When the Yorkshire-based theatre company Red Ladder learned that they will suffer a 100% funding cut from Arts Council England in 2015, they declared that they would survive by calling upon their “army” of friends and supporters. That band includes the novelist David Peace who has handed the company the stage rights to his book The Damned United for £3.68 (a penny for each page in the novel, about Brian Clough’s brief and ill-fated stint as the manager of Leeds United). Peace, who grew up in West Yorkshire, says the company helped shape his own work, including his 2013 novel Red or Dead.
When did you first see Red Ladder’s work?
The first work I saw was possibly either This Story of Yours by John Hopkins [about a policeman accused of murdering a suspected child abuser] or Stitchin’ the Blues by Maggie Lane [a one-woman show about the sit-in by Lee Jeans workers at a factory in Greenock]. Both were staged in the mid-80s. Red Ladder were very much part of the atmosphere and fabric of Leeds – a radical Leeds – in the same way bands such as Gang of Four, the Mekons, Three Johns, Redskins and Chumbawamba were. And that radical tradition and example is still what Red Ladder means to me.
Which of their shows in particular have had an impact on you?
I was very lucky to see Sex & Docks & Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Balne Lane Working Men’s Club in Wakefield in 2011; simply one of the most entertaining and inspiring nights I have ever had. Not only the show itself, but the conversation between the actors and the audience afterwards, which is an integral and unique part of what Red Ladder do.
You became part of the Red Writers group. What was that all about? Who else was involved and what did you gain from the process?
Although I had no experience writing for theatre whatsoever, Chris Lloyd and Rod Dixon (of Red Ladder) invited me to the meetings they hosted for the writers they were working with at the time: Emma Adams, Alice Nutter, Ben Tagoe and Boff Whalley. Essentially, these were very informal chats but they created the opportunity for everybody to discuss their work. I am always fascinated by the ways different writers – or any artists – work, and so it was a privilege and an education for me to just listen and learn.
How did that group help shape Red or Dead in particular?
More than anything else, it was the utter commitment of these writers, and Red Ladder, to the society in which they live; their work is not for or about themselves.
Do you recognise any parallels between their theatre work and your own fiction? Have you seen their piece about the miners’ strike?
Unfortunately, I’ve not been in the UK when We’re Not Going Back has been on. But yes, it is an example of one parallel, and the historical events and social issues we are concerned with.
You’ve spoken of the influence of certain novelists, such as James Ellroy, on your first books. How do you feel theatre has influenced you as a writer?
Well, too many playwrights in too many ways to list. But yes, initially playwrights such as David Storey, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Alan Bennett and Jim Cartwright. And then, more consistently, Aeschylus (and particularly Tony Harrison’s text of The Oresteia), Shakespeare, Büchner, Brecht, Eliot, Beckett, Shūji Terayama, Heiner Müller and Sarah Kane.
What do you think theatre can do that novels can’t? And vice versa?
The origins and traditions of storytelling are oral and communal. The novel, written by the individual for the individual, has broken with and nigh-on destroyed that tradition; it is a very isolated and limited art form. The theatre of Red Ladder is its very antithesis, and illuminates the possibilities for something more; something communal, something shared. A different way of living.
