjoy collaborating.

How hands-on are you with your touring productions?

Nick: They take on a life of their own really. If we go do a Q&A we see the show and occasionally have some notes, which we pass on to our producer or to Caroline. But really by opening night it’s all pretty much there.

Ian: [Laughs] Our notes are always ‘Could the actors not ad-lib please? Can they only say exactly what we’ve written?’.

You are doing post-show Q&As again for Trial By Laughter. What do like about the process?

Nick: The ones we have done for The Wipers Times are always very instructive because we meet people who’ve got their own stories to tell. We did a Q&A down in Chichester last year and a lady in the front row said ‘I have a little knowledge of this subject because my grandfather was Fred Roberts [who edited the paper]’ so we said ‘Please come up on stage’ and we just sat there asking her questions about him. It’s a great way of interacting with your audience. In Salisbury we were talking about trying to make The First World War accessible to younger audiences through a humorous story and a young girl at the back who was around 13 went ‘Well, it works!’ With the Q&As you get a bit of a discussion going and a bit of a debate.

Ian: There was a great moment just before one of the Q&As where someone said ‘There’s an Army chap in the audience who said he thought you’d got it pretty much right’ and when we asked who he was they said he was Deputy Supreme Commander Allied Nato Forces.

What you hope to get out of the Trial By Laughter Q&As?

Ian: We want to know what they think really, what bits they’re interested in and whether they think we should still be worried about this sort of thing. Hopefully they’ll think we very much should be.

Nick: We’ve become very energised by this subject matter and we’ve found it fascinating. All we’re really trying to do is try and get other people as interested in it as we are. We happen to think Hone is one of the most brilliant men in history and we hope other people share our opinion

The Wipers Times is touring the UK before heading into the West End and Trial By Laughter is heading out on tour. Is this your bid for theatrical domination?

Ian: [Laughs] Everyone else is toast. No, we’ve come to theatre a bit late I suppose in terms of writing. We’ve done a lot more telly and some film, but it is fabulous and there’s nothing like it – the pleasure of crafting something that goes on to have a life of its own, where it plays in different places and has different reactions from an audience. It’s incredibly rewarding.

Nick: It’s one of the biggest surprises of our writing career that this has happened. Never in our wildest dreams would we have thought of doing a play but then we were asked to. Now we can’t think of anything we’d rather do. We wrote the original radio script of Trial By Laughter with an eye to thinking ‘This has theatrical legs’.

Trial by Laughter is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 29 January to 2 February 2019. 

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Tell us a little about the show?

It’s about two abandoned children: a brother who at 13 makes an impossible promise to his three-year-old sister. He does this for the most genuine, humane and compassionate reasons, but doesn’t know it’s impossible when he makes it.

By the time he realises, he knows that in breaking it he’ll destroy the only thing that has made their joint experience of a cruel world bearable. But without surrendering that thing, he can’t fulfil his own needs as a human being. Can he sacrifice his needs to maintain someone else’s happiness, and can he keep the biggest promise he’s ever made to the one person he’s vowed to protect?

On a larger scale, the play is exploring how we use fictions and play to protect our children from the realities of the world. It questions how much is too much, and what happens when you use storytelling to survive in an inhumane world, but it ends up isolating you from facing up to reality.

What was the inspiration for the story?

I became a Dad. I was spending hours and hours making up stories with my daughter when she was two-and-a-half, and that story world is in good health now: she’s five-and-a-half but bath time is still full of hundreds of interconnected characters and backstories and sub-plots!

We live behind a cemetery and it’s very beautiful – we go walking in there all the time. She was an early reader, and at a very early age after reading the gravestones one day and asking us what they were for, suddenly grasped the concept of death and was utterly inconsolable.

At least, she was inconsolable until we told her all bodies go back into the ground and help the flowers grow, and she said as long as the flower was purple that would be fine and then she seemed fine with her own mortality after all.

I’ve always been gripped by the power of story – particularly through theatre – to transform our perception of reality, but having a child ended up putting that question front and centre in my daily life.

Which questions should be answered with a full truth? What are the ones where the answers require subtleties of language to circumvent or dampen the severity of the truth? How much truth is too much?

The play takes place between 2016 and 2023. What does this the seven-year span reveal about the characters?

