It's intriguing to me to encounter a playwright as my home is in writing (not very good) poetry, and novels about jazz singers finding corpses in fountains that no less than twenty literary agents rejected (at the time I was livid: now, however, I can see their point). So why, Elise, do you write plays? "I'm not too good at descriptions, and I don't know the names for many of the things you see on the street." Lamp-post, bus stop, empty crisp packet rattling along pavement...? She started to write plays when she was 15, "but the first time I completed a first draft was when I was 16, about Joe Orton's relationship with Kenneth Halliwell, his lover and murderer." And it's this play, Live With It, that Elise became vaguely famous for.
It's easy to see why; at first glance it's an odd topic for a girl of 16 to write about. When Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey at 17, it was a play about a teenage girl, but as a teenager, Elise "was hugely influenced by gay or androgynous male artists, their lives, and their tastes - Oscar Wilde, Morrissey, David Bowie, Truman Capote, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Andy Warhol. I still often think I'm a gay man trapped in a woman's body." Contrarily, Elise found herself more interested in Orton's life and personality than his work. "I read John Lahr's biography of Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, before I read Orton's plays." Her favourite Orton plays are Entertaining Mr. Sloane and The Good and Faithful Servant , which she finds "unusually sentimental for Orton." She isn't as fond of the farces, as "shock-tactics unfortunately seem to date a play!" The danger of writing a play about someone who writes plays is you have a the ability to be professionally critical.
What comes across very clearly in Elise's play is the claustrophobia of Orton and Halliwell's (rather odd) relationship. They lived together in a small flat for many years, having met as student actors at RADA. They turned to writing, and lived on Halliwell's inheritance until it ran out, then eventually Orton scored his hit with Sloane. Orton was unapologetic about his interludes with random chaps in public toilets, and Halliwell's work was never as well-received as Orton's. It was a recipe for disaster and Halliwell murdered Orton and took his own life. Was there something about this intensity and destructiveness that appealed to teenage Elise? "I think I'm definitely drawn to the idea of intense, destructive relationships, but I don't really have them - certainly not to the degree of the couples I've written about. I guess I get to live that out in my writing. I think what attracts me to couples like Orton and Halliwell, and Jane and Paul Bowles (the subject of my second play, Non Sequitur), is the idea of a relationship forming a cocoon against the outside world - no matter how high the price."
A novelist's work will face little alteration, unless their editor bears a grudge. But not so for the playwright. The jury's still out as to how much Delaney's A Taste of Honey was altered by the director who first produced it. How about Live With It? "It was altered quite a bit from the workshop to production stage. The workshop dramaturge suggested that I take out the framing device of having Orton and Halliwell handcuffed together in hell." This kind of interference is deeply annoying, as Elise admits that hers had been "a pretty juvenile idea" but "since the handcuffs and some of the hell scenes remained in the play, I worry that the script doesn't make a lot of sense now! However, no one's ever called attention to it." The play's second production was at Toronto's 'Buddies in Bad Times Theatre', where the director asked Elise to send production notes, but she "decided to "be good" and not interfere with his conception. I regretted it when I saw the production. Many lines had been cut, and while I understand that it's sometimes necessary to do that to keep down a play's length, I thought that a lot of the sense and impact of the play was lost, especially the last scene, which I'd been so proud of. Also, the director (who, let it be said, loved the play) interpreted it as (despite all) a gay love story - not surprising, since he was doing it for a gay theatre. In consequence, some of the coldness and claustrophobia of the script, which the original production maintained, was lost. The actors (as I recall) actually admitted to being afraid to say many of the lines to each other, they were so cruel!"
Live With It was first produced by a small theatre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Elise lived at the time, when she was 18. She tried her best to be an enfante terrible, by "taking tips from Truman Capote, but no one really paid any attention. Based on the writers I loved, I thought it was my duty to be sexy and provocative. For example, I posed in newspapers with a cigarette on one occasion, although I was under the legal age to purchase them, and on another in handcuffs" - cheekily enough, one of the props from Live With It.
