In a preface to one of Catherine Johnson's lesser-known plays - and next to
her Abba musical Mamma Mia! they are all lesser known - she writes
encouragingly to future performers: “Don't be put off by the songs.
Enthusiasm, energy and the ability to hit the right notes are more important
than West End performances.” Sitting in the big house that Mamma
Mia! bought, Johnson grins.
“You are going to ask me was that my note to Pierce Brosnan, aren't you! But
the thing is, he can actually sing. Close your eyes and he is not off-key at
all. I think the trouble is that people are looking at his face and
thinking, 'Ah, it's Pierce Brosnan looking awkward'. But he is acting.”
Anyone, you might say, who criticises any aspect of a movie that has earned
£400 million at the box office and is the fastest-selling DVD yet needs
either to examine his head or one of Johnson's royalty cheques. I still
think that her stout defence of Brosnan shows how nice she is. In fact, this
cheerful, diminutive 51-year-old, whose voice and humour recall Jo Brand, is
even nicer than that. Though she is in demand from the National Theatre and
the BBC, she is lending her talents instead to the venue that first
showcased them, the newly reopened Old Vic Studio in her home town of
Bristol.
But if you book for Suspension believing Mamma Mia! to be the
sort of ironically life-affirming nonsense that Johnson normally writes you
will be in for a shock. Her new play features an estranged father
communicating with his daughter on her wedding day via a banner precariously
unfurled from Clifton suspension bridge. It is a comedy but a very dark one
- like many of her plays, including Through the Wire, a musical about
a juvenile detention centre where her “note not for Brosnan” appears.
“Partly, I think, Suspension is a riposte to Mamma Mia!”
she says. “OK, let's not have a feelgood ending that says it's great not to
know who your dad is, and three guys turn up and one looks like Pierce
Brosnan and another like Colin Firth. Suspension is more about what
it would really be like.”
Johnson claims to be nearer to Rosie, the carefree Julie Walters character in Mamma
Mia! The Movie, than to its central figure, the unmarried mother Donna,
yet when it comes to dysfunctional families she knows what she is writing
about. After an early divorce from a warehouseman called Ted, she broke up
with the father of her two children, Huw and Myfi, in her thirties.
“It was difficult for me because I felt I had let them down. The ideal
lifestyle I had in mind for them did not materialise. We were told this was
the only way to bring up kids if they were not going to become scourges of
society and I felt I had cheated them somehow. Still do. I don't think they
would say that. I hope they would not say that.
They're happy kids [both are now in their twenties] but it still hurts anyone
in this situation. When there is a report like the one from the Children's
Society the other week. I feel defensive if there's a suggestion that when
there's a breakdown in a relationship it's been a lifestyle choice.”
If anyone looked like ending up a scourge of society it was the young Johnson.
The daughter of a Workers' Educational Association teacher who moved his
family from Suffolk to Cornwall and then Gloucester, she was a regular
absconder from school, expelled at 16, partly for wearing a halter-neck top
but mainly for telling her headmaster where to go when he reprimanded her.
She then went through a period of drinking and promiscuity and married at
18. Later, inspired by the punk ethos, she chucked her office job and worked
in a record shop.
By 30 she was divorced, pregnant and living with an irregularly employed
labourer called Paul and their baby son in a damp, two-bedroom flat. “That
was when I thought, 'What am I going to do with the rest of my life?' And
that is when I wrote my first play. It was having Huw that crystallised
everything. I had someone in my life who was unexpectedly so important. I
had not realised how strong the maternal instinct was and how it could make
you want to change everything. I had always had this vague sense that one
day I would be a writer, one day. But now I had this little chap running
around who I felt deserved a bit more out of life.”
In short, the reason for writing was money, money, money. The play was Rag
Doll, about the incestuous relationship between a girl in a Gloucester
village and her uncle. Johnson entered it for the Bristol Old Vic/HTV
Playwrights Award under the pseudonym Maxwell Smart (filched from the
Sixties TV show Get Smart). The theatre's PRs were delighted to find
that the competition's first winner was in reality a poor local mother. They
produced Rag Doll in 1988, which was televised by HTV. More plays
followed, most for the Bristol Old Vic or the Bush in London. She also wrote
for Casualty, Band of Gold and Love Hurts.
“By this time Paul and I had split up and I was bringing up the kids by
myself. Looking back I think it was a nightmare but it was probably not that
bad. There was just never quite enough money. I was always chasing the next
job. If I had a commission and it paid me, that money would be spent and I
would be trying to get another commission while writing. So I always felt I
was playing catch-up. It was panicky and tough. Writing often had to be done
at night because I couldn't fit it in during day. The children would be back
from school wanting attention and I would be thinking about the rewrites
needed for the morning. TV is unforgiving about time. Everything needs to be
done immediately so there were all-nighters.”
