Playwrights have the titan Michael Frayn to thank for the most apposite phrase to describe our perpetual condition. Frayn wrote the screenplay for the 1986 film Clockwise, and at the lowest moment of headteacher Brian Stimpson – played by an end-of-tether John Cleese – he articulates something that might well be pinned above every playwright’s desk. “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand,” Stimpson says, while lying on the ground dressed in monk’s robes.
It’s an unwelcome, familiar feeling. I’m waiting to hear back from a major theatre to see if I’ve been selected as one of two writers whose ideas they want to develop, selected from a shortlisted pool of eight hopefuls. I’m also waiting to hear from another theatre if they are going to stage the play they commissioned me to write in 2019. It’s not looking good, but you never know. Playwrights: we live in a far worse condition than despair, we live in hope.
