Welcome to hardtalk. Im stephen sackur. The coronavirus pandemic has dealt a devastating blow to the performing arts. No one knows when theatres like this one will be able to unlock their doors. So what happens to all the writers the performers, the venues themselves that enrich our cultural life . My guest today is arguably the best british playwright of his generation, james graham. What are we prepared to do to protect our culture . James graham, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you. Theatres are closed right now. Yourjob is very difficult to do in many ways. Does it feel like this pandemic has brought your world crashing down . It does feel like that way but it must feel like that across every sector at the moment. The only problem is that even though the virus affects all sectors, it will affect the theatre the worst because of the nature of what we do. What makes theatres so special and brilliant to hundreds of millions of people around the world is it requires you to be close to people and that is one thing we cannot do at the moment and we are unsure, based on the science, when that will ever happen. So as companies. As bars and restaurants open up over this summer, we will have to admit that will not be the case for theatre. People have used phrases like existential threat a lot during this pandemic about different businesses in different sectors. Perhaps more than any, they have used it about theatre. Some theatres say that they are very close to going bankrupt. You, obviously, are very well connected in the industry. Is that exaggeration or is that true . It is really true. It is really devastating and upsetting. They were the very first buildings to close, they closed because the government told them to because Public Safety is obviously the most important thing. Because the Business Model is a mix of box office, both ticket sales for the show that night, and also the majority of that is advance bookings so booking to see hamilton next spring, they have completely dried up for an audience that does not necessarily have the confidence to book far in advance. So there is no income, these are buildings that are expensive to run, expensive rents, expensive everything else, but with zero income. Its such a fragile model. You have called for, and im quoting you here, an aggressive government bailout. Others have said they want an Emergency Relief Fund specifically for the performing arts and in particular for theatre. Yet, i am mindful of, for example, th national theatre, which has talked about the degree to which it faces a real existential threat, it gets a substantial government grant already. In this time of crisis where the entire economy is facing a severe long term recession, do you think the public really believes the government should pump special targeted money into theatres . It is the most important point and i do not disagree with you. These are hard arguments to make against the backdrop of every person in the country suffering economically. I wish i hadnt used the word bailout. That was a few months ago. The actual term is investment. Its an investment that the government always gets back and if the economy is going to recover and the one benefit of this kind of crisis is that it is not all these industries are basketcase businesses, they are profitable in normal times. Once people re emerge into the light they can be profitable again. It is just that theatres are uniquely and disproportionately affected in that they will be the very last buildings to open. If that is the case, in the last decade, the arts and culture and entertainment were almost the Fastest Growing sector of the entire economy. Nurses and hospital beds and teachers are going to need those businesses that do return a profit to the economy to be firing on all cylinders and we can do that and want to do that you cannot do that with zero income for up to nine months. I want to get a little personal if i may. For you, as a writer, for both screen and theatre, what has happened to your creative juices, your creative impulse while you, like all of us, have been wrestling with lockdown, with isolation. You are living on your own, right . So there is a sense of isolation. What has that done to you . Its weird, isnt it . I live on my own and i normally enjoy my own company because i am a writer and i need to be in my own head a lot. But what is really beautiful and i am so grateful to be allowed to be a creative is that you have these moments of a self imposed lockdown where you can just be in your own head and creative and then you emerge and have wonderful moments of real collective action, making a play in a rehearsal room with a company of actors over four weeks and then sharing that with hundreds of audience members is almost the most public thing you can do. Its so collective and so shared. And now none of that is happening. Is that getting to you . But i dont think i am more special than anybody else but it is getting to me in the sense that it is. Writing is a bit of a weird job. You are sat in your office, your room, your kitchen table, making things up. There will always be a level of imposter syndrome, i feel, and silliness about it not being a properjob but i know it means a lot to many people to watch tv dramas and films and plays so what motivates you in that weirdness is knowing that eventually one day you will share it and it will be a real thing, and it will notjust be something abstract you make up. It is just very hard to find yourself in that situation when you do worry about an industry, the oldest industry in the world, theatre, and its ability to survive. It is hard to motiviate you. Also, like everybody else, like you, i spent a vast amount of my time just being really worried for people that i love, my friends, and the part of your head that really worries about people and society is the part of your head you have to enter to do the work and sometimes you just do not want to go in there. You used an interesting phrase a minute ago about imposter syndrome and i know you are talking specifically about how you feel right now under lockdown but ijust wonder whether you are being honest about something deeper . You come from a background