My first impression of John Godber is that he doesn't look like the Creative Director of a hugely successful regional theatre; he looks like he should play rugby for one of Hull's two Superleague clubs. Not that I actually know what a playwright should look like, you understand. But I don't come up to his shoulder and I'm wearing three inch heels.

He is a rugby fan, as it happens. He wanted to play as a kid. We chat about my conversion to Rugby League from football and my support of local team, Hull Kingston Rovers. Rugby is something of an obsession in Hull, you see. The first major play he wrote for Hull Truck Theatre, Up & Under, was about Rugby League, and thus tapped into the major passion of the local people. For me, this sums up the real skill of John Godber; the combination of beautiful writing and commercial appeal.

Having recently moved to a shiny new theatre on Ferensway (the main road through Hull town centre), Hull Truck has embarked on a new era. John was kind enough to chat to me about his plays, about working in regional theatre, and to share some advice for the playwrights of the future.   

Gemma Noon

I had a good drama teacher at school, so I'd sketched out little sketches, but those are the significant points in my life that led me from being someone writing sketches to someone writing something that I thought had meaning about the world.

The second play, the one about my friend, I brought to the University of Hull in 1981. I met Antony Minghella, who was a University lecturer, and who had just started working on Grange Hill with Phil Redmond. On the strength of that meeting I got an agent, and I started to write Crown Court for Granada television. So I was teaching, studying for a PhD and writing for television. It kept me off the streets!

How did you get involved with Hull Truck Theatre?

I got involved with Hull Truck In 1983 at the National Student Drama Festival, which was really significant in my career. It was held in Hull, but is now held in Scarborough. I'd been there in 1977 when I was a student at Leeds University. I came to Hull in 1981 and 1982, and I met Mike Bradwell, the man who had set up Hull Truck back in 1971. I kind of remember telling him a joke that he thought was very funny. The next thing I knew, I got a phonecall via my mum at home, saying “would you be interested in applying for the job of Artistic Director at Hull Truck?”

Well I'd never heard of Hull Truck, to be honest, as I was from West Yorkshire. I came for the interview, and the man in the interview room before me was Danny Boyle. He drew the short straw and went to Hollywood; I came to Hull.

I started work at the end of 1983. In 1984, at the very first board meeting, I was told that the company was insolvent and was going to close. I'd just packed in a job as a head of drama department to run a company that was insolvent.

Now my doctorate was on a guy called John McKendrick and his use of language. He adapted a lot of German plays, and part of my MA was on German Theatre. So what could I do? A series of German plays, or something more popular? I wrote Up & Under, and the rest, as they say, is history. It went to the Edinburgh Festival and won an award; it toured the West End and won an award. I'd already written Bouncers by then, so we then toured that. In a sense, I've spent the last 26 years doing the same thing; writing plays not specifically about this region, but that appeal to it.

I saw that you are credited with being the third most performed playwright in the UK; that must feel pretty special!

They're just statistics so be careful; the third most performed thing was based on a Government performance paper. My plays are performed a lot though; we perform them a lot because they're a source of revenue. Schools do them because they are on the GCSE and A level syllabus, even some Universities. Amateur dramatics groups do my plays because they are cheap. Not easy, but cheap. And they are on in various places all over the world.

Most of the creative industries are strongly rooted to London,yet your work is widely performed and Hull Truck one of the best known theatres in the UK. Do you think that the regionalisation of your work is part of its success?

My voice is a regional voice, you might say, and now I kind of avoid London. A) I don't need it, and B) quite often that metropolitan sensibility doesn't understand the milieu I am writing about. It comes back to class, really; we are heading towards quite a class-focused election, and for me, class has never disappeared. If you go beyond the square mile in London, then the people the are no different to Hull. The kind of people who go to the theatre and the nature of those theatres is very similar to this part of the world. If I have done anything, it's to build an audience in this part of the world who perhaps on the face of it wouldn't have gone to the theatre as their first leisure option.

Your plays are often very accessible and with wide commercial appeal, opposed to being strongly “artistic”. Is this deliberate? Do you think there is a degree of snobbery in the creative industries about what constitutes “art”, or “literature”?

What we've always tried to do, and I think that this has been our success in some fields and to our detriment in others, is that we've tried to produce work that deliberately had easy access. That's not to say that it is popcorn, or chewed bubblegum culture. Even the titles of the early plays were very easy to read; Bouncers, Teachers, Shakers, Up & Under, not stuff like The Glass Menagerie. We've always tried to keep the glass clear so that the audience “get it”. There are observers who think that is too easy, but I think filling a theatre in Hull on a wet Monday is never easy.

There's always some kind of gremlin in there who is going to say “but where's the art?”. As soon as you stick “art” on, even the people who want to see the “art” won't come see it! There is a culturally centralist kind of thinking, the thinking that gets on News Night Review or the Booker list. It seems to me that there is quite a narrow band of culturally accepted “art” - and I mean by that novels, prose, plays, art, opera, music, even – and the further out you go from that bullseye, work gets less coverage.

