Theatre groups are like rock bands, says the musician Mat Osman, fixing tea in his dressing room before the sound check. Their natural life spans are short; they tend to spark, combust and collapse. It’s a tale as old as time. They might as well be reading from a script.
“Every band,” he says. “Every acting troupe. They all set out feeling that they’re doing something fresh and new. But it’s like a Greek tragedy. It’s always hubris, and you always overshoot and think you’re better than you are. It’s always the same story. And it’s always fucking Icarus.”
Osman has experienced this at first hand as the bassist in Suede, the group he co-founded in the late 80s with his schoolfriend Brett Anderson. Now he has written it, too, in the form of a novel about star-crossed child actors in Elizabethan London. It’s a book about performance, he says, because the subject fascinates him. Everybody performs, whether they’re on stage or not. They might perform the role of a rock star, an office worker, a van driver, a writer. And if they play the role well enough, who’s to say it’s not true?
We meet in the wings of Bristol’s O2 Academy, at the tail end of Suede’s latest UK tour. Osman is imposingly tall and the room is comically small, but this is the world that he knows; his home for the next 90 minutes. The Ghost Theatre, he explains, was partly written on the road. “Touring is absolutely brilliant for writing. People always say: ‘How do you find the time to do both?’ But I don’t start work until nine at night – the rest of the day I’m sitting in the hotel or in places like this. What else am I going to do but write?”
His original idea was to spin the story of a band – specifically the Sex Pistols – set in 16th-century England, but that felt too gimmicky, too thin a conceit. Then he saw a BBC documentary, Abducted, about children kidnapped from the streets of Elizabethan London to perform at the Blackfriars theatre and the missing pieces fell into place. Most of his characters were real-life Blackfriars boys, the prime time entertainers of their day. “Almost every Londoner went to the theatre,” Osman explains. “So these children were as famous as you could be without being high-born, while at the same time being the lowest of the low, utterly despised. Actors and whores. The two terms were synonymous.”
It’s an excellent novel – riotous and abundant, full of vivid, dirty life. The Ghost Theatre clatters between the slums and the palaces, the streets and the rooftops, and folds Queen Elizabeth in with a rogues’ gallery of crooks. Osman’s heroine is Shay, a bird-worshipping fugitive from the Isle of Dogs who hooks up with the mercurial child star Nonesuch. But Osman’s real co-star is the city of London itself, stewing in a soup of smoke and sweat. The players crave escape, companionship and sanctuary. The theatre is their haven, although there are trapdoors here as well.
“The stage is the only place where everything makes sense,” Nonesuch says at one point. Osman sympathises. He grew up in Haywards Heath in West Sussex and could hardly wait to leave. For as long as he can remember, he dreamed of playing in a band. “So that was always on my mind. That was the way out. If you come from lower stock, it’s either sport or it’s art – those are your only escape routes. And I’m the most uncoordinated person of all time, apart from my brother, so it was always going to be art.”
I like the idea of the Osman boys, Mat and Richard, in the humdrum English suburbs, each plotting his own clean getaway. With the benefit of hindsight, it all panned out perfectly. Mat loved 1970s glam and 80s indie, and went on to form one of the best bands of the 90s. Richard, three years younger, thrilled to prime time telly, pre-watershed fare, and would later find fame as the co-presenter of Pointless and the author of the bestselling Thursday Murder Club novels. The siblings set out from the same sitting room. They seem to have landed on different planets.
Osman shrugs. “The biggest difference between my world and his is that Rick has no interest in being cool. And he never has – it’s quite impressive. At the age of 15 he was writing for a golf magazine. He loves Saturday night TV. He loves Ant and Dec. He loves Busted. He doesn’t want to be Martin Scorsese. And I’ve got so much respect for that.” Another shrug. “I mean, I’m 55. There’s something undignified about being 55 and worrying whether something’s cool or not. Unfortunately it’s built into 40 years of being a musician.”
Suede broke up in 2003 and re-formed in 2010. But the intermission was tough; it was his Icarus crash. Every band falls apart. Every time it’s a shock. Osman ran out of funds in six months and had to take whatever work was on offer (shifts at Amazon; stints at an internet travel company). It was a grim period, he says, but it also got him writing. “I always thought that music – being in a band – seemed the pinnacle of human existence. But as I get older, books become more important.”
His 2020 debut, The Ruins, was your classic first novel: the tale of a doomed rock star and his reclusive twin brother. His aim with The Ghost Theatre was to write something more ambitious. So he dreamed up his opulent Elizabethan tale of power and class, performance and gender fluidity, only to realise that he hadn’t strayed all that far from home. He’d taken a personal story, not dissimilar to The Ruins, and dressed it up in period clothes.
There is a bump of boots on the stairs outside. The door swings open and Brett Anderson walks in. All at once the energy in the room is different. It’s as though we’ve slipped from book world to music world, or to that contested liminal space in between. The Suede frontman is here for the sound check but he’s come a few minutes early. He wasn’t expecting a journalist and needs a moment to arrange himself.
I ask what he thinks of The Ghost Theatre, and Anderson admits that he hasn’t read it yet. He turns his back and fills the kettle. Facing the wall, his shoulders hunched, he says: “I had to badger Mat for ages to get a copy of the last one, The Ruins. I haven’t started badgering him with this one yet. But I will do – I ought to.”
These days, depending on who he’s talking to, Osman will either describe himself as a musician or a writer. The disciplines are distinct, but maybe they share the same aspirations. “In the end it’s just about putting words in a certain order, combining the words with tone and voice. But if you do it well, it changes the way people think. You see that with a great singer. You see it with a great writer. The way they can create the conditions for a consensual hallucination between the reader and the author, the audience and the band.”
Osman can’t entirely explain it, but he’s been there when it happens and it’s the finest feeling in the world. “I’m an absolute sceptic about everything supernatural. But that’s what spells are,” he says. “That’s what magic is.”
• The Ghost Theatre is published by Bloomsbury on 11 May. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
