Editorial: Joel Horwood
Dream List: what plays should we be reading, putting on and going to see?So if this is really a question about what I would cite as big influences, I would suggest reading some Caryl Churchill, Georg Buchner and Enda Walsh. If I could, I’d put on Adam Rapp’s The Metal Children, Pater Schaffer’s Amadeus and Matt Hartley’s Sixty Five Miles. In terms of going to see things now, I would recommend the Photographers Gallery, the current Tate Modern Turbine Hall exhibition as soon as the place opens (on your own if possible), Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train (LAByrinth are awesome), Storm Thorgeson’s exhibition and Joanna Newsom in May. I’m also going to make sure I go and see more Noel Coward, amazingly I’ve only recently seen Breif Encounter and it knocked my socks clean off. Oh, and this: www.imheremovie.com Describe your first theatrical epiphanyWhen I was about sixteen Dad drove me to Bury St. Edmunds to see Heroine by Nigel Charnock. It blew my tiny little country-boy mind. But it wasn’t some kind of Lottery hand moment, I didn’t think about writing plays or theatre until about a decade later, but it stayed with me. It really educated me about what is specifically within the power of live performance. Who would you invite to your fantasy theatrical dinner party?It’d have to be the kind of dinner party where you cry ‘fuck the deposit’ when you’ve found a half-full pot of paint... Then I’d invite every actor I’ve ever worked with, the blue one from Monster’s Inc, a gremlin, Johnny ‘Rooset’ Byron, Stephen Jeffreys (selecting the booze), Enda Walsh (on the potcheen), Big Billy Shakespeare (cooking), Simon Stephens (on the decks), Sam Shepherd (eye balling people) and Gambon (starting a punch up). James Graham, Al Smith, Tim Price, Chloe Moss, Matt Hartley, Sean Buckley, Ed Hime and Lucy Kirkwood could create an improv version of Step Up 2 in the living room. What are your career highlights so far?I don’t want to pick one above anything else but… My friends getting behind Mikey The Pikey. Friends from primary school to university, without every single person I knew helping in some way, it just would never have happened. We sold out a big bastard of a theatre and I’ve never forgotten the feeling. That feeling is really why I decided to keep trying to do this. To be strict though, the exact highlight moment, when all of it hit me, was when we got a Mexican wave in the interval of the first show. I wept like a child. A really confused child. What's the strangest experience you've had in the theatre?The strangest experience is sitting amongst an audience and feeling moved by whatever’s on stage, looking around and seeing that I’m the only one. Or watching an audience be moved by a piece of theatre, looking around and realizing that I’m the only one not feeling anything. Who is your favourite actor of all time?I think the best actors need the best roles, so giving a superlative value judgment to an individual as opposed to a performance seems a little weird. I’d suggest that the best actors are the most ‘playful’, which I think means that they stay genuinely ‘alive’ within a role. Not in a ‘Oh, I’m gonna move this prop over here this time’ way, more in a not knowing the answers to things way. But I have definitely felt heat coming off Mark Rylance when I’ve been in the same room as his ‘Rooster’ in Jerusalem or Ben Whishaw’s 'Hamlet', Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s ‘Sarah’ in 2nd May 1997, Andrew Scott in Sea Wall… Who is the greatest influence on your career?Audiences. In terms of deciding whether I have a career or not and by teaching me so much about my own writing. Where do you want to be in 5 years time?Call me sentimental but I think that answering this can only end in failure… What' s the best thing you've ever seen at the theatre?The productions where you can feel how complete the synthesis of logic is. When the actors, text, direction, the whole building, everything is in complete agreement about just what is being produced and how. I don’t think it happens as much as it should and it invariably leaves me feeling like there’s something obvious I’m missing. I’ve felt this when watching August: Osage County, The Walworth Farce, Good, C90, Kiki and Herb, Pina Bausch and Nigel Charnock’s work but I’ve definitely not felt it enough and it’s not one ‘best’ thing. What are you up to at the moment?Rehearsing The Count of Monte Cristo at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It’s my first attempt at adapting something and I was asked to write it for a cast of six. It owes a lot to Stop Making Sense (the live performance by The Talking Heads) so it’s quite a left field take on an old classic. Biography: Joel HorwoodA member of the Royal Court/BBC ‘The Fifty' scheme, Joel Horwood is currently on attachment at The Hampstead Theatre and is table writing on Skins. He is also on attachment at the National Theatre Studio. Joel's plays for the stage include: Jack and the Beanstalk (Co-written with Richard Bean, Che Walker and Morgon Lloyd Malcolm for the Hammersmith Lyric 2009); Suddenlossofdignity.com (Bush Theatre); All the Little Things We Crushed (Almeida Theatre); Inches Apart (The Old Vic); Bay (The Young Vic); Is Everyone Ok? (Nabokov Theatre Company for Latitude Festival and touring the UK Festivals); I Caught Crabs in Walberswick (Hightide Theatre Festival, Pleasance in Edinburgh and transferred to The Bush Theatre); Stoopud Fucken' Animals (The Traverse Edinburgh); Food (Co-written with Christopher Heimann and performed at the Traverse Theatre, for which he won a Fringe First Award); Mikey the Pikey (Edinburgh Festival/Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury for which he won the Cameron Mackintosh Award) and Cattleprod Shakedown (Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough). Radio Credits include: OK Computer (Friday Play for BBC Radio 4) Joel's latest play, an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on Friday 16th April and runs until 16th May. Click here for further details of the production. |