that most people in theatre probably do not come from. Your mum and dad raised you in north nottinghamshire in a coalfield area, depressed economically, you went to a local school there, frankly the ambition for most kids was probably not to aim at the west end or the theatre or even think about it. Do you think that has fed into the way you feel about where you are today . In terms of. Yes, it must have done. It feeds into everything doesnt it . Nottinghamshire, uniquely, is such an interesting political and cultural place because it is not quite north and it is not quite southern. That has had political consequences in moments of great tension like the miner strike in the 1980s when it was a county split down the middle and i can only assume that has impacted upon in my political writing it has a desire oi sense, area. Desire to create empathy for multiple different points of view when it comes to politics and not have my work be an activist and agenda towards one particular point. In the 1960s there was a wave of writing drama that was written very much by working class writers. Some from nottinghamshire, from the places you are from. Do you identify today as a working class writer . I struggle with it but dont know why i do and i shouldnt. The language i normally tentatively use is that i am from a working class background but i accept, even though i sort of reject the idea behind it, that you cant be an artist and you cant working class. Ijust know it is hard to have a play in the west end with the lights and the glamour and to feel authentically working class. I can only assume that i am because i am from that background and it is important for me to get those voices into my plays. And it is certainly important, looking at your life, that your mother, for example, and your teachers at school, they always encouraged you to think big when came to your love of performance, of theatre, of the arts. You were fed a hope and an expectation that you could do it. It is not billy elliot, not the hollywood story where i faced resistance all the time from teachers or from my family. They thought it was brilliant. They loved coming to see me appear in a school play. Theyd not think it was silly, nor non masculine, any of those things you normally associate with the arts in working class communities. I remember my mother burst into tears when i got on a train for the first time to head to london, because you didnt go to london from nottinghamshire, when i was moving down here. The only reason i am now a playwright with, fortunately, having plays on broadway or having tv dramas and films in america and finding myself at the emmy awards last year in hollywood is because i went to a comprehensive school with the teacher who thought that working class kids should read plays and that is the only reason i am doing what i do today. And yet in a funny sort of way, you are not really a political writer. You do not have, it seems to me, a Strong Political set of views which colour all of your work. It is more that you are trying to find the humanity in politics. Is that true . I suppose i have a real geekyjoy in looking at systems and processes and institutions and trying to work out what makes them tick. With this house which is set in 1970s westminster, the last dramatic Hung Parliament we had prior to the coalition. I deliberately kept Margaret Thatcher and keith joseph and James Callaghan off stage because it. Itjust did not interest me. I feel like we were familiar with the ideology of left and right and the tensions between them but we are less familiar with i certainly was when i looked at that gothic palace and how impenetrable and intimidating it is, i did not know how it worked. I did not know how legislation passes through the house. I didnt know how a whip manipulates, encourages, persuades a member of parliament who does not want to vote a certain way to eventually walk through that particular lobby and i always think it is a bit of a gift to be a british playwright in particular because we are so old and our systems are so old they naturally they lean towards absurdity. You turned the arcane detail of westminster process into a successful play in this house but then you did something also fascinating with a different sort of political complicated situation. You turned the brexit furore in the uk into a successful tv drama called the uncivil war. At the heart of that was not David Cameron or borisjohnson, it was a guy who at the time very few people had heard of, called Dominic Cummings. Yeah, what happened to him . most of us know of him now as Boris Johnsons most important advisor. But why did you, long before cummings attached himself to prime ministerjohnson, why did you see him as a fascinating character . He really is a fascinating character in the world of politics that often sounds increasingly stale in terms of the sound of it and the level of conversation. As you have seen, he is a disruptive and unpredictable surprising catherine wheel of conversation and linguistics. Did you meet him and talk to him as research . It was quite late. We had a tactic which is sometimes effective you identify your sun in the middle of the universe, Dominic Cummings, and you start on the outskirts of planets and rotate your way in gradually just so you can gather information and feel confident when you get there. So i interviewed as many people as i could from vote leave interns or marketing and communications people. And i arrived at Dominic Cummings once there was a draft and i needed him, i had specific things i wanted to know and i was grateful. He devoted a lot of time to it. You need to strike the balance between spending time with people but you maybe start to feel a sense of. Not loyalty but you want to represent them fairly. And that is where it gets complicated. You are portraying real life and real events but in a fictionalised form and some critics, i will quote to you a campaigning journalist, carol cadwalladr. You got involved in a public debate with her about the veracity, the trueness to life of your brexit screenplay and she said that your Dominic Cummings, the one you created on screen, is a sherlock character. A maverick polymath who brilliantly