ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY: Rob Drummond

Playwright, actor and 'amateur cosmologist' Rob Drummond has two new plays coming up – Quiz Show and The Riot Of Spring premiere in April and May this year. We caught up with him to talk about life, the universe and wrestling

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 28 MARCH 2013

When he isn't fighting muscled men or being shot at by audience members, Rob Drummond is a serious chap. "I don't understand people who aren't interested in big questions," he says. "I loathe talk of mortgages and tax returns – it bores me to tears. Yes, we have to deal with these things but please don't talk to me about them while I'm trying to live." Now that his hit from the Traverse's Fringe programme, Bullet Catch, is taking him to the USA, this intellectual drive has helped him to write two new pieces: Quiz Show for the Traverse and The Riot of Spring as part of the National Theatre of Scotland's Auteurs season. 

Since his previous successes – including the spectacular Wrestling, which had him rucking with Scotland's finest sports entertainment grapplers – have featured Drummond in a starring role, Quiz Show almost feels like a return to the classic format of scripted theatre. 

"I've never hidden my desire to be considered a serious playwright who writes, well, plays with characters and a plot and a fourth wall and all that," he admits. "With Quiz Show the format came first. I knew I wanted to take the structure, rules, atmosphere of a quiz show and use them to tell a story. I just didn't know what story." 

While the advertising hints at dark secrets and mysterious hosts who are offering greater prizes than a mere holiday in Benidorm, Quiz Show has that Drummond enthusiasm for big ideas. He explains that "the quest for truth was an obvious step. The story itself, you'll just need to wait and see." And although he claims that had he not been persuaded by an advisor of studies to study theatre at University, he could have easily become a writer for television or film, he enjoys the freedom of live performance. 

"Well it's immediate, that's appealing," he continues. "I can pretty much say or do what I want without delay and interference." Since he has frequently taken detours to discuss the vastness of the universe and existential despair (in Bullet Catch, nominally a study of the vaudeville trick), or childhood fantasies of macho violence (Wrestling, unsurprisingly), Drummond makes full use of theatre as a place of ideas and debate. It allows him to entertain his intellectual curiosity. 

"I don't care what colour your curtains are, I care that electrons behave differently when they are being filmed by a camera!" he insists. "What the fuck is that about? I don't understand people who are not curious, people who don't die a little inside when they realise they will probably go to their deaths knowing on balance next to nothing about the universe they exist in."

---

"I THINK THERE'S SOMETHING QUITE BEAUTIFUL IN THE FACT THAT ORIGINALITY CANNOT EXIST" – ROB DRUMMOND

---

While Quiz Show plugs into contemporary society's anxiety about television, snatches its tired style and chucks it back refreshed and sparkling with ideas, The Riot of Spring goes back a century to the premiere of The Rite of Spring: a ballet that caused a huge fuss because of its startling originality. If Quiz Show throws down with truth, Riot hustles originality. One of the characters is an artist driven to insanity by his need to be original.

Drummond has made his mark by applying unexpected juxtapositions – fighting and personal monologues, or suicide and stage magic – but he is less worried about being unique. "I used to worry about it. What's the point in even doing this, it's all been done before. What's the point?" he says. "Even The Rite of Spring, which seemed to come from nowhere but Stravinsky's soul, had its sources."

"I don't worry so much about it now because I think there's something quite beautiful in the fact that originality cannot exist." He has found an alternative to originality, fortunately. "It's about honouring those who have gone before and taking their gifts and making them relevant to your situation, borrowing, adding, changing and then hopefully leaving enough for the next lot."

Drummond might be looking forwards to the future generations already, but he is still regarded as part of a new generation of theatre artists – the NTS Auteurs season has lined him up next to Kieran Hurley, another graduate of Glasgow University, Nic Green and Claire Cunningham: all performers who, while not necessarily sharing themes or even genres (Cunningham is most famous as a choreographer, for example), do have a common enthusiasm for new ideas and expressing a personal vision.

However, in presenting two works close together, Drummond has managed to both bridge the Edinburgh-Glasgow divide and the one between Live Art, traditionally more of a west coast matter, and The Script, supported in the identity of The Traverse as a theatre for 'new writing.' This eclecticism might come from that same restless energy that seems to have him in training for every other production he writes.

"I mentioned earlier that I wanted to be just a plain old playwright, and that's true," he reflects. "But I also want to be an actor. And a director. And a wrestler. And a magician. And a dancer. And a filmmaker. And an astronaut." Whether the next production will be Rob Drummond's Gravitational Leap Of Faith, he refuses to stop asking questions and trying new things. "Why would anyone not want to do everything? We're only here for a short time, it's criminal not to try to get as much out of it as possible," he continues. "At the moment people seem to be allowing me to make this type of theatre and that's great, so for now, I'll do as much of that as I can. But I'm still also a playwright and a husband and a football fan and an amateur cosmologist." 

He is also an entertainer – willing to take a bullet to entertain during The Fringe or get beaten up by wrestlers. Quiz Show, although it is as much a thriller as a parody of celebrity culture, follows up on his interest in the way that popular culture can embody profound truths. He made Wrestling come on like classical mythology and Bullet Catch like a metaphor for free will. Yet for all of his investigations, he admits to a disappointment. 

