Peter Hamilton Interview

September 26, 2024

Peter Hamilton Interview

This week we interviewed Peter Hamilton, writer of The Elephant in the Room, running at Waterloo East Theatre between 8th – 27th Oct 2024

Q. Tell us about your background, when you first developed an interest in theatre, and what drew you to playwriting.

A. I was born in Armley, Leeds 12 in October 1943 and as a child attended Armley Infants School, known locally as The Clock School, now notorious because of the Roberts asbestos factory behind it. Asbestos dust lay everywhere in the streets around the factory and the area has the highest rate of mesothelioma – a rare cancer caused by exposure to asbestos – in the UK. I mention this because I think, while I have escaped the cancer, I detect in myself some of the psychological symptoms associated with long-term exposure to asbestos, such as somatization, interpersonal sensitivity, phobic anxiety and paranoid ideation. I’ve always been a bit of a mess and later on became practically addicted to benzodiazepines, the very strong tranquillisers. I’ve been more or less out of it for the last sixty years. We left Armley in 1954 and moved to Headingley, a more middle class area and I was lucky enough to pass the 11+ and go to Leeds Modern School. All this time I knew that English Literature meant something to me. I was always interested in writing and also I used to entertain my cousin Carol with puppetry plays. Eventually, I went to train as a teacher at Coventry College of Education and studied English and Drama, even though I was pretty much out of it on tranquillisers. I was a disaster as a teacher.

In the rehearsal room: Tanya Katyal (Yama)

Q. For anyone who hasn’t read about it yet, can you give us a synopsis of The Elephant in the Room?

A. In The Elephant In The Room a young man, Ashley Davenport – wealthy, white, middle-class, public-school educated – after a few years and several bad career choices such as Officer Cadet at Sandhurst, the Law, Stockbroker, EFL teacher, VSO work digging sewers in Bangladesh, intertwined with backpacking round the world, has a brush with near-Death in India where he has become drawn to Hinduism and life as a Holy Man. He has been called to follow the Spiritual Path. About this time his Grandmother, who brought him up in a large country house near Basingstoke (his parents were killed in a plane crash when he was four) also dies and leaves him the house and a considerable Investment Portfolio. The house was originally built by his Great-great-grandfather, a Marine Insurance broker, who was fascinated by Indian culture, religion and philosophy and always kept a live Indian elephant in the library. And when he died his will stipulated that this elephant should always be there. So Ashley grew up with an Indian influence in his genes, almost, and always felt something of an outsider in English society. He seems to have imbibed a sort of passiveness, even as a child.

After his near-Death experience in India he is lost and all at sea and so decides to enter a Rest and Retirement Home. He has been playing Bowls with some pensioners in a Basingstoke park and feels drawn to the elderly. As he puts it in the play he feels the Immensity behind what is supposed to be the real world. He feels ‘Eternity shifting inside him’ and feels himself hurtling towards oblivion, so that when he learns about The Lilac Room where patients go to quietly pass away, feels this is for him.

In the Rest Home, however, he also meets Kim-Ly, a Vietnamese illegal immigrant, working as a Nursing Attendant, who wants to study science, as a physicist or cosmologist. She has a terrific drive to the future. They have a brief affair, Kim-Ly becomes pregnant and they eventually marry, although Ashley is not quite at ease with this. He also starts to study Accountancy. Thus, he is borne away on the Great Chaotic Current of Life. I think this is the most important aspect of the play: it is not a ‘white saviour’ work where white liberal/left ideas save the world; it shows a young white man surrendering to a very non-European tide. It also reflects the undercurrent of Indian influence on European culture for the last 2,000 years.

Q. Tell us a bit about Clockschool Theatre Company, and how you came to work with Director Ross McGregor?

A. I set up Clockschool Theatre Company (named after my old Infant school!) to present my own plays. I have had about ten produced on the Fringe. I have had various directors over the years – Christopher Wren, Dominic Grant, Darren Tunstall, Alistair Treville, Gavin Slaughter – but then settled down with Ken McClymont who was Artistic Director of The Old Red Lion, Angel, for several productions. I met Ross McGregor when he was producing the first showing of Elephant at The Tabard Theatre, Chiswick.