It reveals how their values change, as they continue to discover more about themselves in conversation with the world around them. It reveals a burgeoning understanding of compassion being the greatest political tool that they can wield in an unjust world.

It also reveals what both of them choose to do when, like many of us, they have made incredibly bold life choices with a huge amount of self-belief and confidence and desire to follow-through, then at some point have those choices challenges as misguided, erroneous and ill-judged.

I wanted to drag Connor – the brother – through a wrenching period of self-doubt and horrible compromise, where the person for whom he cares most in the world suddenly becomes an obstacle to his own deeper needs.

That felt like a darker side of becoming a parent that a lot of people don’t talk about – and I should add that whilst it’s a dramatic amplification of anything I’ve ever felt, I know it’s not an unreasonable fiction to suggest that this can sometimes be the case for new parents.

The play is written in a mixture of prose and verse. Why is this and what does each writing style bring to the piece?

I first began exploring the layout of monologue and dialogue more like verse years and years ago, but it came to the fore when I was writing Free for Half Moon back in 2013-14, and was searching for a notation of theatrical language that could communicate more to the performer about the play’s subject matter – parkour and free-running – and that could score not just action but rhythm, movement, tempo, physicality, moving image and music.

Quite a few people say my writing can be listened to as much as watched, which I take as a compliment! But I’m interested in how the rhythm of free verse can add to our journey through a story, and how one performer’s voice in the space can utterly transport us through image, metaphor and poetry.

In Off The Grid however, I needed to ground the piece linguistically by way of contrast to Connor’s wild and imaginative fictions – the prose sections offer a much more grounded experience of the story world, as witnessed by onlookers rather than Connor.

As an audience, that means quite a few times we get to understand the same moment in the plot from very different perspectives: and to me that’s a stylistic choice that supports the blurred lines between fiction, reality and truth that the piece is exploring.

I’m always curious to see how form, style, structure and metaphor can coalesce in a play’s dramaturgy to fundamentally support its themes and narrative. Writing is so much more than just plotting the story, and in theatre I think we’re able to really push those boundaries of what it means to communicate a human experience.

What process do you go through when writing a new play?

Usually there’s a curiosity or question that leads to a huge amount of research – interviews, reading, taking photographs, embedding myself in the subject matter, then sifting back through it and distilling down to the essence of the story – but with this play, because of the amount of myth-making and story-creating involved, I resisted it.

I wrote up the idea quite quickly and tried to write more instinctively: which was aided by Half Moon’s incredible Careers in Theatre programme where playwrights are able to hear very early work – just a page or two of exploratory and very open writing – responded to by over 100 school children of the target age range in a matter of days, via music, image, design, lighting and performance. The muscularity that brings to the formation of an idea is tremendous, and it always brings you belief as a writer in what you’re doing.

After that I become very diagrammatic and structure-oriented, looking for the metaphor at the heart of the work and starting to play with story designs and shapes that can allow me to see the whole shape of the play on a single (often very large!) sheet of paper.

Then it’s about using that to create the first drafts, and then onwards via feedback with actors and a director draft by draft to hone, trim, edit, shift and ultimately nudge the work closer and closer towards being rehearsal-room ready. I find first drafts the slowest and hardest part of the process – I much prefer re-writing to originating material.

What inspired your career as a writer? What advice would you give to young people hoping to follow in your footsteps?

The number one thing that inspired me is the same number one piece of advice I give to people wanting to be writers now: permission. Seek out permission from others or from within yourself to be a writer, or the writer, in an environment that supports you to do so.

I first wrote plays for my Scout troop when I was 12, and then the local amateur dramatic company when I was 14 and 15 – just skits and sketches and rip-offs from Black Adder and Monty Python mostly – but that desire (although the product was often flawed!) was lent so much integrity by the support of those around me, that they were essentially giving me permission to give it a go.

If you can seek out or give yourself validation as a writer, a creator of fictions that can translate your unique experience of the world to others, then you’ll naturally gravitate towards more and more environments that can support you – be they environments of learning, professional experience, work experience, mentoring, or just trying things out with your mates in your room.

Finally, what would you like audiences to take with them after seeing the show?

A feeling of hopefulness and a renewed belief in little creative gestures having big impacts.

Off the Grid comes to Waterside, Sale in Trafford on 20 November 2018. Visit website for full tour details.

Off the Grid: David Lane (playwright) from Half Moon Theatre on Vimeo.

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