No one could accuse theatre director, writer
and activist Neil Bartlett of a life unlived. He talks to Martin Flynn
Neil
Bartlett is a creative dynamo: one of the country’s most respected playwrights
and directors with a growing reputation as a writer of dark and spooky novels.
His ten-year stint as artistic director of Hammersmith’s Lyric Theatre
led to both professional acclaim and a gong from the Queen. Known for his
outrageous political drag shows in the 1980s and battling against repressive
Tory anti-gay legislation, Bartlett was an early campaigner for the rights
of people living and dying with HIV and Aids.
He was recently acclaimed in The Observer as, “an artist who can really
change the way people feel,” and by the Literary Review as, “a
writer who can really change the way people think”.
Dark days of Thatcher
Neil Bartlett grew up in Chichester which he describes as “one of the
smallest and whitest towns in the known universe.”
His parents took him to the town’s famous theatre, so even as a child
he was immersed in the world of the stage.
After Oxford, where one of his tutors was novelist Alan Hollinghurst, he moved
to London where he wrote his first book in an Isle of Dogs’ tower block.
Who Was that Man? is a historical fantasy about Oscar Wilde written during
the dark days of Mrs Thatcher and Clause 28 when Aids was beginning to decimate
the capital’s gay population. It echoes another time of witchhunts against
homosexuals 100 years earlier when Wilde faced condemnation and imprisonment.
“I always wanted to work in theatre,” he explains: “I performed
as a clown on the street; I performed in nightclubs. I wasn’t a drag
queen like Regina Fong. I wasn’t doing comedy drag but dramatic character
monologues.”
Bartlett moved onto theatre direction, first at the Derby Playhouse, and for
the next 20 years around the country, culminating at the Lyric and now with
the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Writer or director?
In 1990 he published his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, about
a tender yet brutal love affair between an older and a younger man. By the
mid 90s he had written Mr Clive And Mr Page about two men living secretly
together in the early 20th century. But is Neil Bartlett a theatre director,
a political performance artist or a novelist?
“I never worry about what box I’m supposed to be in. I haven’t
been arrested yet and I seem to be getting away with it.
“People say ‘You used to be a radical queer performance artist
and now you’re directing Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company’
and ask why I have gone legit.
“But I say ‘Have you read Twelfth Night? It’s about men
falling in love with a young man dressed up as a girl who then dresses up
as a boy. It’s one of the queerest, most outrageous plays ever written.
“I am a gay man and I’ve always been out even when it wasn’t
fashionable. My world view and cultural heritage is that of a gay man but
I never set out to write or direct as a gay writer or gay director.
“For a long time I was that Neil Bartlett, who did the naked show wearing
high heels and waving his willy around. But times have changed and many other
writers and directors have now come out, and being gay in the arts isn’t
newsworthy anymore.”
Sustained attacks
In the early days of HIV Bartlett did many benefits. At that time, before
there was any hope of effective treatments, being gay in London meant losing
many of your closest friends and lovers.
“I lost people close to me, and people close to me lost people. I was
actively campaigning for the end of Clause 28 and worked for the World Aids
Day office in 1986, just manning phones, organising people and benefits. It
was very much part of my life.
“It was a time of unbelievable hostility if you were a gay man. I still
can’t look at Thatcher’s face without feeling angry. If you weren’t
there in the 1980s it’s very hard to understand the kind of systematic
attack we were under. Even getting a paper in the morning meant facing headlines
in all the tabloids like ‘Aids Scum’.
“It’s hard to make people realise now how vitriolic and sustained
the attacks on us, as gay, men were under Thatcher. Every week someone close
was sick and every week someone was beaten up.
“It was very dangerous to be out as a gay man under Thatcher. Peter
Tatchell was attacked when he stood for parliament by a man who now admits
he is bisexual.
“HIV impinged on all my life and work. A lot of my solo performance
pieces were created for Aids benefits and were trying to articulate that anger.
People needed to fight back and that’s why people who were brave in
that era are so much loved.
