Skin Lane

"The books that we have chosen are not necessarily about theatre per se, but they have had a profound influence on our practice in theatre, either because of the way that they have handled themes that we have wanted to explore but did not know how, or because they helped with practical elements of our work. Our first book is Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett, an activist, a gay writer, a playwright, and also the director of the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. This novel set in the sixties, is about a fifty-year-old man, a furrier, who doesn’t know anything about his sexuality. While most gay novels are about the gay, usually American, lifestyle – a kind of Los Angeles gay scene – this one is about a character who doesn’t know he’s gay. And the subtlety with which Bartlett tells about this man’s bemused discovery of his sexuality through his relationship with the nephew is very beautiful. The context is knives and fur – you’re in the middle of a very claustrophobic state of mind, a highly eroticised atmosphere. As soon as I [Basil] read this book, I thought, I’ve got to meet this person because he is handling a theme that I have always wanted to explore in my work. Rae Smith, the designer of War Horse was also his designer and she introduced us. We met and immediately felt that we had to work together. So he put a proposal to The National, which he had not done before, and it was accepted, and so we have been working on a play together. The first adult play we did was about two gay women, and although their sexuality was incidental to the story, very subtle, it did inform their political decisions. We wanted to find somebody who could do that, who could tell a story about being gay but in a subtle way. Neil’s solution to the problem was to do a play about a long-term relationship, which we thought would be like watching paint dry, but he said, Watch me. And so I [Adrian] made two puppets of ninety-year-old men and two puppets of nineteen-year-old men. We took two sketch puppets to London to show Nic Hytner at The National and he loved them. So it’s been a wonderful journey from reading a novel to making a play."