Adaptations

On being done with fish

Hello,

I’m back!

I’ve missed writing these. I never meant to stop.

Why did I?

I considered this in my last post (in 2024!) but the updated version is: The last few years really took it out of me for various reasons and it seemed wiser to reserve my energy for my creative work and to keep my thoughts for my diary. There was also the reality of my being attached to a couple of institutions that people care a great deal about (and try to divine the workings of from any missives). This made me warier of saying that much lest any of it be taken as a reflection of the attitudes to those institutions. Which meant my many aborted attempts at restarting were all distinctly small fry topics. “The Art of the (Writing) Snack” is top of my drafts list and…while I’d still love to write that actually, it isn’t why I started this in the first place.

Now…becoming a more private person has absolutely made me happier but there was a discipline, curiosity and small community that this newsletter fostered that I’m keen to find again. So I am committing to bringing it back. Not once a week, but once a month at least, aiming to go out on the last weekend (so you should get the next one on the 26th April). If you’ve got too many of these things in your inbox, this is your chance to unsubscribe with no offence taken. If you’re still interested in reading Patelograms, I hope you’ll do so with good faith and an understanding that it reflects my views alone.

While I can’t promise there will be a coherent theme to what I write, I’m definitely going to point to things that I loved each month in the hope you might love them too.

In this first post I’m going to talk a little about what I’ve been working on and some thoughts that had been swirling as I approached my 40th birthday earlier in March.

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JOHN

Look, I’ll tell you a story, all right? I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish. I had 60 goddamn fish tanks in my house. I’d skin-dive to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus, Holacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon capistratus. You name it. Then one morning, I woke up and said, “F*ck fish.” I renounce fish, I will never set foot in that ocean again. That’s how much “f*ck fish.” That was 17 years ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean. And I love the ocean.

SUSAN

But why?

JOHN

Done with fish.

My university dissertation looked at the works of Charlie Kaufman (I know, I know) in relation to shifting identities. One of those was a movie called Adaptation. If you don’t know the film, it’s tricky to summarise but I didn’t love when I first watched it. Then I absolutely loved it on rewatch for my dissertation. Maybe I’d hate it if I watched it again but the quotation above has stuck with me and I think about it more than maybe anything else.

The pandemic was when it really sat in my head as I saw scores of my contemporaries leave the arts. Theatre in particular is an industry powered by love that has no consistent capacity to return it. When I started out, it felt inevitable that talent and passion would find its reward. I’ve been around long enough now to witness how some of the best writers, actors, designers and directors cannot find viable careers let alone glamorous success. There is little ability to make that just. And also a real…shame I suppose in admitting that it’s not working out. If not that, then the constant hamster wheel stops one from examining if it’s worth it.

When the industry was forced to stop, there was a moment to consider if this life was still bringing any contentment. A lot of people I knew decided that it didn’t. Most of them have gone on to find other joys. I’m sure many of them would not have had thought that was possible. Because people come into the arts to follow a passion and to have an all-encompassing passion feels so rare that you can become a hostage to it. The idea that anything else could give you the same satisfaction feels ridiculous.

And yet.

This (ironically?) filtered through into a play I was writing. As everyone and their mother knows, for nearly a decade now I have been working on a play centred around the relationship between George and Marcia Lucas and while George’s trajectory is both well-documented and familiar, Marcia’s was both harder to excavate and harder to grasp. A supremely talented, highly rated film editor, deciding she wants to knock it all on the head and do something else. When I was younger and hungrier for success, this felt unfathomable. Being older now, getting to grow as a person alongside the play, it makes more sense to me than anything else. Maybe Marcia was done with fish (if not quite as intensely as John).

Last year, the day after my 39th birthday, I found out my partner was pregnant and had my own minor done-with-fish as a thought instantly came to me - “I am so ready for my life to be about something else”. In fact it was more than a thought, it was a truth so undeniable, so irrepressible that I knew I could not keep living and working as I had been. It stayed hauntingly true even after we discovered a few weeks later that the pregnancy wasn’t going to work out, it’s still true a year on and I have spent that whole time grappling with what that means.

