Andrew Eaton: The Prompt

ON THURSDAY I went to see Every One, a beautiful, poetic new play by Jo Clifford at the Lyceum in Edinburgh. I cried a lot. When I'd stopped crying I wondered whether I'd been this affected purely because of what I saw on stage – a story about a family ripped apart by a sudden death – or because I also knew it echoed a real tragedy in the playwright's own life.

This bothered me. We seem, as a culture, obsessed by the idea that there must be tangible links between the work artists make and the lives they lead, and that the latter will boost our understanding of the former. All the reviews I've read of Every One pointed out that Clifford's life partner died six years ago, and that the play must therefore be very personal. One review described it as "an open wound of a play"; another suggested Clifford's experience "still seems almost too raw to handle".

I know these critics, and respect them both, but their assumptions annoyed me a little. Is this sort of thing helpful, or even meaningful? Everything artists make is personal, simply because they made it. Clifford is transgender. When I first met her, in 2003, she was living as a man, John Clifford. After John's wife Sue died, John felt able to become Jo. That is, clearly, a profound life experience. But does gender reassignment feature in Every One, even obliquely? No it does not. Death does, however. Is it, therefore, more personal than Clifford's last play, Jesus Queen Of Heaven, which explores gender but not grief? Which is more personal, then? Isn't it pointlessly reductive even to try to answer that question?

I could, very easily, be accused of hypocrisy here. In recent weeks, this magazine has carried interviews with Corinne Bailey Rae and Laura Marling, and both features made quite a lot of the fact that traumas these women have experienced in their lives – the death of Bailey Rae's husband, Marling's split with her boyfriend – have inspired their music. The clear implication was that you, the reader, should listen to these albums with this fact in mind.

What can I say? I'm just doing my job, folks, and apparently you like that sort of thing. For what it's worth, I am not doing it with a clear conscience. Art, if it's any good at all, is bigger than the lives of the people who make it. Every One is a profound, ambitious piece of art, about grief, yes, but also about capitalism, the Holocaust and religion. You should go see it, whether or not you know anything about Jo Clifford.

• This Article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, March 28, 2010