Being an artist is hard work, there will always be those who ridicule the creative, offering such assured words that it’s not the done thing, that it is not a real job, that there is something of the wastrel in those that offer parts of their soul to the world through the efforts of expression. The hard work, the pressure of such enlightened perspective, pays off when something you mentally give birth too becomes fact, when it becomes as true as a memory held dear.

For Richard Weston, memory is the point, it is a life that can either be embraced or locked away in a box, stamped, forgotten, given credence to or ignored; memory is the most powerful of emotions and as we talk inside the rapidly filling The Great Western inside Lime Street Station about his play Opbergdoos, memory, of times past, of those yet to appear in the air, playfully make themselves known as the football banter of Liverpool’s game at Anfield reaches its crescendo.

Opbergdoos is your debut play.

Richard: “Yes, this is the first play I have actually written, I have written a couple of films before but I’ve never had the chance to write a play which I think is very different because it’s that kind of dramatic tension involving a live audience which is very different to something you can go back into the editing room and change, this is something you have to roll with and go with the audience with, so yes I’ve never done it before so there is a bit of trepidation but I’m very excited about it.”

It must be difficult in a way, not only have you written the script but you are the solitary actor within the play, a complete single hander. Does that add to the tension you feel?

Richard: “Yes it does, the difficulty with a one person show and I have seen quite a lot of them and enjoyed quite a few of them, I think the difficulty is that usually in a play the drama comes from two people speaking, having a conflict with each other. This is though someone who is speaking from experience, the conflict is with his memories, all his thoughts and addiction comes into it as well; a man who is trying to find coping mechanisms to deal with the things that have happened to him, to deal with the idea that all those things are lost and because it is a one-man show I think there is a lot of grounding to propel and accelerate those kind of emotions.”

Was the process of writing the play demanding?

Richard: “It started out as a novel originally, I realised it was too dense, I didn’t think it had the same dramatic effect because the things he is talking about, the way he speaks about it is almost as if he coming from a different language. I feel that people are doing this in the everyday world anyway, people are trying to decode each other all the time and this is a character who has drank a lot and in a completely different world but the idea is for the audience to decode where he is coming from what he is actually saying and through the medium of a novel I didn’t think it was going to work, that people would put it down. However when seen from an audience point of view, the demand of seeing one person, of daring you to listen was more suited to the idea of a play.”

It feels as though the character is departmentalising his own life, would that be fair, all these boxes representing his life, especially this strange sounding one in Opbergdoos.

Richard: “That’s it, there is huge tapestry of memories and not all the boxes have the trinkets of his past life and because they are all locked up and sealed away, he is trying to forget them and this one box that sits in the middle of the room is very poignant, it is the one that he is trying to forget the most. The other ones he can just about deal with but this one has his memories, the life he could have had, the life he wanted to have once upon a time, in that box in his head is who he could have been as opposed to who he is and there is resentment there.”

Is there something of yourself with in this, not just the writer or the performer but something that has been captured in the character, perhaps looking at life in a different angle now that you have come back to the Wirral?

Richard: “Yes there was a personal thing because I left London after finishing drama school and came back and all my stuff was in boxes and the amount of stuff I collected, the treasures that some had become useless, came with me and I started asking myself what was I going to do with it, I had been training non-stop for three years and I didn’t know what to do. There was this one box which said Opbergdoos, which just means storage box in Flemish, and on the surface it seems like nonsense until you read the translation and I looked at it and wondered what it would be if everything I had was in there, if someone’s past was enclosed and it got me thinking of how much it had changed me in the last three years, what had influenced me; that’s where it all came from really.”

On a personal note, was that part of the process; was it difficult to find yourself back in the area after being away in London, a different mindset?

Richard: “With regards to different environments, people are very diverse, the drama school experience can be quite intense and there a lot of very nice people within it but there is an intensity and people having their own inner conflicts, it was difficult as I wasn’t used to that but ultimately very rewarding, a great training. It teaches you a lot about writing, you get to learn to devise shows with other people and what some people can and cannot do and I realised that with the texts we studied, there was a lot of influence coming from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.”

It’s funny that you should mention Harold Pinter as I have The Caretaker going through my head as we are talking, I’m not saying obviously that that is a conscious aspect but there is a truth to the fact that everybody is a product of what they read, has that influenced you at all?

Richard: “It has, I was thinking of The Caretaker the other day, there is that one monologue by Aston in which he talks about when they operated on his mind; that very much played on my own thoughts. I was fortunate enough to see The Caretaker at the Everyman Theatre with Jonathan Pryce a few years ago, an excellent performance by all three actors, and I had never read the play before and it just astounded me as you never really know what they did to him or who how it changed him from who he was before and that was a huge thing for me in this play; he is trying to forget who he was, the difference being that Aston was operated upon and my character is operating upon himself.”

That is very similar to the feeling a reader can experience when reading Pinter’s The Birthday Party as well, that loss of self inflicted innocence, it resonates that in your play.

Richard: “That’s it; that loss of innocence is a theme in it, he comments upon it and he falls into the trap that such an action can bring. By looking at these memories, the pining down of trying to recapture innocence and how happy they were of how important they were at the time, the thing that haunts him is that he has grown up in a way that he might not have wanted to.”

That’s the problem with memories, you can’t have a truly perfect happy memory without it being attached to something of equal sadness and the reverse is true, the most saddest memory will always have something beautiful attached to it, the perception of something good surrounding it.

Richard: “Yes that’s it; I saw a study recently about how memories are created, that people can add parts to the memory and say this happened and that took place but actually they never took place. Memories are unique but also can be corrupted.”

Opbergdoos is on at the Lantern Theatre, Liverpool on Thursday 28^th and Friday 29^th January. Tickets are on sale from the Lantern Theatre Box office.

Ian D. Hall.