The Choir: Paul Higgins interview
Paul Higgins talks his new play The Choir, finding the truth in theatre and humour in the darker moments of life
You might know Paul Higgins from Channel Four’s Utopia or from his short but memorable turn as Jamie in The Thick of It, or you might know him from the stage. This time he’s taking more of a behind-the-scenes role, having penned The Choir, soon to be performed at The Citizens Theatre. A new musical written in collaboration with Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, The Choir is, in Higgins' own words, just what it says it is: “It’s about a man who tries to start a community choir from scratch in Wishaw, and what happens when he gets this mixture of people in the room who wouldn’t usually be in a room together; the tensions and the obstacles that that presents to everyone involved.”
A musical about a community choir sounds instantly upbeat and uplifting. “Of course that’s the intention,” says Higgins. “The intention is that it will be this nice upbeat thing that brings everyone together but it turns out that it’s not as easy as that. There are major differences between the people that come along – major differences in politics, in politeness. There are people there who are 19 and there are people there who are in their late 60s, and they all have different ideas about what is the proper way to behave. It certainly is uplifting but it’s also very difficult in places.”
This is not Higgins’ first play, and the difficulty he mentions speaks to the darkness that ran through his first play Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, which performed at The Traverse in 2008. “It was dark but it was very funny. I always called it a comedy and people would say, ‘Why do you call it a comedy? It's terrible the things that happen’ – someone dies and stuff like that. And I would say I think it is funny.” This may worry those who are looking for a more lighthearted play, but Higgins assures us that humour can and should be found within darkness, even if it takes some time to convince your audience.
"I recently read a play that was all completely doom and gloom. Life isn’t like that" – Paul Higgins
“It took a long time to get it put on because I don’t think many people believed me about it, and then we did a reading of it with the National Theatre of Scotland in Glasgow and the audience laughed their heads off at this supposedly dark stuff. A lot of this is true for The Choir as well. It’s not a comedy but there are some really funny people in that room – people who are used to cracking jokes and people for whom humour can be a weapon and a way of asserting themselves.”
Comedy is much more than a tool for Higgins; it's a part of life and a huge part of his work. “I don’t believe plays that are not funny. Macbeth is funny and King Lear is funny. Life is funny. I’ve just recently read a play that I was offered that was all completely doom and gloom and I said to my agent, 'That’s not true, life isn’t like that.' Even in bad situations there’s always wit. That was the case with Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, and then when we put it on in Edinburgh the audience laughed a lot which really helps when the story is dark. Certainly nothing as bad happens in The Choir as somebody dying but it’s not easy, and I really didn’t want to write anything that was sentimental or 'Hollywood happy ending'. I was trying to balance the need for it to feel real and true with the need for it not to be miserable. And it’s not. There’s a lot of joy in it and a lot of humour and a lot of fun.”
Some of that fun comes from the music, and when speaking of working with Ricky Ross, Higgins is only excited: “It’s been great. We’ve had our ups and downs, as you would when collaborating with anyone, particularly when you work in different fields as well. He’s concentrating on the music and I’m concentrating on the drama and sometimes they can come into conflict a little bit... but we’ve done it, you know. It feels amazing. And as Ricky says, we’ve made something completely new. A brand new play, all the songs are brand new. It’s not a jukebox musical, it’s not taken from a film, its not an adaptation of a novel. It’s brand new and that doesn’t happen that often any more.”
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Of course, Higgins started as an actor and this works directly into his writing: “One of the actors was laughing at me the other day because he saw me writing. I was doing a little rewrite, and I’m acting the whole thing out in front of my laptop, mouthing the lines,” he jokes, but with obvious truth behind it. “When I imagine scenes, I imagine what it will be like to get them on their feet and I hope everyone’s got enough to do, people aren’t just left standing around. It’s quite hard to write for 12 people, you don’t see that very often actually. Even a play with a cast of 12 the scenes are often two handers, four handers, people coming and going. There’s a bit of that in this play but for a lot of it everyone’s in the room. I try to make sure every line of dialogue is true to that character, and an actor will be able to say it and to feel comfortable saying it.”
And writing his own work changes his approach to taking on roles as well: “I find myself getting much more fussy with writing. When I read plays I think, ‘Ah, come on. This is not good enough.’ Writing is hard. I’m not being disparaging to other writers but if you’re very demanding of your own work you want other people to be demanding of theirs.”
With an acting career that takes him across both film and television, Higgins has a film in mind for his next project, and can see the filmic nature of The Choir. “There’s lots of different scenes and lots of locations in it which has been quite a challenge for Dominic Hill, the director, to make it all happen on one set. But the scenes move very fluidly from one to the other, sometimes intertwining. I really like the freedom to be able to do that.”
It sounds in that sense like a production on a very grand scale, though Higgins emphasises the lo-fi nature of the content itself: “Imaginatively, I think it is on quite a grand scale. It could be a really exciting night in the theatre. I’m hoping it will be a real, proper live event which often theatre isn’t, even though that’s all it has really going for it, that it’s live. Sometimes what you see is a tired reproduction of something that was once alive, in rehearsals or in previews and has become kind of a facsimile. So I’m hoping it will be a proper, live experience every night and that people will get something out of it.”
The Choir, Citizens Theatre, 24 Oct-14 Nov, 7:30pm (2:30pm)