A woman centre stage

As her new play, Nell Gwynn, opens at The Globe; Glass talks to award winning playwright and director Jessica Swale, about her work, women in theatre, and the alchemy of writing.

Jessica Swale returns to the Globe this month with her new Restoration comedy, Nell Gwynn. The play tells the story of “pretty and witty Nell” (as described by 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys), who ascends from selling oranges at the theatre to become mistress to King Charles II, and one of the first and most famous women on stage.

Glass spoke to Swale about her work as both a writer and director; whether we might consider Nell Gwynn and earlier works like Blue Stockings (a play about the first women to study at Cambridge) to be feminist plays; and about being surprised by her own characters during the writing process.

Can you tell us about your new play, Nell Gwynn?
It’s a comedy and it’s about an amazing woman who existed at a time in theatrical history, where after a decade of the puritans, who banned everything remotely fun – including Christmas and live performance – Charles II brings it all back, and that’s where we pick up the play.

I’d been writing it in stages for a couple of years. Usually with a play I’ve had an idea and I’ve known what the story is going to be, whereas with this, her story is really a rags to riches story, which dramatically is not necessarily that interesting if the dramatic arc only goes in one direction… So it took me quite a while to do enough research to get a real sense of who I thought she was.

A fascinating period in history and theatre, what first attracted you to Nell Gwynn’s story?
I’ve known about her for a long time and I’d directed a lot of Restoration plays but the tricky thing is that no one knows all the much about her. Because she was a working class girl her history wasn’t recorded with any of the detail that would have been used for someone of a higher class. I became interested in her at University when I was studying Restoration theatre… and the fact that women were on stage for the first time must have been a fascinating moment, and it must have been a very difficult moment too for the men who’d always played the women.

Was it difficult to find good information about Nell Gwynn during your research?
It was difficult to find out the truth about her. A lot has been written but most of it is just people trying to pull together threads of information…so there’s about six or seven years disagreement over when she was born and some people think she was born in London, some in Oxford. Of course as soon as she gets involved with the king, the information we have becomes much better…But the joy for me as a writer was that while I found out as much as I could I never had the intention of making a documentary-style piece of theatre about her. And so when I had enough information to lay the foundations of the story, I gave myself the liberty to invent on top of that.

Did your sense of her character evolve quite quickly?
Yes immediately actually. As soon as I started writing her dialogue I thought – oh I know this voice, I could just hear her voice in my head.

Quite often when you’re writing a scene, you won’t know what’s going to happen to a character until you write it, so you don’t always know what they’re going to say. And in every play I’ve written, I’ve started writing a scene assuming that I know what’s going to happen, and then suddenly someone says something surprising. I think that’s where interesting writing comes from, when you don’t plan it too much and actually it was much easier for me to write her because I had the opportunity to invent around history.

That idea of things starting to happen by themselves during the writing process sounds almost alchemical – that characters start to take on a life of their own, and to do things you don’t expect…
They’re quite naughty actually! You think you know what they’re going to do… but that’s what really excites me about writing. I wrote a play a couple of years ago called Blue Stockings, and at one point one of the characters we really believe in brings out a ring and says he’s going to propose to his girlfriend and at the end of that scene he tells us who it is and it’s not the character we all expect. Even talking about it now makes me feel really emotional because I only realised when writing it – what if he doesn’t end up with her? What if he’s scared of the Blue Stockings? And that for me is really exciting, when the audience is surprised.

There’s a point in Nell Gwynn, similarly, when she’s done something that is so politically aggravating you don’t know if the theatre will keep her on or not, and as I was writing that scene I didn’t know if they were going to let her stay. That’s when it’s interesting because you’re being led by the characters’ personalities as you’re getting to know them.

I wanted to ask you about Blue Stockings; in a way the story of Nell Gwynn, as a female pioneer on stage reminded me of the pioneering women students in Blue Stockings. Do you see a parallel there? And do you think you are more attracted to telling women’s stories?
I think I’m attracted to real emotion and I’m very interested in writing about situations that could have really happened. I think historically, the truth is that there are major historical events, in which women were instrumental that just haven’t been written about in theatre because there has been a lack of plays about women and women’s history.

I didn’t set out to find those stories but Nell Gwynn is such a huge person in the history of theatre and as far as I know there’s never been a large-scale play about her, which is ludicrous! And when you think about some of the really boring men there are plays about, who didn’t really do anything to warrant having two hours of stage time… Nell Gwynn was such an incredible player and she was the mistress of Charles II – she changed British History.

I am attracted to pioneers because I’m attracted to people who are passionate and I think that’s the main thing that those two plays share. Nell couldn’t be more different to those women in Blue Stockings because Nell is from a completely different sort of background and she doesn’t think intellectually she thinks from the heart, although she’s a great wit and she’s very intelligent, she’s not bookish and she doesn’t have a shred of education. But they all have a headstrong passion in common.

It’s the same with a play I did for the indoor space at the Globe last year about Thomas Tallis. He was a man who faced enormous religious change and had to change the music he was writing accordingly, in order to keep his head. It’s not the fact that they’re female, it’s that they are people I’m interested in.

It’s interesting that you say that and I’m sure you get asked questions like this a lot – but I wondered to what extent you consider these plays to be feminist plays, or indeed part of recent social-cultural changes where we are beginning to see more stories about women?
I mean I’m a fully fledged feminist and I think it’s really important that people embrace the term. I think what’s difficult – and I understand why people don’t like being labelled, or don’t like their work being labelled – is that plays are good because they have something emotional to say. If you write with a political agenda it can often mean that your work is didactic and I think the problem with describing the play as feminist is that it sounds like the purpose of the play is to convert people to understanding more about women, that’s not why I write – I think they’re human plays and human stories.

But having said that, I also feel a responsibility to write for women and I feel they’re underrepresented in the roles that they play, both in number and scale, and I’m really delighted to have written a lead role for a woman at The Globe. I actually changed the play recently because it was written for seven men and five women and I thought – I am not putting on a production about a woman where the men outnumber the women, I’m going to write seven female parts!

And so I found two more women who now, weirdly, are so instrumental to the plot that I can’t imagine how the play ever worked without them. I think it’s easy not to ask the question of what the gender of the part should be. I think it’s possible to start from a sort of mathematical equality point of view and end up with something that’s really interesting.

Lastly, what else are you working on, and what are your hopes for future work?
I am in equal share a writer and a director and I’m really enjoying doing both. I had wondered whether one might replace the other but it really hasn’t happened, so at the moment I’m directing Fallen Angels at Salisbury Playhouse and I’m really loving being in rehearsals with my sole responsibility being to direct the play, and not having to rewrite it at the same time.

So I suppose I hope that I continue doing both. I’m also becoming increasingly interested in film and I’ve just written my second screenplay. Blue Stockings is in development as a film at the moment too and I was given a bursary from Bafta last year to write a screenplay, so I’m hoping that might become something. Writing film is a sort of strange combination of writing and directing because you write the action as well as the text. I’m also writing a play called Thursday’s Child which is about the illegal adoption centres in the 1920s.

So incredibly busy!
Yes, very busy!

by Tara Wheeler

Portraits of Jessica Swale by Justin van Vliet

Nell Gwynn is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1, 020 79021400, until October 17