Tim Nunn

All my life I’ve been a coffee drinker. I would even confess to a certain amount of disdain aimed at the ‘tea’ drinkers around me. I could never understand the appeal of ‘tea’ when the oportunity for coffee was also present. As instant coffee began to fade from common practice around the 90s my loyalty to the juice of the roasted bean gods was ingrained even further with the fun of learning about beans and roasts. I am salivating as I write this.
It was in the early 90s that I began to drink green tea with work associates. At the time I was working and mixing with Chinese activists who were in the tail spin of the Tiananmen Square protests. I would sit in Chinese restaurants and meeting rooms with debates politely starting in English and turning into shouted Mandarin and Cantonese arguments as the tempers and caffeine levels rose. And gallons of green tea were consumed, literally gallons.
I got a taste for the green tea but it faded as I moved on from the campaigning with the Chinese activists. I was never able to recreate the delicious green tea I was served before and, I suppose, got lazy.
In recent times I’ve been less lazy about my hot drink consumption, particularly as my tolerance for caffeine has dwindled. A cup of coffee in the afternoon will often cost me a night’s sleep nowadays.
I still can’t drink ‘builders’ tea. Does nothing for me. It might be to do with the reliance on milk, which I can’t stomach mixed into a hot drink, no matter what. But now I’ve become almost obsessional about many other kinds of tea. And, damn, it’s good. Here are some:

Jasmine Silver Needle White Tea – at any given moment it’s not unlikely this is what you’ll find in my cup. It is being on an Asian hillside in a cup. Every mouthful has fragrant white flowers and fresh, young, crisp tea leaves sharing their flavour. Not much caffeine but lots of uplift, refreshing and just damned nice.

Oolongs, lots of them – known by some as the champagne of teas. Perhaps to the horror of those people, Oolong teas very often remind me of fine hand-made beers. Complex flavours with cereals and fragrant maltiness or herby hops, that sort of thing. Not big beefy beers maybe, but with character and history to them. Oolongs have lots of varieties and I’m just starting on my journies around them.

Gunpowder – yum. It’s a bit bitter and a bit, sort of, rough. But drink lots of it. It becomes a good friend.

Genmaicha – Japanese peasants made their tea last longer by adding roasted rice. This is a woody, smell your skin on a sunny day, flavour that is unique. Not for every day but when it happens it’s fantastic. Some of the rice pops completely during roasting so there’s the occasional little popcorn – some people call this popcorn tea.

Puerh – the fine vintage red wines of the tea world. In China there Puerh teas that are centuries old that sell for thousands of pounds per ounce. One day I will try one of those teas. I drink a Taiwanese Puerh tea that has been prematurely ‘aged’. First time is an incredible experience – the water turns black. The eyes tell you this is going to rich and strong, then the nose finds something different, and then the taste. It is mult-layered and fragrant and light. It is rich but in the complexity and not in the weight. It feels like a story, a long fable, in a cup. Then, the second cup from those leaves is different, and the third is different and the fourth is a reminder of what’s gone before.

I’m heading for the (special temperature controlled 60º-100º) kettle.

In the late ‘80s I was campaigning against human rights abuse. Around 1989 I was shown a document by a researcher that was very sensitive at the time. It documented the abuses meted out by the UK security services in and had been leaked by an official with inside knowledge and first hand experience. Most of the document detailed physical and psychological abuse that nobody could deny should be described as torture. Suspects were brutally beaten but left without bruising, frozen near to the point of death, isolated and threatened horrifically.

The content of document was horrific but what really caught my attention was a section that described techniques that went beyond the physical and psychological techniques of cruelty.

One section described how the as the years had progressed the interrogatees had become increasingly sophisticated in their resistance to interrogation, allegedly due to training they had received in the Middle East. Techniques had been learnt from meditation that cushioned them from everything happening around them and to them. That cushion was found very difficult if not impossible to pierce. Interrogators were finding physical force, threats, isolation and other proven methods to be progressively less effective. The secret services began to consult even wider about how to crack this meditation cushion around their suspects.

