Sarah Urwin Jones Journalist, Writer, Broadcaster

Let’s get the specifics out of the way first – it’ll be better that way, believe me.  Realism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (the dictionary for people who like to use the letter ‘z’!) is an ‘inclination or attachment to what is real’.  It is characterized (OED) by ‘a tendency to regard things as they really are and to deal with them accordingly’.  It has been a philosophy, a doctrine and an artistic genre, constantly reinvented.

Despite a tendency to enjoy claiming to be ‘realists’ – an assertion most often made when trying to gain the upper hand over an ‘optimist’ in an argument - most people prefer to live at the opposite end of the spectrum, an area which, in layman’s terms, is often classed as delusion –at least if you’re British. A spade is a spade. We’ll have none of your Rorschach ink blot flights of fancy in this country, thank you very much.  It’s tempting to bring in surrealism here, of course, but that would only blur the issue.

It is, however, an appropriate point to usher in Anthony Neilson, ‘in-yer-face’ theatre’s bad boy of the 1990s, peer of Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane, native of Edinburgh, respected writer of 2004 hit The Wonderful World of Dissocia and opening attraction of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival with his new play entitled – yes - Realism.

Lowering, in a very real and concrete fashion, outside the CCA Café over a pristine packet of unopened fags, a pint and a veritable conflict of ideas about Realism, Neilson shakes hands and hunkers down.  A psychologist might have a field day, but as there are no psychologists available, we will have to make do with that scourge of modern realism, the Cod Psychologist.  (Readers may read with Freudian accent, or perhaps more helpfully in the accent of Freud)

Observation: Subject is uneasy, distracted.  The placement of the pint, Martello Tower-like, suggests a palliative for a distasteful task. Demeanour; wary, perhaps defensive, appraising.  Nice suit, though.

Neilson toys with the fags, holding off for a whole ten minutes before ripping into the plastic packaging and more or less chain-smoking through the rest of our conversation.

PS May have control issues.

“It’s a simple idea,” he announces, abruptly, on the subject of Realism.  “I could tell you in one sentence.  But unfortunately I can’t,” he continues, with some satisfaction, then adds, “No really, I can’t.  Not for any pretentious reason, though.”   It would spoil it for the audience, although he’s resigned to the fact that it will be ‘ruined’ for anyone who comes in after the first night review.  “I can say it’s the flip side to Dissocia, but it’s certainly not a sequel.”

Dissocia, for those who missed it, theatricalised the mindset of a young woman with mental illness, an imaginative, thought-provoking take on a seasoned idea which the playwright himself memorably marketed with the line, “If you like The Wizard of Oz but feel there’s too little sex and violence in it, then Dissocia is the show for you.” It took a refreshing look at theatrical form and started to move away from Neilson’s pronounced emphasis on narrative.  But if Dissocia started that shift, Realism, he tells me will be a real leap into a more non-narrative form.  And if Dissocia dealt with the draw of madness, Realism deals – at least putatively – with the draw of the everyday.

“I mean it’s not the greatest strapline in the world, but it’s the story of a day when someone might say to you, ‘What have you done today?’ and you’d say ‘fuck all’. And so the question is, what do we mean when we say ‘fuck all’? By what standard are we measuring that?”

For the more traditional playwright, the definition of ‘fuck all’ may be turning up on the first day of rehearsal without having penned a single line of a script that will be produced in the EIF in five weeks time – a pleasure which awaits Neilson’s seven actors the following morning.  It’s an idiosyncratic creative explosion that might, one imagines, drive sane actors to the brink of insanity and insane actors to voice-over work and beyond, but then Neilson’s timeworn stock-in-trade is just such seat-of-your-pants theatrical creation.  It hasn’t always been that way.  There is another play of his on the Fringe in August – his second-ever play, Normal.  “I’d written at least a third of it by the time of the first rehearsal,” he remembers, archly.  Ever since then, he says, he’s been getting “worse and worse.”

The Anthony Neilson Guide to putting on the show ‘right here’
-Never, ever, be prepared.
-Keep a note of crass jokes.  There’s not enough crassness at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Neilson doesn’t like to call himself a writer, “I never wanted to be one,” he says.  More a “creator of work.”  “I wouldn’t lay any claims to being a great writer or anything. I think the only thing I’ve got to offer is a hope that what I do is a bit unusual and nobody else would do it. I’m not really bothered if there’s a plaque to put up after I’m gone.” Neilson shifts in a few inches from the farther reaches of the bench opposite, easing into conversation as he works through the play that will be in his mind for the next 5 weeks.

