Artist Interview: Playwright Neil Bartlett
THE PLAGUE playwright on adaptation, community, and what Camus can tell us about today
Streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021, Lantern Theater Company’s U.S. premiere digital production of The Plague was adapted by Neil Bartlett, who has a long and rich career as a writer, director, actor, and translator in the theater, as well as an artistic director and a novelist. His work has been seen on Europe’s major stages, including the National Theatre, Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and the Bristol Old Vic. He adapted The Plague in 2017 using only text from Albert Camus’ novel, and directed its first production at London’s Arcola Theatre. To learn more about him and his vast resume, visit his website. His script of The Plague, alongside his accompanying essay, can be purchased through the publisher or on Amazon.
Neil Bartlett recently Zoomed with the Lantern’s Dramaturg Meghan Winch and Artistic Director Charles McMahon — also the director of the Lantern’s digital production — about artistic process, his priorities, and the universal resonance of The Plague.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Meghan Winch: How did you first encounter The Plague, and what drew you to theatricalizing it?
Neil Bartlett: I read The Plague when I was a teenager…and again sometime in I think late 2016 — I hadn’t read it since — something started to tap on my shoulder. I remembered that story. I remembered a story of a place where everyone slowly went crazy and no one could work out how to stop it, but then they do. And I remembered a sentence that my teenage-self loved from the book: “There is more to admire in our fellow human beings than there is to despair of.” I think I’ve got that right. That sentence jumped at me, and I wanted to know if that sentence had ever been true. The 1980s was the first wave in this country of the British AIDS epidemic, and there was this rhetoric of hatred, of them and us, of fear, suspicion, mobilizing the worst about people for political ends. I thought those days had gone, and then I saw them coming back, an enormous amount of hatred. So, I went to my bookshelf to see if I still had my copy of The Plague in English, which I bought for myself when I was 15. I still had it and there was that sentence underlined. And I went, “Okay, that’s it,” and I started work.
Winch: In reading the play and in watching Charles’ production, that’s the line that always sticks out to me as well.
Bartlett: It’s a question. But where it comes in the play, no one who is on stage has any reason to believe that this sentence is still true. And some people in the play are fine with that because they believe it gives them carte blanche to live in the world however they want, for their own pleasure and profit. And other people say, “No, somehow, against all the odds, we have to operate as if that sentence was true.”
Charles McMahon: That’s a very interesting thing because in living with this and watching the actors go through it, at that moment, when that occurs to Rieux, it could so easily go either way. There’s this aspect of essentially, that it is something that they’re choosing. “This is the perspective that I’m going to choose. And I’m going to put my chips on this square here, but it’s not necessarily true objectively for everyone and for everything.”
Bartlett: I mean, the world has changed a lot since I produced that script. I can’t believe — the poster for the London production was a Middle Eastern child, but wearing a face mask. And now of course it looks like, “Oh yeah, well, it must’ve been done in response to the pandemic. And that’s why he’s wearing a face mask.” No, it wasn’t.
Winch: Could you talk about that experience? You wrote this in 2017, during a swell of authoritarianism, of xenophobia. Now we are still in the midst of that and in the middle of an actual pandemic. What has it been like as a playwright and theater maker to do this play and then see all of this follow right on top?
Bartlett: Well, it has been extraordinary in the very simple sense that there have been so many productions. Of course, the connection between our current experience of the world during a pandemic and the original story is only in the minds of the spectators, and that has always been true of The Plague. In London, very elderly people came to see it. I love audiences — I always ask them, “So, why are you here?,” and they said, “Oh, we remember this story. We remember how much this story mattered when it came out.” It was translated into English really early, so it was in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and it was a story about that question, “There is more to admire about our fellow citizens than to despair of,” that statement, buckling under the weight of fascism. To those elderly people, the story wasn’t about contemporary right-wing xenophobia or anything; it was about the fight against fascism.
The great thing about The Plague is that it is not about the plague. The mechanics of the plague are brilliantly done. The rats, the serum, the death of a child, the rising numbers, the falling numbers, it’s brilliantly done in the original. And what I’ve done of course is amplify the simplicity of those mechanics in the adaptation, in that you never see it. There isn’t blood, people don’t have symptoms, people don’t die onstage. It’s a piece of storytelling theater. It is done with the simplest possible means, with just five people. So, it isn’t about the plague. It’s about “How do I respond? And how does my neighbor respond when we are given a choice as to how to deal with catastrophe?” And I think a lot of people are going to say, “Oh, this isn’t about coronavirus… What it’s really about is how do you deal with turning on the radio in the morning? And the radio says, “You know your worst fear? It’s just been exceeded. Now go to work.” I think that’s why this story has never gone out of print.
McMahon: That’s an incredibly interesting point in light of what people in medicine have been going through this whole time. While the pandemic has been going on and people have been at home or suffering some inconvenience in order to try to stay safe, the people who work in the hospitals are burning out, mentally exhausted for a year and a half. That’s what I kept thinking of every time, for instance, in Rieux’s monologue and a chorus where he talks about the experience and the toll that it’s taking on him.
Bartlett: Yeah. I think it sounds like what you’re saying is you have much the same experience as myself and the actors. We never had to struggle to get an audience to imagine what it might be like to live through a plague. Everyone was right with us. As soon as Rieux said, “There was this rat, and I didn’t think anything of it,” everyone went, “Yep. That’s how it starts.” It’s that thought of, “I don’t need to worry about that.” And it’s been utterly extraordinary because with every production there’s been an intense connection between the audience and the story.
Winch: Let’s go backwards a bit to your adaptation of it. Can you talk about the choice to use Camus’ language? There’s no invented language in your play, correct?
Bartlett: That’s right. That’s a thing I do. This isn’t my first adaptation. I’ve got a little shelf of them and all of them have that in common. My version of Oliver Twist, or my version of Dumas’ Camille, or my version of Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol — it’s my edit, but it’s not my voice. Because I only work with authors whose sentences I love. It’s partly a rather purist hangup of mine. If it says Camus on the poster, and I bought my ticket, I would be disappointed if I went, “Hang on. That doesn’t sound like Camus at all.”
McMahon: That’s one of the things about the story that gives it this incredible power. It is so boiled down. Just having these essential images, they take on this almost primal significance. Everything that’s out there has got a tremendous resonance and it acquires the power of symbolism just by the fact that it’s the only thing that you see.
Bartlett: Yeah, that’s a lot to do with my aesthetic as a director and as an adaptor. I really like everything on stage to pay its dues. I’ve always worked in theaters that never had enough money. My first question is always, “Can we give a small number of actors absolutely fantastic jobs?” Not have someone sitting around going, “Yeah, I’ve got that great moment as the secretary, and apart from that, I helped change the set.” And also that goes for the design; right from the beginning, I’m going to have five chairs, two tables, five white coats, five microphones, and one folder of paperwork, period. That’s it, that’s it. Because the more you take away, the more you will find what matters.
The other reason for keeping Camus’ language is that he is a great writer for shifting perspective. He can switch from that really grand, philosophic register to “There was a rat on the second step of the staircase,” and his brilliant and most characteristic trick is to go from detail to the biggest. When Tarrou says “That Christmas was the Christmas from hell. Empty shop windows, no children,” you see everything and it’s just a few words. And so why not stick with that writing? Because it’s brilliant for the theater.
Winch: Charles, do you want to talk a little bit about your staging? You have a little bit more than a few chairs, but not much.
McMahon: We put some more papers out there, the desk, a table. Then it transformed with a few simple objects, a phone, a framed picture of Rieux’s wife. We started out with a microphone and a jug of water, the things that you see at an inquest, and it ends up with a blotter, a phone, and a desk lamp. Then it switches back at the end. We threw in a few little tricks like that because we thought, “All right, this is a film.” If we’re doing this as a play, we have to go dead simple. The thing that I keep coming back to as a basic aesthetic principle is you can do theater with one person by firelight. You can tell any story. If you start with that as the basic principle then everything that you add on has to have a really good reason to be there.
Bartlett: Yeah, yeah. Hear, hear.
Winch: Neil, you directed the first production. When you were writing it, how did you balance those hats? Were you playwright first and then shifted to directing? How do you balance those roles?
Bartlett: Years of practice. I’ve been doing that double job of being a playwright and a director for a long time. I think the way that I write, the way that I adapt, is I am visualizing the mechanics of certain moments. Not that the production is finished in my head at all. In fact, I do a very specific thing: as I finish the rehearsal script, I go, “Okay, I can see the whole thing. I know how I’m going to do everything.” Then I put all that to one side; I start in the same place as my actors. “Right. What is the first page of the story? Have you met each other? Who do you know? Oh, that’s interesting. Two of you are dead. Right. So how do we play that? Do we have to play that?” I start at that point.
