Playwright James Rushbrooke doesn’t believe in heroes. With his award-winning play Before I’m Dead on its debut run at The Glitch, Rushbrooke tells the News what acting in an improvised Bristolian soap opera and working in secure mental health has taught him about theatre and writing complex characters, writes Melina Block.
Rushbrooke honed his craft while working as a drama teacher after leaving university. The number of children in his classes often outnumbered the roles available in ready-made productions, so he started writing his own scripts. After a decade of this, he moved to London and wrote his first adult play, landing him in the Old Vic Community Company in 2013 for two years.
The following years included writing for TV, local theatres and pantos, eventually leading to him entering the Vault Creative Arts Playwrighting competition. His winning script, Before I’m Dead, is a grounded, nuanced two-hander, focusing on the relationship between a charity worker and the dying teenager he’s been assigned to help.
“I have, like, five ideas a day and if I started writing them all I’d never get anything done,” Rushbrooke explained. “So, what I do is if I have an idea I’ll jot it down and then I’ll leave it, and if it comes back to me and keeps knocking on the door of my consciousness then I will eventually write it. [With] Before I’m Dead, I knew that I wanted to write a story about a charity worker and a teenager who was dying because it’s an interesting premise, but I didn’t know what that looked like as a play.”
Rushbrooke’s usual writing style is naturalistic, something which he departed from when constructing this show. “For me, this one, the most challenging thing was letting go of convention.”
With only two actors performing various roles, darting between the past and present, Rushbrooke described Before I’m Dead as “kind of everything, everywhere.”
Having formerly worked in child protection before his current job in secure mental health, Rushbrooke is no stranger to the complexity of humanity. “I’m a people person and if you work in secure mental health, which I do, […] you have to be very comfortable in the grey morality of human existence.”
“Although I write, I suppose, plot-driven stories, I like characters that exist in this grey area, like, not everybody’s a hero. If you come to the end of the play and you know what the playwright thinks or wants you to think about something, I don’t think you’ve succeeded as a writer. I think you need to present morally complex characters and then walk away.”
He reiterates his distaste for preachy, didactic theatre, preferring multifaceted portrayals of humanity. “If you read some of the things people have done, which I have, they’re absolutely horrifying, and if you read what kind of childhoods these people have had, they’re equally horrifying.”
When it comes to the actual act of writing, Rushbrooke also draws on his performance background; while in Bristol, he acted in an improvised soap opera. The cast would perform a play off the cuff – the only thing they knew each night was that they were working towards a cliffhanger. “I don’t really know where a play’s going until I start writing.”
What he does know, though, is the psychological profile of his characters. Describing the process of writing characters as “sitting and listening to two imaginary people having discussions and just taking the notes,” Rushbrooke clearly likes to immerse himself within his creations. An experienced playwright, his instinct guides him through the process. “It’s all kind of subconscious but it’s done through an intuitive grasp of structure.”
This freedom is complemented by an intense interest in contextualising universal themes within people’s everyday inner-lives. “I like really big ideas […] but you explore it through the small world of a character.”
Describing his usual style as domestic dystopia, he outlines that this just means showing large ideas through a personal lens. “I think human beings don’t deal with the big stuff. So, Before I’m Dead, it deals with cancer and death and grief and psychological abuse, but really it’s just about two people in a room.”
Acknowledging that presenting these topics on stage can help generate post-show discussions, Rushbrooke emphasised that, in the moment, it is just about the people we see in front of us; that’s what audiences can immediately connect with.
The Glitch, 134 Lower Marsh, London, SE1 7AE until Sunday 21st June
Ticket link: https://buytickets.at/vaultcreativearts/2153481
