“I am always thinking in theatre how to be useful, how not to make it about me,” says playwright Alexander Zeldin, with a slight frown. “I think theatre has a unique quality which is that it’s at once very private and incredibly public. You are experiencing something in your own mind and heart when you are watching other people.”
Zeldin’s new play, The Confessions, which opened in Vienna and arrives at the National Theatre as part of a European tour this week, extends that tension between internal and external, between a personal reflection and collective history. About the life of a woman called Alice, the play spans the period from 1943 to 2021, from birth until death, and is based on conversations with his mother. “It feels transgressive to me because it’s talking about private things in a very public way,” he says. “I hope people feel there’s something that resonates with them because the idea when you write something so personal is that it becomes personal for the person watching and becomes about their life. That’s my hope.”
Zeldin is best known for The Inequalities trilogy, a series of plays that cast a compassionate but unflinching eye on the lives of people worst affected by austerity. Beyond Caring from 2014 was a devastating portrait of those struggling to survive on minimum wage, zero-hours contracts. It was followed by Love, about the suffering and dignity of homeless families forced to live in temporary accommodation, and then by Faith, Hope and Charity, in 2019, where the focus fell on the users of a crumbling community centre.
All were distinguished by their remarkable sense of urgency and truth, but also by the way that they encouraged empathy with people who are usually ignored, and whose stories are rarely deemed worthy of staging.
The Confessions follows a similar pattern. It begins with an old woman saying she is not interesting – and then devotes the next two hours to telling her story. “I didn’t want a play at the National Theatre to be about an exceptional life,” Zeldin explains. “We’ve seen that 100,000 times. I’m bored. I want to celebrate the so-called ordinary, because the ordinary is extraordinary. That’s the path toward a greater empathy and a greater understanding of human beings which is what theatre is capable of.”
As he talks, over Zoom from his flat in Paris, Zeldin leans forward intently. He is an amiable presence, full of vitality, keen to make himself clear. In particular, he is anxious to stress that although The Confessions was inspired by his mother, it is propelled by a desire to honour an entire generation of women whose lives have been ignored, and is the result, like all his work, of long research and imagination. “There is a lot that is made up,” he says. “I interviewed dozens of women in their 80s about their lives. It’s a kind of dance with truth, and maybe that dance gets you closer to the actual truth.”
He was also inspired by the autofiction of writers such as his friend Rachel Cusk and the Nobel prize-winning Annie Ernaux. “I wanted to try to write something that I didn’t have a model for in theatre, but was there in their novels,” he explains. “A shape that was not filling in all the dots but was drenched in experience and the body and the feeling of being in a space. I feel the novel has found a way for the writing of self that the theatre hasn’t in the same way.”
The play’s main root is a series of interviews that he recorded with his mother just as the Covid epidemic began. They talked intensely about the events that propelled her out of her native Australia and to Oxford, where Zeldin and his younger brother grew up, and where she still lives. The timing felt significant. “Every day on the screens of our televisions there were 1,000 people dead. I started to ask myself, how can the theatre react in any way to this,” he says. “It’s not a Covid play at all, but the epidemic confronted us with the possibility that we’d lose everything, and it does echo that feeling of wanting to know where we’re from, what makes us.”
The result became a story about emancipation and self-determination. “My mother fought a fight that was fought by millions and millions of women to find out what her true life was.” As they talked, his mother – who has asked her son not to name her when he talks about the play – revealed shocking events, including a sexual assault, that she had previously kept secret. Why does Zeldin think she suddenly confessed all, aged nearly 80?
He thinks for a moment. “Parents tell children things about themselves and their frailties perhaps to keep their children moving forward, to show us that we are all wounded and continuing to fly and continuing to live, that gives us courage. I’ve always felt that revealing frailty and kindness and the struggle to live in the circumstances in which we find ourselves is a gentle act, one that gives you hope. Story can do that for us,” he says, with a quick smile.
