Who Will We All Become?
Debut playwright Michael Reid talks to Ben Harrison, co-artistic director of Grid Iron, and adapter and director of Mayflies
By Michael Reid
Ben Harrison came to Mayflies through his daughter.
“She said, ‘I’ve read this amazing book; it’s basically your life.'”
He could see what she meant. Andrew O’Hagan’s novel begins among a group of young men immersed in the music and politics of the 1980s, a world Harrison recognised immediately. “There’s a character called Noodles who is very bookish, and I was the nerdy bookish guy.” He even admits to once taking Sartre’s Nausea to a nightclub because he thought it might make him more attractive to girls.
He read Mayflies quickly, the final sixty pages “in floods of tears.”
Now Harrison has adapted and directed Mayflies for Grid Iron, staging it in the rear warehouse of Brown’s of Leith, a former metalworks. The story moves between two versions of the same friendship: Tully Dawson and Noodles as young men on an ecstatic trip to Manchester in 1986, and three decades later, when Tully is dying and asks his oldest friend to help him end his life on his own terms.
The novel draws heavily on O’Hagan’s own life and his friendship with Keith Martin, which makes adaptation a complex proposition: fictional characters sit very close to real people, some of whom are still here to see themselves reflected back.
I wanted to ask Harrison about this because my own first play, Safety, draws broadly on five years I spent working in mental health. It is entirely fictionalised, but even at that distance I’ve found myself thinking about responsibility. What happens when you turn experiences involving other people into a story?
For Harrison, “it’s all to do with trust. Do we trust people with this material?”
O’Hagan spent time in rehearsals but gave Harrison considerable freedom. “He’s so full of feeling, but he’s so emotionally tough and resilient,” Harrison says. “He trusted us so implicitly with the material.”
There have been stranger connections too. Jude Bain, who plays the young Tully, discovered that his mother knows and works with Keith Martin’s sister, who was, Harrison says, delighted by Bain’s casting. Several of the men on whom the wider group of friends is based have now seen the production. Their responses have been emotional but “ultimately positive.”
“Really, what we’re talking about is catharsis”. Although, his chief concern as an adapter was not to make the story sentimental.
“The book is so gloriously beady-eyed and unsentimental, and that’s why people are moved to tears by it. It’s just heart-stoppingly accurate.”
Mayflies is, among many other things, an unusually open account of love between male friends. Harrison has noticed the production drawing a particular audience into the warehouse: “men of a certain age — my age, mid-fifties — perhaps not your average theatregoer. Quite a few people for whom punk hasn’t quite died yet.”
“There’s people in that room that I haven’t often seen in theatres.”
The men in the story have inherited very different ideas about masculinity. Harrison talks about the gulf between Tully and his father, Woodbine, who is “consumed by anger and sadness.” He remembers O’Hagan telling him that men of his father’s generation and class “had never held a bunch of flowers.”
“That’s literal, but that’s metaphorical as well, isn’t it? They’d never got in touch with their gentleness, with their femininity.”
For Harrison, the music of the 1980s offered an alternative. “What happened in the 80s, with people like Morrissey, is that he gave you permission to be human and male in a very different way. In a very androgynous way, actually.”
One of Harrison’s favourite lines in the play is: “Who do we all become?”
The question arrives as the characters contemplate the distance between the boys who went to Manchester and the middle-aged men they have become. “How do we now, years later, become someone who’s concerned about working up an appetite for dinner?”
Tully is different. Harrison quotes the book, which calls him “the master of the reversal of expected outcomes”: countercultural as a young man and still determined, at the end of his life, not to accept the ending prescribed for him.
“The expected outcome is to have a slow, lingering death in a hospital in eastern Glasgow. But no, that’s not going to be my outcome. My outcome: go to the best restaurant in Zurich, where James Joyce died, and go out in a blaze of delight.”
That continuity between younger and older selves was central to the production. Harrison spent more than seven months casting, wanting it to feel plausible that one actor could become the other. But in the first workshop he discovered something else.
“I always knew that the older characters would look back at their youth. What I didn’t realise quite so much is how, in theatre, the young characters can look into their futures.”
The theatrical adaptation allows the boys to see what is coming. Young Tully takes a pill from the hand of the older Noodles. The younger men sit at the back of the gig and quietly watch what life has in store for them.
In a wedding scene, younger and older selves dance together.
Watching it, I was moved by the way the two generations weave in and out of one another, grasping hands and shoulders for Strip the Willow or The Gay Gordons. It feels like a ceilidh across time: the same lives briefly sharing the same dance, at once inseparable, and impossibly far apart.
Harrison laughs. “A ceilidh across time. I might take that as the title of my autobiography.”
Mayflies runs at Brown’s of Leith (Rear Warehouse), Venue 320, until 30 August.