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The brutalist Royal National Theatre building, which sits aggressively on the south side of the River Thames, in London, is a “love it or loudly despise it” kind of place—all concrete edges and unwelcoming angles. King Charles III once morosely described it as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London.” For the playwright and screenwriter James Graham, however, it holds a certain appeal. “I think the geometry of it is fucking sexy,” he told me recently.
We were seated on a mezzanine floor in the dining room of the theatre’s upscale restaurant, Lasdun, named for the building’s architect, Denys Lasdun. Looking down through a large window, we could take in the buzzing lobby and the pre-theatre-drinks crowd. The vibe surrounding us was moody-industrial: white tablecloths and black leather seats, with spotlit concrete walls and dark flooring. The ceiling, also concrete, was coffered, like a particularly sturdy beehive.
Graham likes an Old-Fashioned at Lasdun’s bar when his plays are in tech in the theatres below, and they often are. (Once you know his name, it’s seemingly everywhere.) The restaurant was a fitting location for a playwright known for history plays that interrogate, in unsparing detail, the U.K.’s most treasured national institutions. In “This House,” his breakout work, from 2012, he explored the inner workings of Parliament and the ascent of Margaret Thatcher. “Ink,” which transferred from the West End to Broadway in 2019, followed Rupert Murdoch and the rise of tabloid journalism. Earlier this year, Graham won an Olivier Award for “Dear England,” his play about the former English soccer manager Gareth Southgate and the pressures of the game.
On the day we met, he bustled in with a backpack, apologizing profusely for being late. At forty-two, he has the bright, slightly harried air of someone who enjoys being exceptionally busy. This year, he has opened two plays in the U.K., and two more are scheduled for the spring. The second season of his BBC show, “Sherwood,” about a real-life murder in Nottinghamshire, the mining county where he grew up, premières next month. At the restaurant, Graham said he had taken the train from Liverpool, where he was speaking at the Labour Party conference. The next day, he would fly to New York, to prepare for the opening of Elton John’s splashy new Broadway musical, “Tammy Faye,” for which Graham wrote the book. (Jake Shears wrote the lyrics; previews started at the Palace Theatre on October 19th.) The show began its life at the Almeida Theatre, in London, in 2022, and has been significantly reworked. “Oh, God, it feels like a big thing,” he said, nervously. What could go wrong with a Broadway show? “They’re so cheap, and they always run for years,” he joked. He ordered a glass of Italian red.
“Tammy Faye” follows the true story of Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker), the American televangelist who, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, with her pastor husband, Jim Bakker, was adored by millions. Together, they ran a popular television show, “The PTL Club,” and a successful Christian theme park called Heritage U.S.A. That was before it emerged that Jim had been swindling money from their followers, and had covered up a sexual encounter; he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison. But Tammy Faye, with her big hair, outlandish makeup, and tendency toward bigheartedness, remained a beloved figure, embracing those whom mainstream evangelicalism shunned. Before the scandal broke, she invited a gay Christian minister with AIDS onto her show. “How sad that we as Christians—who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone—are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care,” she said.
An unusually eloquent waiter—an aspiring actor—took our order and returned with the plates: pork shoulder for Graham, a hockey-puck-size fish cake with anchovy sauce for me. “I mean, their story—Jim and Tammy’s—is obviously Shakespearean,” Graham said, cutting into his food. “It’s a rise and fall from poverty, through love, success, chaos, destruction of empire, shaming, and then coming out the other side having learned a valuable lesson. Like, it’s all there.” When Graham joined the project, however, he had never heard of the Bakkers. John and Shears were both longtime Tammy fans, and had been toying with the idea of a musical for years. They had watched clip after clip of “PTL” and written a few songs, but didn’t yet have a story. “Elton really knew her to his bones, and comes from that musical tradition. The gospel South, that’s his music,” he said. And, he went on, “Jake has been obsessed with Tammy Faye since a young boy, like, seeing her as this gay icon that he knew before he knew he was gay.”
John sent a car to pick Graham up from a flat he shared with a few others. (“I was, like, Please don’t send a car! I can just take the Tube.”) They had dinner in the pop star’s house in Windsor. Once he got the job, he immersed himself in Tammy’s world, reading histories of the evangelical movement and the memoirs of the pastor Jerry Falwell, who becomes a villain-like figure in the show. Eventually, Graham told John and Shears that he wanted the musical to go beyond Tammy. (Graham told me that they said, “Make sure you keep the heart. Don’t go all cerebral.”) “I thought her story would be infinitely more powerful if it was against the backdrop of a wider exploration of that system. What is televangelism? Why did it emerge? What need did it fill?” he said. “You do say the words, quite early on, ‘I think I want to put Ronald Reagan in it.’ ”
The restaurant had filled up and grown noisier as we approached showtime. No one seemed daunted by the prospect of a nearly three-hour production of “Coriolanus” downstairs. Growing up, Graham had never heard of the National Theatre. He was a shy kid who would spend hours alone in his room making up stories, unless he was performing. He loved ice skating—not a traditional choice in his tough, post-industrial town—and appearing in school plays. (“A massive Billy Elliot cliché, I know,” he said.) He studied drama at the University of Hull, and didn’t set foot inside Lasdun’s building until he came to London, in his early twenties. The first play he saw there was David Hare’s “The Permanent Way,” a sweeping epic about the U.K.’s railway system. Sexy. “Why I love that as my first play is because it was a really big commercial, popular hit about the privatization of the railways, which has given me confidence to do, on paper, really nerdy, political plays about things that should sound unappealing.”
