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| REVIEWS | BY GERALD ISAAMAN |
 She was Ken Barlow’s girlfriend in Coronation Street, is a prolific novelist and playwright. No wonder Camden Town’s Beryl Bainbridge is short of time. She tells Gerald Isaaman about her new play... |
But the formidable Beryl Bainbridge, prolific author of highly successful novels and plays since the 1960s that have earned her royal invitations, literary fame and prize-winning recognition, is now confronted with a dilemma. She has been commissioned to transform her novel, Injury Time, winner of a prestigious Whitbread award in 1977, into a play aimed at the West End. And she is finding it difficult, the more so as she also wants to write another book. “But I can’t do two things at once, and that slightly worries me,” she insists at her home in Albert Street, Camden Town. “When you come back to my earlier books, as in this case, you wonder how you did it, where it all came from. It really surprises you. “Writing plays is probably the hardest discipline of all. It’s entirely different from anything else. It seems at first that you don’t have to bother with those pages of prose and description. But it’s pretty difficult. To tell the truth, these days I really haven’t been drawn towards writing plays. “If I had come up with a perfectly original idea rather than something from one of my own books then it would probably be slightly easier. You are not hidebound then worrying about having to alter some of the material in the book. “It is difficult to do, as you are so immersed in the way it was originally in the book. So I am struggling with it. I hope to finish it in a month or two. Then we shall see if it is any good and what happens to it.” It is not as if Dame Beryl, now 68, lacks the talent and experience, even though she complains that it is a decade since she wrote a play. She lists eight in Who’s Who, including some for television. She also wrote a stage version of her 1989 novel, An Awfully Big Adventure, for the Liverpool Playhouse in 1992, and later it became a film, as did her novels The Dressmaker and Sweet William. And her own early career as an actress – she once played Ken Barlow’s girlfriend in Coronation Street – means she has theatrical knowledge and skills that come in more than handy. You can add to that the fact that nowadays she is the theatre critic for the Oldie magazine, dropping in at matinées in Shaftesbury Avenue and elsewhere to see the latest offerings, among them Sean Bean playing MacBeth. “It is terribly exciting and he is very good but he plays it with a Lancashire accent, and that fudged me,” she says. She has also been to the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre to see Moray Watson in Hugh Massingbird’s one-man play, Ancestral Voices. “That was fascinating because Moray was with me at the Liverpool Playhouse,” she recalls. “I loved going back stage afterwards for some old time stuff with him, remembering all those names from the past.” She describes Injury Time as a “black comedy”, which was vaguely inspired by the Balcombe Street Siege. It tells how a divorced woman invites her married boyfriend to bring two friends to a dinner party, which is then, incredibly, invaded by a woman pushing a baby in a pram, followed by two gunmen who take them all hostage. “So what was going to be this quiet dinner party is suddenly on nationwide telly,” explains Beryl. “That’s the rough idea.” She has to fit in her writing with increasing demands on her time to attend festivals, book signing sessions and readers’ circles – all the result of her high profile as a three-times Booker Prize nominee and a much admired writer. “Meeting your fans is always very beneficial,” she says. “I have to turn down a fair proportion of invitations otherwise I would be swamped.” Yet she has no regrets about giving up the stage. “I was quite shy and nervous,” she admits. “What was good about it is that a training like that in the theatre gives you a head start when you go round giving lectures and talks. You know both how to project your voice and you have got the confidence.” She also worries about who might star in Injury Time. “The dilemma is that, as I wrote it all those years ago, the people I imagine might be in it are now too old. They’re my time, 20 years ago, and we lived differently then. My God we did. It’s a different world we’re living in now. “The West End? That’s the hope. You go out first to a provincial theatre – if there are any left by then – and if it’s any good the play will come to town. It really will be fascinating to see what happens, and if my name goes up in lights.” |
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