Introducing "Playing With Fire"

This play opened 35 years ago.

Almost exactly: 11th June 1987.

I wasn’t consciously aware of this, but my subconscious must have known. And maybe that’s why I’ve chosen this date to publish this play.

It was my third play for the Traverse, after LOSING VENICE (1985) and LUCY’S PLAY (1986). It’s number 10 in my catalogue.

I wrote it in five days, between the 12th and the 17th of April. I took 6 months to write LOSING VENICE, and ended up completely broke. A lesson I learnt from that play was that the only way to earn a living as a playwright was to write extremely fast.

Also the Traverse used to schedule and announce my plays before I’d actually written them, so there was a lot of pressure on every script.

And it was difficult, because our elder daughter Bex as 7 and our younger daughter Katie was 2, and we were sharing childcare.

We divided each week in half: half work, half childcare, and that meant we both only worked part time.

The only way I could get this play finished was to get out of the house and stay somewhere else. A friend let me use her cottage in the Scottish Borders.

But I couldn’t stay away for long; and I guess Susie’s mum Jean came to stay to help with the children while I was away.

Susie was making her living as a freelance writer and illustrator, I think, and I was reviewing dance for The Scotsman, and picking up odd reviewing jobs for the BBC at the same time.

It was an incredible struggle just to get by, and the strains in the struggle are reflected in the relationship between Justina and Fernando in the play.

I’d read a book the year before called “A Distant Mirror: the calamitous fourteenth century” by Barbara Tuchman, and loved it.

Her idea was that the 14th century was a time of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A time of war and plague and desperate upheaval; and in that sense it was an image of our own time, as we move from late capitalism into whatever social structure will next emerge.

It seemed apt then, and it seems apt now.

And that is one reason for publishing it… also I loved this play, and it saddened me that no-one really seemed to get it at the time.

Cygnet Drama School in Exeter had it on they syllabus for a few years; but beyond that it just disappeared.

Those days I was living as a man, and calling myself ‘John Clifford’.

I was struggling to find my identity; writing a play with a woman at the centre, and an equal number of men and women in the cast as my way of resisting the injustice and discrimination in casting women suffered in those days (and still, sadly, do….)

Becoming these women in my imagination helped me. And one reason for my fascination with alchemy, and with Jung, was because of his fascination with the figure of the androgyne.

I’m surprised I never explored it in my play; I imagine it was still too painful.

And still felt too dangerous…

I’m publishing it in instalments, to make it more accessible. I hope this one gives you pleasure.

And makes you want to read the next…