British Playwright and Author Steve Newman Shares Valuable Insights on the Writing Life

Steve Newman  inside Holy Trinity Church.*
Photo credit: Hilary Newman

Early this summer I began sharing my work on the Medium, a blogging platform for writers and readers, created by Ev Williams. It wasn't long before I saw a piece about Hemingway by a writer named Steve Newman. It was only natural that this would catch my attention, first because Hemingway's writing served as a catalyst for my own writing career. The second reason is self-evident.

Because the quality of what Steve wrote was consistently high I began following him on Medium and soon learned he lived in the same town where Shakespeare was born. A British playwright like the Bard, he shares a lifelong passion for theater and literature. He graciously accepted when I asked if we could do this interview and capture his thoughts about the writing life.

EN: Perhaps we can begin with a brief overview of your career.

Steve Newman: When my second play, Tamarind, was produced in 1988, at the Half Moon Theatre in London, before moving to the Edinburgh Fringe, I was living and working in Southport (a small seaside resort in Lancashire), earning a living as an oriental carpet buyer for a large department store. At that time hundreds of Afghan rugs were arriving in the UK depicting the Russian occupation of that much fought over country, showing violence in a very graphic style. I bought dozens of them, creating quite a stir when the local media got hold of the story. Even though we raised a good deal of money to help displaced Afghans, the owner of the store became increasingly unhappy with the publicity. It cost me my job, which proved to be something of a blessing.

I moved back to Warwickshire working as an assistant manager of a filling station in the small village where I was born. Working shifts gave me space to write, and study for a degree in history with the Open University. I graduated in 2003.

When on late shifts one of my regular customers was the head voice coach at the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company), an elderly lady who spotted I’d been writing, and asked to read some of my stuff. When she left I thought no more of it until a couple of evenings later when she called in again to fill up, and told me how much she’d enjoyed reading a couple of the short stories, and a page or two of a play, but was less then complimentary with regard another piece, which she thought was rubbish, but as she left she shouted back, in very strong language, “…don’t stop, keep on ‘effing’ writing.”

I did, and in the late 1996 I was commissioned to write a musical play about an all-girl jazz orchestra fronted by a singer I rather admired. The result was Am I Blue - A Jazz Musical, produced for the RSC Fringe Festival in 1997. It was good fun, with a good deal of comedy, plus half a dozen songs. It was great to work with a live band, too. The show then toured a number of outlying south Warwickshire villages.

In late 1997, after a boozy party, I co-founded – with two other Stratford playwrights – The Bird of Prey Theatre Company. It was, and still is, a company dedicated to new work, and in the six years of its initial life BoP produced fourteen new plays by writers from around the world, including four of my own, two of which – Ancient Pinnacles, and Portrait of the Artist – were produced at the RSC Summerhouse in 2001, and again at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham. The following year my Hemingway play, Across the River, was also produced at the Crescent.

In 1999 I directed Reg Mitchell’s musical version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at Stratford’s Civic Hall (now The Playhouse), which was extremely stressful, aiding the aging process no end, but worth it.

For many years I’ve written features for magazines on military, social, cultural, literary and theatrical history. I’ve also written dozens of RSC reviews over the last twenty years or so.

In 2008 my wife and I created the Stratford-upon-Avon International Festival of Literature, which was held at The Shakespeare Hotel, here in Stratford, over a weekend in April, with guests that included Canadian actor, director and playwright, Brian Gordon Sinclair, the late Sebastian Peake, the writer and musician son of novelist Mervyn Peake, and the author of The Outsider, Colin Wilson. It was a great concept (and weekend) but couldn’t, in the end, compete with the Stratford Festival of Literature (which sneaked up on us a couple of weeks later), which continues with great success. During the festival Brian presented me with the Canadian Hemingway on Stage Award, for services to the Memory of Ernest Hemingway. I’m very proud of that.

Later in 2008 Hilary and I created Newman Books. So far we have published five titles, including, in October 2016, award winning poet Dallin Chapman’s first novel, Tree of Shadow, which received good reviews. Its sequel, and the second part of a trilogy, Isle of Deep Waters, was published on September 7th 2018. The third volume is coming out in January 2019.

2010 saw the re-invention of The Bird of Prey Theatre Company, with a re-staging of my diner play, 1651: An Evening with Oliver Cromwell, at the Dirty Duck (The Actors pub, just down the road from the theatre), and later for The Battle of Worcester Society at the Commandery in Worcester, which was the Royalist HQ during the Second Battle of Worcester in 1651, a battle from which Charles the Pretender (later Charles II) fled. In 2016 I was commissioned, by The Worshipful Company of Bakers, to write a dinner play to commemorate the 350th anniversary of The Great Fire of London. The resulting drama, The Great Fire of London Remembered: An Evening with Samuel Pepys – which included five new songs - was performed, for five nights at The Baker’s Hall, a splendid venue in the City of London. The script had to be changed slightly every night to accommodate different City of London Guild members.