solves problems no one else can. And your portrayal made out that he won through genius and not through allegedly criminal methods. Because all that in the end got investigated. And because you created a performance and a screenplay that was so great, that is what sticks in peoples minds. The positive take on a guy that so many people in britain have grave reservations about. You have to take that responsibility really seriously. I respect her but i disagree. On the night of the broadcast, i retweeted all of my twitter followers to her feed so they could see someone telling them how terrible my drama was. To be fair, she really likes the drama, but she just disagrees. She almost liked it too much. She felt it invited people to not dig into the real difficult detail of the brexit campaign, but actually to just admire the sort of personality, the fizzy whizbang personality of the guy you put centrestage. I also accept that when you cast someone like Benedict Cumberbatch that comes with that baggage of great intellectual genius from sherlock, some of that will be there. I fundamentally disagree. I think brexit creates a frame for everybody through which we see it based on our own political prejudices, so with no disrespect to her, that is why i wanted to engage with her all the way through, is that she wants a certain kind of film and i didnt want to give it to her. You are not a campaigner. And what you are also is an entertainer. It strikes me that what is absolutely amazing about you is you can make people laugh, cry, feel empathy and sympathy in stories which to most folks are about politicians who they are deeply cynical about, politics they dont want to hear more of, yet you take that and turn it into entertainment. It has to be because whether you are a journalist like carol, or a writer like me, you have the subject matter which feels very far away and it is just an exercise and bringing them closer to most peoples understanding, so of course it has to be funny and you have to be moved. Unlike journalism, dramas greatest political weapon is empathy and humanising people we dont normally see as human beings. Which take you as far, in the play ink, as Rupert Murdoch. Isnt nobody that you cant empathise with . I really believe the best way. We are in such a divisive time, and my question is always, how do you convert people . How do you win . The best people to hold difficult and problematic people to account is not to just demonise them, because when you are just getting the view back that you want to see. The best way to hold them under a great deal of scrutiny is to first give them a defence. Whether we like Rupert Murdoch or not, has revolutionised and transformed the news industry and has certain skills we can either admire or malign, but lets not pretend. It is simply a question of asking an audience to go, what motivates them . What do they think they are doing that is good . At the end, i can disagree with them and the negative impact it has on society, but over the course of two hours of theatre, that is the time to get more reasonable, a guardian reading audience for the first time to say what is it about the sun that appeals to more people than appeal to my paper, and then you just do both things prosecute and defend. People listenign to watching this all over the world may be wondering he sounds fascinating and his plays sound incredibly multifaceted, but he writes such british stories, they are not relevant to me. Is there something universal that goes far beyond the detail of westminster process or the tabloid newspapers in the uk . I definitely do, because there is a rule i keeping my head that the more specific you get about a time period or a culture, a nations story, the more universal it is. As well as exporting work across the world, we receive work across the world, whether it is an Arthur Miller play from the 1950s, or parasite, a south korean film. The specificity doesnt narrow the appeal. They widen it because they strangely make it more timeless. You have talked about the importance of pure entertainment. Are you thinking about going in different directions, getting away from the straight play . Without a doubt. I probably saw more musicals than straight plays growing up, and that is my access to theatre, and the artform is more theatrical than plays often. Yes, i am writing a musical with eltonjohn at the moment. It is a story that he found, actually. It is about 1980s televangelism and how the Television Ministries with often quite big hair shoulder padded characters became the largest ministries in the world with millions of worshippers. It is set in Reaganite America and the tension between faith and religion, thats sort of my bit. I am trying to make it a little bit of political and i have a conversation about that. Can you and eltonjohn actually work on it collaboratively and collectively even now in a time of pandemic . It is not easy. None of the great 20th century musicals were written over skype, the joy of that collaboration is that you are around a piano together and you feel vulnerable enough to make bad ideas and make bad choices, but you can improve. It is difficult. You and eltonjohn are currently zooming and sharing ideas. We are starting to. There is a script i have written and songs, but i dont know how anyone else does it, but i get new ideas for a script and inspire him and his assistant to do a song so you have a back and forth tennis match where he comes up with a song idea that i have to rewrite the script for. Look, i am not going to try and play it cool when i am in my house and eltonjohn zooms me, i have to check my background is cool enough because he is in my house. But he is one of our greatest artist and he wrote one of the most successful musicals of all time in terms of the lion king which is running in cities around the world. But it is a valid artform and you can sneak in some really important questions and that is what i will try and do. When can we see it . We will try and finish it in lockdown and then i guess hopefully next year when theatres reopen. You have written very frankly about mixed feeling you have that incredibly Turbulent Times we are living through, which include obviously