There is no mistaking that the Liverpool Fringe has caught the attention of the public and dramatists alike; it may have some way to go to rival the Edinburgh Fringe, but all in good time, for now it has taken on a life that is representative of the city that bears its name. It is also a festival of drama that sees Brian Coyle and Emma Bird once more collaborate on a play, with Ms. Bird directing and Mr. Coyle having written what should be regarded as a heavy hitting comedy and satirical play, The King of the World.
The play, which is on at 81 Renshaw Street on June 6th and 7th, stars Pea Lee, Keith Hyland and Sean McGlynn, with sound design by Paul Abbott. The play asks What happens when a man with an enormous thirst for power, but a tragically brittle ego, is made King of the World? In a kingdom ruthlessly ruled over by a permanently tanned King with strange orange hair, one of his lowliest subjects decides he has had enough of the King’s increasingly mad decrees. Can he survive defying the King, especially when he can’t even depend on the loyalty of his oldest friend?
To have the writer of the critically acclaimed Welcome To Paradise Road back in Liverpool is a privilege, one that should happen more often, as his insight in to the world of drama has been invaluable as a resource and as a spectacle.
Before The King of the World comes to the Fringe this week, I was fortunate to meet Brian at the Baltic Triangle’s Unit 51.
Welcome back to the city Brian, I am right in thinking this will be your second play to be performed in Liverpool?
Brian: “Yep, yep, a couple of years ago, myself and the Director Emma Bird put on a play called Welcome to Paradise Road, which you came along to see.”
Yes, I thought it was wonderfully scripted, I especially enjoyed Alun Parry’s character’s role within the play.
Brian: “Yes, he was a pretty scary character.”
Which is not him at all really. You are working with Emma again in this production, The King of the World.
Brian: “Yes, Emma got in touch with me and said, I am thinking of doing the Liverpool Fringe this year, do you have anything you want to do, and I had this idea, so I replied you like political satire don’t you. We exchanged a few E-mails about it; she said that sounds really good…write it. I then had to get down and finish writing it.”
In your experience, is political satire a hard subject to broach, after all it’s not everybody’s cup of tea is it?
Brian: “From a writer’s perspective, it’s an area that can be relatively straight forward if you have a passion for it and the passion is usually the emotion of anger. If you are really, really angry about something in politics, politicians, that sphere then I find from a playwrights’ perspective then the best way I can address that is to write satirically because quite often it is just ridiculous situation, this world that we have got ourselves in. From a writing respective, it is something that is relatively straight forward, he says, ha-ha. (laughter). Of course, even though you are writing with a satirical observation in mind, ultimately a play is about the people in it, so that’s the thing you need to crack, what are these people’s story, who are they, what is the story within the scenario.”
Once Emma told you to write the play, was it an easy process from there?
Brian: “It took a couple of months and then several re-writes after that back and forth but that is quite a short period for a play for me, it can be a much longer process. It is a case that you get started with an idea and it flows and if it doesn’t flow then probably you don’t have an idea in you anyway. You go away and you come back to it and it has run out of steam, it might be that it wasn’t as good an idea as you first expected it to be, so it’s like you have had your initial burst of creative energy but now you have to turn it into something that actually works and that can take a long, long time. Not all the time, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes you can write a play in a couple of weeks and then a few more weeks redrafting is done, but I have also been involved in plays, and still am that takes years to get to a point where you can put them on.”
When did you first start writing?
Brian: “Well I didn’t start writing till about ten years ago, slightly longer, I didn’t start writing drama till I was well into my forties and I worked in I.T. at the time and I was freelancing, so between freelance jobs there is usually a period which I gradually extended and extended and I would write in that period and I did that for several years, and in the early days I didn’t get anything on and then it started to happen and I would extend the period out longer and then one day I stopped my job and I didn’t go back. For the last five years I have been writing full time and living very frugally.”
