Simon Stephens: Manchester is richer than ever in theatrical potential

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/19/simon-stephens-manchester-home-funfair

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Two years ago, the theatre director Walter Meierjohann asked me to meet him. He wanted to ask me something. He was rather sheepish about his request. He’d been given my number by Sarah Frankcom, the director of four of my plays and the newly appointed artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre. He was sheepish because he was about to open a new theatre in the heart of the same city. It would be an amalgamation of the old Library theatre and the beloved Cornerhouse; a theatre in a new arts centre that would call itself Home. He wanted me to write an English-language version of Odön von Horváth’s Kasimir and Karoline to open the place. In effect, he wanted to steal me from her.

Of course that’s not true. In the past two years Sarah and Walter have been deeply supportive of one another, and their co-existence is mutually beneficial. They make each other work harder and inspire each other to rise higher. I am honoured to work for both of them and hope to continue to do so. The new energy Sarah has brought to the Royal Exchange and the opening of Home has energised the city’s theatre in a way I’ve never known before.

There is a curious contradiction in an arts centre having the name Home. Isn’t one of the most important functions of art – cinematic, theatrical, visual – to take people out of their homes? Homes are places that are settled and reassuring. I love my home because I love hanging out with my kids and my wife and our cats and eating takeaway curries and watching Modern Family. The function of art is to unsettle and trouble, to provoke and excite, to alarm and inspire. These are fundamental and urgent actions but not necessarily homely ones.

I should know. My friend and mentor Stephen Jeffreys once told me that it is a myth that playwrights need to think up a new subject with every play that they write; rather, we have myths that we return to. His idea has been central to my teaching ever since. My myth seems to revolve around a consideration of exactly what it is to be at home, what it is to leave home and how we might ever return. These questions sit in every play that I have written.

For 20 years I’ve thought of London as my home. I got married in Hackney town hall. My three children are born and bred East Enders. But, if somebody asked me what my hometown is, I think I would still, instinctively, say Stockport. So the idea that an arts centre called Home is opening up a few miles up the A6 is appropriate to me. The idea that it is opening with a play that I have written is flattering.

Related: Home truths and house red: why we love making theatre in Manchester

I often wonder at the relationship between growing up in Stockport and ending up a playwright. It’s an oddity in a lot of ways. I didn’t go to the theatre a great deal as a teenager. I went a few times. My mum and my uncle were involved in amateur dramatics. I went to see my uncle in Great Expectations at the beautiful Altrincham Garrick theatre. My dad’s mum had a career in the city’s music halls in the 50s. I sang tunes from Oklahoma! to her as she lay on her deathbed and that seemed to make her smile. As a family, we went to Christmas shows. I remember seeing Barnum in the Manchester Palace and being thrilled by the idea of somebody abseiling down on to a stage. But we spent much more time watching television dramas.

Later, I went to see a few plays at the Green Room or the Exchange, but nowhere nearly as often as I went to see bands at the International or the International 2.

Manchester’s theatre-writing tradition isn’t like its music tradition or its tradition for TV drama. I wonder then if the roots of my playwriting in Stockport don’t lie in its relationship to theatrical traditions but in the town itself.

Stockport is a suburb and a satellite of Manchester. As I grew up there, Manchester always existed over the horizon, at the other end of the 192 bus route. Its promise was as strange and alluring to me then as that of Moscow to the Prozorova sisters. It was the city where cool bands played. It was the city of cool record shops, with their terrifying, aloof staff. It was the city that the Smiths sang about, the city that the Fall came from. Stockport, in comparison, was a town on the edge of things, and perhaps that’s where writers are happiest, on the charged edges of places. Looking out at the world, or at least looking for it.

Stockport, in the 80s, had a small-town mentality. I went to an all-boys comprehensive, a school where academic achievement was viewed with suspicion and where girls, with their civilising influence and nicer smells, were absent altogether. I was about 17 before I met more than a couple of people who liked the same music as I did. Perhaps such a mentality was also perfect for the emerging writer. My sense of being a loner was reinforced in a schoolyard where the unconventional was perceived as just being fucking odd. Such a sense of the conventional was ballast to define myself against. Creativity became an act of defiance. Literature and drama carried with them the possibility of escape.

Related: Home is where the art is: narratives of nationhood

For a bespectacled, spotty, lanky boy with a weird love for the Jesus and Mary Chain, Stockport town centre was also a fine breeding ground for watchfulness. It felt like a violent town to go shopping in. It felt like a violent town to go drinking in on a Friday or Saturday night. I quickly learned to be watchful. It could kick off at any minute. This kind of watchfulness, exercising a sense of what people were about to do next, was perfect playwriting preparation. I pay my mortgage by considering the things that my characters are about to do next. Maybe I learned this as a 17-year-old, at the Merseyway shopping centre at 11.30 every Friday and Saturday night.

And Stockport, in those days at least, was a Conservative town. Perhaps it was here that I came to equate the Tory party with the reactionary, the wilfully ignorant, the violent and the cruel. This is an equation that has never left me and that drives me to tell stories in the hope of dramatising the possibility of justice or compassion.

But it was also the place where I met my best mates. It was the place where my mum would bring me a cup of tea in bed every morning. It was the place where my dad would give me a lift to wherever I wanted to go and buy me the occasional pint. It was where I could hang out with my brother and sister and my extended family, knowing that they accepted me as fully as anybody else. Perhaps it is this contradiction that has allowed me to be a dramatist rather than an essayist. Theatre concerns itself with contradictions. Stockport was great training for keeping my eye alert to them.

I return often now, to see my family, and for rehearsals and to see how Stockport has changed. It has been changed by the changes to Manchester. In the 80s, the edifices of the second world war seemed as legible to me as the promise of a European future. Now Manchester seems a city standing toe to toe with the energy of Hamburg or Barcelona as much as it does the energy of any other English city. And, as London prices itself out of the market of real artistic creativity, this will only accelerate over the next few years.

There is an entire generation of young artists that simply can’t afford to live in London any more. And they are moving, in their handfuls, to Manchester.

No art form is better catered for than the theatre. At the end of the 80s, when I went into Manchester, it seemed as though everybody I met was in a band. Now it seems as if everybody I meet in the city is in their own theatre company or writing their own plays. It feels as if something remarkable might happen here.

I called my version of Von Horvath’s play The Funfair and relocated it from the Munich Oktoberfest to a Platt Fields or Heaton Park travelling fairground. Von Horvath, an inveterate exile, was trying to make sense of the changes that were happening in his home country, as the triumphalist right wing of south Germany rose to what would be deadly prominence.

It gives me no pleasure to open the play in a month when the right wing in England is as triumphant as I can remember it ever being.

I woke up on the morning after the general election speechless with incredulity, as horrified by what the people of my home country had done as Von Horvath was by what the people of his home country were doing in the 1930s. This is what writers often do. We blink in horror as we watch the terrible things that people in the places we think of as our home can sometimes do to one another.

The only consolation might be that now there is a new place for our observations. The gangly, spotty, watchful outsiders of today’s Stockport might have a new focal point for the stories they want to tell. Manchester is richer in theatrical potential than I can ever remember it being. Home is at the heart of that.

• The Funfair is at Home in Manchester until 13 June 2015

• On 23 May, Home is hosting a Guardian/BAC debate about theatre, nationhood and devolution