Interview: John Godber Talks SCARY BIKERS at Trafalgar Studios

Scary Bikers, starring the BAFTA Award-winning duo of John Godber and Jane Thornton, makes its London debut in April at Trafalgar Studios on Whitehall. BWW spoke to Godber, one of the most performed playwrights in Britain, about the play and his work in theatre.

Your accent, like mine, is not metropolitan - it's northern. Do you think theatre has enough presence in the North, or does enough with the concerns of the North?

I think in your neck of the woods it does!

I'm on the board of the Royal Court (and have been for a long time) and that is certainly a theatre by Liverpool for Liverpool because of Liverpool.

The Everyman changed a little bit with its ensemble policy, but when it started, it was a writers' theatre with Bill Morris and Chris Bond and Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, so it was all about making work by people in Liverpool for Liverpool.

Kind of coincidentally, last night I went to see a play called Joan and Jimmy, which is about Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood. That all goes back to where all this started with Joan Littlewood and it segues into my work with Hull Truck.

It wasn't rocket science. It was set up in 1973 and I took over in '84. When I went to run the theatre, I think the box office figures were about 16% a year - in a 194-seater, that wasn't great.

So what do I do? I had a research degree in German Theatre - should I put on a season of Georg Kaiser plays? No. I wrote a play about rugby league and, lo and behold, people came to see it and it turned round the fortunes of the theatre.

This is a long way round of saying that if you make work that is legible, then regional audiences will respond to it. Of course, they're going to see Calendar Girls and Wicked and Dirty Dancing and The Full Monty on tour and Warhorse etc, but for me, what's more important is indigenous, home-grown work that speaks to the community that responds to that theatre.

I saw the second ever performance of Blood Brothers back in '83, so these shows can go a long way from the "ghetto" of the North.

We can segue on that too.

Do you remember a company called Merseyside Young People's Theatre? I was asked to direct that. I was a teacher at the time and a fella called Paul Harman came along to my school and said that he was doing a production of a musical called Blood Brothers. Obviously, I couldn't get out of my teaching contract. The first director was Danny Hiller and subsequently Bob Thompson.

Then you're about authenticity - if the work is authentic in Liverpool, it will have authenticity wherever it plays.

When I go to the cinema, I keep seeing posh English eccentrics on screen and then winning awards - why is it that so much of the acting talent is so middle-class?

It's a good question.

My daughter has just graduated from LIPA [Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts]. And I helped set up Brookside.

Why did she go to LIPA? It's a good course, it's a great city, it's cheaper - money has to play a part, doesn't it? If you go and do an MA in London, it's costing £16,000 for one year at acting school, and if you do a similar MA in the North, it's going to cost you £4,000.

Who is commissioning the films? Who is raising the money? Well, they're probably not people who have done work down Upton pit. That might sound like a 70s trope, but it's as much the case now as when I was graduating from Leeds University back in 1978.

There's been lots of talk. There was a famous dialogue between (was it?) Julie Walters and an actor about working-class boys and so on, and the truth is that if we're not creating work for people to act who are from that level of society, then we're going to lose the authenticity of that voice about this country. It's a simple equation to my mind.

You have a strong hand of appointments in education - what do you get from that and what do you give?

We're going back to Liverpool again! I was elected Professor of Popular Theatre at Liverpool Hope University, and I go and give talks and I'm there if somebody needs information.

Closer to home, we've been involved with a school in Hull called Archbishop Sentamu Academy, a school in a very difficult part of this neck of the woods.

My wife [Jane Thornton] wrote a play last year called Ocho about eight men from Hull who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. We applied for City of Culture funding, but didn't get it, so we decided to raise the £26,000 we needed, mounted the play in Hull and decided to take the play to Barcelona.

Two of the cast were offered scholarships at the Institute of the Arts in Barcelona (which amounted to £100,000 - a win for anybody) and the other members of the cast were offered places at LIPA, at ALRA and at York St John University and other drama schools.

So that's 14 kids from a very tough school in Hull who, overnight almost, had the light go on, and they're going to spread the word in Higher Education.

The perilous state of drama, art and music in our schools is shocking. We need to keep the authentic voice of "The Street" in our colleges and universities, coming through young people who have lived it, so they can express their views about the world that we live in. Consequently, drama, art and music deserve their place in the school curriculum - it's essential. Sadly, that looks like a case of ever-decreasing circles.

It's become almost inevitable, with the baccalaureate, that drama is something you do alongside chess and lacrosse.