"The insanity I experience when making a show is not to do with creating something new so much as creating something perfect," he concludes. "Which I will never achieve. And much like the realisation that I will die not knowing the secrets of the universe, that fact sucks."

More Politics, Or Something (Emerging Artists, too)

Kenneth Davidson didn't so much give me the number of the beast in response to my last blog, he gave me its post code. I am always worried when I try to get political, because I know that I have friends who are far more knowledgeable than I am.

In the meantime, I did check out the speech made by Maria Miller. Ever since Rob Drummond did a version of  the Blondie number and dedicated it to the arts minister, I've been trying to get my head around the problem. I mean, she's a Tory, right? Did anyone expect her to say anything that didn't involve their catch-phrase of austerity?

The British political theatre of the 1970s, at least in the English, scripted variations, expressed a determinedly socialist intention and an almost anarchic cynicism about the antics of socialist politicians. The Labour Party is pictured as hopelessly compromised, the smaller parties as dismal cults of personality. Before the advent of punk, which fired into the raw, inarticulate alienation of the working classes, theatre was possibly the most dynamic public forum for the discussion of counter-cultural ideology. While the hippies of the 1960s settled into drug psychoses and addiction, or mellowed out over Pink Floyd’s jams, playwrights were seething.

If there is a revival of the political urge amongst young playwrights today, it is tempered by the spirit of the 1980s (Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society might be more historically prescient than her war against trade unionism, what with the reformation of ideas like “friendship” and “privacy” thanks to the Internet) and the 1990s, when Tony Blair deliberately courted the arts and, mainly in the now derided Cool Brittania phase, made them courtiers to the state. Rather than taking swipes at the figures who engage with existing political systems, there is a focus on the lives of the victims of the systems. At its best, contemporary political theatre is compassionate rather than angry.

Anger is a difficult emotion to express. It is deliberately repulsive: much of the reason for the original resistance to punk was perhaps its naked aggression. Whether The Sex Pistols were mining the incoherent anguish of personal alienation, or The Clash were making rudimentary attempts to join the political dots, punk married a conservative sound – the rough edges of noise that would later flourish in the wave of 1980s bands who regarded feedback as an instrument were more a function of musical ineptitude – with an immediate rage. If early rock’n’roll took the joyous and nervous blossoming of adolescent sexuality, punk grounded itself in the teenage temper tantrum.  

Rob Drummond is possibly marking himself out as the angriest of the new generation of Scottish theatre-makers. Both Quiz Show and Riot of Spring have scenes of disgust: the quiet meditation on child abuse that concludes the former and the karaoke tribute to Maria Miller in the latter. They swerve into the lack of focus that is often the hallmark of rage – the closing monologue of Quiz Show fails to consider why celebrities can get away with paedophilia, merely condemning it (a statement impossible to reject), and the irritation directed at the culture minister is trivial, especially in the context of a play that brings up the major disturbances that rocked London (before the Olympics restored a measure of national pride).

In both cases, however, Drummond is exploring something different from the compassion studies of his contemporaries Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair. In Rantin, Hurley offers a kaleidoscope of modern Scottish lives, only briefly tearing into the tyranny of late capitalism and containing this monologue within a broader narrative that is more interested in presenting the richness of individual’s lives. McNair’s thrilling Donald Robertson, meanwhile, is a close-up on how comedy can save a young man’s social status while destroying his moral integrity.

Drummond is harking back to the 1970s of the punks rather than the playwrights: he is doing anger as a counterblast. If it works better within The Riot, that is because the overall structure – episodic, sketchy and consciously aping a DIY production – hold the moment more carefully. The speech at the end of Quiz Show, while a more precise moral position, is disappointingly vague in a play that has a well-managed formal shape. The difference is between the script, which allows for deeper discussion, and the DIY devised show that taps into immediate energy.

The kind of detailed political analysis that can make the 1970s’ authors dated has not resurfaced in the contemporary political writers. It’s noticeable that much of the strongest political theatre has addressed matters of national identity – Alan Bissett’s Turbo Folk or Greig’s Dunsinane.

There’s a precision in these works’ understanding of the relationship between Scotland and the UK that has not been matched in the early responses to the London riots. Hurley, in collaboration with AJ Taudevin, offered Chalk Farm, a look at the experience of a rioter and their mother, an approach mirrored in Riot of Spring.  In both cases, the story was descriptive and the underlying assumptions about the reasons behind the riot were more struts for the plot and characters than the complex deconstruction Dunsinane applies to Anglo-Scottish relations.

In two senses, this isn’t important. Drummond and Hurley, and Taudevin, are all emerging artists – hardly at the first stage of their career, but not in the pomp of their glory. There’s time for them to do the analysis, probably when they become middle-aged. And it isn’t just the job of the artist to complete the discussion: the audience can get involved too. Both Chalk Farm and Riot, and Rantin et cetera provide a provocation.

Indeed, the compassion Hurley and Taudevin display in Chalk Farm sets a tone for the discussion, as well as giving a few details for the post-show arguments. Even the incompleteness has a virtue: it prevents the drama from becoming a rhetorical announcement of a definitive position. As Leonard Cohen points out, when he wasn’t boasting about sexual conquests or being a Baldy Buddhist, it’s the crack in everything that lets the light come in.