The laureate of intractable conflicts

13 September 2008

Clemency Burton-Hill talks to the American playwright Christopher Shinn about his new play about a US presidential election night in the era of MySpace and YouTube

Looking every inch the Brit that he isn’t, American playwright Christopher Shinn takes a bite of a sandwich in a Shepherd’s Bush rehearsal room on a rainy summer afternoon and confesses that, although grateful, he still finds it ‘a mystery’ that it should have been London’s theatrical community, rather than New York’s, that made his career. For his latest play, Now or Later, recently opened at the Royal Court, will be his fifth to premiere in London before going anywhere near his own continent, about which he relentlessly writes.

It’s not that Shinn, 32, is not successful in his native country. Quite the contrary: the author of nine critically acclaimed plays, he is the winner of an Off Broadway Theater Award for playwriting and the recipient of numerous grants including the esteemed Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been performed all over America. It’s just that London, almost always, seems to get there first. ‘Something about my plays seem to make sense to a British audience,’ he smiles, a little shyly. ‘And English playwrights made sense to me — Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond. Their more naturalistic plays felt like reality to me, more so than many American playwrights.’

As someone fascinated by human psychol-ogy — it would have been his alternative career had the writing not taken off — Shinn admires, above all, the ‘integration of the social and the psychological [in English theatre] that we don’t quite have, I think, in America, where the psychological is seen as separate from the social and the political.’ He cites Tennessee Williams as an example of this curious disconnect in American drama. ‘He was a political person, but he didn’t write political plays.’ With a bemused shrug, he wonders why. ‘Perhaps there’s something repressed about the human experience, and any play that threatens to undo that repression is too scary to us as Americans? Or else, we just don’t see ourselves as being shaped by the social and the political.’ Which would surely be impossible, I suggest, and he agrees. ‘Of course. And it’s a paradox. Take the election: we’re obsessed with the human stories, you know, Where I Come From, My Struggles, What My Parents Were Like. And yet, really digging deep, getting under the skin of the political and social issues that define us somehow feels “un-American” because it reminds us of differences and divisions we don’t like to think about.’

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