Physical Poetry

David Greig's play The American Pilot received its U.S. premiere December 2006 at Manhattan Theatre Club, in New York City, under Lynne Meadow's direction. Although Greig is a top-drawer talent in his native Scotland and across Europe, his work has only recently been finding its way to American shores. Of the same generation as Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Phyllis Nagy, and Anthony Neilson, Greig's work is both of and apart from the 1990s UK new brutalist writing movement—"of" because his work shares with Ravenhill and Kane's a formalist, classicist concern with the effects of violence on society and individuals, and "apart" because his dramas tend to focus outward instead of inward. His plays avoid the "bed-sit" and instead stretch across open spaces and different countries. Greig's plays are often epic in scope and historical in nature, whether the emphasis is on recent or ancient history. Carving his stories with great detail and depth of vision, Greig writes primarily tales of individuals struggling with the burdens and regrets of memory. His central figures—usually men, and usually loners—are possessed by a desire to remake history (their own or their country's). His plays include Pyrenees, Outlying Islands, Victoria, and The cosmonaut's last message to the woman he once loved in the former Soviet Union, and have been produced by, among others, Paines Plough, Traverse Theatre, and the RSC. His translation of Camus's Caligula was presented at the Donmar Warehouse in an award-winning production in 2003. Greig is co-founder of the collective Suspect Culture in Glasgow. This interview was conducted via e-mail in early December 2006 while Greig was literally in transit to the U.S. to witness the stateside premiere of The American Pilot.

* * *

I remember when I first read The American Pilot last year after its RSC premiere at the Other Place, Statford-upon-Avon, in April 2005, and I was struck by its willful, emotional jaggedness as well as its sense of rage and outrage. I wanted to ask first off about the quality, though, of fear in the piece. The Pilot's fear of his own displacement, the fear mixed with fascination/disgust and a hint of love the community has of him and how this fear is for you situated in the structure and motion of the text as a marker of the culture of fear we all live in.

I suppose it is a play about fear but that was not a conscious intention of mine. I ought, I suppose, to give a context to the play's writing which might illuminate my answer. I wrote the play in February of 2003. It seemed plain that there would be an invasion of Iraq but that invasion had not yet happened. I was writing Pyrenees at the time and had no intentions of writing about war. I was sitting in a café preparing to teach a class on playwriting and, for that purpose, reading Heiner Müller, and I re-read a monologue of his spoken by a Russian soldier on the front in World War II. The monologue begins—I'm quoting from memory here—"We saw him coming, THE GERMAN." The monologue continues with THE GERMAN capitalized always. In one magical instant I had the thought—"We saw him, THE AMERICAN, and he was the most beautiful man we had ever seen." In that sentence and that moment I saw the whole play from beginning to end. I wrote it in two days, sent it to a few friends who commented. I made some changes and by the end of a fortnight the play existed in the form you see it today.

Oddly, it didn't find a home easily. As an uncommissioned work it was hard to program and so when it came out people saw it as a "post-Iraq" play whereas, in fact, it is pre-Iraq. So—to return to your question about fear. The fear for me is fear of the other. The capitalized ones. THE GERMAN, or THE AMERICAN, or THE TERRORIST. That...