Q. Who or what was the inspiration behind the play?

A. The original idea came from a newspaper article I read about fifteen years ago which described a young man of nineteen checking himself into an Old Peoples Home. I thought he must be able to afford it and it started from there.

Q. Why this subject matter?

A. Many white British people these days are disturbed at the gradual erosion of English Identity and it is a subject which greatly interests me. I think the loss of Empire has had a catastrophic influence on the English psyche; for instance, I think it’s behind all the current obsessions with what is called ‘victim culture’: people feel guilty about Imperialism so everybody is rushing round desperately trying to prove they were never really part of it. E.g. Not so long ago it was quite fashionable for the liberal middle classes to perhaps dig up some Irish ancestry etc. But the answer is inside us: as Krish, the Charge Nurse in the Elephant says “ We must find this place inside ourselves and make it our dwelling place for ever.’ And this knowledge has always been there; peace and security dwells inside us.

Q. Is spirituality important to you and why, and have you ever taken a spiritual journey in any form? If so, tell us about it and what you gained.

A. I am a practising and fairly devout Roman catholic now, but I converted to the Church after a long journey via Gurdjieff, Alice A Bailey, Buddhism, Thomas Merton. I was interested in New Age type things for a long time but then read a book called Holy Blood/ Holy Grail which rather put the wind up me. But I still read the Upanishads and the Gita and get a lot from them, especially the translations by Eknath Earswaran. In Hinduism there is this immensity of space but Christ is at the centre of things for me. I have had two or three moments when I have felt very close to His presence. He is King of the Universe.

Q. Can you tell us how this play has developed since its first performance, and when this was?

A. Its first performance was last November at the Tabard theatre but I have rewritten it since, mostly around the character of Ashley. In that production he was a kind of Evelyn Waugh parody of a public school boy – the Etonian toff of the 1920s. He’s much more modern now – does VSO, has probably been interested in Socialism at some stage. Some public schools. such as Winchester and Wellington College (transformed by the progressive reforms of Anthony Selsdon, who introduced Holistic Studies into the curriculum) are real innovators. I also greatly admire courageous educators like Katherine Birbalsingh who impose discipline and some traditional teaching together with a very modern comprehensive approach. I dread what the Labour government is going to do to schools. There won’t be a lot of Diversity in the system.

At its heart The Elephant In The room is a coming-of-age play about a young man finding his place in the world and embracing the teeming, vital chaos of life.

Q. Would you categorise your plays to date and, if so, which genre would they fall and why? Is there a reason you are drawn to certain subjects?

A. I have so far categorised my plays as Grisly Comedies and I think my greatest influence was Joe Orton, particularly in the the formality of his language. My first play Switchboard in 1997 was about a night telephonist in a women’s hospital who rapes a young night porter. In 1979 I worked a Night Telephonist at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Euston and this had in fact happened in the 1950s when the Night Telephonist used Chloroform from the Dangerous Drugs cupboard to overcome the night porter and so reduce him to a Permanent Vegetative State. It was my first Grisly Comedy. Since then I think my most successful play was Danelaw which was about a neo-Nazi group, based on Combat 18, who want to found an all-white supremacist nation based on the ancient Danelaw, with Chelmsford as the capital. There is an element of comedic lunacy in British neo-Nazism.

Q. What makes the play unique, and what do hope audience members will take away with them?

A. I think what makes this play unique is its recommendation of the Spiritual Way, waiting to be taken inside all of us. I think the world stands on the brink of a huge upsurge of the Spirit. The elephant is beginning to move in everyone now and people will one day be able to transform things.

Q. If you could sum up The Elephant in the Room in one line, what would that be?

A. Again it’s from Mr. Krish ‘We must find this quiet place inside ourselves and make it our dwelling-place for ever.’