DESCRIBE THE NIGHT
BY RAJIV JOSEPH DIRECTED BY LISA SPIRLING
THE WILL MORTIMER INTERVIEW WM Between your first degree and coming to New York, you spent three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal. Tell me about that. RJ I had studied creative writing as an undergraduate and I realised I needed something to write about. I grew up in Ohio and I felt I really needed to broaden my horizons, so I applied for the Peace Corps, went to Senegal and spent three and a half years there. Knowing that I wanted to be a writer, I started writing a journal the day I left home and I kept it religiously: I have now been keeping a journal for 21 years. But those first three and a half years in Senegal were the most intense ‘journaling’ I have done, because in some way it became my therapy. I was thrust into a new and frightening world where there was no-one else to speak English to, so I had bouts of loneliness, bouts of self-doubt and the journal really helped me through that. In some ways that experience made me into a writer, and it was my fascination with journals that led to my reading the Isaac Babel 1920 diary which inspired Describe the Night. WM Had you always seen yourself as a playwright? RJ When I studied creative writing, my ambition was to be a novelist, and in Senegal that was still my ambition. When I came back to the United States and moved to New York City, I decided I wanted to be a screenwriter and I was accepted onto NYU’s dramatic writing programme as a screenwriter. But once I was there and started taking courses and seeing new plays by leading playwrights in New York, my life changed completely because I realised that I was much more attracted to that sort of work. WM If you had been a novelist, what sort of novelist would you have been? RJ Well, my big influences were – and still remain – Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera… WM …Magical realism? That’s certainly there in your playwriting… RJ Well, what I enjoy about the theatre is the ‘theatricality’ of it, the fact that in live performance the use of metaphor – the use of magic – is accepted in a different way from when it’s used in film. And
I find that when I write or attempt to write naturalistic plays – although I love naturalistic plays written by other people – I fail. Because the idea bores me. WM My sense is that Describe the Night is very different from the body of your work. Is that your view as well? RJ Yes, but I would also say that all my plays tend to be different from one another. I don’t think there is any overarching ethos that connects the plays and I tend to jump around in my choice of subject matter... WM But there’s something about the scale of this... RJ True, I have never written something quite this epic in scale, and that was part of the appeal. When I started writing Describe the Night I wanted to create a wide spreading narrative in which stories connect across generations. My aim was that part of the experience and the enjoyment of watching the play would be that when a story that took place in 1920 connected with a story that takes place in 2010, the connection and the realisation of how it connects should be simultaneously deeply satisfying and moving. WM Russia... has that been an abiding interest? RJ Well, I have been very interested in Vladimir Putin for the last ten years or so. A writer friend once asked me ‘which celebrity would it most blow your mind to meet?’ and I replied immediately that Putin would be the most surprising person one could possibly meet in the entire world. And then I asked myself: ‘why do I think that? What’s so fascinating about him?’ and I realised that he seems terrifying and also somehow immortal... he seems to me to have mythic status, to almost be a sort of mythological beast... WM I can see that… Your admiration for Babel, tell me about that... RJ I read Babel’s short stories in college, and found them fascinating because I thought they were bizarre: unexpected, dark, perverse and profane. And when I found his 1920 diary many years later I was even more taken with him, because – as someone who keeps a diary himself – I was very interested in how writers note down their thoughts. In fact, the diary is only
THE HAMPSTEAD THEATRE LITERARY MANAGER TALKS TO THE WRITER
RAJIV JOSEPH fragments: one section ends mid-sentence, and it picks up forty pages later. It’s absolutely not to be read as a narrative. WM And how did you come to zero in on the love triangle between Babel, Yezhov and Yezhov’s wife Yevgenia? RJ Once I started doing the research about Babel’s unlikely friendship with Nikolai Yezhov, the titbit that Babel had an affair with Yevgenia was far too fascinating – and titillating – to ignore and it immediately became a focus of the play. WM Let’s talk about the larger triangle: the intersection of the three narrative strands. How did you select the material? RJ When I came across the 1920 diary I had started wondering about writing a play about Babel. But when the plane crash at Smolensk took place in 2010, a lot of the articles that were written about it talked about how this brought back to light generations of conflict between Russia and Poland. And I was surprised to realise that I knew about this history and about the Russo-Polish war from Babel’s diary and his Red Cavalry stories. I thought that there might be a connection to be made. But these two strands are chronologically far apart – 2010 to 1920-1940 – so what was required was a third panel that I could fit in. That ended up being about a young, hungry, somewhat insecure KGB agent in Dresden in 1989... WM The play was developed using workshop techniques? RJ I worked with graduate acting students from NYU using a version of The Joint Stock Method. I effectively had eight very intelligent research assistants who were going out into the world, bringing back research and performing it for me. It was a wonderful way to work. I also did a lot of reading and we had people come in and speak to us: Val Vinokur, who is a renowned Babel scholar talked to us about Babel’s life, and a Polish filmmaker who has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about the air crash showed us his movie and talked to us about his work.
