British author Mark Haddon (pictured) interviewed by Carole Cadwalladr of
The Observer in the UK:
You've written novels, children books and TV dramas – why a play now?
I've been thinking about doing a play for about seven years and getting nowhere. What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.
Are there certain similarities between your debut play, Polar Bears, and your novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time? They're both mystery stories, for example, aren't they?
Polar Bears has got a mystery story to it, but I tell you what, it's bloody mysterious. If we've done our job right, people are going to come out of the theatre saying, "Wow, what was that about?" What we want is for people to come out feeling as if they've been hit around the head.
And the main character has an affliction that affects the way she sees the world? In Curious Incident it was Asperger's, in this case it's manic depression...
Everyone sees the world differently. One of the things that's interesting about people who have label-able conditions is that we recognise bits of ourselves in them, don't we? I wish I'd never allowed the publishers to put the word "Asperger's" on the cover of Curious Incident. It became an issue book, and I found myself repeatedly saying: it's not really about Asperger's, it's about difference. It's about acceptance of others. It's about that sidelong, Martian view of the world. I slightly worry that if I say too much about Polar Bears, people will say, "Oh, it's a mental-health issue play."
Where does your interest in the mind, and its disorders, stem from?
I've realised that there are two subjects at the centre of everything that I do: the first is the waywardness of the human mind. You can see that in everything that I've done. Coming Down the Mountain [a television drama] was about Down's syndrome. There's extreme anxiety in A Spot of Bother. And there's that-which-I'm-loath-to-call-Asperger's in Curious Incident. And these things do not happen in isolation: the way that you get to understand someone's mind is by looking at the relationships between them and the world around them.
As well as your professional interest in the mind, you also used to volunteer, didn't you, with people suffering from mental and physical disabilities?
In a very previous life. After three years at Oxford I wanted to do something that wasn't about me, frankly. It was before Margaret Thatcher made students boring by means of severe economic pressure.
On the subject of politicians, I couldn't help noticing on your blog that you've been quite rude about David Cameron...
They're a cabal of very wealthy people who are probably playing to a gallery of other wealthy people. Whatever they say in public. I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
You said once that you'd experienced "industrial-strength mood swings". Did that inform your play's subject?
I'm a writer! If you work in an office it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you. There are kids who fit in, very naturally, and the world is not puzzling really for them. And then there's another group who feel a bit uneasy in themselves. If you're in the first group, you're not going to become a writer, you'll be a fighter pilot or a bank robber. The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, "I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one."
So do you feel you fit better into the world these days?
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't fit very well as a failed writer. That helps, doesn't it?
Does it? You've been both not-so-successful, and extremely successful. What are the pros and cons of each?
The pros are you can live in a bigger house and buy as many CDs as you want and you don't panic about money. And the cons... I have a vivid memory of when Curious Incident took off, which was very early on, before it was published here, and it was quite scary. It's like having one of those dreams in which your car starts to fly. They're great, but if your car starts to fly in real life, it scares the living daylights out of you. And you know fairly quickly whether it will wreck your life, or whether you're going to ignore it. These days I ignore it completely.
You said in an early interview that you'd always felt like you had your nose pressed to the window of the House of Literature and they were all in there – Ian McEwan was in the kitchen, and Jeanette Winterson was washing up. Are you there too now, peeling the potatoes?
You realise eventually there is no place like that. What keeps you writing is that you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still going uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're trying to get to. I was writing something recently and I was chuckling at something I'd written, and my wife looked across and said, "Do you think that real writers do that?" And I didn't even notice it was funny at first, because I still think, "Oh, one day I'll be a real writer."
British author Mark Haddon (pictured) interviewed by Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer in the UK: