Sunday Times

Never say curtains: David Leddy's No 1 rule

Personal heartache and the challenges of plying his craft in unusual venues are grist to the mill for Scotland’s edgiest young playwright

Should Scotland’s hottest young playwright lack dramatic inspiration, he need look no further than his own hectic life. In the last few months David Leddy has coped with a death in the family, his lover’s serious illness, their recent civil partnership and the unhappy departure of a key member of his theatre company two weeks before the opening of his awardwinning play, White Tea, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

It’s a catalogue of events that might puncture even Sir Dickie Attenborough’s chirpy show-must-go-on philosophy. But Leddy, 36, is nothing if not a trouper. He is a man who comes to terms with his emotions not in the wee small hours in the dark but in the glare of the spotlight. When his partner Calum McCallum, who has renal failure, became dangerously ill, Leddy’s response was to write Home Hindrance. The play, about the premature death of a young man, was staged in the couple’s flat on the 16th floor of a Glasgow tower block.

“It’s been a very intense year,” he says. Intense is what Leddy does best. White Tea was first performed at this year’s Fringe by two actors to a sell-out audience of 20, who donned paper kimonos and drank tea. Sub Rosa, his Victorian melodrama which took place in the bowels of the Citizens Theatre, played to a capacity crowd of 15, and Home Hindrance was performed for just six people every night. Susurrus, another critical hit, based loosely on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was performed to an audience of one, wearing headphones and wandering around Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden.

“I want my audiences to have an emotional experience,” says Leddy. “I am fascinated by the intense, intimate relationship with an audience because we are encouraged so much nowadays to communicate without actually meeting anyone. There are so many social networking sites. Louise Welsh [the novelist] said to me the other day: ‘I want to set up Off Your Facebook.’ We are all so busy; we see each other less often. My work counterbalances the idea that we live increasingly impersonal lives.”

For theatres, obsessed with putting bums on plush-velvet, fold-down seats, his unconventional staging, which draws heavily on his performance-art past, ought to be an anathema. Instead, he is one of the most talked-about forces in Scottish Theatre and is helping to put an art form largely ignored by London critics outside the Festival onto an international stage.

So far this year Leddy has won a Fringe First, the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe prize and a Herald Angel award for White Tea, the story of the estranged, adopted British daughter of a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima. He has just been nominated in the best director category of the Theatrical Management Association awards for Sub Rosa, which will be announced in London on November 1.

The day after I meet him he is flying to Milan for a series of performances of Susurrus in Italian. Then he is off to North America to view potential venues for its run there. “Most conventional theatre is not economically viable,” he says. “Box office takings are small. Often these very intimate pieces create such a buzz that they end up selling out. At the time we did Home Hindrance in the flat, The Patriot was showing at the Tron with smaller audiences than us.”

Home Hindrance in 2007 catapulted Leddy out of the cul-de-sac of performance art and onto the critics’ radar. A requiem for the living, the action centres around a young man called Rory who has died. In each room of Leddy’s flat, the audience encountered somebody who had been close to Rory — from a thwarted gay suitor in the living room to an uninhibited lover in the shower and a dreamy wife on the bed. The play is ultimately about grief. McCallum, Leddy’s partner of nine years who inspired the show, was given the right of veto.

The pair met in a nightclub in Brighton in 2000, got “very drunk” and sang Abba songs. McCallum had suffered acute renal failure at the age of 18 and had had a kidney transplant. But after 13 years, the transplant failed. He has been on the waiting list for six years. In the interim, he has suffered a series of worrying afflictions, from peritonitis to problems with the levels of calcium in his blood which involved him having his throat cut open and his parathyroid glands removed earlier this year.

“Home Hindrance was braver than I anticipated,” says Leddy. “I hadn’t realised how hard it would be to have people in the house acting out this drama every night. It isn’t about us — nobody portrays us — but it is about the ethics of writers writing about things that are close to them. I don’t use much autobiographical material in my work so it felt very different. I felt like a vampire.”

McCallum is having dialysis three days a week for five hours at a time. When they travel abroad, arrangements have to be made to provide his treatment. This month they are off to Venice for a holiday. “It’s difficult but there are worse things,” says Leddy. “We’re waiting for a transplant. The chilling thing is that the call is most likely to come on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s a very mixed thing to wish for. Ultimately, you are wishing for a teenager to die in a motorcycle accident.”

They starred in their own intimate show earlier this year when they had a civil partnership ceremony at the Glasgow Art Club, followed by a party at Leddy’s favourite cafe in Hyndland. “It was great,” he says. “It was so much more than I expected. I think because my partner has been so sick, there was this real sense of the relationship surviving against the odds and that was very emotional. I can totally understand these people who get married eight times and every time have a huge wedding.”

Leddy’s challenge now is to write a play that generates the same intensity of emotional response in a much larger audience. He is working on a piece for the National Theatre of Scotland to be performed next autumn to audiences of about 200. “It has to be something uplifting and joyous,” he says. “The new piece will be for a large audience who will get to dance and throw paint at each other. There will be lots of music and you will leave feeling excited to be alive.”

Little in Leddy’s background points to his current role. He was brought up with his brother and sister in Woking, Surrey, where his father works in a factory and his mother is a hairdresser. He was first taken to the theatre at the age of eight to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Apparently I was completely mesmerised by it,” he says. “My family are very keen on the arts and I’ve wanted to make theatre from when I was very young.”

After a spell in youth theatre he studied theatre studies at Lancaster University. He says he is the only person in Scotland to have completed a “practice-based PhD in theatre”, which comes as no surprise. “ Lancaster was a great department but it kind of trains you for a job that doesn't exist,” he says. “Nobody ever made any money in performance art.”

Not that money interests him much. He has no real desire to write for film or television, where he would earn far more. His route into mainstream theatre came via Glasgay, the gay arts festival, which he directed for two years. “It’s a horrible job,” he says. “It is really difficult to do because it is so underfunded. The funders — the city council and the Arts Council — didn’t really want it to happen.”

But should a festival aimed at a small minority get public funding? “It’s not directed at just one section of society,” he says. “I think of it as a themed festival. The reality is that the majority of audiences for Glasgay events are straight. “I understand that people might have a problem with a specialist festival, but when you look at the specialist festivals they have problems with and the ones they don’t, it is very interesting. They tend not to have a problem with the Italian Film Festival or the French Film Festival.”

His family is very supportive of his own sexuality. “My dad is such a right-on sister, it’s unbelievable,” he says. “But it makes me feel very old to think that growing up as a gay teenager I had no culture reference points. We had Colin in EastEnders and that was it.”

Leddy first came to Glasgow aged 16, when his father took him to see the National Theatre’s production of Blood Wedding. He has always loved the city, and when there was the chance to move back with McCallum, a Glaswegian, in 2001, he jumped at it. Now he has become an honorary Scot — “the rising star of Scottish theatre”, according to one London critic.

There are, however, concerns that the recent renaissance in Scottish theatre may come to an abrupt end, partly because of the bureaucratic problems surrounding the birth of Creative Scotland. “Nobody has any idea what is going on at Creative Scotland,” says Leddy. “I went to the launch and during the speeches there were audible snorts of derision coming from members of the Arts Council staff. They were making these grand statements but their own staff had no idea what was going on. It’s worrying for all of us.”

Whatever the outlook for Creative Scotland, Leddy’s future seems assured. With a clutch of awards, international demand for his work and his new piece for the National Theatre eagerly awaited, the maverick of Scottish theatre continues to surprise.

After we finish, he is off for physiotherapy for stress-related back problems. With any luck, he won’t find a cure. Creatively, Leddy thrives on stress. You can always rely on him to make a drama out of a crisis.

Gillian Bowditch, 18 October 2009