The Plays: Losing Venice

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this article first appeared on the Traverse Theatre web site, March 2001

In a way, Losing Venice happened a bit by accident. My partner just happened to meet a young woman on the London train. Her name was Jenny Killick and she was coming up to work as assistant director at the Traverse. And when we first met, sometime in 1984, the idea was for me to translate a play by Lorca.

But somehow that got turned into the idea of my writing a new play.

At this time, I had been trying to get something put on at the Traverse for about three years. My scripts hadn't even been acknowledged; the whole place made me feel angry and nervous. I had a pint before meeting Jenny to see if it would make me feel better.

It didn't. We met in the old theatre in the Grassmarket, in the space downstairs that eventually became the bar but which at that stage was Traverse 2. It was horrible: cold, damp, dark and dingy. Also an unbelievably awkward shape.

I really hadn't a clue what to say. The space did not inspire me. I was desperate for a pee. I promised to send in an idea and rushed off as soon as I could.

I had my pee in an old public convenience in the Grassmarket, situated just underneath the War Memorial. As I looked around the urinals, the space reminded me irresistibly of the appalling theatre space I was supposed to be writing a play for.

So I rushed off and scribbled down an idea for a play set in a run-down gentlemen's convenience that was threatened with closure. It took me about 3 pages, and I was very proud of it, and scribbled down as a PS: I've another idea set in 17th century Venice.

This was all about the Spanish poet Quevedo (1580-1645) who I'd studied at university and whom I'd found both fascinating and utterly repellent (I was to use him again, much later, for my only broadcast televisionplay). He had been involved in a plot to destabilise Venice in 1618 and turn it into a Spanish colony. One of the reasons I had always been fascinated by Spanish history at this time was because I kept seeing connections between Spain then (an antiquated colonial power desperately in need of re-discovering a new identity for itself) and Britain now.

I had briefly been television critic for The Scotsman the year before (which had been complicated, in that we didn't have a television at the time, and I'd had to borrow one) and had had to watch the news coverage of Mrs. Thatcher's grotesque Falklands adventure.

This had preoccupied me profoundly, and I'd had a vague idea of writing about it. But the Venice/Quevedo story was so unlike anything I had ever seen on the Scottish stage, and so unlike anything I imagined anyone would ever want to produce, I didn't take it at all seriously, and so when Jenny suggested we meet to discuss my play idea I hadn't given it a single thought.

I was expecting to talk about the public convenience idea, which by this stage had turned into some kind of black farce with symbolical undertones; but she never mentioned it. Instead she asked: "Tell me about this Venice idea".

And so I did, as best I could. Then she asked: "Is this going to be an epic?", and I had a strong sense that this was the Key Question. That if I got the answer right, then the commission was mine.

The only problem was that I didn't really understand it. I was also too shy and insecure to ask her what she meant. An epic for me was an obscure and rather difficult Spanish mediaeval poem with a manly hero I found it impossible to relate to. So I was about to say "no" when some vague memory of Brecht made me say "Yes."

"Yes, Jenny" I found myself saying, "It's going to be an epic".

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