Focus on: Vinay Patel

The Murdered by My Father writer tells Theo Bosanquet about Sticks and Stones, a new play for Paines Plough that examines the power of language

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 3 minutes
Published 27 Jul 2018
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Since first appearing at Summerhall in 2014, Paines Plough’s portable Roundabout venue has become a staple of the Fringe, boasting some of its best new writing. This year’s programme features three world premieres played in rep, one of them by in-demand writer Vinay Patel. 

Those familiar with his work—or, indeed, his Twitter feed—will be unsurprised that Patel’s play Sticks and Stones is billed as a "razor-sharp satire". Introducing the play, he says it sprang from his many conversations with friends on the subject of offensive language. He’s particularly interested in the schism between what the internet generation deem offensive language versus those who don’t spend a large amount of time scanning social media.

Patel’s credits include the BAFTA-winning Murdered by My Father for the BBC and he’s one of a raft of young playwrights who recently became fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. But he doesn’t want to come across as preaching from the London bubble. He is keen to keep reaching new audiences. Conscious that Roundabout tours to a broad range of places and communities, with Sticks and Stones he set about creating characters and situations that would resonate widely.

He describes Sticks and Stones as a “workplace comedy”. The drama springs from that most familiar of linguistic landmines, the poorly judged joke. But the sympathies are evenly proportioned – or, to use Patel’s words, “everyone’s a bit of a dick”. This is a deep dive into grey areas. “The thought I had when I started writing the play was, ‘What is it like to be a civilian in the culture war? How do you know what’s good or bad, right or wrong?'” 

To further muddy the waters, he hasn’t assigned any racial, gender or class descriptions to the characters. As well as offering his director, Stef O’Driscoll, more scope for interpretation, this also makes things slightly more straightforward considering her cast also have to perform two other plays (Island Town by Simon Longman and How to Spot an Alien by Georgia Christou). Cleverly, Patel has also kept the offensive words blank so the audience are forced to fill in the gaps. This contains intriguing potential for self-revelation and ensures the focus is on the “dynamics of language” rather than the language itself.

Patel was raised in Bexley, a BNP heartland. He grew up without much exposure to theatre and always assumed he wanted to write for film until studying a masters at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and deciding to focus on plays. He makes a persuasive argument that theatre, especially when it makes an effort to reach out to audiences, is the perfect medium for our changing times. “The far right wants to tell people there are easy solutions to our problems. But what we want to do with art is make people comfortable with complexity.”