Graham has a theory that a history play needs two things to succeed: an interrogation of an institution that feels urgent because it reveals something about a nation’s identity, “mixed with a story that is just an incredible engine of entertainment.” In “Dear England,” the question was how Southgate would get the players to talk about their feelings. “That’s the small thing,” Graham said. “That’s the vehicle to go, What is this old sport, in this old country, that cannot reform and change?” Which part does he prefer? “You never get away with it if you haven’t got that story engine,” he told me. “You go, Wouldn’t the Navy be amazing to look at and put onstage? And maybe the Navy would be, but if you don’t have that engine that just delights and surprises, and makes you cry, and makes you laugh, then you’re not gonna get there.”
“Tammy Faye” will open in a contentious American election season. The story is almost overly resonant with our own time, Graham said. “That’s why I’ve always loved doing plays or musicals about recent history. You don’t even have to do anything—they just naturally elevate your story to a metaphor, an allegory.” Like many of his other shows, it is an origin story of sorts. Graham sees Tammy’s home life as part of the beginning of reality television. Her marriage, her mothering, her divorce, and, later, her long battle with cancer often played out in people’s living rooms. “Reality television, of course, ends decades later, with a reality-television President,” Graham said. The show is also set during a “transition moment,” in the eighties, “when that sacred line of church and state is crossed, and they began, in Reagan’s time, to work together. [We are] seeing the human impact of that in the last twelve months with Roe v. Wade, and the Supreme Court, and the evangelical movement behind Trump.”
Earlier, almost as soon as we had sat down, Graham told me about another theory he has. (He often speaks like an excited history teacher, as if the past were always on his mind.) “I believe we’re in a crisis of storytelling,” he said. When I asked him to explain, he said, “A country is only the stories it tells itself about itself.” It’s his contention that, since the 2008 financial crisis, the West has struggled to tell a coherent story about itself. We’re all living in our own realities; everything is fractured through the digital world. The people storming the Capitol on January 6th, for instance, were “people in a different story, in a different reality,” he said. “Like, Trump won the election and it had been stolen, and, no, he didn’t.” When you put the stories next to each other, “they can’t coexist,” he said. “And there are real-world consequences to this problem.”
So what’s a storyteller to do? I asked. “Do a musical about Tammy Faye!” he said, breaking into a smile. He went on, “This is so sentimental, but musical theatre is all about sentimentality. But her one simple idea was that love is the most important thing.” She wanted her television show to be a “welcoming, broad church,” and “she loved gays, and she loved straights, and she loved liberals, and conservatives.” Graham, too, hopes the musical will attract audiences of diverse political and religious beliefs. “In the theatre, where everyone has to be together, and listen to the same story, I think that’s a really healthy, really powerful thing,” he said. “But you have to balance sentiment, because it can be cheesy.”
He had been talking so much, so quickly, that I had finished my fish cake while he was only halfway through his pork. “Are you sure you don’t want a side or something?” he asked, politely. I ordered fries, with mayo. “That’s the right choice,” he said, of the mayo. “Evil, but I love it.” Several years ago, Graham had had something of a come-to-Jesus moment of his own after a promising relationship fizzled. The man he had been dating at the time told him he should see someone about his working habits. (Graham has dated both men and women.) He had never considered therapy. “Unless it was over a pint in a pub and taking the piss out of yourself, therapy was just not—I thought that’s what New Yorkers did, not people like me,” he said.
When he finally went, the therapist pointed out that he had holes in his shoes and wasn’t wearing a coat, even though it was winter and he could afford one. She sent him to a group meeting for workaholics. At first, he thought the language was “cringe,” but then “people just started talking and I was, like, Oh, my God, I do that, Oh, my God, I do that.” He called his ex, crying. Since then, he has practiced saying no to projects, and has taken an occasional vacation. But when I asked where he’d gone on his last one he couldn’t remember. “The Caribbean?”
The restaurant had quieted, though it was only seven-thirty. Most of the diners had left to catch a show. I asked Graham if he’d ever had a bad reaction to writing about a real person. When Benedict Cumberbatch played Dominic Cummings in Graham’s TV movie “Brexit: The Uncivil War,” from 2019, he received “a lot of anger” from the progressive left, he said. Some felt it would elevate Cummings, and allow people to empathize with him. “I was surprised by that,” he said. “You’re just going, What makes people tick?” He loves writing a defense for complex characters. “What an important exercise in your own head to go, I disagree with this person, and I’m going to spend months asking why he’s doing what he’s doing.” I asked him how one reconciles Tammy Faye’s flaws—the fraud, the opulence—with her message of love. “You don’t,” he said. “For a writer, as a character, that’s brilliant. You embrace that, because there for the grace of God. All of these stories, you look at it and you go, What would I really have done, actually?” And, with that, he swiftly packed up and departed. He had work to do. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
