Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Kieran Hurley explores the generation gap in new play Adults
Kieran Hurley is getting a reputation for being a man who can skewer a troublesome question with a writerly pin. His hugely acclaimed play Mouthpiece expertly took apart the issue of contemporary theatre’s fascination with working-class experience, leaving no one unchallenged, not even himself.
Thinking about it, he laughs. “People will accept these kinds of challenges if you’re also willing to turn the gun on yourself, which I think is one of the things Mouthpiece tries to do. Theatres get it in the neck, audiences get it in the neck, but the writer gets it in the neck more than anyone.”
The play, which premiered at the Traverse in December 2018 and came back for 2019 Fringe went on to a London run and was part-way into a world tour when the pandemic struck. It did more than address an issue: it was funny and moving and audiences loved it. He hopes that his new play will have some of the same qualities.
Adults, which premieres at the Traverse this week as part of the theatre’s 60th anniversary programme, is a different animal setting out to skewer a very different question. It’s a three-hander – “the first play I’ve ever written which has four walls and unity of space and time” – which brings two millennial thirtysomethings into confrontation with a man from the previous generation, highlighting how much the world has changed in the last three decades.
Ian (Conleth Hill), is a teacher approaching retirement who has engaged the services of a young male sex worker but finds himself, instead, meeting a woman he once taught. Zara was inspired and encouraged, but when she took his advice she found herself in a world which did not deliver.
Hurley says: “Ian has invested a lot in his internalised ideas of the right way of doing things: the wife, the kids, the respectable job. He is at the end of his career and what does he have to show for this decades-long commitment to being a good guy? Very, very little, actually. But he does have a pension and a house and a retirement fund, things that the other characters in the play could never dream of.
“Zara has inherited a world which looks quite different from the one that the previous generation was setting her up to believe existed, and she’s pretty angry about that. It’s really a play about what it means to grow up in a world that is set to fail you and disappoint you, who’s to blame for these things and what responsibility we have. These three characters are all, in different ways, struggling with the reality of being grown ups in the world.”
Adults takes place in Edinburgh, because meeting your old teacher in a brothel “could and probably has happened in Edinburgh”. It pleases me to write stories set in Edinburgh for the Traverse, especially in the Fringe when people’s relationship with Edinburgh is so transient and fleeting.”
Hurley’s plays often speak to live political issues. His debut, Hitch, staged in 2010, was about activists attending a G8 summit in Italy. Beats (2012), in many ways his breakthrough work and since made into a film, was about the rave scene in Scotland and the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill. He has continued to make up-to-the minute work, including Chalk Farm (2014), co-written with his partner AJ Taudevin, about the 2011 London riots, and the apocalypse-themed Heads Up (2016).
Adults is set in a “society ravaged by decades of austerity. The generation now in its thirties has come through a society shaped on completely different lines than the generation now in its sixties. So the play’s not about David Cameron or Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer or anyone else, but it’s about the human experience of what it means to grow up and live in society as we have shaped it, which, of course, is political.”
At the same time, he has an uneasy relationship with being described as a political playwright. He feels his abiding themes are isolation, alienation, intimacy, community. “If you look at Mouthpiece, it’s a love story, really. It’s about a human experience of trying to exist in the world. The political playwright label, I totally get it, but I do think it sometimes prioritises issues rather than the humanity of stories, which doesn’t actually give an accurate impression of the work.”
The plays focus on live ideas because they are ideas he is in the midst of working out. “With Mouthpiece and with Adults as well, I feel like I’ve got something I want to say, but I’ve also got a bunch of conflicting views about that thing that may remain unresolved through the process of writing. The play is an attempt to spend some time in that conflict working through some things.”
He describes Mouthpiece as “me working out a lot of my own s*** about where I come from. I am neither Libby (the middle-class playwright) nor Declan (the working-class man whose experience she appropriates) in terms of my relationship to art and class. But the questions about class and voice are all questions I’m asking.
“Often, there’s a sense of politics in my plays, a sense of a right or wrong, a sense of a message there on some level, but it will often be a bit slippery and difficult and contain some different angles and challenges and contradictions because that will reflect my own relationship to it as I’m writing the play.”
Adults, Traverse Theatre, until 27 August (times vary).
MOUTHPIECE
Kieran Hurley’s play, Mouthpiece, was a landmark moment for the Traverse team, says Linda Crooks, the theatre’s CEO and executive producer. “Mouthpiece was really a signpost for a new dawn, the question he asks in the play was in parallel with our own thinking: whose story is it? We have to find different ways of engaging with the wider community and being out there. I think we’re due for another The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, a play that makes people feel part of a conversation, not being spoken at, particularly the people who feel excluded.”
As it celebrates its 60th anniversary, the Traverse is perhaps more aware than ever of issues of engagement and responding to a fast-changing world.
Its festival programme, Crooks says, reflects its values: two world premieres of plays by Scottish playwrights, Adults and The Grand Old Opera House Hotel by Isobel McArthur, and revivals of successful Traverse plays like Laurie Motherwell’s Sean and Daro Flake It ’Til They Make It, alongside new work by companies including Breach Theatre, Ireland’s Fishamble, the final play in Javaad Alipoor’s acclaimed trilogy.
The theatre also hosts a handful of returning hits, like Lauryn Redding’s Bloody Elle, balancing guaranteed sellers with more risky new work.
Crooks hopes the Traverse is on course to match its 2019 success - its best festival to date. “There are warning signs that the funding cuts comings up from Creative Scotland later this year are doing to be particularly brutal, so that makes this August even more important for us. It’s a last hurrah before we go into the fight.”
There will be an exclusive reading of Mouthpiece at the Traverse on 7 August at 4pm.