Coffee at the National: A Conversation with Lucy
Caldwell
Lucy Caldwell, author of Where They Were Missed, and award-winning plays The River and
Leaves, talks to our fiction editor.
I first catch sight of Lucy Caldwell in the bookshop of the
National Theatre, paying for a handful of books at the till.
“Oh hello,” she says, greeting me with a radiant smile, “Do
you mind just waiting while I sign for these?”
We go to the theatre café, braving the doubtful weather to
sit outside, under a sun shade, watching the skateboarders,
joggers, tourists and pigeons that make up most of the
South Bank’s passers by on a summer afternoon. Lucy
shows me her spoils: Winsome Pinnock’s One Under,
Marina Carr’s On Rafferty’s Hill, Stuart Carolan’s Defender
of the Faith, and the Shell Connections anthology of Plays
for Young People 2005.
An eclectic collection, all the titles are connected in some
way with Caldwell’s work, projects she would like to do, or
particular interests.
“On Rafferty’s Hill was produced by Druid, the theatre
company that will be producing my play Leaves,” she
explains, “Stuart Carolan jointly won last year’s George
Devine award, I would really like to write one of the Shell
Connections plays, and Winsome Pinnock is just one of my
favourite writers.”
It’s been an extraordinary six months for the 24 year-old
writer. Having won the PMA award at Edinburgh for her first
play The River, she was offered an eight week placement at
the National Theatre last Autumn. There she wrote her
second play, Leaves, which has just scooped the
prestigious George Devine award for Most Promising
Playwright. She has just been commissioned by the Royal
Court to write a play for their main stage. Meanwhile, her
first novel Where they were Missed was published in Britain
in March, having received considerable acclaim in Ireland.
She is now working again in ‘The Old Kitchens’ at the
National, reading and preparing for her latest project, a
play, set in the literary salons of 1830s Paris, to be directed
by Natalie Abrahami.
“The play examines ideas of what it means to be a woman
and class,” she says, waving away a pigeon which has
come to inspect my bag.
“Nowadays it’s very hard to have both a career and a family.
Giving the play a contemporary setting would have made it
feel too much like an issue play, but setting it in the past
gives you the freedom to explore these ideas. It’s too simple
to say ‘men oppress women’ but by exploring the way
things happen at different levels of society, you can show
things that you couldn’t directly say.”
Caldwell explains that the play will draw heavily upon music,
featuring a harpist and, possibly, a cameo appearance for
Chopin. Having abandoned the original idea of adapting a
George Sand play, she and Abrahami were keen to retain
the feel of Sand’s milieu and spent a weekend together
reading, talking and “coming up with the world.”
They were particularly drawn to the richness of the
nineteenth century Parisian literary scene, where, amidst
the clash of the Ancien Règime and the Nouveau Riche, the
salons, run by women, provided a meeting-place for artists
from all strata of society.
As well as the play, Caldwell has also begun writing her
second novel. In contrast to Where they were Missed, a
lyrical and moving exploration of growing up in Belfast in the
1980s, her second book is set amidst the ex-pat community
in Bahrain. According to the author, it will be on a grander
scale than her first book, reflecting something of the scope
of works such as Sarah Waters’ The Nightwatch, and the
“big” nineteenth century novels. It will also contain
Caldwell’s first foray into third person narrative.
“I was never able to write in the third person before this,”
she explains. “It always felt like being a nineteenth century
God in control of my characters and there was something
very uncomfortable about it. That’s probably one of the
reasons why I like writing plays so much; there’s nothing
between the audience and the voices of the characters.”
Resistant to the assumption that writers can only excel in
one field, an assumption which she feels is far more
prevalent in England than in her native Northern Ireland,
Caldwell enjoys switching between the disciplines of play
and prose-writing.
“It did worry me for a while,” she says. “When I started to
write plays I thought ‘perhaps I’m simply a competent
enough writer to write a play and young enough to show
promise’, but I don’t worry about it now. That said, I do find
that I have to focus on one or the other at a time; if I try to
write prose whilst I’m working on a play it becomes too full
of dialogue or I start giving my play characters long,
eloquent speeches which wouldn’t work on the stage.”
For Caldwell, the way to focus on a project is to immerse
herself in the form, ideas and subject she is tackling. Before
she took up her first placement at the National Theatre she
“just read plays for three months”; when commissioned to
write a short story on wedding feasts for the BBC she
travelled to Romania to attend a gypsy wedding, and “when
it transpired that [her] second novel wanted to be set in the
Middle East” she spent a lot of time visiting mosques,
Muslim families, and, of course, Bahrain.
“You can get facts and figures out of books,” she says. “But
I needed to go there. I needed to know how the air smelt,
what the sunrise looked like, the atmosphere of the place.”
This passionate immersion of herself in her work and her
love for it are two of the most striking and inspiring things
about Caldwell. For so young a writer, she already has a
way of working and a commitment to following her artistic
instincts, which is very specific to her and which she trusts
implicitly.
For Caldwell, writing is “a process of discovery”, a journey
for which she knows the final destination, but not the route.
“I don’t plan, but I always know the ending when I start
writing something. That’s one of the first things to come. I
hate it when things just dribble off.”