And then came a tax bill she couldn't pay. Her agent set to work and found her
two jobs, one on the children's soap Byker Grove, the other being Mamma
Mia! - although the credit for the latter gig truly belongs to her
friend Terry Johnson, who had directed Rag Doll. He, she says,
introduced “the idea” of Johnson to the producer Judy Craymer, whose earlier
attempts to find a story to wrap round the Abba songs had come to nothing.
As for the idea of a plot that pivoted on a wedding to which three potential
fathers of the bride turned up, it came to Johnson just as she was leaving
Craymer's office after their first meeting. “Judy said, 'Sit back down
again'.”
I ask if she ever saw Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell, a Gina Lollobrigida
movie about a woman who lived on maintenance payments from three GIs. She
hasn't, but people have told her about it. She wonders, rather, if she was
influenced by a play called Filumena Marturano, which she thinks she
saw in Bath. Since she then spends ten minutes googling on her phone to
identify its author (Eduardo De Filippo), its influence must have been
marginal at worst.
Johnson had remarried by the time Mamma Mia! had its premiere in London
ten years ago this April, so has had a partner to share her success: the new
house with its swimming pool, another property in Bristol in which to write
and a London pad, first-class travel to openings around the world and a trip
to Skopelos for the filming. “Every time people got into a huddle I thought
someone was going to say, 'It's been great Catherine, but we really need a
team in to sharpen up the comedy ...'. Maybe David Mamet was busy.”
She was asked to write again for the Old Vic by its new chairman, Dick Penny,
who joined after the playhouse fell dark during refurbishment and a funding
crisis. “There was this groundswell of opinion throughout the city that
something must be wrong for the place not to be producing theatre. I went
down there and was surprised how emotional I felt ... This was the studio
where I started and you know how evocative the smell of a place can be. It
was still a bit shabby, with the same old chairs, and I knew that I wanted
to be back in there.” She says that she is driven by a sense of guilt that
her work is not good enough. And her success? “I do feel guilty about it. I
feel I haven't done enough to earn it. It doesn't feel fair or that it
should land on me and not any of the other millions of writers out there who
could have done just as good a job as me.”
But wealth does not solve every problem. It has not, for instance, this
morning prevented her spilling curry sauce over her retro-fridge. Nor has it
brought her health. Around the time that Mamma Mia! opened Johnson
contracted the chronic gut condition ulcerative colitis. She is a relatively
mild sufferer, but ill enough today not to be able to eat lunch.
Fortunately, her appetite for writing plays about “things that happen to
people who don't have much of a voice in the theatre” has not been
diminished by the triumphant silliness of Mamma Mia! “When all is
said and done,” as Brosnan almost sang towards the end of the movie, Johnson
“is still striving for the sky”.
Suspension, Bristol Old Vic, King Street, Bristol (01179 877877), Fri to
March 28
Biography
Catherine Johnson was born in 1957 and grew up in Wickwar, South
Gloucestershire.
Early life Aged 16 she was expelled from Katharine Lady Berkeley’s
School in Wotton-under-Edge. She married at 18, divorced at 24 and was
unemployed and pregnant by the time she was 29.
Writing a hit Johnson moved to Bristol, won a playwriting award, and
writing work followed. However, by the end of 2000 she was being
investigated for unpaid tax bills and she believes that she was even poorer
than a pre-fame J. K. Rowling, who “at least could go to a café to work on
her Harry Potter books . . . I couldn’t even afford to do that.” Then her
agent found her the job of writing Mamma Mia! for the stage. After the
success of the musical she spent two years condensing the 2½musical<NO>show
into a 100-minute film, which has become the highest-grossing movie released
in the UK. In 2003 her play Little Baby Nothing, about Bristol teenagers who
are into sex, Satanism and cider, was staged at the Bush Theatre in London
to critical acclaim.
In 2007 she founded the Catherine Johnson Award for Best Play, a crème de la
crème award for the finest play by a Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme winner from
the previous year.
Small talk
Abba “They wear their hearts on their sleeves. That is what attracted
me to their songs. The words are quite raw, in fantastic contrast to the
tunes. Why do their songs return to the theme of things that have not gone
quite right when on the surface everything has for them? Maybe it is just
some existential despair we all carry with us.”
Mamma Mia! “When my agent told me I’d been asked to do it, my first
thought was I can’t wait to tell the girls at my aerobics group. We always
played Abba there.”
Guilt “I don’t think I would get out of bed without the
fear of guilt about not meeting people’s expectations, not doing things well
enough, am I working hard enough? I think I am essentially quite lazy.”
Working mothers “My phone would be to my ear while I was cooking and
I’d want to say, ‘You really don’t get this. I have two children. I cannot
rewrite your script right now’.”