In all of this, though, the question is “who are you writing for?” You need to write the things that you want to watch. The challenge for me some 55 plays down the road is why write another when I could just dig one out of the cupboard? What could I bring to another one? What is the point? The answer to that is “what was the point in the very first case?” because unless you go back continually to the first principles, that you believe in the power of performance and the spoken word then actually I'm in the wrong job, no matter how much I've written. You have to be very clear what your aims are.

You recently ran a series of courses for aspiring playwrights in Hull; how important is it to both yourself and to the Theatre as a whole to support new and emerging regional talent?

I'm bound to say as a writer that heads up a theatre, and has for a long time, that new writing is crucial. The downside is that it is often raw, unlearned and unskilled by it's very nature. Often these days new writers have been brought up on television and cinema, so consequently their skill base within writing for theatre is quite thin. A problem, now we have a bigger theatre, is that it is cruel to expose new writing to a larger audience. That's where the Studio comes in, where we can nurse new writing in a smaller space. I'm 53 now, and I've forgotten what It's like to be 18, so if we are to continue to attract young audiences then we need to develop writers who are writing from that perspective.

How difficult a market is this to break into? Where would you recommend people start?

If it was me, well accept that no one is going to look at an unsolicited script. My view, although many will disagree, is try to realise the production yourself. Put in on at your school hall, the youth club, or go to the Edinburgh Festival (although this is costly). Throw your cap in the ring. I'm advocating this, because it is how it worked for me. I was working full time as a teacher so I had a salary, I fancied writing a play so I wrote one, put in on in the school. No idea where it was going to end up. Someone saw it and said “oh, you can write dialogue!” and a month later I was sat in Granada Television being given a cheque to write Crown Court. That's the dream ticket; for most people it is “hmm, not bad, try next year.” and then back to the drawing board.

I'd also say, know your enemy! Know what is out there already; there's no point writing about four redundant Sheffield steel workers who decide to strip to make a living, because everyone is going to point out that it's been done.

The hard facts are that if you were commissioned to write a play, and it took you a year, then you might make £7k. That is not a full time career position. Over time, because I've written so much, it isn't the commissions that keep my electricity running, it is the royalties. It is hard when you start out. Playwriting isn't lucrative compared to television writing, although television is harder to get into.

Who are you main influences?

I was influenced a hell fo a lot by Bertolt Brecht, which is a bit weird coming from a mining background. I wasn't usually influenced by British theatre, not massively influenced by Shakespeare in the early days, although later on I became influenced by Neil Simon. As I got older I had more time for Ackbourne and Steven Berkoff.

Are there themes which you think you go back to?

I'm interested in the Underdog. I suppose I see myself as one and this area as an underdog. The Outsider theme interests me, as I was fascinated by Camus' book and very much by the way he is there but not. It speaks to this region as it is slightly off the beaten track. I like that, although a lot of people don't get that. Escape is another theme I come back to. I think that speaks to the sea and to the region. Whether it is getting away from the corporeality that you are tied into, or going on holiday. It is about being someone else and re-invention.

You adapted Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry books for stage. How different an experience was it to adapt those compared with writing original works?

It was very different in that it wasn't personal. I was asked to adapt them for stage, and my daughter said that if I didn't do it she'd leave home – A very Horrid Henry reaction! Initially the idea was that I'd write an original narrative, but I thought that the audience would want to see the stories that they already knew on stage. I looked at my favourites and my daughter's favourites, and built an event around them. I didn't want it to be about John Godber, I wanted it to be about Francesca Simon. The prose is very tight and the structure very filmic, which made the stage play very energetic. I just tried to be true to the raw material.

Have you ever thought about writing in a different format?

I started to write a novel of Bouncers. The idea was to write the book and then maybe a film. I wrote the first 45 pages and sent it to my agent, who sent it on to a literary agent. She sent it straight back saying “this isn't a novel”. I was astonished! It was from the protagonist's point of view, so there wasn't a lot of prose in it. It was my first and only attempt at novel writing; I am having too much success at writing plays to keep going at it!

Is there anything that you are yet to achieve that you have set your sights on?

I know I can write populist plays, so I'd like to look at the wider architecture of my plays. Some of the things that I'm proud of are plays I'm not really known for. I wrote a play with my wife Jane about sex trafficking that was well reviewed but it wasn't a big sell.

One of the major drivers for my work so far has been that I had to fill the theatre, so part of me had one eye on the box office. I had to, otherwise we wouldn't have got this far. Whether I continue to, I don't know. I keep threatening to write a play about Puccini.

I am currently adapting Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for stage which has never been done before on a large scale. That is a hugely prophetic book when you think about it. It has big potential.

And finally, can you sum up a key piece of advice for aspiring playwrights?

I would say make sure that you write what you want to see. It may well be that no one else wants to see your plays, but at least you'll be true to yourself!