Once the ending and the subject are in place, Caldwell
loses no time in getting words on the page. After a year of
research, the first 25,000 words of her second novel were
written in just 10 days. Rather than revising work on-screen,
she prefers to write subsequent drafts from scratch because
this “keeps things fresh”. She wrote the final draft of Leaves
with the manuscript face down on the floor next to her chair.
“I work fast,” she says. “You’ve got to if something is alive
because there is only a limited window of opportunity before
it starts to die. It can be hard. Getting used to the slight
depression when you finish something is hard. But I have to
trust my instincts. I find myself suddenly interested in
something and start to work on that.”
Trusting her instincts has already taken Caldwell on several
journeys through very varied terrain. Indeed, while many
writers appear reluctant to explore settings outside their
experiences, Caldwell seems to relish the challenge of
embracing both the familiar and the remote in her writing
and ranging freely across the geographical and temporal
landscapes.
Are there any settings or themes that she would feel
hesitant about tackling?
“I don’t think – at least I can’t think of – anything that I
wouldn’t, hypothetically at least, write about. Although it’s
very interesting because place is always very active and
integral to my stories.
“One of the best quotations I ever read was by Henry
James on the old chestnut of ‘writers should write what they
know’. I’m paraphrasing him, and so probably mangling him
horribly, but the essence of what he said was that a young,
unmarried girl could walk down a staircase past an officers’
mess while the officers were having tea, and from only that
glimpse of their ‘real’ world she could, with her internal or
‘writerly’ life, conjure up a whole novel’s worth of story and
sentiment about them.
“I suppose in the end you just have to hope that you’re
portraying something as truthfully as you can. By that I don’t
mean ‘factually’, because of course I’m writing fiction, not
journalism or even travel-writing, but rather that the novel
and the characters are true to themselves.
"A great friend of mine once said that you have to write with
a brave heart and a bold sword, and I always repeat that to
myself in times of doubt.”
For Caldwell, the biggest dilemma so far has been deciding
how to handle the Troubles in her first novel. As a Northen
Irish writer, she was acutely aware that there would be
“certain expectations” of a novel set partly in Belfast in the
1980s.
“I had to work through what it meant to be a Northern Irish
writer with the burden of the Troubles,” she explains. “Part
of me didn’t want to mention them at all, but that would
have been like having ‘the elephant in the room’. In the end
I decided that the Troubles would be there like the weather
is there; people comment on them and they change
people’s plans, but they are not the subject of the book.”
Although part of the novel is set in Belfast where Caldwell
grew up, Where they were Missed is not autobiographical.
The central character, Saoirse, is in fact eight years older
than Caldwell would have been, a fact which meant that
Caldwell could not automatically “reach for [her] own
childhood” when writing the book. Yet, despite this, Caldwell
is conscious of a “funny alchemy” between reality and fiction
in certain episodes in the novel. In particular, she cites an
event in one of the early drafts which her sister maintains
she can remember happening in real life, but which
Caldwell was certain she had fabricated.
“The book isn’t autobiographical,” she says, watching a
woman on a neighbouring table fight to save a cake from
the clutches of the birds. “But here and there the gap
between real and not-real is blurry. It is a product of my
thoughts, my experiences, and the way I looked at things at
the time I was writing. Only I could have written that novel.”
Despite her belief in her vocation as a writer, Caldwell is
very conscious of the influence that other people have had
on her writing. Having taken part in the Royal Court Young
Writers’ Programme and subsequently worked as Senior
Reader at the Royal Court, she stresses the importance of
the support she got from the tutors and editors there,
picking out Simon Stephens and Graham Whybrow in
particular. She is also very grateful to the National Theatre
Other writers are also a source of great inspiration and
fascination for Caldwell. I ask her who her favourites are
and receive a long list in reply featuring Elizabeth Bowen,
Patrick Hamilton, Dambudzo Marechera, Chinua Achebe,
Yeats, MacNeice and Flaubert, among many others.
For Caldwell the best art is “redemptive, not in a religious,
but in a spiritual sense”. This is something she strives for in
her own writing. It was one of the catalysts for the creation
of Leaves, which began partly as an exploration of the
reasons why the suicide rate among young people in
Northern Ireland is one of the highest in Western Europe.
“Art can explore or represent things that we can’t talk about
directly,” she says. “It can be cathartic. As Marina Warner
says, story-telling is a way of apprehending truths. Of
course it’s entertaining too, but at its best it’s also
redemptive.”
There is a practical aspect to the redemptive possibilities of
writing for Caldwell too; through writing Leaves she came
into contact with a bereaved mother in Northern Ireland who
intends to start a support group for the families of suicide
victims. Lucy hopes to become involved with this. She is
also working with the Pushkin Foundation to help teachers
develop skills for teaching creative writing. Eventually she
would like to become involved with charities working to
record the aural tradition of story-telling in Africa.
“I’ve always thought that I would be an aid-worker if I
weren’t a writer,” she says. “I hope that perhaps I might be
able to do it through writing.”
In the meantime, however, there is a play to write and a
novel to finish. Lucy Caldwell gathers up her books and
heads back to ‘The Old Kitchen’ to do a couple of hours’
reading before dinner and I make my way home, inspired to
have met a writer who is so confidently and passionately
committed to her art, and yet so free from arrogance and
affectation. We leave the South Bank to the pigeons.
‘Where they were Missed’ is published by Viking, price
£10.99.
Ann Morgan
I've been lucky enough to write for a variety of publications both in the UK and abroad. Here are some examples of my work.