After the antics of fans/idiots before and after last weekend’s Euro final, there are a number of words you might reach for to describe the interactions between men, but “delicacy” probably wouldn’t be one of the first. Still, in her play Hymn, the playwright Lolita Chakrabarti has tapped into just that: the sweetness and vulnerability at play between heterosexual men who care deeply about each other, even if they’re not necessarily brilliant at expressing it.
Hymn, a two-hander, was written for and first performed by Chakrabarti’s husband, Adrian Lester, and friend Danny Sapani, in an empty Almeida theatre during lockdown. It was one of the best pieces of theatre I saw online during that period, but part of its appeal was the chemistry between the two actors, so the fact that it’s about to reopen at that same theatre IRL, is super exciting.
Chakrabarti, who is also an actress and received an OBE last month for services to drama, was first inspired by Duncan Macmillan’s play Lungs, another intimate play for two actors which painted a poignant portrait of the way a relationship developed over time without changing its set, which she found ingenious. “I just loved it, they were suddenly in a supermarket, they were suddenly at home, they were suddenly in an argument,” she says.
At the same time she had long been observing the male members of Lester’s family, “his brother, and his cousins” and her own male friends, and the way that they interacted with each other.
“There’s just something about their relationships that I’ve observed over the years - there’s a delicacy between men that you just never see [on stage] do you?” she says. “You see, I don’t know, the macho bit or the stereotypical bit. But there’s this sort of, girliness, actually, a conversational ‘I like your hair, I like your clothes - an intimacy that I thought, I really like that.”
Hymn is a love story, essentially, though not a romantic one, but it also deals with the expectations that men put on themselves and each other.
“I think it’s very strong, that expectation of what men are meant to provide,” Chakrabarti says. “There’s been the whole thing about men losing their way: what is the new man? Nothing you do is right, be strong but be sensitive, be kind but be mean. It’s not a clear message is it? Those traditional roles of being the head of the family, the father to sons, the breadwinner, the hunk - is that still a word?! - have gone, so who are they now?”
The theme of men communicating badly is one that swirls around her next acting project too, Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version. Chakrabarti will star opposite Kenneth Branagh, who also directs; he plays buttoned-up teacher Andrew Crocker “Crock” Harris, whose inability to express himself has caused his students to despise him and an irreparable rift to open up between him and his passionate wife, Millie, but a gift from a pitying student gives him a glimpse of emotional redemption.
“It’s a beautiful play,” Chakrabarti thinks, and though at first glance it might seem an odd choice for right now - its two film adaptations and at least four TV versions are all cut-glass accents and quivering reserve - “it doesn’t have to be like that. I think that it’s a classic play waiting for reinterpretation,” she says.
Branagh asked her to think about whether there was “anything regional in there” that she wanted to run with, “and actually, my character Millie talks about Bradford so much - she’s from Bradford, her dad owns a clothing shop in Bradford. And you would never hear that, would you with the accent, then? Because they used to sort of dilute accents, and use the BBC accent. But now, if she’s from Bradford [she switches suddenly to a soft Yorkshire] she’d talk a bit like that, you know. It’s an interesting idea to unbalance it, the language is quite formal. It’s funny to be calling your husband ‘my dear’, it immediately sounds really middle-aged.”
Millie is “quite a faded sexy character” she says. “I’m really looking forward to playing her.” The school setting too, once a boy’s public school, has been switched to a co-ed school, further shifting the dynamics.
As a parent of teenage girls herself, along with thousands of others she spent lockdown dealing with the fallout from the cancellation of GCSEs, but says that lockdown was merciful on her family, up to a point, despite it falling for her in the middle of a filming job in Glasgow (Vigil, a star-studded submarine drama for BBC One, which also stars Martin Compston and Suranne Jones) and halting production just before the end of episode three.