“People like Regina Fong, Lily Savage, Andy Bell, Boy George, Michael
Clarke and Derek Jarman were fires for life at a time when a lot of people
wanted to kill us and so many of us were getting sick and dying.
“The changes for us as gay men over the last 20 years have been remarkable.
My partner and I have just had our civil partnership ceremony at Brighton
Town Hall. And I don’t think any of the actors I work with even think
about me as a gay man.
“No one really notices now or cares. But 20 years ago if I was directing
Twelfth Night the papers would be on the phone asking if it was a gay production
and would school children be coming to see it.
“Even when I was interviewed for the job to run the Lyric in 1994 I
was asked whether I was going to turn the Lyric into a gay theatre. But I
don’t think you’d ever get that question now.”
Latest novel
Neil Bartlett’s latest novel, Skin Lane, published this spring, tells
the story of an older man’s obsession with a sexy teen in 1960s London
just as homosexuality was being decriminalised.
There is something very scary about the book: a tenseness and underlying thread
of violence. It kept me up at nights.
Will Self described it as, “a fiendishly taut psycho shocker that recalls
Simenon at his most hard-boiled and Highsmith at her creepiest”.
It covers the great themes of love, desire and death, has a raw emotional
power and a real sense of time and place.
“My work is very deeply felt. The pieces often start with an image.
I create pictures and I tell stories. I don’t think love and death and
desire are gay issues; they are issues for everyone.
“When people say that great art has to be universal, it’s bollocks.
Jean Genet didn’t wake up in the morning and say I must be universal
today. Great art comes from a situation fully realised and from a voice which
is fully expressed.
“I speak from my life and my culture. And my culture comes out of Jean
Genet and Regina Fong.
“We’re finally reaping the benefits of gay liberation in 2007.
As gay men we’re living in a more civilised country now than we ever
have lived in the past.
“In Skin Lane I felt compelled to go back to 1967 and try and get inside
the mind of a man who knows nothing about his sexuality and who hasn’t
even begun to realise his desires.
“I wanted to take people back to the primary moment when you want to
touch another man’s skin. Desire is one of the most important things
in your life.
“It’s called Skin Lane but it’s not about the fur trade.
I am interested in something which is on one hand exquisitely beautiful and
on the other hideously ugly and stomach churningly revolting.
“That’s why I used it because that’s what a lot of people
think about us, ourselves included. Two men together is the most glamorous
and thrilling thing in the world but we still see it as shameful.
“There are many sorts and types of death. There’s also the life
not lived and the man in my novel is facing that kind of death.
“If you don’t live, or are not allowed to live, then that’s
another kind of death. It’s even sadder to have a life completely unfulfilled.
A life unlived. How many people can honestly say ‘I went for it’?”
21st century gay man
“I’m beginning rehearsals for Twelfth Night which opens in Stratford
in September.
“I’m doing a new production of Jean Genet’s The Maids with
an amazing actress called Kathryn Hunter who is playing all three parts for
the Brighton Festival in May. And I’m creating a piece in Manchester
called The Pianist.
“I walk my bull terrier over the Downs in Sussex. I do all the boring
things. I cook. I garden. I have meaningful sex with devastatingly attractive
strangers. I go to the gym. I drive along motorways much too fast listening
to Maria Callas much too loud. I’m your standard issue 21st century
gay man.”
Living with a new liver
Nearly 50, Bartlett appears fit despite a chronic viral infection. “I
live with hepatitis B and I’m on my second liver. I had a liver transplant
in 2000. So I know about living long-term with a fatal illness.
“I don’t want to assume your readers will need cheering up or
any sort of advice from me. All I want to say is don’t doubt how strong
you are and how strong we are as a people.
“Just look around at what we’ve come through and what we’ve
been through and don’t doubt that we can get through this. HIV is a
problem of terrifying proportions. But look how far we’ve come.
• ”l Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett is published by Serpent’s
Tail, £10.99
• www.neil-bartlett.com