That said, I think in every adaptation, there are certain things which it does behoove the director to know how you’re going to do it. So I knew I was going to tell the story of the plague itself with sound, that there was never a stage direction which says, “We see an eight-year-old child in a hospital. I also knew it was going to be framed as the giving of testimony. And that came from the famous opening of the novel, which says these events happened in a city in the year, and then he doesn’t give you the date. So I took two things from that absolutely literally: One, this is a report on a catastrophe with hindsight. And two, although everything seems very real, entirely plausible, you can’t say, “Oh, this is happening in this city in the following year.” I wanted everyone to experience the events through the filter of their own city and their own experience of their own city.
So the two hats question: It’s one hat.
Winch: Have you seen any other productions since your own?
Bartlett: No, I haven’t. I very rarely go see other productions of my scripts, because I love that they have this completely free life. But Charles, I wanted to ask you, were there any times when you were working on the staging where you thought, “Oh, I wish I could just phone him up and say, ‘Listen, it’s Wednesday. I need to get this done before six o’clock, just tell me how you did this bit.’” Were there any times where the script seemed obscure?
McMahon: I don’t think so—just reading, it was just like a series of really, really vivid pictures. I mean, the fact that we don’t see the child, or when there’s a stage direction that they assemble the bed out of tables, that was absolutely clear. That is a transformative thing that is possible and compelling in the live space but not necessarily so much on the small screen. The challenge was taking it and saying, “Okay, how do we do this on camera?” And in some cases, I think we just did camera shifts or movement, or just some change of perspective. Since we’re curating all of the impressions for the audience and not letting their eyes wander, we had to try to create some kind of experience that would give the same sort of neuron firings in the brain that you get when your eyes do get a chance to wander and change focus.
Winch: There are places in the script where you give a production a good amount of freedom: Which actor does Rieux conscript to be at the other end of the phone call? How are some of the choral lines delivered? What was your impetus behind that, between the places where you’re very specific and then the places where you give a production more space to choose?
Bartlett: I guess because I know as a director — for instance, the choruses, I know as a director, no point in assigning lines in a chorus until you’re experimenting in the rehearsal room, absolutely no point at all. If you do that, you’re forgetting that chorus is all about the personality of the individual voices in the chorus. How do those voices interact? So that’s just the practical experience of knowing when to offer what will hopefully be helpful clarity and when to say, “Listen, this is chorus. Go for it.” I think the choruses would be the most different things from production to production, because of course they would be, depending on the balance of age, of gender, of culture, of color, all of those intangible things.
Winch: Charles, how did you and the cast approach those moments?
McMahon: Where the chorus lines were unassigned, I asked myself this very question a bunch of times. At one point we considered actually having them do choral speaking, which I’ve heard sometimes used to great effect. To do that even remotely well takes a lot of rehearsal time where everyone’s in the same room, and our first three weeks were on all on Zoom, which has latency issues.
Bartlett: You were so, so wise, because choral speaking only works if you can sense the breath of the other people, even if you can’t see them. I had an even more extraordinary challenge because I did this script on the radio during lockdown. So, the actors not only weren’t in the same room, but I recorded their entire parts on different days. Some of them never even met each other. I did the choruses with choral speaking, but I achieved that by editing. It worked brilliantly, because people said, “Wow, how did you get them doing choral speaking on Zoom during lockdown?” Sometimes I lied and said, “Well, it just took, you know, extraordinary actors to achieve that.” I didn’t say “No. It just took hours of editing.” I think you were very wise.
Theater is a practical business. I mean, that’s something else that comes with the package of my adaptations. For a decade, I was lucky enough to run The Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith in London. We never had any money. Opening night was the first day of week four. So I never put anything in a script that couldn’t be rehearsed within that timeframe.
Winch: Neil, what do you want audiences to take away from watching this?
Bartlett: That original sentence. That sentence. And each other. I want people to be profoundly reminded by this show in particular of mine, that the word “we” still has meaning. No one who watches this show on their device thinks that they’re the only person who’s watching it. They know that other people in other dining rooms or bedrooms or living rooms are also watching this happen. More than ever, the thing that I want to give people is the word “we.” “Us.” From this story in particular, straightaway you get this idea that these are individuals. It’s a contested story. But all the way through, there’s that sense of, at some point we have to acknowledge that we are “we.” But the short answer is that sentence. That’s why I want people to take away.
Related reading: Albert Camus and the Plague of Fascism: How experiences of colonialism and the French Resistance shaped Camus’ The Plague
The Plague was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in July 2021 with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