One of the weapons they found was humour – jokes. They learnt that they might be able to crack through all the defences if they just find the joke that their victim just could not resist. They learnt that even in the ultimate hostile environment of the interrogation cell they might find the joke to break down the defences. Once the laughter came they were able to lever open the crack and break the suspect’s resolve.

I was fascinated at the time by this brief anecdote in a document that was generally intended as a record of physical and psychological torture. One of my points of interest at the time was how this demonstrated a far greater and confident display of power than the physical force or psychological cruelty used by other, perhaps less sophisticated, interrogators. The infliction of torture is usually a demonstration of power and status as well as an exercise in obtaining information. By using the instinct for laughter the interrogators were manipulating rather than simply extracting and foregoing the temptation to ‘teach a lesson’.

Under the circumstances of saving lives from the acts of a terrorist this seemed more efficient and pragmatic. But it also made me consider the impact on the interrogatee of this manipulation and how in the long term he or she may have preferred to heal the wounds of torture rather than have the confusion of having broken under the pressure of laughter.

These sophisticated interrogators were searching for methods that took them inside emotions and instinctive reactions and to play with the complexity of the mind. The fact that it was also unlikely to make them fall foul of international standards was incidental.

Of equal interest to me, and particularly as a maker of theatre, was the potential this story had for an investigation of humour. Why do we sometimes laugh at a joke that had a subject matter that would otherwise repel us? Why do we laugh at all, at anything? Why do most comedians see the need to find the edge of what is regarded as ‘decent’ and then push their comedy just that little bit further. Even the normally conservative late Ronnie Barker felt the need to tell a controversial 9/11 joke during his swansong TV programme.

This document revealed the calculated use of comedy as a weapon by the state, but the potential power relation between the comedian and audience is apparent in any performance. This potential is demonstrated by the urge for audience heckling that can disturb the relationship and shift the power to the attention seeking audience member.

The world lost a substantial amount of colour with the death of Ken Campbell. A bit of sadness today. Here’s a pic I took of him a few years ago. The most stately eyebrows on the planet.

There’s a moment of theatre from years ago that I have since realised was the stimulus for me seeking a life in theatre. I’d been keen on drama at school and had a part-time job backstage at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds while I was doing my ‘A’ levels. But it was when I moved to London that I started to see the sort of theatre that I hadn’t the opportunity to see in Suffolk.

In 1986 I saw the double bill of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and ‘Endgame’ by Samuel Beckett at the Riverside Studios. It was the former of these that was to have an enormous impact on me and open my eyes to an intimate experience of theatre that I hadn’t realised was possible. I was lucky enough to have a seat in the middle and just one or two rows from the front to see Max Wall’s Krapp. From the first moment with the banana he was absolutely captivating, entertaining, funny and, at the same time, performing with an intelligence that was daunting. Max Wall had a face that could hold an audience without need of words or action and he used its plasticity to full effect without cheapening the text or going for easy laughs.

That performance was as close to perfection as I have ever seen, and suspect I will ever see. I wanted to see it again and again but the run had long sold out and I never did. Perhaps it’s just as well as I’ve since learnt that attempts to repeat such special moments have the potential to ruin the memory of the first. Maybe I would have learnt something of how he achieved such a special thing if I’d seen it a few times, but would that add to the value of seeing it that first time and forgetting to breathe while he was performing?

Max Wall died in 1990 and I remember my stomach lurching when I heard. Somehow I thought he would exist forever. About six months after the show I had seen him in a dark and scruffy pub in South London. He looked old and frail but he was part of the architecture and, therefore, permanent.

A postscipt on this is that twelve years later I was having dinner with some friends including an artist whose work I admire a great deal. One of those dinner party games was introduced for everyone to name a piece of art or moment that had been the most influential to them. I sat there armed to tell the story of Max Wall at the Riverside Studios but, before me, the above mentioned artist started to tell exactly the same tale. Later we worked out we had probably sat only a few seats apart, although the chances are on different nights. Each of us had the same passion for what had happened to us at that show.