Invariably a birthday makes you think back on what has changed for you between now and the last big interval. I spent my 30th birthday in the writers room for Doctor Who, back when it was all still secretive. They got me a cake, Chris gave me a small R2D2 that George Lucas had given him, and I snuck back to London for the night where I got absolutely hammered with good friends in Chandos and the Players’s Bar before catching a 5am train back to the room and trying to stare away the hangover. The beats of the episode board I was squinting had shifted even in the brief time I’d been away. They would morph entirely again as they wound up becoming an episode I went on to write a few years later.

I spent my 40th birthday in a workshop for an adaptation of Cloud Atlas that I’ve been working on for the last three years. It’s a book that changed the way I thought about protagonism in both senses of the meaning. Even if it goes nowhere, it has been the honour of my theatre career to have worked on it and there’s no greater pleasure for me than to be in a room with smart, playful actors after so many hours alone. It’s also HORRIBLE as you quickly realise what does and mostly doesn’t work in this script you’ve been poured your whole self into. But that is part of how a script evolves into a truer version of itself and I try to remember that that pain is a privilege. (And they also got me a cake).

Brief sidebar: I had a good-natured conversation with a critic at a party who was frustrated with the amount of theatre adaptations writers take on. I’m sympathetic to that frustration and wish it was less the case but the reality is that adaptations are a path many writers take in order to access a scale they would otherwise not be trusted with. The judgement of who gets trusted is maddening, of course, but while the world is what it is, writers will find whatever method they can to fulfil ambitions to tell larger stories.

Where am I going with this? I’m not sure. Shall I attempt a neat conclusion that likely doesn’t hold up? OK, so I THINK ageing well is partly a process of gently unmooring yourself from meaning while trying to stay sane. How you do that is the tricky bit. For me, while the first half (fingers crossed) of my life was defined by tightening my grip on what I loved, the second half I suspect will be one where I try to hold that love a little more loosely. Not because I want to love any less but because I sense now that it is not the grip that defines passion. Passion will always define itself, sometimes beyond how you are able to understand it in the moment, so all you can do (I THINK) is stay curious about it.

I am still ready for my life to be about something else. I have taken on roles that allow that to be the case. Writing though, remains with me for now. It was my passion as a kid writing short stories on the kitchen table. It was my passion as I wrote on-demand tales for school friends for a couple of quid. It was my passion as I realised while film was my first love, theatre was all I could think about. Writing remains my passion now at a point where I’ve become a much weirder writer than I expected to be. I feel like I targeted the mainstream, passed through it entirely and am off somewhere I don’t know. Wherever that is, I am excited to see it.

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On to something I loved then…

This month, it’s a play called Welcome to Pemfort by Sarah Power which I was really taken by when I read it last year. I’m a sucker for work that properly grapples with a hard question (rather than posing the hard question and answering the easier one) and this play approaches its question with a real canniness and deftness of tone. It’s now running in a well judged production at Soho Theatre until 18th April that’s worth catching if you can.

A sneaky second thing - Exeunt is back! If you’re reading this there’s a high probability you know that already but I for one am delighted and theatre criticism is better for it. If you want good things to exist, we need to pay for them so I hope you’ll consider supporting Exeunt 2.0. Deeper engagement with work creates a stickiness between artists and critics that helps makes theatre a community.

NEXT TIME ON PATELOGRAMS…The Art Of The (Writing) Snack

See you then,

Vin x

P.S. For anyone wondering - yes, the cats are still about. I took them in believing I was looking after them for their “final years”. Instead, they’ve stayed with me for my entire thirties. They’re 18 and 1/3 years so we’re definitely Approaching The End but, God, I’ve been lucky to share this time with them.

I am so very lucky.