Getting it right

It is worth taking a moment to point out that Macmillan is a very self-effacing type and that this is not a woe-is-me conversation – his next play will be The Iron Throne, a stage prequel to Game of Thrones, so his career has hardly gone off the boil (more on that later). But he is philosophical about the delays to his new work reaching the stage:

“I’ve been writing a play for London’s Royal Court for nearly 10 years,” he says, “which I feel really bad about because Vicky Featherstone commissioned me and then she’s not there to stage it. And, you know, I don’t know how many more artistic directors will come through before I finish it. But it’s a good premise that I haven’t done justice to.”

The thing is, it’s not as though his early 2010s hot streak was due to him banging out a series of classics overnight. People, Places and Things took eight years to write. It’s a drama centred on Emma, a highly intelligent, highly cynical actor who spends the first half of the play off her face on booze and drugs and the second half reluctantly squaring up to her problems. She is a ferociously complicated character and in Jeremy Herrin’s runaway minecart of a production we see her life as a cacophonous blur. There’s a deliciously complicated relationship between Emma and her mother, and a twist for the ages at the end. It’s a stupendous performance from Gough, who plays Emma and has been the driving force behind this revival: she’s been pretty much pushing for it to come back since its final performances in 2017, Macmillan says.

The play took so long to write in large part because Macmillan was determined to win the approval of experts on addiction and recovering addicts.

“People from different recovery centres and people in recovery read early drafts and said: ‘That’s crap. That would never happen. You’d never say that. You’d never do that.’ And it’s a really bruising experience. But what we ended up with is something that I think is quite robust and feels… accurate.”

He wryly describes as a “horrible” moment when it dawned on him that the play’s accuracy was liable to be highly important to at least some of the people who’d watch it. “I realised there will be people in the audience every night for whom these ideas and these themes and this experience are of mortal significance. And if I get that wrong, if I’m too exploitative or if I’m too sentimental or if I’m just inaccurate, you can really knock someone off balance.”

‘I’m in this weird place: every new play I’ve had on was written when no one gave a shit about what I was doing’

He also feels it is a subject relatively little Western drama has ever got right, or at least without turning it into tragedy. “I think recovery in particular is hard to dramatise because there’s no definitive end point. 
It’s why Western narrative structure often means that addicts either die from overdose or they’re cured in a way that’s not authentic. Part of the appeal for me as a nerdy writer is trying to solve that structural problem of how do you make something that feels like a satisfying evening of theatre without it feeling annoyingly open-ended.”

People, Places and Things (2024 edition) will not be dramatically different, but Macmillan, Gough, Herrin and company are still looking for new details in it. It sounds as though there may be tweaks to acknowledge recent trends in drug use (hello, ketamine!), and society’s greater articulacy in discussing trauma: “It’s changed some of the central dynamic of how the play works, I think particularly the relationship between the mother and daughter,” Macmillan says.

Whatever the future of his writing, Macmillan is fiercely devoted to his existing clutch of plays. Although it took an age to write, People, Places and Things is the closest thing he has had to an instant hit. Every Brilliant Thing, a poignant and funny monologue about a young man coming up with lists of reasons for his mum not to kill herself, has never exactly been “a hit” in the sense of being performed by a celebrity in a massive theatre, but has been a cult hit, beloved in fringe productions from New York to Nairobi. Half joking, Macmillan attributes this to it being cheap to stage (it’s a monologue with no set requirements). But he’s too proud a parent to laugh its success off.

“Every Brilliant Thing was written in a similar way to People, Places and Things,” he says, “but for people who have experience of sadness and depression. My formative theatregoing was those mid-1990s plays where everyone kills themselves in the end. So a play saying you’re not alone felt like a very unfashionable but worthwhile thing to say.
I suppose I was looking for the play that spoke about depression and suicide in a way that I felt I needed to see, and that felt authentic to my own and other people’s experience.”

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A play finding its moment

The last of his trilogy of self-penned ‘hits’ is Lungs. An experimental two-hander about a couple freaking out about having a baby in a climate-changing world, it debuted in a low-key 2011 Paines Plough production. Three years later, the eco-minded auteur Mitchell staged it at the Schaubühne in Berlin, in a production famously powered by the cast pedalling stationary bikes to generate their own electricity. But its big moment came with the Old Vic’s 2019 splashy revival. Macmillan thinks it’s a play that has grown in stature as alarm at global warming has escalated. 

“When it first went on,” he says, “it felt like a satire of a sort of middle-class, neo-liberal couple who are using climate change as an excuse not to talk about whether or not they want to have a child. Now I know people – I’m sure you do, too – who are having those conversations and wondering: should we have a child now, not knowing how much of the planet we have left? So, yeah, the world sort of caught up with my neuroses.”

When Macmillan points out he’s not written a new play in a while, I make a weak joke about Game of Thrones author George RR Martin’s legendary inability to finish the sixth novel in the series. I had, of course, forgotten that in the time Martin has managed to not finish The Winds of Winter, one of the myriad distractions the author has found is assenting to The Iron Throne, a stage prequel to his novels written by Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke.

