A Quote by Mike Bartlett
Theatre tends to be more metaphorical and intense, as you're locked in one room and focused on one thing. Television can hop around, and you need to invest in its naturalistic reality more. But I love writing both, precisely because they're so different.
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It's fascinating to work with a company of actors of such different ages, experience and talents. I'm one of a generation brought up on television whose acting is more 'naturalistic', whereas with some of the older generation it's more heightened. But I think there's room for both styles.
I'm one of a generation brought up on television whose acting is more 'naturalistic', whereas with some of the older generation it's more heightened. But I think there's room for both styles.
Rather than disliking theatre, I've expressed a preference for television because it tends to deal in its small way much more with issues and is able to reach a broader church of people than theatre.
The song writing is different because with this stuff, I write it on my own and with Hot Water, we're more of a collective and I love both sides of that. Honestly, it's two different animals but I love and respect them both and feel really honored to be blessed with people who care about it and come out and support both sides of it.
As you get drawn more and more into other activities, like political activities, very demanding, you have to find different rhythms of writing; I think that's the word I'm looking for, rhythms of creativity which then, of course, become very intense. I think your writing then tends to be very intensified simply because there are other demands which seem equally important.
What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.
Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.
I have so much joy in my life. I love my husband and kids so much. So much love. I'm also more focused now on spending more time at home and in town instead of going on tour. Because of that nesting, I find that I'm even more into writing and creating.
Reality television is to television what marble and gold are to real estate. The point is to dispense with the idea of taste. It's all id. The more unrestrained the better. We all know that 'reality' in reality television is not real. That anybody who would participate in reality television is a fake. But pretending otherwise makes them real.
I love film and TV, the medium of them, just because it's such a smaller screen. It's much more precise. Ideally, I'd like to do maybe a film a year of some sort and use that to work more in the theatre because theatre really is my first love.
Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.
The real writing of a piece comes only when you are performing it. It is why I like theatre. In film and TV, the image is locked forever, but in theatre, there is constant change; each performance is part of the writing process.
The theatre starts every night at half past seven, and I like the rhythm of going to the theatre, parking the car, going to the stage door; I've grown up with all of that. I'd love to do more theatre - I mean, I shouldn't be telling the world that I can't remember lines any more, but I find it more and more difficult, so I don't know.
The difference when I'm writing a story versus writing a joke is that writing a joke is so much more about the structure and it's less about the conversation. To me, the thing that I love about stand-up is the intimacy between performer and audience.To get it even more conversational was something that really appealed to me and that I really enjoyed doing. My early experiments with it, with just telling a story from my life on stage, it was so satisfying to do. And seemingly for the audience as well. It's a different thing, and it's a different feeling and a different vibe.
I think the challenge in hour television or half-hour television is that the more it's around, certainly on commercial television, the less time you have to tell stories these days, because the more commercials they're putting in.
In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.