That is the thing isn’t it, people don’t realise how close to the bone writers really live. Did that perhaps influence your subject matter for King of the World?
Brian: “Ah no, I think whether I was working and making lots of money in I.T. I would have felt the same way about Trump, and the way the themes of the play which is about tyranny, despots, these hard men that are all around us, these hard men leaders we have, we have always had but right now we seem to have even more of, Putin, Kim, Erdogan, Xi Jinping, there is quite a few of them and they are quite similar.”
Most of the ones who have ran Britain for the last several decades have been as well. These suits, the ones we have in our own country could be seen as incomprehensibly evil in their own way.
Brian: “Yes indeed, I did write a play about Blair once a few years ago, because he made me very angry. So yes, I have written several political plays but it’s not a side-line; it’s one of the strands of my writing, but political satire is one that I do enjoy writing”.
Obviously, I am not going to ask you for a complete run down of the play but King of the World has got a very Orson Wells type feel to it.
Brian: “Yes, funny that you should say that as with Wells, you have Citizen Kane which is based upon in part William Randolph Hearst, and Trump is not dissimilar to Hearst in many ways when you think about it, his obsession with the media is a big thing. The crux of the play is that I have been thinking for quite a few years about these so called hard men leaders, they have certain characteristics and callings, they have huge egos but also brittle egos and they can’t stand anything being said about them or done to them, they hate democracy. It is very inconvenient and they will do anything to hang on to power, only in the last two or three years Putin has gone from being so called President of Russia to the Life-Time President of Russia.”
Indeed, and it is just a case of language or semantics which stops it being thought of as Tsar.
Brian: “Well you’re right, there is no difference apart from the semantics, Xi is going through that right now, he is making himself the Grand Leader for Life and Putin is trying to do the same. They hang onto power, they have these egos which are incredibly brittle, and when Trump came along, I thought, wow, he is just like them, he has that same pumped up-ness, Mussolini like draw, right down to the point of replying to Tweets about him in which somebody might take the piss out of him, it is really pathetic, he won’t be President for life though, he won’t be the King of the World but he is a starting character because he’s such an easy creation for laughs. So, if you start at that point, imagine if he was Kim, if he was Putin, and he had that power, he would love it, what would he be like, it is an amalgamation of these types of leaders taken to an extreme; hence the King of the World, he just wants his subjects to love him, in fact he demands that they love him, and if they don’t then they’re in big trouble.”
It’s a bizarre thing, you think back to Daniel’s dream about the King Nebuchadnezzar and the feet of clay, a statue symbolising vulnerability, despite having most of the said statue cast in bronze and gold.
Brian: “Oh yes, exactly. I saw a documentary by Mary Beard on Julius Caesar and I thought yes, Julius Caesar is Trump, well he’s not, but he has a good grasp of propaganda; well Julius Caesar is Putin is a more accurate description, a real ruthlessness which is in direct comparison with the leaders of today, writing about Trump is pure satire in some ways, but the interesting thing for me is how the subject is these societies act, how they get on with each other or not. That is where the drama comes in, where in these societies somebody may support the leader, somebody may not, but not say or they get into trouble, they disappear. It is when you get down to the people level, so I have imagined these three people and their relationship to the glorious leader is where the conflict arises and the power they have over each other and how they use or don’t use it and how that plays out.
It comes right down to these three people, in the play they are called The undesirables, they are the Jews, they are the Gypsies, they are the Muslims, they are at that level, but if they don’t love this leader then they are not going to be around for much longer, so how does that play out, especially when one of them gets some power.
The Play as we said is being directed by the superb Emma Bird, you must obviously enjoy working with her?
Brian: “Yes indeed, she has this terrific grasp of what I’m trying to do. The job of the Director is take the play, the text on another step and take it even further and she is able to do that.”
Brian Coyle’s King of the World is on at 81 Renshaw Street, Liverpool, on June 6th and 7th. Tickets for the performance are priced at £5.
Ian D. Hall