I was lucky enough to go to Bretton Hall College, the college for the Arts in the North, there was a fella in the year above me called Ken Robinson, who became the spokesman for the arts education across the planet. Dave Llewellyn, who played a key role in setting up the course at LIPA, was also at Bretton Hall.

The reason our daughter chose that course was its view that we all have the ability to be artists and poets and writers - and nowhere is it better exemplified than in Liverpool, where four lads got a band together and the rest is history. Nothing's changed really.

The invisible walls that theatre has built around it need demystifying. It's such an important element for people in positions like yours and mine. We can say, "Listen - it's okay. You don't need to have a ruff, a beard and a pair of tights! We need to hear what you're saying about the world."

I'm coming up 63, and I go into these schools sometimes and think, "F*** - it's 1974!".

We encourage our kids - one daughter is an actor, the other wants to write musical theatre - and it's been easier for them. But I went to talk in a school in Goole last year and one kid said that he couldn't be an actor because he was from Goole. And I said that I couldn't remember reading anywhere that you couldn't be an actor if you were from Goole.

Moving on to comedy, I see fewer and fewer comedies every year (proper comedies where people laugh) - what are the specific challenges of making comedy in theatre?

For me, comedy has to come from the characters, from the situation.

Let's go back to Liverpool with "I'm desperate... Dan" from Boys from the Blackstuff. Integrity of situation, integrity of character, absurdity of the world the two characters were living in - that's where I think the best comedy comes from.

Someone slipping on a banana skin has never made me laugh, but I'm from a mining background and we're pretty miserable. Given very acerbic, sarcastic, well-observed lines in a situation - that I find funny.

Someone once said to me that they didn't know if they were laughing at the characters or with the characters - well, we could be all day dissecting that one. But I think you only laugh if you have empathy with the character in that situation - almost an instance of "There but for the Grace of God go I." To paraphrase Alan Ayckbourn, "Don't tell the audience you think you're funny. Let them decide."

There are so many plays that one sees where you think that these guys are just trying too hard to be funny.

What brings you to Scary Bikers?

I am a Remainer - and not just because we have property abroad. The universities, the whole notion of being a European - I like that idea. Yet in Hull, where I live, 69.9% voted out, in Wakefield, 71% voted to leave. So I wanted to work out why.

I investigated with a straw poll and most of it wasn't about immigration in that part of the world, most of it wasn't about racists and it wasn't about getting the country back - it was actually about the Miners' Strike.

They'd had enough of David Cameron, enough of MPs of all colours telling them what to do and think - there was a complete disenfranchisement from the political elite with its metropolitan mindset. It was almost an act of self-harming to think, "F*** it, I'm going to vote to leave."

That transcended the notion of what do I now do.

What's very big in Yorkshire is The Tour de Yorkshire based on the Tour de France. So I got two characters who are from both sides of the political fence. He's a hospital porter and a redundant miner; she's a former private school teacher - and they meet at a bereavement class. They set out on a tandem ride to Florence - on the 23 June 2016.

So we have the situation and the metaphor (which I originally thought comedic, but has turned into grim reality) of two people stuck on a tandem on opposite sides of the Brexit divide. Of course, they need each other to keep the tandem going forward, but they're constantly bickering.

I'm performing it [with his wife] only because I couldn't get Mark Addy (who is the most wonderful actor in my plays) and I thought that, though I'm never going to be James Bond, I could credibly be a hospital porter (at 18 stone) and could get away with playing a redundant miner, as I went to school with a lot of them.

Are you getting an audience who are unravelling their thoughts about Brexit, or are they just coming for a laugh?

It's fascinating. We toured it last year and were invited to Trafalgar Studios, who asked us to bring it to London for six months - to which I replied no, but we will come for four weeks. We have ageing dads, we've got a dog and all the usual domestic stuff.

On tour, there were frissons in both Hull and Wakefield, because we were saying things that were perhaps unpalatable for that audience. And we had standing ovations in Winchester, because we were saying things that the audience there completely understood. Saying to some of Hull and Wakefield, "You voted wrong" - well, you could cut the atmosphere. And that's entirely what theatre is all about.

Sometimes it takes your breath away when you go back and you think "Oh my God". It's very difficult sometimes, because you think, have they let themselves down, have they been let down, have they been ignored? Certainly Wakefield and that area has been ignored since the end of the Miners' Strike. There's been a little bit of investment and they're getting some cultural purchase, but generally, it's fallen off the radar, because the news stories have gone.

Scary Bikers is at Trafalgar Studios 2-27 April