Over the years I’ve studied and written extensively about American literature, not least Ernest Hemingway.

EN: When did you first begin to see yourself as a writer?

SN: After a read through of an early play of mine, Doughboy, about a horse in the First World War (don’t ask) I could certainly see myself as a writer, and kept bashing away on my little portable typewriter (I replaced it with a word processor in 1987), concentrating on learning to write plays by reading plays: everything from Shakespeare, Shaw, Pinter, Miller, Drinkwater, O’Neill, Priestley (who is rather underrated these days), Delaney, Rattigan, Dunn, Hellman, Maugham, Sherwood, a lot of Chekov, and Wilder, plus a good many screenwriters; in fact just about every playwright and screenwriter I could lay my hands on. It’s only by reading, and widely, that you can write.

Of course, living in Stratford, I was able to see the odd play or two at the RST (Royal Shakespeare Theatre), all the time watching the stagecraft very carefully, and how certain directors use dialogue, lighting and set design.

After Tamarind my playwriting ground to a halt for a bit, so I then tried my hand at reviewing, with my first attempt – I forget which Shakespeare play – accepted by a national theatre magazine. They paid well too. I wrote for them until the husband and wife team, who owned and edited the magazine, decided to give up. It was a huge learning curve for me, especially when faced with some really bad productions.

By 1997, when we created The Bird of Prey Theatre Company (it was a sort of antidote to Bill Shakespeare, the ‘Swan of Avon’), I realised I could actually do it, and do it reasonably well. But it took a good ten years to learn.

EN: What was it that most fascinated you about writing?

SN: For a playwright the most fascinating thing about writing is seeing your characters, especially historical characters (and I tend write about historical characters) come alive: firstly on the page, and then on the stage. It can be a very emotional experience indeed when an actor first stands up and looks at you as say Walt Whitman, or Genghis Khan, and speaks your lines. You know then that you have achieved something just a bit special. Thereafter it becomes a drug: you have to do it again, and again.

It’s the same when writing magazine features about writers, which I did for twenty years or more (and still do), breathing life into well known, and not so well known names, and how their work can change an individual, and then a whole generation, and future generations, and the world in which they live. The most interesting writers I’ve tackled so far would be D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Denys Val Baker, Martha Gellhorn, and Edgar Wallace.

I’ve also written features about composers, jazz musicians and soldiers, most interestingly Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Vaughan Williams, Duke Ellington, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who was a great writer as well as a soldier and spy.

EN: Someone once said that the British are more concerned about making art, whereas Americans are more concerned with fame. I realize this is a generalization, but I get the sense writing well (art) is a concern of yours. What were the steps you took to improve in the craft of writing?
Also, you’ve drawn a measure of inspiration from Ernest Hemingway. What are the most striking features of Hemingway’s writing?

SN: I don’t see too much of a difference between the American and British outlook on art. I think both countries have, over the last couple of hundred years, created an impressive number of writers, composers, musicians and artists that have changed the very shape, word and sound of every aspect of our lives.

If we go back to the 19th century and look at Walt Whitman for instance: we have a man driven to write a poetry that was passionate and different, a kind of poetry he’d never come across on any bookshelf, or read before, with the exception of his Welsh grandmother’s Bible, which gave him the determination, and the vocabulary, to write an ocean and a prairie of work that changed his life, and ours, forever. Realising what he’d created he was determined to make a name for himself – to get his work read - and, as a consequence, he became concerned with fame. It never made him any real money, but brought him recognition and a lasting reputation. He’d worked for it.

Britain was little different. Think of Dickens, who had discovered and mined a resource within himself that had to be written down and then exploited – by himself – because he knew it to be good, and, like Whitman, realised it was somehow important. As a result he sought and found fame, then worked himself to death.

Think of Sam Clemens, and the work of his creation, Mark Twain, and the seeking of fame thereafter, and the influence it had on one of the 20th century’s most important writers – in the US and UK -- Ernest Hemingway, whose fame came about through the growth of a different element – the publisher’s editor.

Perhaps the most famous literary editor of all, in the US, is Max Perkins, who brought fame and fortune to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, James Jones, and the South African novelist, Alan Paton.

