I am eight years old and an enthusiastic member of the St Andrew’s Cub Scout pack in Croydon. Realising that the more athletic and sporting badges are not for me, I set my sights on earning my Entertainers badge. I write my first play, a theatrical epic that conflates what little I know about the histories of Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake.
1975
I am eight years old and an enthusiastic member of the St Andrew’s Cub Scout pack in Croydon. Realising that the more athletic and sporting badges are not for me, I set my sights on earning my Entertainers badge. I write my first play, a theatrical epic that conflates what little I know about the histories of Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake. In this now lost and rarely performed work, an Elizabethan adventurer sails to the New World, and then defeats the Spanish Armada on his way back to England. On arriving in London, he presents the Queen with a potato, after putting his cloak on the ground to cover a puddle.
The play is staged by my fellow Cubs to riotous applause. I receive my Entertainers badge, and so my glittering career as a playwright is begun… The vast majority of my writing for stage after this is either an adaptation of, or is inspired by, a pre-existing work, and the principles that I establish in my first masterpiece – including a cavalier attitude to the source material, and an emphasis on story and adventure – remain to this day.
I am not writing a faithful dramatization. What is the point of that? It already exists. Rather I am putting on stage my personal response to the original. And still focusing on entertainment rather than athletics and sport.