“There was the joy at the beginning, in not feeling like, I’ve got to pack a bag, I’ve got to go somewhere, I’ve got an audition. That freelance life is so distracting, so to suddenly sit at home with permission because everyone was sitting at home with permission, felt strangely quite nice. And then the actual truth of the pandemic was just awful. Adrian got Covid, I got Covid, my Dad got Covid, friends of ours were sick, then there was the isolation and the uncertainty…”
Though she and Lester kept busy with voiceover work, wrangling with duvets to create a sound booth, it must have been very concerning to watch their very freelance industry grind to a terrifying halt.
“Completely. Every nook and cranny of it. Buildings completely shut and everyone - from the people who are coming in for work experience because they might be actors or stage managers or designers or whatever, to the people who are in the offices running the place, everybody stood down.” It was terrifying, she says. “Theatre runs on such an edge anyway. I mean it generates a huge amount of money, but it needs a lot of that money to function also. It was quite grim.”
A number of years ago Chakrabarti wrote an article outlining her love/hate relationship with theatre, citing among her strong dislikes the elitism, the gatekeeping, the cost. Has it changed, I ask?
“Completely! Completely. I must have written that before it all started to shift. So many women have come in to run buildings, [there are more female] writers and female-focused things, and inclusion and representation has gone almost the opposite way to what it was. It’s unrecognisable. That’s good!” she says, though she concedes that cost is still an issue. “I wonder how that’s going to be affected by a year and a half of not having doors open? Will people have to put their prices up?” she wonders, pensively.
Still, I ask, might the pandemic have provided an opportunity for an acceleration of change that was dragging its feet before? Absolutely, she thinks.
“The pandemic and the BLM movement, Trump, I think all of it. We’ve all been sat at home watching terrible things unfold, really huge, awful things that have been happening and our access to the world has been through screens,” she says. “And I feel like we’ve all had a lot of time to think and go, right, OK, if this can suddenly come at me from nowhere, what do I do with the rest of my life? Life is short; life is precious, what am I going to do with it?”
An unseen but talked about character in Hymn, Benny’s son Louis, represents the views of the younger generation for Chakrabarti. “I think, with young people particularly, who’ve got a lot of energy, I think their commitment, and their politicisation, their activation into making change happen, has inspired a lot of older people to move as well. And it’s unequivocal isn’t it? They’re like, I don’t want to live in that world. And I’m not going to change me, you change.”
Louis gives his father a tough time, essentially over capitalism, but he demands to be listened to. “And actually, they are the audiences of the future,” Chakrabarti says. “They’re the consumers of the future. They’re the people who are going to buy your cars and your toilet paper that’s advertised on TV. So if they’re saying I don’t want to see the same old people advertising loo roll, you have to change.”
Is she optimistic that theatre can change? Very, she says. “There are going to be - well, there have already been - some terrible casualties. There have been people leaving the industry, because they can’t afford to wait. And there are buildings and companies where there are struggles happening around how to make ends meet. But in terms of the quality of work, the access we’ve given…”
She gives the example of the livestream of Hymn. “I think the Almeida is about 320 seats. And we sold I think, between 1,200 and 1,400 tickets a night for the livestream. And we had people from Kenya, Australia, America. And you know, there was absolute silence in the theatre when they finished the show, because obviously, no one was there. And then Twitter and everything went off, and we’d get all these tweets and messages from all around the world.”
That level of access for £10-15 a ticket is “a new frontier” she says. “And it is interesting for everyone; for the old gatekeepers and the ones who are coming” who “are many - the level of frustration, isolation, suffering, denial [that people have been through], all of it is going to feed an amazing generation of artists.”
For all the hand wringing about how to get new audiences into theatres, it’s a simple equation, she thinks, especially with unprecedented levels of access. “If you tell good stories, and you tell stories that include all people, they’ll come.”
Hymn is at the Almeida Theatre from July 26 to Aug 13, almeida.co.uk. EDITORIAL UPDATE since publication, due to Covid-enforced absences the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company production of The Browning Version has been cancelled