Elise's dialogue fizzes with quick-witted verbal sparring, which seem to resemble one of Morrissey's more vituperative interviews. Yet Elise claims that she doesn't speak like that in real life - "I'm no Oscar Wilde." Although she doesn't carry a notebook around with her (how many writers actually do? I'm lucky if I can gather together a functioning biro and a faded bus ticket at the moment inspiration shuffles in), she has "stolen lines from my friends for plays, and based pieces on conversations I've had with people. I have a pretty freaky memory for conversation." Remember that the next time you go down the pub with her, then.
The themes and issues in Elise's plays reflect her own concerns at the time, even when she is writing about real people, as "that's why I'm drawn to certain characters and stories." She doesn't always know she's identifying with one of the characters while she writes, and "I've even found that often the character I don't think I'm identifying with is the one I identified most deeply with." As most of her writing "is either biographical or autobiographical, the starting point is obvious." But then, the characters "take on a life of their own, doing things and changing in ways that surprise me, even if I know what the end of the play is ahead of time." As she's studying at theatre school at the moment, her tutors won't let her work on a piece she started in 2004, "a play about New Wave casualty Billy Mackenzie, who mysteriously committed suicide aged 39, as I'm supposed to get away from my biographical habits!" Her first year project is to write a one-act play, "which, I think, is going to be about a female Mormon missionary in Montreal." Once she has time to write biographically again, she's "contemplating a play about Abelard and Heloise, the 12th century French lovers. Heloise was a famously learned young woman and Abelard a famous philosopher; he became her tutor and they had an affair, which led to his castration by her uncle and guardian. I've also written part of a play about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet and founder, that I hope to return to someday."
As well as biographical plays, Elise tried her hand at adapting Henry James' novel The Wings of the Dove as a play called Milly's Will "for the Manitoba Theatre Centre. I came up with the idea and they applied for the commission grant just before news of the film came out! But they never liked what I did with the script, so it has never seen the light of day." She's drawn to James' work because "I'm fascinated by his utterly bizarre psychology and baroque stylisation (probably why MTS didn't like my approach to the script!)." She had a brief foray with screenplays when she rewrote one for her former husband, cult Canadian director, Guy Maddin. He asked her to help with the dialogue but "it was a doomed request - the characters and situations were so ridiculous I couldn't take them seriously enough to write good dialogue for them. The only thing that remained consistent is that it was a film noir about hairdressing and hockey." In the end, Maddin turned it into a short silent film which won an award - "in retrospect I should have realized that ridiculous characters and situations make very little difference to what he does (brilliantly) as a filmmaker."
It's perhaps obvious, in the quote from Live With It at the beginning, but Morrissey's influence on Elise has been profound. She began to listen to The Smiths when she was 15, which just so happened to be the same time she started to write plays. "Morrissey's lyrics made me realize that you could be profound and "dark" yet also be witty at the same time. Morrissey first influenced my poetry, and having discovered I had the ability to be witty, I transferred that style to my playwriting (and very properly gave up writing poetry). In addition, the bare, bleak style of Live With It was influenced as much by Morrissey kitchen-sinkers like "Girl Afraid" as it was by Samuel Beckett. Morrissey also helped to expand my vocabulary - count the multisyllabic words in Live With It that appear in Morrissey songs! I stole a few lines from Morrissey for Live With It as well - from 15 to 18, there was no songwriter (Smiths and solo) I listened to more frequently or attentively." There was an hiatus, though, and Elise rediscovered him through the internet in a "fit of teenage nostalgia, which ultimately led to a bout of slash fiction writing, which was crucial in a lot of ways to my decision to leave academia [Elise had been studying for a postgraduate literature degree] to return to playwriting at this late date." Before you ask, slash fic is a branch of 'fanfic', and has an... ahem... 'adult' bias. It's great fun for the non-prudish and as it provides authors with a ready-made, eager audience, is a fantastic way to feel encouraged to write. It's very good for mending writer's block, although the danger is that all you might end up writing is slash. In some ways, the play that kicked off Elise's career is a piece of slash fic.
The characters that seem to interest Elise are people on the cusp of society, or in intense, unconventional relationships. It should certainly be interesting to see what direction her writing goes in. Having read some of the Billy MacKenzie play, I can certainly say it's a great shame she can't work on it at the moment. She has great perception of her characters, so that they come alive in the text to a degree that is often surprising. No matter how vile a character might be, she paints them wholly, to a pitch where you empathise with them and genuinely care about them. Elise is adept at showing us human nature in adversity.