In the UK, it would not be a single publisher’s editor that brought writers to the attention of the reading public as much as other writers (certainly in the first third of the 20th century) who were part of the so called Bloomsbury Set, most notably the novelist David Garnett, who helped bring novelist D.H. Lawrence to prominence, a writer who (like his namesake T.E. Lawrence) always backed into the limelight and then wondered why he was the centre of attraction. This happened spectacularly with his self-published novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book that earned him £4,000, no small sum in the late 1920s, and a reputation for writing ‘dirty books’ which did the sales of his other books no harm at all. Sadly he didn’t live long enough to enjoy the money.

But generally speaking the above mentioned writers -- and many who shared their time, and came after them in both the UK and US -- wrote because it was part of their psyche to do so: because they read good writers, writers who had also read well and long.

In the States, in the 1950s and 60s, it would be a predominance of excellent magazines, such as The New Yorker and Life, that rightly exploited the ever increasing demand for good contemporary writing -- especially after World War II -- by a public in search of writers who might be able to explain what was going on in their new nuclear world. Those same readers also read the books by American literary historian, Van Wyck Brooks, who took delight in reminding them in splendid and clear writing of their rich literary heritage. It was a golden period of quality publishing. In post-World War II Britain it would be the BBC who promoted a great deal of new writing, as would Penguin books, and, from the 1970s, such commentators as the writer and broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg, who continues to remind the British of their literary past and hopes for the future. A national treasure.

All I would say to aspiring writers is read, and having read write. What makes good writing is good reading: it is food and nourishment.

As a young man I found such nourishment in the works of Hemingway. I also found an honesty in his writing, an honesty born out of his own readings of D.H. Lawrence and Tolstoy, two writers I had been reading before I found Hemingway on a bookshelf in a small cottage in North Wales not long before he shot himself.

Hemingway was an absolute revelation that is hard to explain, but when I read his story ‘A Cat in the Rain’ on a cold Welsh afternoon, something clicked inside my head and I realised that reading is writing and writing reading. It is as essential as food and drink. Charles Dickens had pushed me in the right direction, but his world was far too populated by over-developed characters, characters who suffered or created hardships. It was, is, writing that leaves you exhausted. Lawrence and Tolstoy (although Tolstoy suffers a bit from Dickensamania) are able to bring you up close to a moving, revolving world made of flesh and blood and desire and sexuality. You are moved hugely by it, you never want to let it go. But you cannot enter, only hang on. It is their world.

Hemingway takes you all the way in, so much so that you immediately understand his language, his emotions and his contradictions, his selfishness and his generosity. His addictions, and his madness. His gentleness, aggression, and, not least, his ability to lead you into danger. You become his bravery. You understand them because they are yours too.

EN: You live in the vicinity of where William Shakespeare was born. In what ways has Shakespeare inspired you or influenced your career?

SN: Shakespeare?

As I write this Shakespeare lies in his grave inside Holy Trinity Church, a ten minute walk from where I’m sitting. Today he would still recognise the church he is buried in and was baptised in, with the exception of a spire built in 1768, a year before the first Shakespeare Birthday Celebration. He would recognise the congregation too I’m sure, and the people of the town, all 30,000 of them, the majority of whom seldom set foot in the church – it has a congregation of 400 -- or go to see any of his plays, although they’re on six days a week, every week of the year.

Stratford attracts 3.5 million visitors a year and most will come because of Shakespeare, with just 350,000 visiting the church, and a lot less than that stumping up £50 a seat to see one of his plays. But he, and his world, and his home town, and the world he wrote about (not always the same thing) are what people come to experience, and God bless them for doing so.

And it’s the worlds Shakespeare created that attracts the visitors: they want to be a part of it for a while: and it’s still there if you care to look for it. The trees and the flowers, the houses, the streets, relations of the poet, friends of relations of the poet. It is still there, just, in the way native Stratford people speak: in the short-cuts of language you can read in the dialogue of his plays.

Shakespeare is everywhere in the gentle sarcasm and cynicism of speech and thought, and like Hemingway he takes you in, allows you in, keeps you in. Also like Hemingway, Shakespeare is honest: he knows he cannot write comedy, and if the actors play it knowing that, they will have found the joke, and the awkward humour that comes from a situation, from life. The same is true of his darkest of tragedies: they are true and real, and you know, like Hemingway, they come from a truth that cannot be denied.

That is how Shakespeare has influenced me – a truth that cannot be denied.

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You can follow Steve Newman on Medium as well as his personal blog here:
stevenewmanstratfordwriter.wordpress.com

Photo at top of page was taken this morning at Holy Trinity with Steve Newman standing below the 18th century bust of Shakespeare, which looks over his grave.