My Zinc Bed: a compelling adaptation of David Hare's acclaimed play for 91Èȱ¬ÌýTwo
Interview with David Hare, writer, My Zinc Bed
What would you say are the central themes of My Zinc Bed?
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My Zinc Bed is really a study about the arguments about alcoholism.
I suppose I knew a lot of friends who were in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], and because of
that I was interested in those arguments about whether alcoholism
is a genetically inherited condition that you can do nothing about,
and in which you have to surrender your will and treat it as one
would treat any other disease – and the argument of AA of rational
recovery. AA is an organisation that believes that only by
mastering your addiction by willpower can you live a fulfilled
life. This seemed to me an extraordinarily interesting argument
and that's what I wanted to write about.
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I was also interested in the question of why addiction is such a
contemporary subject. We hear about it all the time now – be it
addiction to shopping, dieting, alcohol, drugs, work – it seems
very much to have replaced belief. Addiction has taken the place
of ideology. When I was young people discussed what they believed
and what their ideas were – those ideas were the ideas which shaped
their lives. Now young people discuss the things to which they are
addicted. So the whole subject of addiction seems to me quite
contemporary and near the bone.
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How did the television version of the play come about?
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It's often said of my stage writing that it's filmic – a series of
fast-moving scenes that are physically realised – and when we did
the play at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000 it seemed obviously
filmic.
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At the time that I wrote the stage play it was very much the cusp
of the internet, and the arrival of all that new cyber business –
but that stuff over the years seemed rather too dated. So there
was a way of looking at it a few years later – to focus on the
basic fable, about whether you can ever be in control of your own
recovery, indeed whether anybody can really be in control of their
own life, that seemed to become much stronger.
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It was actually my agent Jenne Casarotto who proposed to HBO the
idea that it was time to try and regenerate the single film a
little on TV again, and that maybe some plays from the theatre
could be adapted once more for television. There's a quite
extraordinary experiment going on at the moment in France whereby a
major television channel regularly transmits plays live from Paris
theatres, and contrary to all conventional modern broadcasting
thinking they're getting huge audiences and massive success with
these transmissions. This is a small-scale experiment I suppose, to
try and get some individual films specially made on the 91Èȱ¬.
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It's nice to remind people that it's possible to do interesting
things, and particularly if you've got very very good actors like
Jonathan Pryce, Uma Thurman, Paddy Considine. You know Uma Thurman
doesn't do many television plays – she's doing it obviously because
she thinks there's something interesting about it.
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How did you go about adapting your stage play for the screen, were
there any particular challenges involved?
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It was incredibly easy, and it's very rare that you say that! I
normally hate adapting my plays for the cinema, and I've done a few
adaptations of my plays for cinema. By and large I refuse to do
them, mostly because I find it very difficult to reconceive things
for new medium. But this has a very strong story about how a
rather indigent poet gets picked up by a couple of rich people and
spends a summer with them, and then gets passed aside by them.
Films adapt more easily when they're like short stories, and in a
way it took me back to the plays that I used to write for
television in the Seventies like Licking Hitler and Dreams of Leaving,
which were very much like short stories, novellas almost – and
that's a beautiful form for television.
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Can you describe the three characters?
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Victor is an entrepreneur who is an ex-communist. Like a lot of
people of that hippy generation he then became a businessman and
swung all the way from the left-wing ideas of his youth to playing
at capitalism with immense success. So he's someone who both has a
philosophical hold on capitalism but also is a player within the
system. He's picked up, if you like, by capitalism, made rich,
then stripped of his money in the course of the drama.
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Victor's wife, Uma Thurman's character Elsa, is an alcoholic who is
trying to recover through rational recovery. The young poet Paul,
played by Paddy Considine, is an alcoholic who is trying to do it
the other way, through AA.
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Victor claims to be the only person who isn't an alcoholic in the
film but by his behaviour you might think he's as much an alcoholic
as Elsa and Paul are.
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What research did you do for the original play?
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I went to some AA meetings, I a read a lot of the stuff about it.
AA meetings are very welcoming and open. I know when the play
happened at the Royal Court it was much discussed by AA meetings –
a lot of people at meetings in London were saying 'have you seen
this play, it's really interesting because it's a philosophical
discussion of what our problems are and what the problem of
addiction is'. So it came out of that. I did do a lot of research
but truthfully it was more through watching the agonies of some
friends of mine.
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Were you involved in the casting process at all?
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Jonathan Pryce was sort of self-selecting! He's always been one of
the foremost actors of my generation. I first worked with him in
1973, and he's just an exceptional film actor – you can't imagine
anybody better to play the role.
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Paddy I didn't know at all, he came to the film, as he put it,
never having had to speak long lines before. He'd always appeared
in films where he was required to be violent, or moody, and has
created a really extraordinary body of work. With my plays there
is always a sense immediately whether the actor can say the
dialogue or not because I write a certain kind of dialogue that is
quite technically demanding and is not naturalistic. Paddy took to
that like a fish to water, and I think surprised himself by the
ease with which he could play the role – mainly because he'd never
been asked to play that kind of part before. He's a writer as well
so therefore was a wonderful person to play a poet.
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Uma I've known since she was 18 or 19, I first saw her work when
she began a film about Dylan Thomas in the late Eighties. We've always
known she was a very good actress but again she might say she
hasn't always been required to show that side of her.
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How do you think the finished piece of work differs on television
than on stage?
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I have changed it a lot. As a result of concentrating on the theme
of alcoholism and much less on the new world cyber business, which
the recent play was partly about, I've actually decided to change
the text of the original play. So now there's a new version of the
play which I'm hoping will be ready for next year. I learnt a lot
by writing the film so for me it's been great!
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