Words matter. These are the best Mike Bartlett Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You go to a protest, and you’ve got all these different groups saying things you don’t necessarily agree with. If I went to a protest, my placard would have to be very long, explaining the ins and outs of my position.
I don’t care more about ’13’ because it’s in the Olivier than I did about ‘Cock’ in a 100-seat studio. They both matter because it’s still a person sat there watching your play. And the play has to be good enough – because there are a hundred other writers out there who deserve to have their play on instead.
I am not entirely off grid. I send a lot of email. But the way Facebook constantly alters its privacy settings to bamboozle you into giving more away is just underhand.
When I got to university, I would read plays and go, ‘But these are about the past. Where are the plays that I love about now?’ I couldn’t find them, so I started writing.
The days of print media are numbered. Some papers will be around for a few years, but everyone knows news is going online. Then you have to ask, who pays for it? How do you deliver it? Is there any money for proper investigative reporting?
In Britain, many people love the royal family, and other people don’t – but either way, we own them, and we have an opinion, and we know a lot about them. It’s as though they’re our own family.
I don’t think anyone is boring, actually, if you ask the right questions and look at them the right way.
Quite a few plays I have written have an implicit critique of capitalism in that, if you follow it through to its end, what happens to the people who are left behind?
When I can find a story that explores something that I don’t know what I think, I’ve got a play. If I knew the answer, I would write a speech or an essay.
One question you ask as a writer or any kind of artist when you start making something is, ‘Does this have reason to exist in the world?’ And you’re reassured when you get little confirmations that people are pleased it did exist – whether they buy a ticket, whether it gets good reviews, whether it transfers.
I wrote a very bad play about Prince William when I was 23 in which he went off to the island of Iona to discover himself. It was very long, and audiences should probably be very pleased that the computer it was on blew up.
That’s the moment you look for as a writer, when the characters start telling you what they are doing rather than you telling them.
Where do we invest our trust now? In politicians? Most people would say not. In banks, in religion, in a sense of nationhood? In each other? Even that has been complicated. It feels like there’s a total collapse of trust, but without trust, it’s impossible to have any sense of who one is.
