Robin French and Clare Pollard - Interviews at the Royal Court Theatre

The Weather out there is as terminal as an overly-affectionate Bear Hug: Mel Cooper visited the Royal Court Theatre and talked to Robin French and Clare Pollard, two of the new young playwrights' with work in the Young Playwrights Season. Though he saw each in turn, he came to the conclusion that there were many shared, overlapping themes that emerged not just from their work but from their lives.

The latest two plays (part of the Genesis Young Writers project) at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, are one act plays that aptly share an evening. Ola Animashawun, the Associate Director of the Young Playwrights Season, explained that he was intrigued by two such different approaches to parent/child problems and relationships. "I suppose both are about dysfunctional families. But in the case of the play by Clare Pollard, The Weather, it's the mother-daughter problems that dominate, and a world of hatreds. Whereas, with the Robin French play, Bear Hug, the problem really - revolves around parents whose love for their child is almost too strong."

It is hard to write about these plays without giving them away - and unfair. It might be best, if you cannot get to see them in the current run, to get hold of the play scripts from the Royal Court (they have been printed) and see for yourself. The delight of the plays resides in the close intertwining of the theatrical images and metaphors in them and the meanings and themes the writers are trying to put before us.

Both plays are written in a rather surreal and metaphoric style. They refer to the world of Ionesco, early Edward Albee, even Samuel Beckett - though both young playwrights have come up with their metaphors before reading relevant 'influences". Robin French only read some Ionesco after everyone told him how much Bear Hug was in the tradition of this playwright, -especially Rhinoceros; and he only read Edward Albee's The Zoo Story after the event too. Clare Pollard had never read Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit before being told that that play too had poltergeists treated in much the same way. Sitting in an office on the 3rd floor of the Royal Court with Sloane Square visible behind her and full of activity and traffic, she mused about that. "What I really feared was that I was so into language that it would become a very poetic or language-oriented play and wouldn't really be visual, so I wanted something to make people startled into watching - and that's why there's a poltergeist in there. I deliberately set myself the challenge of its being very visual. I wanted it to be full of visual metaphors and images that came from what you were looking at. "Also," she added, "knowing how the magic is done but also knowing what it is supposed to be happening makes the imagination take over. The poltergeists are a very theatrical thing, something you could not do that way in film. I guess you could argue that it is simple but very Brechtian 'Alienation Effect'. You know you are seeing a set up in a theatre but also you respond to it as if it were the real thing - causing a true suspension of disbelief. But I am amazed at how many people tell me I got it from Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. I have never seen or read that play."

I met with both playwrights at the Royal Court, one right after the other. Ironically, both knew each other at Cambridge where Clare read English Literature and Robin read French and Italian. And both had come to the conclusion that they were writers and wanted to write plays while they were at university.

Clare was actually already a writer when she arrived at Cambridge. "I was a depressive poetry-writing loner of a teenager when I was growing up in Bolton. Then I went to Cambridge, where I met the man who was to become my husband on the first day. We just got married last month. He's an architect. My husband and my in-laws are very excited - they're my press office. They keep a scrap book. My mother is very proud too. My dad died last year. I actually wrote this play while he was ill. Maybe that inspired an apocalyptic vision and feeling. So many people focus on the mother-daughter aspect of the play; but in fact, for me the important thing was the apocalypse happening outside, the collapse of the ecology of the world."

I asked Clare if she knew what had inspired her to want to write plays when she already had an established reputation as a poet. "My mum has written all the village pantomimes since I was very little and I always used to watch her plays. So she's really excited that I have a play at the Royal Court. And I guess that is why I always wanted to write a play. But no, I never got involved in theatre or any of that at Cambridge or before now. But a great friend of mine did - she was in Footlights. And so was Robin French and that was how we got to know each other. It was quite funny when we both turned up here at the Royal Court and it was decided that our two plays should be put on together as a double bill."

An hour later, in the same room, Robin was telling me: "At Cambridge I got involved in Footlights - and I guess that really focused things for me. Footlights requires real comedy and it makes you really understand about audiences and playing to them. You write the sketches and you play in them; and you know what is working for an audience pretty quickly, and what needs cutting or changing. I did that for four years. Footlights taught me how much you have to work to get it right for an audience and also about live theatre. I did my degree in French and Italian literature. Now I can't speak either very well, which is very embarrassing. I spent my year away in Rome. I was lonely. I hung around with lots of English people and didn't speak Italian at all and had a brilliant time. And got to thinking about writing."

Just as Clare is a published poet, Robin already has a job writing scripts for television for a living.

"I've been writing comic TV scripts since I left university three years ago. I look 15, I know. In fact, I want you to say I am 15. I want to be a precocious talent the way Clare was at school and not a strange boy man. But I know that if I was 15, there would not have been time for me to have done all the things I did so far. And really, I do now have two writing careers in a way. Television writing is working for a kind of industry where you are going for a large audience; you're trying to please a lot of people. I guess that's why I wanted to write a play. Bear Hug was just about me pleasing myself. That's the best way to write. To write what you want to write and trust that you can convey what views you have to the audience. Whereas writing for TV, I've been stuck in that 'what do they want' worry mode. In TV there are a lot of gates. You go to a producer and he goes to the channel and at the channel there are several levels of approval to get through. In theatre, there are fewer gates to go through; and there's a lot more respect for the writer. Also in TV it gets put on in a definitive version right away. What gets broadcast even goes onto DVD forever nowadays. Whereas a play script can be taken up and done by different people in lots and lots of different ways - it's kind of like a piece of classical music that can stand a lot of interpreters and approaches. The play medium is much nicer to the writer than television."

