Alistair McDowall’s new play The Glow transports its viewers again to the 1860s the place Mrs Lyall, a spiritualist medium, is visiting an asylum, looking for somebody to behave as an assistant. There she finds an odd, anonymous, unvoiced lady and takes her dwelling, solely to find that the girl herself has powers.
The premise isn't wholly unfamiliar however McDowall is worried as a lot with English delusion and Arthurian legend as he's with the supernatural: how the previous stays with us within the current and the way we fictionalise historical past to make sense of ourselves. McDowall got down to write a fairytale “that had precise penalties”, taking one thing that seems to reside within the realm of the unbelievable and grounding it in the actual world “for there to be price and emotional heft”.
The Glow is meant to catch folks off-guard, he explains over Zoom from Manchester, the place he sits surrounded by bins, having moved home the day earlier than. Presenting audiences with one thing that appears acquainted after which unravelling it's one thing McDowall is nice at: his performs have a approach of enjoying along with your expectations. This will make them tough to write down about with out revealing an excessive amount of. X, from 2016, is an efficient instance: it's set on a analysis base on Pluto that has misplaced contact with Earth. The clocks begin going backwards. There's a glitch in time. However it's, at coronary heart, a play about loss.
Time has performed a key position in plenty of McDowall’s work. “To not contemplate time as a correct aspect throughout the writing of the play,” he says, “could be like not contemplating character or scene construction.” Nonetheless, like JB Priestley, he has a number of works that may very well be described as “time performs” and 2011’s Sensible Adventures even comprises an precise time machine.
Extra just lately, All of It, a 45-minute rattle by means of one lady’s life, was carried out by Kate O’Flynn at London’s Royal Court docket final yr. It was directed – like X and The Glow – by Vicky Featherstone. “I have a tendency to write down work that’s fairly high-concept,” he says. “There’s all the time a hazard of somebody getting fixated on the idea and making one thing flashy.” However Featherstone, he says, may be very rooted. Regardless of X’s off-world location, she understood that the “story was truly fairly easy.”
Rising up in Nice Broughton, North Yorkshire, McDowall’s curiosity in theatre was sparked, partly, by a drama trainer. At college, he learn an enormous quantity and began stealing books “which I’ve since posted again out of guilt”. He finds the decline of drama in colleges upsetting, not simply because it implies that potential writers or actors received’t have their eyes opened in the best way his had been, but additionally as a result of drama can “temporally erode all of the divisions that may construct up at college”.
Excited about movie to start with, he couldn’t afford a digital camera however discovered he may stress his buddies to be in his performs, lots of which had been “variations on The Breakfast Membership”. By this he means lots of people sitting in a room, speaking. “That’s what I assumed a play was.” However then he obtained into Beckett and Sarah Kane, Laurie Anderson and Sam Shepard, and commenced to find the potential of theatre. “I'm a theatre nerd,” he laughs.
Initially commissioned by Royal Welsh Faculty of Music and Drama, earlier than enjoying London’s Orange Tree theatre, his 2014 play Pomona – a mixture of dystopian thriller and Lovecraftian horror – feels just like the antithesis of a Breakfast Membership play. After a wobbly first preview, he remembers pondering: “Oh God, I’ve written an actual stinker.” It’s a bleak play, nightmarish in locations, but it surely grew to become a cult hit, transferring to the Nationwide Theatre’s short-term Shed house. It’s his most carried out play up to now and has been staged all around the world, one thing that also appears to shock him.
Studying an early draft of The Glow brings to thoughts every little thing from Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Critics usually touch upon the deft approach McDowall makes use of style tropes, however he's shocked theatre doesn’t do that extra usually. In any case, he says, “a analysis base on Pluto is simply as pretend as a drawing room in Victorian London”.
McDowall is energised by the thought of individuals having the ability to come collectively in an auditorium as soon as once more. That is why, he says, theatre will all the time be his dwelling: there’s a magic there you'll be able to’t discover elsewhere. “You may put folks in a room with some actors and you may go wherever.”
The Glow is on the Royal Court docket, London, 24 January-5 March.
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