He has always been close to his mother, a teacher of English as a second language. She’d left Australia to settle in England, where she met his father, a Russian-Jewish refugee who became a lecturer in education. Zeldin’s passion for theatre – “I really believe it is a miraculous place” – developed after his father died, when he was just 15. “I went down a weird path as a teenager and got into trouble at school. The way my mother reacted to that was amazing, because she didn’t censure me, she tried to understand me. I was very blessed because she encouraged me to be an artist, I think because she hadn’t been able to herself on some level.”
The Confessions has music by Yannis Philippakis of Foals, a friend since he and Zeldin were teenagers. “We met smoking cigarettes by the river,” he says, with a grin. “We’ve encouraged each other over the years. I’m really interested in the way he’s managed to create such singular work.”
The same might be said of Zeldin, now 38. At Oxford, he set up his own theatre group outside the university – “I didn’t get involved in the university drama society because I found it full of people who were so self-absorbed. I felt intimidated because I always took theatre so seriously and I felt like they were just trying to get a career.” Then he went travelling to Egypt, Russia, and South Korea, making work, directing theatre and opera. In 2011, he returned to develop his own works while teaching at East 15 acting school in Essex. He also worked as an assistant director to Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne.
“I miss him,” says Zeldin of Brook, who died last year. “He was a huge influence on me, and I was very lucky that I was able to spend so much time with him.” He shares Brook’s way of thinking, his international sensibility. “I feel we gain from the breadth of perspective that we can have. It’s not going to damage what is wonderful about the British theatre if it were to look a bit more outwards.”
Zeldin is now based in Paris, an associate artist at the Odéon Théâtre de L’Europe. His most recent play, Une Mort Dans la Famille, which also had its inspiration in the time after his father’s death when he was visiting his grandmother in a care home, premiered there and was written in French. Yet Zeldin is also an associate director at the National and his next projects are all in the UK or the US. “I’ve got so much support here in France to be able to work, yet I fundamentally want to be in the UK more,” he says, simply. “I’m increasingly interested and excited by the possibility of telling a big story to a big audience. That’s where I feel like I want to go. And I think that the toolbox you get from working in Europe helps with that mission. But there isn’t that very rich thing we have in the UK which is the crossover between the state sector and the commercial.”
Spanning the two cultures in this way, he is in a strong position to see the differences. “Let’s not put too fine a point on it,” he says. “It’s really a disgrace how little funding the UK arts have. It’s shocking and it’s unacceptable.” He is conscious of the dynamism of British theatre; his breakthrough play, Beyond Caring, was staged at the Yard, a theatre run on a shoestring. “France funds quite a lot of companies quite well so there’s a lot of people who can make a living being an artist in France. In the UK, that’s certainly not the case. In France, artists are part of the fabric of society and the political class make a real point of caring about that.
“The rich tapestry of diverse talent that we have in the UK could be rocket fuelled by having an investment in it. Look how incredible we are with nothing. Imagine what we could do with a bit of something.”
As the artistic director of an independent touring company, he is equally fierce about Brexit. “Brexit is an unmitigated disaster for the performing arts,” he says. “The amount of administration and cost that comes with it, for nothing. It’s going to affect the next generation so badly.”
For all his outspokenness, Zeldin isn’t a political playwright. His theme is humanity not society. “Why shouldn’t a play about the homeless crisis be on at the National Theatre?” he asks. “The Inequalities plays are about our national situation. They’re plays about the heroes and heroines of our time going through a trajectory that is representative of the experience of being alive in Tory Britain.”
The Confessions takes him on a new journey. It is not naturalistic, and it compresses a whole life in the second half of the 20th century into a two-hour span. Yet it shares his desire to provide insight into lives that are overlooked. “It’s a story of a woman’s attempts to be herself against the pressures of the time,” Zeldin says. “She’s not a great sportswoman or a prominent politician. But why not give those ordinary lives the dignity of a great arc? This is Peer Gynt in a woman’s life, the epic life of an older lady.”
The Confessions is at the Lyttelton theatre, London, 19 Oct-4 Nov
