Michael Cox speaks with writer Alan Bissett about his latest collaboration with A Play, a Pie and a Pint and the National Theatre of Scotland.
“It’s probably worth saying, first of all, that I didn’t choose the play,” says writer Alan Bissett about his current adaptation of The Confidant. On top of working on a new novel and editing an anthology, Bissett accepted A Play, a Pie and a Pint and the National Theatre of Scotland’s challenge to adapt a Latin American play, thinking it would be a simple task. Five drafts later, Bissett acknowledges that the job was much more difficult than simply giving the characters a Scottish dialect.
Originally written by Gilberto Pinto, The Confidant looks at a post-revolutionary world where feelings about the old regime are still rife. A man, who has been out celebrating with friends, comes home to find his wife ready for a confrontation: she has made a discovery about a choice he had made in the past. “It’s a very tight, paranoid power struggle between the husband and wife over the course of the play,” says Bissett. “That appealed to me as a playwright because I like the confines of that. You have 40 minutes, a husband and wife arguing over a particular point that may or may not be true, so there’s all sorts of potential in all that for a dramatist.”
Bissett admits that he initially had mixed feelings about the project, describing the original play as ‘high volume’ and overtly political. In adapting the play, Bissett decided he wanted to focus more on the ‘human aspect’ to make it work more for a Scottish audience. “I wanted to find the human beings, and not just focus on the politics, but about a marriage that has just collapsed.” He also made sure the characters’ voices were more Scottish. “I wanted the voices to feel recognisable to the audience. [The play] doesn’t specify which country it’s set in. I wanted it to feel like it was drama that was coming out of Glasgow, with Scottish concerns being addressed.”
He also finds it timely that the headlines are currently focused on revolutions. These might be happening now in the Middle East, but those people’s fight against oppressive dictators rings similar to his characters, and Bissett thinks it makes the Latin American season of plays “feel more current than historical,” as they had when the project began several months previously.
In speaking about creating political theatre, Bissett says “We can give audience nakedly political material as long as they feel the characters are real people and that they aren’t being lectured. If an audience is told that their particular viewpoints are wrong, the way they live is wrong, that’s when they shrink away. But if they watch a tennis match, it’s different. These two people have different ideas on how a revolution should have been conducted. Both are on the Left. Both wanted the dictatorship gone, but they have different programmes of how that should take place.”
Asked if he had any sympathies with the characters or the play’s themes, Bissett admitted that “I did understand the politics and the moral heart of the play. In Britain at the moment, a revolution wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’ll feel like a failure if watching this play doesn’t help make that happen,” he says with a laugh.
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