Why being hopeful is more radical than ever now

The most radical thing that you can do right now is hope, according to acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens.

Best known for his Tony and Olivier award-winning adaption of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Stephens says sharing an experience with people who you might disagree with politically, ideologically or culturally has never been more radical than now.

“It’s an increasingly rare thing nowadays to go and sit in a room with people you don’t know and share an experience, to look in the same direction and engage in the same story together … to turn your phone off and look in the same direction with people who you not only might not know, but if you did know them, you might not agree with them about some things,” Stephens told Saturday Morning.

Playwright Simon Stephens accepts the award for Best Play for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” onstage at the Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall on 7 June, 2015 in New York City.

Theo Wargo / Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions / AFP

.”

He admits it may sound “hopelessly romantic”, but he truly believes it.

Despite the challenges theatre has faced, especially since Covid, it needs to persevere, he says.

He draws a parallel with the decade following the World War II – a period when playhouses across Europe were physically and financially devastated. Yet by 1956, the works of the likes of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and German playwright Bertolt Brecht felt like a creative revolution, he says.

“Part of me thinks 2026 could have the same optimism.”

Simon Stephens: World’s most hopeful playwright

Saturday Morning

Stephens is drawn to the observations of actor and writer Peter Ustinov, who reiterated that an optimist was a person who understood how sad and miserable the world could be. But facing the world with that knowledge is brave, Stevens says.

“I always take the notion that optimism and hope will always be the radical option,” he says.

“It’s always been difficult. It’s not the most difficult time ever. It’s a time which is kind of charged with a grip of a kind of neoliberal technology that’s like paralysing people’s imagination and leading people into a polarised position of fear, and that is monetising fear and monetising polarisation.

“There’s a rank dishonesty and a kind of like unapologetic capital drive to that that I kind of have a fair contempt for, but I think what happens when you go to a theatre, what happens when you go to a gig, what happens when you look at art, proper art, what happens when you engage in real storytelling is you realise the complexities and the nuance of the world, and you realise that there is a determination in the kind of human spirit to keep going.

“You realise that polarisation is a pernicious lie and that the nature of the human animal is really one of contradiction and complexity and uncertainty and that’s the thing that theatre can provide. That’s what theatre is for. It’s what it’s always been for.”

Now one of the world’s most performed living writers for theatre with over 45 plays to his name, Stephens didn’t actually aspire to have a show on in London’s West End when he was younger.

“The writers who most inspired me when I was a teenager, when I was a kid, were songwriters. I kind of went to the type of school that if you kind of like admitted to somebody that you wanted to be a writer or that you liked English or you like reading or you like writing, you just get thumped.

“So, the one art form that allowed a kind of celebration of linguistic expression was songwriting.

“It was only when I was in my 20s that I realised that I had a really quite singularly terrible singing voice and that I was never going to make it as a singer-songwriter. And it was also then that I started going to the theatre for the first time and realised the kind of like kinetic connection between the two art forms, the liveness and the unpredictability, the volatility.”

Stephens is hosting the inaugural Playwrights Workshop as part of the Auckland Theatre Company’s new three-year masterclass project.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand