Versatile writer excels in all media

Joe Penhall is in a remote cottage, working on some ‘exciting film projects that he can’t really talk about’.

When a writer is ensconced in their writing bubble, they take little notice of the outside world – nothing distracts them. Penhall has even picked a spot that has deliberately bad mobile reception.

So that he takes time out of his enforced writing retreat and calls back – and wanders around in the wind to find a point where I can actually hear the conversation – is a little surprising to say the least.

It’s not the only surprise. Penhall has little time for writers who don’t, can’t or won’t switch between the media of stage, television and film and where many writers have bucketloads of modesty – at least publicly – he is full of praise for the brilliant play that really launched his career.

Blue/Orange premiered at the National Theatre in 2000 with a dream cast – Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln and Chiwetel Ejiofor. It was not surprising that the play transferred to the West End and that Penhall won the Olivier for Best New Play and perhaps even more impressively the Evening Standard Best Play of the Year.

“It keeps being done and people keep coming back to see it – it doesn’t seem to have dated at all,” says Penhall.

On the face of it the play is about a young black man who believes he is the son of Idi Amin and that oranges are blue. A young doctor and an older consultant clash over his treatment.

“It’s about a lot more than that. It’s a really strong piece; it was much more evolved than anything I had written in the 1990s. With the play I really hit a nerve in that it was a great story but it was also about something that made people think – it was about the abuse of power.

“The idea that senior doctors, powerful people, were vulnerable to arrogance and hubris, trickery and self-serving hit a nerve. I suppose the idea that the establishment, if that’s media moguls or MPs, are not above hubristic, semantic-laden trickery, is a pretty powerful one.”

If this all sounds like hubris on the part of the writer himself, it really isn’t. It’s just that Penhall, who began his career working on local newspaper the South London Guardian, isn’t the sort to beat around the bush. His Australian upbringing perhaps lies behind the fact that he calls a spade a shovel.

It is an attitude that has brought him not a little controversy.

After the success of Blue/Orange he began to flit between writing for stage, television and film and was the screenwriter on the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in 2009. Produced by the heavyweight Hollywood brothers the Weinstein brothers, Penhall was publicising the film when he made an ill-advised comment about how the film had undertones of criticism of religious America.

“In retrospect I said some unwise things and the Weinsteins took me to one side and said that I wasn’t on the publicity tour any more,” says Penhall, laughing at the memory.

Other film credits include Enduring Love and The Last King of Scotland and one of the films he is currently working on, which he can talk about, is a ‘cowboy movie I’ve been talking to Sam Mendes about for a couple of years’.

So, why the switching between the different arenas? Again, he is in bullish mood.

“If you are a navel gazer and you want to get something off your chest, then the theatre is possibly the place for you to go – and more likely than not, stay,” says Penhall.

“I love writing for theatre, but I don’t understand why writers would limit themselves. There’s great freedom to write for film, where you can have a herd of buffalo stampeding across the screen.

“It’s always about telling great stories.”

On the write road to success

Joe Penhall was born in 1967 and was called ‘one of the finest playwrights of his generation’ by the Financial Times.

After the success of Blue/Orange in 2000, Penhall wrote the screenplay for BBC2’s four-part dramatisation of Jake Arnott’s acclaimed East-End gangster novel The Long Firm and adapted Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love for a 2004 film starring Rhys Ifans and Daniel Craig.

His play Some Voices premiered at the Royal Court, transferred to Broadway and was also turned into a film.

Blue/Orange, York Theatre Royal, to May 19. Tickets on 01904 623568.