When a student she knew as talented, determined and incredibly hard-working requested permission to miss her class on scriptwriting, Dr Sarah-Jane Dickenson was surprised. This was a student who never missed a deadline, never missed a class and always gave his best to every assignment.
“Why?” she asked, wondering what his excuse could possibly be. Perhaps she didn’t expect an answer that would come close to being a legitimate justification for missing a class.
“I’ve organised a theatre tour to some mining communities near my hometown,” was the response from James Graham, “and one performance clashes with your next session”.
This tour was of his student play Coal not Dole which he took to the Edinburgh festival. It also represents a clear link between the work he was interested in whilst studying for his Drama degree at the University of Hull and his latest work, the two series of Sherwood, the finale of which has aired on BBC 1 recently.
It’s just over 20 years since James graduated with a BA Hons in Drama in 2003. In that time he’s established himself as one of the most important living playwrights in Britain with masterpieces such as This House, Ink and Best of Enemies, and has written stunning TV movies and mini-series such as The Quiz, Brexit: The Uncivil War, and Coalition. As well as receiving vast quantities of critical acclaim, he has also risen to greater public prominence with Dear England about the trials and tribulations of the England national football team under the leadership of Gareth Southgate and with The Way, a show he co-created alongside Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis (and which also found its narrative roots in industrial action).
Looking through his extensive back catalogue feels like an exploration of the big stories behind key moments in collective English memory. He uses events from history to comment on the present (for example This House telling the story of British politics in the 1970s as a way of exploring some of the issues in British politics in the early 2010s); he explores explosive contemporary events in a way that humanises and centres the characters over their divisive politics (Brexit); and he looks at sensational stories from culture and entertainment in a way that handles the controversial figures at the heart of the story in a sensitive and more revealing way (Quiz). It’s as though he’s building an alternative English memory that somehow feels, despite its fictional nature, as though it’s a truer reflection of us than the reality we are daily presented with by the media.
Sherwood, though, feels like a refinement of some of the key aspects of James’s work. A genre piece set in the modern day in which the origins of the crime being uncovered finds its roots in the past, during the miners’ strikes of the 80s. We are given a puzzle of modern-day England that can only be understood by looking again at our past, finding new meaning in what has gone before and acknowledging that it informs who we are now.
Certainly, the ingredients that made James Graham the writer he is were present during his time as a University of Hull Drama student.
“He said early on he wanted to write political plays and explore his fascination with history,” said Sarah-Jane, an academic who taught him throughout his degree.
At Hull, James was given the freedom to explore his embryonic talent. There was a creative freedom to the department at the time he was a student, and he took advantage of that freedom to try things out and to find out exactly who he wanted to be as a writer.
“In the drama department they had the space to play, a lot of the work they produced was extra-curricular,” said Sarah-Jane. “The course was wide ranging in content and they had the run of the Gulbenkian Theatre spaces to try out things without fear with like-minded people.”
That fearless desire to experiment and try something different is the hallmark of James’s work, and it is wonderful to hear that Hull played a small part in allowing him to develop that side of his work. Indeed he has often spoken of the importance of Hull in his development as a writer.
When he returned to campus in 2018, one of the themes of his Inspired in Hull talk at the Gulbenkian was the strength of feeling he had for Hull and his time here, and how important it was to his development.
“His writing is politics with a heart,” said Sarah-Jane. “And that’s what Hull gave him: the opportunity to learn about the history and the cannon of political theatre makers, which he wanted to be part of, and the opportunity to make as well as learn.”
If James Graham hasn’t already cemented himself in that cannon of writers, then it surely is only a matter of time. In spite of being a genre piece, Sherwood is certainly also a political piece of work and certainly a career highlight in a career that is full of highlights.
If you haven’t already watched Sherwood, you can find it on iPlayer here.
Dr Sarah-Jane Dickenson, formerly Senior Lecturer in Drama & Creative Writing at the University of Hull, is a playwright and academic. Dr Dickenson was interviewed for this article by David Simpson, Alumni Engagement Manager.