Clare admits that she was looked upon as a precocious writer. "I've got two collections of poetry out. The first one, The Heavy Petting Zoo, I wrote when I was in school, in sixth form. I was something of a teen sensation or prodigy and it got a lot of coverage because it was mainly about sex. It also had a picture of a naked woman on the cover who looked a bit like me. My second collection, Bedtime, came out two years ago. But I want it to go on record that I didn't pose for the picture on the first one. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!"
I wanted to know why Clare took to writing plays with her success as a poet already underway, something Robin had already asked her before we started the interviews.

"Partly it's the tradition. Look at T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden and so many others. There is a history of people writing plays and poetry. I love Renaissance drama. I studied English Literature at Cambridge and I guess in a way theatre has always been my favourite art form and I studied it intensely there. A lot of my favourite playwrights, like Shakespeare or Beckett, are sort of poets anyway. There's the dramatic structure, the conflicts, of course, but also people are talking to each other in poetic or beautiful language. What often disappoints me about contemporary playwriting is the paucity of the language, the lack of real and beautiful language or startling language. I guess it's to do with the trend of realism. It's just pretend realism anyway, not actually real. Truthfully, I've always wanted to write plays and found it is hard to do on your own, it is such a process - but poetry is easy to write on your own. You can write a poem in two hours and you've got this wonderful, whole, entire thing that stands on its own."

Robin French and Clare Pollard have somewhat different stories about how they came to the attention of the Young Writers Programme. In Robin's case, he sent in a play and was invited along for a talk. But he was already writing for television. Clare's was perhaps more conventional.

"I got the impetus to start writing plays by joining the Young Writers course here," she explained. "I came to see Kevin Elyot's Mouth to Mouth with my mum and saw a leaflet in the lobby. I applied and didn't hear back for about three years because there's an incredibly long queue to do it. And then one day I got an offer in the post to join the course - luckily I was still young enough, though three years had passed. There is an age limit you know! It was a wonderful course and led to this step by step."

Robin taught himself about playwriting as he went along at Cambridge. "I grew to love the way theatre works from Footlights. You never see it the same way twice. Theatre works because there is a conflict that audiences can get excited about and they provide a change in mood every night. Of course, I'm also terribly jealous of people who can write prose - connected stories and all. I guess a play, the conflict, the dramatic dialogues, this is just the way it occurs to me. You go from something someone says and then going to the reactions. You have to be true to all the people in your head. In the novel, you can play with narrative voice, just tell the story and so on. But I have been writing for ages. I wrote dreadful adolescent diaries when I was about 13. Those were incredibly embarrassing. I used to draw animals as a child, from age five to about the time I was about 14. And I would just sit and draw animals all weekend. I guess I was quite an internalised child. I always think of that as the lineage to spending all that time in my own head writing. It is great when you get something out, but horrible if you work at something and it doesn't come together."

Clare's play, The Weather, is definitely not autobiographical. "It is biographical, however," she admitted. "The character of the mother originally came from the life of Anne Sexton, the poet. She has been accused of abusing her daughter. She is a wonderful poet and I am writing a dissertation on her right now. So, yes, The Weather is loosely based on her. That's where the denouement comes from."

There is an ambiguity in that last moment of The Weather, and Clare admits that she prefers each member of the audience to make up his or her own mind - though she has her own theory. "I know what I think happens. I think the play is a tragedy. I think she kills her mother. But the director likes to think she doesn't. You could read it that it's over in the sense that the game's over and she's going to leave now. Seizing the knife from the poltergeist could mean she has taken control at last, not that she is about to lash out definitively."

But there is also a question of abuse in the play; and that too is ambiguous or something each member of the audience has to decide about him or herself. Clare says, "I did want it to be ambiguous. Something the mother could tell herself didn't happen. Something the daughter could maybe imagine happened when it didn't. Does one really need to know? What certainly did happen is that the mother is overly intimate with her on every level and observes no boundaries."

The casting of the two plays is very strong; and in particular it works for an audience to have the two sets of parents in the two different situations played by the same actors. Robin admits that in his case the metaphor of the play came from his own experience and things that happened in his family that are so intimate he is even afraid to let his parents see the play in case they are hurt. But for him, the parents are truly heroic. The metaphor is that their son has turned into a bear and we watch how they deal with it and with the young man trapped in a bear's body. "A play is public property and the audience or critics have a complete right to take the play to be whatever they want. Ionesco told people quite hard what he wanted them to see. I don't want to do that. I want the play to mean for each member of the audience whatever they happen to glean from it."

Bear Hug is the more immediately and overtly hilarious of the two plays in the way it is acted out - and ultimately, I think, the more disturbing of the two. For me, the play is about mental illness and how a family copes with it; for others it has seemed to be about adolescent rebellion or about drug addiction. The power of the metaphor resides precisely in its elusiveness - and its openness to so many interpretations.

Clare grew up watching the pantomimes that her mother wrote for the local community every Christmas. Robin grew up in a family that he says was hardly artsy at all - though he is the middle brother of three all of whom are very creative in their different ways. Clare has her poetry - a new collection is coming out soon; and Robin his writing comedy for TV.

Ultimately, both talents are committed to writing plays and create texts for the live theatre. Both feel the theatre is the ultimate place where we can experience our world, our selves, and learn something about our contemporary lives. Both glory in language, in jokes and in the use of theatrical metaphors. And both seem to me to be the emerging talents of tomorrow.

Production images supplied by the Royal Court Theatre, photographed by Steve Cummiskey.