I must have been about 14. Our English teacher had taken us to a library and set us a task. We were to choose any book from the shelves and start reading. I wandered around, went to the toilet a few times, pretended to look for a book. Eventually, my teacher caught me. He glared: why don’t you have a book in your hand like everybody else? I turned to my right and spotted a small section of books that looked much thinner than the rest. Jackpot.
The first thing that struck me about the thing I had in my hands was how easy it was to read. This was not the kind of language I had come across in English lessons, a language I found impossible on account of my dyslexia, and an inclination towards staring out of windows.
This was different. It was full of white space. It was all dialogue. And it spoke in strange, funny, unpredictable ways. The usual rules of grammar and syntax didn’t seem to apply. Commas fell in odd places. Words tumbled down the page like confetti. Sentences didn’t really exist. A hyphen wasn’t there to represent some linguistic rule I didn’t understand, it was something physical, something to do with the way a person spoke. In short, there was no right or wrong in here, there was just these characters speaking and that was the only truth that mattered.
The play was Road by Jim Cartwright. What was it about this filth-ridden play, set in Lancashire in the 1980s, cataloguing the surreal comings-and-goings of a single, depressed street, that spoke so directly to a sheltered young Jewish boy from north London?
I remember finding the protagonist thrilling. A swashbuckling, charismatic, broken man called Scullery who stank of danger. I remember the lawlessness of the whole thing. The language on the page was a kind of gateway to something raw and bodily.
It was rude, illicit, playful. But also deadly serious. And the more playful it became, the more terrifying the whole thing seemed.
I am in three places at once. Firstly reading this book in the late 2000s, because if I don’t my teacher will be angry with me. Secondly, walking down the street in a city many miles from here, meeting people I would never otherwise have met. But thirdly, and most thrillingly for me, I am in a theatre. I am watching this thing happen on a stage, in front of an audience, characters walking off left and right and transforming back into actors.
On the one hand the world I lived in, on the other this book. Smash these two reactants together and a third thing could emerge, a piece of theatre. And the prospect of that smashing felt thrilling. What might that be like? What kind of people would I meet in the process? What kind of rooms might I enter? What kind of community might I become a part of? In short, where could this book take me?
In very real, very practical terms. I wasn’t holding a completed thing in my hands, I was holding a kind of a blueprint, a map that suggested a place, but not the place itself, not yet.
I remember very distinctly closing the book in my lap, looking out the window and realising – with a kind of resignation – that I had to write one of these myself. Because if this messy, lawless thing existed, then I should make a messy lawless thing too. I had the response ready for my teacher’s red pen: that’s just how the characters speak.
Sam Grabiner’s play Boys on the Verge of Tears is at Soho theatre, London, until 18 May
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