For some reason Scottish writers tend to come from uncompromising places like Paisley or Greenock or Pollock or one of the other art-free, beauty–exclusion zones in which Central Scotland is so rich. Simon Donald was born and brought up in Wishaw, a not-horrible small town in Lanarkshire. The horrible thing about Wishaw is that it’s not even very horrible, though the local golf course does back onto the site of the vast Ravenscraig steelworks, recently deceased but still chemically active. Wishaw itself is OK: it’s an oasis of OK-ness in an uncompromisingly unbeautiful desert.
In one of Donald’s earlier plays, Prickly Heat (1988), there’s a mad old bampot of a man living in a condemned Glasgow tenement, full of stories about the time he was a gun-runner in Vera Cruz and his elemental struggles with winds called ‘El Diablo’ and such. “The sirocco, the khamsin and the monsoon. I have been blasted by every hot wind on every hot continent on God’s earth,” he says. There’s a pause, then – “The wind here hasnae even got a name.” I love that line. It’s so – well – true. Stupit. But true. It’s a line that’s about all the places in the world where people find it hard to live imaginatively because the place thy live has no sense of place somehow, no story to tell. Hownslow. Slough. Middlesborough. In fact let’s face it, practically everywhere.
Anyway, what am I saying…I suppose I’m saying that yes there is an element in Donald of that clichéd equation which goes ‘sensitive soul plus small unexciting town equals hothouse imagination.’ And it’s true that Donald still remains attracted to what attracted him as he grew up; movies, stories, science, all the things that first gave him a sense of the fabulous. One of his favourite writers is Stephen Jay Gould, the palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist….which is basically Dinosaurs for Grown – ups, or the Wonders of Creation for Rational Atheists so don’t be too impressed…and anyway he gets equally excited about Elmore Leonard thrillers or a Giant Morrison comic like Doom Patrol.
But I’m only drawing attention to the hothouse orchid aspect in order to emphasise something else altogether…his imaginative robustness. Because what tends to happen to people who live in placeless places (I’m talking about everyone, not just artists) is that there’s an imaginative splintering; the imagination either goes for social realism or else it goes for sci-fi superheroes, life-is-elsewhere exoticism. Personally, I’m not keen on either of those for longer than five minutes: I don’t think the either is a very useful model of the universe, as a scientist might put it , meaning that the model doesn’t describe or help or see hellish much.
I kind of think the job of a playwright is to make us all interesting to ourselves again, to make us wondrous to ourselves even supposing we come from Wales or someplace. OK, as I’ve hinted, this is what Donald was born to do but even so – when you see it happen it’s beautiful. In The Life of Stuff he achieves the trick of creating a heightened fictional world with its own undiscovered laws, out of elements that are recognisably here-and-now – Holly, Ibiza, movie-talk; a world which then has scale enough for both wine gums and love, the DSS and the angel of death.
I love the way the play can move in odd targets from intimate worries like eczema to dire thoughts like murder and wrap it all up in a bow-tie. I love the characters, the way they’re trying to invent themselves, moment to moment, with whatever comes to hand …these characters don’t have lives or ‘psychology’ so much as consciousness, life. Whatever their ‘goals’ – Evelyn’s quest to get some good drugs up her nose, Leonard’s interest in the R&D side of applied violence – they pursue them with an almost moving ability to avoid moral responsibility. But all the time their imaginations are going non-stop, hyper, as if they’re trying to imagine who they are all the time and never being quite sure…
Something about all this is very tender – maybe- because of his relationship to his characters – or maybe because, underpinning all the jokes and terror, is Donald’s belief that life is…what’s the atheists word for ‘holy’?. .and that everything is made of the same stuff.
Chris Hannan
Donmar Warehouse 1993