Gregory Burke interview: Once more unto the breach

Published on Friday 17 April 2009 16:54

HOW do you follow up a global stage hit like Black Watch? With a large measure of bravery, a good dose of humour and a few Hoors, writer Gregory Burke tells Peter Ross

EARLY one morning in the bar of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, the cast and crew who are about to start the process of staging a new play, Hoors, are sitting in a big circle, introducing themselves. Eventually it's the turn of a small shaven-headed man in jeans and a lilac Ralph Lauren jumper. "I'm Gregory Burke," he says, "writer of the disappointing follow-up to Black Watch." Laughter ensues.

Fast-forward a fortnight and Burke is sitting in another Edinburgh pub, pint in hand, and explaining that his joke was also a defence mechanism. "It's the great unsaid, isn't it?" he muses. "It's one of those where you think, 'Oh, everyone's going to be so disappointed in me now.' So I felt I had to broach the subject. Hoors is a completely different piece, but everyone is going to sit in the theatre and go, 'This is not Black Watch.' It could be a disaster. I don't know what critics are going to say or how many tickets it's going to sell. The script works, it's funny, we've got a very talented cast and director, so I think it will be great. But in this game you're only as good as the last thing you've done, and Black Watch was unprecedented. I can't top it. I can only follow it by following it. It's either that or give up."

Black Watch, which dealt with the experience of the Scottish regiment in Iraq and through history, won every award going, and toured internationally. It was, in every sense, a big play – elaborately staged and hugely resonant.

Hoors is very different. With a cast of four, it feels smaller and more domestic. It is set on the evening before the funeral of Andy, a man who died while overindulging in drugs and sex on his stag weekend in Amsterdam. His fiance Vicky is being supported by her younger sister Nikki, and they are visited by Andy's pals, Tony and Stevie, who have come to pay their respects to the body of their dead friend. What follows is an exploration of empty hedonism and consumerism, sexual morality and the crisis of masculinity. Remarkably, given all that, it's also hilarious. The director Jimmy Fay calls it "a Hawksian screwball comedy like His Girl Friday", albeit one in which Van Gogh is described as a "f***ing 19th-century self-harming Orange f***".

The play is based, in part, on Burke's own experiences. His older sister Valerie's husband died after only a few years of marriage, and Burke – a lapsed Catholic – remembers the surreal experience of sitting with his sister in the living room with the coffin and people coming in and not knowing what to say. He also knows all about stag weekends. "I've been on several really quite mad ones. Nobody died, but one of the boys having a heart attack was the worst. An Indonesian dwarf sold him adrenalin saying it was herbal speed."

Now 40, Burke's own debauched days are behind him and he's well into long-distance running. He didn't drink at all between Boxing Day and the evening of March 8, when Black Watch won best play and three other gongs at the Olivier Awards. It was a good night out, and he was delighted to see Sir Derek Jacobi, whom he admires for his work on In The Night Garden. "Makka Pakka Washes Faces was my favourite book of 2007." From this you may gather that Burke is the parent of a young child, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, which explains, in part, his lapsed hedonism. "As soon as Anna was born, I just lost interest in it. I have more fun going to the park and going on the chute."

Although the first draft of Hoors was written in 2005, before Black Watch, Burke has reworked it and it has a post-coital feel that seems apt for this particular limp social and economic moment. On the day of the first read-through, when Burke and the cast sat in a Leith warehouse running lines, the Dunfermline Building Society went bust. Burke, who did some of his growing up in first Rosyth and later Dunfermline, has always been fascinated by the impact economics has on behaviour. In 2001, in the introduction to his first play, Gagarin Way, he wrote, "Economics decides the fate of people, not their politicians. Governments are powerless when up against a multi-national, the vagaries of the stock market and history. But the people remain. That's the constant. We remain and we find other things to keep ourselves amused." That could have been written for Hoors.

Having dropped out of an economics degree, he has an autodidact's wide-ranging mind and is obviously very clever. He loves language and is fascinating on the roots of words; "radge" and "gadgy", for instance, he explains as Romany derived words which became part of Edinburgh slang when Roma families moved to Niddrie in the 1950s. But he wears his learning lightly and seems more animated the less high-falutin' the subject under discussion. His eyes light up when he learns I'm from Alloa. "Really? It's a proper tough wee town. I remember going through there with the Pars, all the skinheads. We just appeared in a puff of smoke and anybody under the age of 25 and over the age of 14 was getting pounded."

He was a skinhead and then later a football casual. Did he do a lot of fighting? "Well, everyone was a casual in those days," he shrugs. "I moved back to Dunfermline after six years in Gibraltar when I was 16, and how do you fit in? For me, it was going to the football, becoming a casual and fighting. People accepted me after that. Not that I wouldn't have done it anyway. It was very exciting and good fun."

No regrets then? "No, I liked the clothes. I remember a boy turned up in East End Park in plus-fours, Pringle socks and, I swear to God, a pair of spats. He looked like he was in the final of the Open Championship in 19-f***in'-20."

As a result of all the flitting he did as a child, identity is the major theme of Burke's work. When he moved to Gibraltar in 1979, he dropped his Scottish accent to fit in with the English children, and he started using it again on his return to Fife. You can see, right there, the expert writer of dialogue beginning to emerge. "Absolutely," he nods. "I took an almost subconscious interest in how people speak and how I could mimic that. Another factor is that I'm partially deaf. I can't hear anything in my right ear. And that makes me very aware of really concentrating on listening to people." He would often have to guess at what people were saying, and then consider carefully how he should reply. He was, in effect, making up both sides of the conversation.

His rise to Scotland's most celebrated playwright was swift and dizzying. In 2000, Burke was working in a series of menial jobs – cleaning floors, washing dishes – when the Traverse Theatre phoned to say they would like to stage Gagarin Way, a play he had sent in on spec. Although it was the first thing he had ever tried to write, and he had never been to the theatre in his life, it was the toast of the Edinburgh Festival in 2001. "I did probably turn into a rampant egomaniac after that, but it doesn't really get you anywhere." When Black Watch took off he was more humble, but its unstoppable success was none the less disorientating. It also coincided with the death of his mother, the birth of his daughter and some anxiety he felt about getting older and finally becoming a grown-up. "But I now feel more settled than I've ever felt in my life," he adds.

He lives in Edinburgh with daughter Anna and "the missus" Lorraine, his partner of 15 years. He spends his days toddling about at home, talking to "the bairn", watching telly, and putting off the dreaded moment when he must sit down and write. His dad kids him on that it's not a proper job if you can do it at home. He is busy though. His next project after Hoors will be One Night In Emergency, a drama for BBC Scotland, which he describes as "Homer's Odyssey in a hospital", and it's possible he may write a version – "not adapting it, just ripping it off" – of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist for the National Theatre Of Scotland. He also quite fancies writing a Glaswegian equivalent of The Wire. "I feel quite comfortable with showbusiness," he grins.

Burke finishes his pint and leaves for the theatre. Head full of Hoors, he disappears into the haar, apparently quite prepared for any triumphs or disappointments to come.

• Hoors previews at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, May 1-3 and then runs 5-23. It is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, May 26-June 6 www.traverse.co.uk and www.tron.co.uk