WM Have you used workshop techniques of that sort before? RJ No, I have never worked from such an early stage of the process with actors. I hope to do so again, because it’s a fascinating approach. What is interesting is that you are sort of relieved of your own tendencies, and the narrative will inevitably take unexpected turns. And maybe that answers your question about why this play seems unlike other of my plays. WM How dramaturgically formed was the material you had at the end of that process and how did you go about creating the play’s final form? RJ To describe the material that I had at the end of the process with the NYU students as being in any form would be a joke, because it was essentially formless. I honed it, and I cut characters and cut scenes, and then I set about creating a balanced structure. That didn’t have to be exact, for instance the 2010 scenes which are at the beginning and at the end act as bookends, but the play actually opens with the 1920 scene... I wanted a sort of balance but I also wanted it to feel like a mobile – to float – in the right way. And it developed organically: four scenes in each act, each act more or less the same length, and in each act we do not spend too much time in any one era. So the final form resulted from achieving that balance. WM You say very clearly – twice actually in the script – no dialects, no accents. Talk to me about that… RJ In my plays accents would act as a sort of cheap hairpiece, a cheap wig where you could see the artifice. And they would make no sense: in my play Guards at the Taj, where I also specify no accents are to be used, the characters wouldn’t be speaking English at all… That’s also true of Describe the Night but here you’ve got different people from different parts of the world, different cities, different cultures and so their accents should actually be a part of the conversation, and I have included this sort of running joke about ‘What’s your accent?’ ‘What accent is that?’ so the audience understands that what the characters are hearing is not what they are hearing.
WM Let’s talk a bit about Post Truth, because that does seem to be at the heart of what you are writing about. Did you set out with a plan or did that just emerge as you were developing the piece? RJ I set out with a plan, but three years ago we weren’t talking about this the way we are today: fake news was not a term and Donald Trump wasn’t in the headlines except as a Reality TV show host. But I have always been very interested in the lies that make it into the history books: my personal opinion is that all history is – in some ways – a lie. It’s certainly never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So the idea of a fiction writer, a poet, a playwright, a novelist being able to tell the history of a place in his own lifetime in a different way to the history books appeals to me. Babel vs Yezhov and Stalin is the dichotomy here. I was really interested in the idea of lies: in the opening scene that launches the play Babel and Yezhov are actually coming to an understanding about what a lie is... WM Of course, because of the post-Soviet dispensation, it is possible for the Russians to re-write history in a way that isn’t possible elsewhere. RJ Yes, and I think the Russians have found a new way of doing that via the infiltration of Social Media and they have used that very deftly. I think we are in a high risk point in the development of human reliance on technology, and the Russians are taking full advantage of that. That’s how they influenced the US election, using social media to disseminate information and to challenge the veracity of established news sources. That questioning of news sources is now ubiquitous, of course, with people on the Right describing the New York Times as a ‘fake news rag’, which is simply untrue. But this distrust of the media has metastasised and now we have a president who encourages that and fans the flames of distrust. WM Do you think the Russian use of those techniques is down to the fact that they have a government run by a lot of ex-spies? RJ Absolutely! It’s fascinating and it’s impressive and one should never forget that. The KGB runs Russia like they never went out of style...
WM But the play isn’t just an exegesis of the transformation of NKVD/KGB tradecraft into politics. You also have fun as a kind of ‘unreliable playwright’, bending your factual characters’ biographies… RJ Well, let’s go back to the first scene of the play where those two men discuss what’s true and what’s not true; what’s a lie and what’s a fact, and try to get to the heart of how difficult that distinction is. Truth is what happens and false is what doesn’t happen... but how does one describe what happens? Two people describe the same thing, and their descriptions differ. Is one description more true that the other? It’s that which led me down this path of mixing fact and fiction; of mixing truth and lies and playing with that, having fun with that. That made the piece fun to write and I think that’s what makes it fun to watch. And that mischief is central to what the play is: it’s not a history lesson, if you want a history lesson, it’s very easy to get one and you don’t need to come to the theatre. WM But do you think that there’s a risk that the play’s serious purpose might be obscured by the playfulness? RJ I hope it’s all part of one rich blend. There is, of course, a risk with any play that proceeds in this way that a certain part of the audience will be confused by it. And whilst I would prefer it if every audience member came out cheering my name in praise, that’s never the case... WM Finally, how do you see the political situation with Russia developing? RJ I think that the sooner we can impeach the President of the United States, the sooner we can start to resolve matters. That’s honestly my opinion.
DAVID BIRRELL RAJIV JOSEPH & LISA SPIRLING