So, now I make theatre, in search of another night like that one with Max Wall.

April 2008. I’m in the Stables flat of the Cromarty Arts Trust writing the script for ‘Hannah and Harvey‘. I have to confess to having spent a few days trying to think through some story problems but now I’m getting there. While I’ve been in the North of Scotland my niece Helen has been in Bath, South-ish England, also working on ‘Hannah and Harvey’ and thinking through some illustration problems. So Helen sent me this cartoon:

Thankfully we’ve both got past the head scratching stage and ‘Hannah and Harvey‘ is going to be awesome (even if we do say so ourselves).

When asked about ‘Only the Men’ I have often said that the idea for the show was born when I visited the village of Sanna in Ardnamurchan on the west coast of Scotland. What is nearer the truth is that the show is the story I needed to tell about my own family, the small farm my father owned and my urge to get off the land as quickly as I could. And the feelings I now have about why that happened.

When I was a child my father often told me that I should ‘get a job in a bank’ and never once gave me even a hint that my future should be working on the land. This was from a man who loved birds, would scour through the pages of the expensive bird books he had saved to buy for interesting facts, would lie on his stomach in a damp woodland photographing a rare mushroom and would never be happier anywhere other than in the middle of a loch with his old fishing rod. But according to him working the land just wasn’t an option for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.

When I had put on a few years I learnt that my father was sad. The death of my sister had shaped my father’s emotions as well as my family. My closest brother and I had been born after her death when the local GP had advised my father that the best thing would be to give my mother another baby as soon as possible. My father never stopped mourning even though we arrived. The family home and the small farm that went with it were sold when Dad finally admitted that he couldn’t live there any more. My sister had died on the road outside the house, hit by a lorry full of rubble.

Adulthood also opened my eyes to the way Dad liked to be alone. And that he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met in my life and ever likely to meet (and I used to work for the Dalai Lama!). I don’t know whether Dad spent so much time alone before Sally’s death but it certainly fitted his general demeanour afterwards.

In my middle age I have felt an attraction back to the rural. I live in the city and enjoy that life but I can feel my shoulders drop with relief when I get into the green open space and my head is once again turned by bird song. The trouble is that I no longer feel that I am ‘from the country’. It is a different language but one I recognise from my childhood.

When I went to Sanna I saw the places of my childhood in the surreal but beautiful geography. The wildlife and the wind were familiar. It was a shock. The evident history gave this reaction a greater resonance. The beautiful sands of Sanna Bay are surrounded by some new homes but even more ruins of old crofts. Some of the new homes have a shadow of an abandoned stone house. When the stone was usurped by concrete the old houses have been left standing, right next to the door of the new home. History ever present. Sanna is a beautiful natural place but it has a sadness that the humans brought with them and left hanging around after when they left.

When I became resolved to write a play set in Sanna I went back for a longer period, several in fact. I set out to meet residents of Sanna and to hear as much of the first-hand history as I could. The story that then unfolded wasn’t a surprise but it came at me with some force. That Sanna was never a place that people should have lived and that it was inevitable that they have left. That the village grew from the clearances and the injustice of that period was finally brought to its conclusion when the last crofter finally gave up and left in 1970s. My father’s voice telling me to get off the land bounced around my head a great deal when I did this research.

There is a modern truth for Sanna that is not necessarily defined by its history. The village now has electricity, telephone, internet, roads and potential of some tourist income. I understand that there is some contention about the modern development of Sanna but my own personal belief is that if people want to live there they should be allowed to change the crofts to accommodate their needs, work the land as efficiently as possible and develop into a real community. But that was not the truth in the 1970s when life was very hard, almost as hard as it had been 100 years earlier, and the outside world had changed.

In all of this I saw the story of a family that had mixed motives for staying on the land, was rejecting it but at the same time could not leave its isolation. A father and son who both felt the inherited attraction of Sanna but who had both rejected it when they were no more than children and had gone to Glasgow. They were Glaswegians on the surface but Sanna was still in their fabric.

That was my starting point for ‘Only the Men’. If you saw our production I hope you enjoyed it.