right now coronavirus and also the rise of populism and nationalism, deep polarisation within societies, be it the uk, us, or many other countries. You have said on the one hand it is extremely disturbing to live through these times, but as a writer, one selfishly thinks what an amazing amount of subject matter and material. Right now, are you finding particularly in this covid i9 pandemic all sorts of ideas coming to you about new humans story to tell in the midst of crisis . I think you have to balance it with feeling every human instinct for the nature of the tragedy, but you cant silence. Basically the Political Part of your brain, which is if we believe, and i do, that storytelling isntjust a distraction or a confection, it is a tool that we can use at difficult times to make sense of things that feel so hard to make sense of, that you feel, as im sure many of my peers do, a sense of responsibility to getting in the mix, despite the messiness that sometimes comes with it, in cases like the brexit film, i think the arts and culture need a seat at this table because we have to, it has always been since flipping greek times, the way that we make sense of the world. You cant look around, what happened in the last year, the proroguing of parliament, this incredible pandemic, what is happening now in america and spreading around the world in terms of the justifiable anger, we can dig into it. The question you have and the anxiety you have as a writer is what is my story and what is my role here . Even though as you recognise i come from a working Class Community that was often ignored and deserves a voice at the table, im a white man and i dont think it is my place to make sense of what is happening in minnesota at the moment. It is my responsibility to step aside at that point and find people have that voice and the anger that is really authentic. A final thought about anger. Is anger a very positive creative fuel, or can actually be corrosive . That is a very good and difficult question. Historically, especially in british theatre, anger has always played a role. The angry young man in the 1950s that came out of a burning sense of class anger and a burning sense of injustice, and if that motivates you to write them, absolutely own it. It is not always my starting point. Did you write as an angry man . I get angry, but what i dont want, and i think we need a theatre that it is provocative, that is dangerous, but the things that i want to write personally, something very sentimental and possibly some people might think i am not the right political playwright for this time, is that i think there is a power in drama that is unifying and that can bring people together to see different points of view when those points of view are legitimate and exist. So sometimes i might write because i am angry, angry about how toxic that exit referendum was, but that wont be the outcome i want to engender in the audience. James graham, it has been a pleasure to have you on hardtalk. Thank you very much. I cant shake your hand but i can at least. I can nod politely. Thank you. Hello again. For many of us, monday was a dry day with variable cloud, some spells of sunshine, and the skies looked like this for quite a few of us. However, we did see some heavy downpours across south west england. Looking at the forecast over the next few hours, we do still have quite a lot of cloud in the sky across the uk. There are a few clear spells for the majority. Its dry at the moment, so those temperatures ought to account for all the cloud not too low, were looking at 8 10 celsius as we start off tuesday morning. So i suppose a fresh start to the day, but we will see some further changes in our weather as we go through tuesday. Although we start off on a dry note, we do have this weather system moving into the north west, which will be bringing outbreaks of rain particularly to scotland and northern ireland. But its the rain here which should arrive quite late in the day for england and wales, and it is a dry start, but we might see showers developing particularly across parts of north east england, running down the pennines and perhaps into parts of the midlands and southern and central england. Dont be too surprised if you see an odd shower formed here as we head into the afternoon. Our temperatures similar to what we had, really, on monday, with highs between 15 18 celsius for the majority of us. Now for wednesday, the area of low pressure starts to move right over the uk, so we are looking at a cloudy day with some fairly prolonged outbreaks of rain. Still, the rain is useful for a number of us it was very dry last month, so the rain is welcomed by gardeners, im sure. But there is more of that rain to come, and it is kind of yo yo rain, if you like it, because as this low pressure deepens and moves to the south, outbreaks of rain moves southwards, as well. But the rain will then return back northwards, so we get two dollops of rain from this particular system. Thursday we are looking at some rain around, across parts of the south. Northwards, theres heavier rain set to move in across the swathe of northern england, particularly north east england, perhaps even a bit of thunder mixed in with some of that. It will start to turn quite windy as we go through the course of thursday, and that continues into friday, turning increasingly humid as well. Now it stays on the unsettled side friday and even into the weekend, with still some bursts of heavy rain around accompanied by claps of thunder across england and wales. But generally further north, the quieter the weather gets, so it may stay dry in inverness in glasgow this weekend. This is bbc news. Im sally bundock, with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. Paying their respects thousands of mourners file past the casket of george floyd in his home town of houston. His brother makes an emotional plea for justice. Thank yall. We will getjustice. We will get it. We will not let this door close. The us economy has officially gone into recession but stocks are surging, with the nasdaq hitting a record high. Our planet matters team has a special report on why Carbon Dioxide or c02 is at the heart of the worlds changing climate