‘Part of the appeal for me is trying to solve that structural problem of how do you make something that feels like a satisfying evening of theatre without it feeling annoyingly open-ended’

Macmillan graciously observes that the fact the play was announced in March 2021, during the height of the pandemic, meant a lot of people missed the announcement. But it is exciting stuff: although there’s no date yet, Macmillan reckons his next new play to be staged will be The Iron Throne. What can he say about it?

“I can say it’s set a handful of years before the books begin,” he says. “The appeal was to work with [the books] for one thing, but also just to write something on that kind of scale with kings and queens and princes and ambition and wars and battles and horses and all of that stuff.”

He wrote a lot of it during the pandemic and says the epic, interconnected nature of global events at the time was strangely helpful to his process. “There’s something about George’s writing where it felt weirdly true to what we were all experiencing at that time. The way our brains perceive the world, we kind of cast ourselves as protagonists in the drama, but we’re not. And those novels are so good. They introduce one protagonist. Then they introduce another protagonist. They’ve both got an entirely different idea of who should be on the throne. And then there’s a whole third thing that is sweeping through that neither of them know about. And it felt like living through the pandemic was that, you know, you never had an idea about what your life was going to be like.”

Martin has been fairly hands-on – how else would he distract himself from The Winds of Winter? – but Macmillan says that after winning him over with his and Cooke’s pitch, he’s been a very agreeable collaborator.

“He was really excited by the prospect of it,” says Macmillan. “What Dominic and I pitched to him went beyond the realms of what he’d originally imagined it was going to be. And so he took some convincing. But he is now fully convinced and fully on board and he is frankly brilliant. He’s been so generous and supportive and so helpful in the enormous world that he’s created. And really, I just want to be faithful to it and create a really rollicking good evening, but at the same time talk about power and who assumes power. Who should be in charge. A lot of things that I think we’re really wrestling with now as a species.”

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Calm assurance

Macmillan is very likeable: friendly, self-deprecating and in genuine awe of his wife. We talk a lot about fatherhood and pandemic parenting. But much as he won’t talk himself up, he will passionately speak up for the works themselves, and will talk about the spin-off of a multimillion-pound entertainment juggernaut he’s bringing to the stage with calm assurance.

His is a fascinating career: for a while it looked like his destiny would be getting in at the Schaubühne. And he’s done that. But he has another destiny as well: People, Places and Things was a transatlantic smash; it turns out Warchus  loved Lungs as much as Mitchell, turning the play into a box-office hit; he’s doing a Game of Thrones spin-off. We may not have seen a new Macmillan play in a decade, but his career seems to have progressed exponentially during that time – an incredibly productive pause.

“I always assumed that if I did make a career of theatre writing, it would be German leaning,” he says. “But the fact that I’m equally in America as I am in Germany… it sort of doesn’t make sense. But it’s a dream come true.”

What was your first non-theatre job?

Shelf-stacker, record shops, cinemas, Blockbuster Video, mushroom farm, wedding DJ.

What was your first theatre job?

I was in Katie Mitchell’s student production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan when I was about five or six. There was a huge dragon puppet in it that terrified me. As a teenager, I did some work as an extra for film and TV. You can see me in the background in Gladiator. 

What is your next job?

We haven’t set dates yet, but The Iron Throne will likely be the next new thing I have on stage. And I’m working on a few film and TV projects that we haven’t announced yet.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?

Don’t write a play to go on, write it to express something. You have no control over whether or not your work gets produced, all you can do is make it as good as it can be and find satisfaction in that. Don’t second-guess or pay attention to industry trends, don’t take it too personally when your work is rejected, just get your head down and do your work. Be rigorous. Be curious. Be sincere. Follow the fun. Listen to people when they call you out on your bullshit. Writing a play is always a collaborative endeavour. Write parts that actors will love performing. Pay attention to the audience, they’ll teach you everything.

Who or what is your biggest influence?

Effie Woods – a fantastic screenwriter and the most extraordinary person I know. All my successes, both personal and professional, have been a consequence of meeting her.

What is your best advice for auditions?

The reason you will or won’t get the part is often nothing to do with how good an actor you are – perhaps they’re putting a family together and you don’t plausibly look like someone they’ve already offered. So don’t take it personally, assume you won’t get the job, relax and just do as best you can – trust that if you’re punctual, professional and can take direction they’ll remember you for other things and suggest you to other people.

If you hadn’t been a playwright, what would you have done?

I did a lot of part-time teaching and when my play Lungs was turned down everywhere, I went full-time. After a couple of years, I started working with Katie Mitchell and had to take extended leave because I was in Berlin during term time. I’m still technically on leave from that job and I expect that when the writing dries up I’ll go back to it.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?

Googling the running time before I book a ticket.

People, Places and Things runs at London’s Trafalgar Theatre from May 3-August 10. More details at: trafalgartheatre.com