Marcelo Dos Santos: ‘Theatre is not a podcast – it mustn’t tell you what to think’
Earlier this month saw a royally intriguing backstage drama. Tom Quinn, who wrote a 2015 biography of the Queen Mother’s indispensable right-hand-man William Tallon, went public about Backstairs Billy, the new West End comedy by Marcelo Dos Santos about the pair’s long working relationship. “I’m going to put a curse on the play, and it will shut in two weeks,” he told one newspaper, avowing that his book of the same name (derived from Tallon’s nickname) was unattributed source material.
If that curse has been put into operation, then it’s proving ineffectual so far. Dos Santos’s play, which stars Penelope Wilton as the Queen Mother and Luke Evans as Billy, has been greeted by a chorus of approval, not least from this paper (awarding it five stars, I heralded it as the best new play about the royals since Peter Morgan’s The Audience). Further raves have ensued for Dos Santos’s witty monologue Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, one of the standouts of the Edinburgh Fringe last year, now reeling them in at the Bush in west London.
Some reviewers noted affinities with Fleabag in its frank, funny discussions of sex (here, the gay sex life of a stand-up comedian, played by Samuel Barnett). The title derives from a question on an NHS mental health questionnaire, which – according to its author – indirectly captures “something of where we are as a generation”.
It sounds like it’s excavating the deepest recesses of perturbed modern psyches, but what surprises and captivates about Feeling Afraid is its buoyancy of tone, and the tautness of its turn of phrase. Amid a theatre culture that often seems to have mislaid its sense of humour, and underlines its political points, Dos Santos has arrived like a knight in shining armour.
He was born in Sydney in 1981 to a Brazilian father and an Australian mother who worked as a teacher. She came to the UK with him (without his father) when he was 10 and they lived in London, though he spent some time in Rio. This background of migration throws up all manner of possibilities in terms of his personality and bearing.
In person, Dos Santos proves well-spoken, thoughtful and chatty with a tousled, bespectacled studenty demeanour and a rather British streak of self-deprecation – “I arrived with an Australian accent, which I proceeded to lose, and there were all kinds of ways in which I had to fit in. I became an anglophile, that classic immigrant thing of trying to out-English the English.”
If he’s quaking in his boots at Quinn’s baleful pronouncements, he offers breezy circumspection. “I read bits of it,” he concedes about the biography, “but there’s a lot of material out there. Tallon was the subject of much newspaper coverage and TV documentaries. [The book] isn’t the only source of information and we wanted it to be imaginative. I just got intrigued by this friendship with the gay butler. There wasn’t much method beyond following an instinct.” Michael Grandage, the show’s director, says Dos Santos is “drawn to making people laugh and to taking on strong political arguments – that’s a rare combination”.
Dos Santos rolls his eyes at the idea that every incident needs to be grounded in fact. As with The Crown, liberties can be taken, fact woven with fiction. “It’s impossible to get to the ‘truth’,” he says. “We can underestimate an audience’s intelligence around this. People understand that they’ve being given a lens to look at a story.” That goes to the heart of Dos Santos’s appeal. It might sound straightforward to trust your audience’s sophistication but he’s bucking theatrical trends in privileging nuance and complexity.
That holds true for Feeling Afraid, which draws on his experience of gay life and its hook-up apps. “I’m an aficionado of the app, though not so much any more – I’m in a relationship. It’s part of gay life. Very few people haven’t been on apps.
“I’ve definitely gone into certain situations thinking ‘At least I’ll get copy out of this’. I’m sex-positive but I’m not scared to say that gay dating is complex – it can be fun but it can also be miserable. It’s fine to represent both.”
Dos Santos is cross-generational by instinct in a way that’s commonsensical as well as usefully commercial. “There’s a danger we pigeonhole older and younger people. Just because an audience member is older doesn’t mean he or she is out of touch or can’t handle certain things. There’s presumption on both sides.”
He echoes remarks by David Byrne, the incoming artistic director of the Royal Court, who was pretty damning of the new writing scene during his tenure running the London fringe space the New Diorama. (“You often go to see work, and know exactly what it’s going to say.”) “I’m not interested in being told what to think or feel,” Dos Santos agrees. “I react against theatre as podcast. I think people sometimes use theatre as a very direct way of telling you what they feel about something, like podcasts or TED Talks, but I just personally quite like theatre that leaves space for debate. We’ve made an argument for theatre as a force of social good, but does that imply that the work has to be ‘beneficial’? Can it not be art?”
In looking to the future, he feels theatre should be more mindful of its past, citing Noël Coward and Joe Orton as influences on Backstairs Billy, and expressing admiration for Tennessee Williams. “I’m a big believer in theatre not binning its past. Some writers are overlooked because they’re writing plays. I have friends who have written strong family dramas or relationship dramas with big themes at their heart, and I know they sometimes feel like it doesn’t excite venues or directors in the way it perhaps used to. I think people have perhaps moved away from ‘well-made’ or domestic plays.”
It needs to be said that, at 42, Dos Santos is not an overnight sensation. After studying English and drama at Bristol University, he ventured into playwriting in fits and starts. He formed a (now defunct) theatre company – High Hearted – in 2008, presenting early plays on the fringe, and worked at the Royal Court’s literary department, joining various writers groups.
The slow burn, he concedes, may be to do with a more cash-strapped, fractured and cautious new writing scene. Some of it may be to do with theatre’s identitarian fad. “I don’t fit into any particular box. People increasingly flag where they’re from, or explicitly say they’re a working-class playwright.
“Even being a ‘gay playwright’ feels newer – when I first worked at the Royal Court, it was ‘That’s interesting but it’s not all of you’ , whereas now you feel you have to put [your identity] forward. I haven’t fitted neatly into categories. It’s been harder for me.”
The pandemic, which saw a planned debut at the Royal Court, Sharks – looking at how we cope with mortality – fall by the wayside, was at once a crunch-point and a godsend. Dos Santos had “cobbled together” a living by teaching, doing script reading and working at a theatre book publisher.
“I had been on the cusp of giving up because I couldn’t get commissions,” he says. With seemingly his biggest opportunity scuppered, he threw himself into writing a monologue instead. “Feeling Afraid is the first time I wrote something that felt like my voice and showcased the kind of theatre I want to make – funny, human but also surprising formally.”
It will be fascinating to see Dos Santos’s next move – he’s working on TV projects, fiercely under wraps. But in the meantime, one should simply rejoice that in a year of slim pickings, theatrically, and grim tidings, globally, he has turned up to put a health-giving smile on our faces and a spring in British theatre’s step.
Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen is at the Bush Theatre, London W12 until Dec 23; bushtheatre.co.uk. Backstairs Billy is at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London WC2 until Jan 27; backstairsbilly.com