Observation: Subject is relaxing, leaning forward, prone to sardonic jokes.  Pint is now half full, or is that half empty?

Realism the Neilson way: Discuss

Realism has been floating around inside Neilson’s head for some time, “if not in any kind of formed way.”  “Having been a writer for a while I’ve stopped coming to any conclusions about anything. That’s for the audience.  It’s made me completely morally ambiguous. You get so used to having to look at things from every angle that you quickly begin to lose any angle on anything yourself.”

“People’s notion of realism shifts. I remember when Starksy and Hutch started it seemed quite a gritty and violent show, and now it seems like Jason King - really over the top. Things are getting realer than real.  We’ve followed realism to the point that it’s become so bogged down in the practicality of life that it’s no longer entirely real.  It’s a bit like being fed body images in the press - I think we’re being fed this diet of distorted realism that’s starting to make everybody feel a little mad because they don’t conform to what societal realism is…” Neilson pauses, grins.  “Maybe that’s bullshit.” He likes making things up, but he’s on the well-trod path of consensus realism, now. “People are saner than we think, we’re just being fed a diet of mundanity.”

Whatever his Realism is, it’s going to come from inside Neilson’s head, and so inside his head we must go.  “What does the inside of my head look like?  Now that’s a good question. If I knew that, I’d know what the fucking design was. A junkyard?”

Inventory of the contents of Anthony Neilson’s head, July 4th 2006, 5.14pm: (large sign in entranceway reads ‘Trespassers will be Shot’)

-One complete last line for play titled ‘Realism’
-Assorted words, jumbled, no obvious order (may be used at a later date, see above)
-A cat and a ball of string (see below)
-Ashtray, overflowing
-Nicholas de Jongh (“that critic” from the Evening Standard) ceremonially impaled on a pineapple hedgehog skewer
-A light dawn haze, on the brink of dispersal (ample room for metaphor)

Neilson narrows his eyes.  “I don’t know if I look at the world that differently from other people.  Sometimes I don’t think I do, then sometimes I’ll say something and it’ll cause some strange reaction. There’s a little bit of Larry David in everyone, right? I think world view is largely formed by our childhood, and we try and mediate that with what we’ve learned as adults. There’s sometimes a bit of a fight…”

“I guess I was brought up in a tense atmosphere,” he adds hesitantly, clearly uncomfortable.  “My parents for one reason or another were not entirely suited to marriage. Put it this way, I find it very easy to write arguments, and I find it very difficult to write peaceful dialogue.  But these things kind of become a strength in a way.  I’ve dragged my parents through the mud quite a few times in the past, but I’m at peace with that now, finally,” he says, taking another drag of another cigarette.  “And anyway, my father’s in the show.”

Cod psychologist jerks awake.  Tell me about your father…

“He’s a good actor, and a known quantity. There is nothing personal in the choice, I just needed an older actor who would trust me,” although Neilson points out that the actor’s characters in any of his nascent plays “develop absolutely according to who they are.  What the actors know is that with even one other actor, the play would go in a completely different direction.” So his father will be very much in this reality.

“Technically” an only child, who was 8 years old before his brother was born, Neilson developed “quite a fertile internal life.” There were no imaginary friends, but he would “imbue other things with life.”   Neilson assumes a distant, slightly disbelieving look.  “I can remember myself as a kid doing something that I can’t possibly have done,” Neilson laughs, recalling how he was ‘best mates’ with his cat.  He recalls an incident in which he “made stuff” out of things he found in the cupboard whilst the cat “agreed to go and wind string round all the stuff in the front room.”  “Odd. When I think about it now, the cat can’t possibly have done that, but I don’t remember doing it. It can’t have been true, in some ways…” he trails off.  “I sound like a lunatic. There’s a lot of stuff in my childhood that I can’t remember if I dreamt or not. It’s not an unusual thing,” he says. “Although now I feel I have a good grasp of what I’ve dreamt and what I’ve experienced.”

Cod psychologist raises one eyebrow.  Pen wavers over notepad. Prognosis: uncertain. Lock doors and await back-up.

Neilson shakes my hand, smiles, and retreats back into his version of reality. The next time he emerges will be in five weeks on press night.   In the words of Jules Verne’s hesitant explorer on his way to the centre of the Earth, “Was I to believe him in earnest in his intention to penetrate to the centre of this massive globe? Had I been listening to the mad speculations of a lunatic, or to the scientific conclusions of a lofty genius? Where did truth stop? Where did error begin?” Join the expedition on August 14th.