Reporter: Richard Maguire
It is with great pride that The Reviews Hub announces that a book written by one of our most dedicated reviewers, Maryam Philpott, has just been published. Examining the work of one of Britain’s most successful and talked-about dramatists, James Graham; State of the Nation Playwright looks at Graham’s career from his early days as Writer in Residence at the Finborough Theatre to the National’s production of Dear England, the football-themed play returning to the Olivier in March 2025.
Of course, Dear England is not just about football. Instead, Graham’s play, like most of his work, is concerned with the state of Britain, as Maryam makes clear in her book which is the first study of the Nottinghamshire playwright. Gareth Southgate’s role as England’s manager symbolised a wider hope than bringing it home. If Southgate could fix the national team, could England be somehow fixed, too? However, Southgate’s tactics fell apart in the penalty shoot-out at the 2020 Euro final against Italy and pundits were quick to criticise him. Talking about Southgate, Matt Le Tissier says in Graham’s play, ‘He’s a soft lad in a hard world.’
As Maryam demonstrates in her book, Graham frequently uses celebrities and their downfalls as a ‘proxy’ for wider debates about Britain and its institutions: The Sun’s former editor, Larry Lamb, in 2017’s Ink and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire contestant Charles Ingram in Quiz, also 2017. Through these infamous men, Graham is able to interrogate the media’s position in society, both tabloid journalism and the battle for TV ratings. These plays reveal the amount of power that these institutions can wield, even when they think they are acting in the public’s interest.
Graham has also tackled politics in plays such as This House (2012), about parliamentary whips during the strike-filled 1970s and Labour of Love (2017), a view of one Labour MP spanning 25 years. But his plays are never dry and, as Maryam asserts in her book, to call Graham a political playwright limits the breadth of his social analysis. It’s the mixture of political history and entertainment that first drew Maryam to Graham’s work. His commitment to serious issues and popularism (not always an insult) has meant that he has received continued commercial success. He really hasn’t penned a dud.
Maryam’s project was born out of an interest in how plays are structured, using long-form criticism to analyse theatre trends, and their place in the West End today, drawing on her extensive career in reviewing. In 10 years, she has reviewed over 1,200 shows for The Reviews Hub alone.
At first, she set about writing an article on James Graham, but quickly recognised that what she had to say would fill a book instead. The celebrity section is only one of the themes that Maryam explores in State of the Nation Playwright. She also gives thought to how The Establishment (the Government and the media especially) goes through periods of transition where the unveiling future isn’t always a perfect one. Take, for example, Maryam’s favourite play, Ink, in which The Sun newspaper becomes the property of the most famous celebrity figure. Rupert Murdoch and Lamb wanted to challenge traditional and stuffy Fleet Street but instead, they (we) ended up with Page 3 Girls and tawdry headlines.
The idea of democracy is questioned in This House where MPs in hung Parliaments compromise their ideals in order, for one side, to carry a vote, and for the other, to force another General Election. Jets are laid on for MPs so that they can get to the vote in time while deals are made with Ulster MPs, all making a mockery of the British democratic system, which again is the subject of The Vote performed during the campaigning for 2015’s election.
Maryam’s book ends with a discussion of Graham’s TV work including Brexit: The Uncivil War and Sherwood about the aftermath of the miners’ strike. The latter TV series continued Graham’s fascination with how democracy is policed when an undercover officer was placed within a union of striking miners in Nottinghamshire and a second series is due later in the year.
James Graham is still only 42 so there should be plenty of plays to come. In the last few months, the BBC has commissioned a series based on Dear England, and Punch, Graham’s newest play, is headed to the Young Vic in 2025 after a successful run at the Nottingham Playhouse earlier this year. Even though Graham is still working, Maryam senses that her book encapsulates a certain period of Graham’s writing. With Punch, a true story about a young man who accidentally kills another, Maryam suggests that Graham’s more recent work is focussing on showing how the Establishment (in this case the Criminal Justice System) affects the ‘ordinary’ person and the feelings of powerlessness this creates in working-class communities, a direction that Graham also pursued in his recent adaptation of hit TV show The Boys from the Blackstuff.
When asked if there are any other playwrights or theatremakers that she would like to see a full-length book about, Maryam suggests directors Jamie Lloyd and Rebecca Frecknall who are also text-focused creatives, as well as writers Roy Williams and Clint Dyer whose Death in England trilogy is soon to be performed in full at @sohoplace. They are writers interested in British identity and how we live today. But while she ponders on a new book, she has plenty of reviewing to do.
Maryam Philpott’s book James Graham: State of the National Playwright is published by Palgrave Macmillan and is available now. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-59663-6
Maryam’s own website is called Cultural Capital and can be viewed here
