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David Greig sometimes imagines his characters grinding to a halt halfway through a play, turning to the audience and apologising for the playwright's failure to complete the work. They then shuffle off. "Anything," he says, "would be better than that." You wouldn't think such worries would afflict a writer who is, to say the least, prolific. Greig has lost count of precisely how many plays he's written, but they certainly outnumber his 39 years. Not that this is the cause of much satisfaction. The writer, quietly loquacious as he sips espresso at the bar of Edinburgh's Traverse theatre, reddens as he says: "I tend to feel ashamed of how many plays I have written. I feel, on some level, that prolixity is the virtue of the charlatan. I'd rather say I had written three plays, each one a masterpiece." At the 2007 Edinburgh festival, Greig had three works on simultaneously: his skilful adaptation of Euripides's Bacchae for the National Theatre of Scotland; a wonderful play for teenagers called Yellow Moon; and his work Damascus - which, after a stint in New York, has now come to the Tricycle theatre in London. Set in the Syrian capital, it is the story of the cultural contortions and confusions of Paul, a middle-aged Scot who has come to the city to try to sell an English-as-a-foreign-language textbook to a Damascene university. The book - with its cheerily fatuous cast of politically correct, multicultural British characters - is regarded sternly by the university's elegant, intellectually rigorous Muna. In one particularly funny sequence, Muna explains that she would prefer Mrs Mohammed not to be portrayed in a niqab, because the institution is trying to promote women's equality. Paul also encounters the hotel's bellboy, Zakaria, who has a yearning for European girls and dreams of a Hollywood career; and Muna's boss, the urbane, cynical Wasim. A bomb delays Paul's departure, and the tone darkens. Greig was born in Scotland before being transplanted with his family to Nigeria (his father worked in the construction industry). They returned to Edinburgh as his age hit double figures, and the young Greig went to Stewart's Melville College, a private school. What got him interested in drama? "When I was 16, a friend said to me, 'Come to the Edinburgh youth theatre. We need boys - and there are loads of girls.' So the original impulse towards theatre was that I wanted to spend time with actresses - and that's still true. I like hanging out in theatres. At the time it was so much more interesting than the social life associated with a boys' private school in Edinburgh. And then there was doing a play! What a thing." He now lives in a village in Fife, the father of a 12-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. "Overcommitment," he says, "has been a strategy for raising a family. They say that a pram in the hall is the enemy of art, but if there hadn't been one, I don't know if I would be doing this. I might be just getting stoned on a beach in Goa." Damascus is set against a backdrop of simmering Middle Eastern violence, which seems to spin into particularly vivid focus given the situation today. But the play is set in 2006 and should not, says Greig, be seen as "a comment on the specifics of the present day". The impulse for the play arose from Greig's visits, as a teacher of creative writing, to Palestine and Syria. As he puts it in his author's note to the published version of Damascus, "the workshops ended up teaching me an enormous amount about the complexities of relations between the west and the Arab world". He says now: "I feel very connected to that part of the world. I felt very engaged with the Middle East - but I didn't want to write about the political situation directly. I would feel queasy about that, as if I were nailing my colours to the mast in order to score brownie points. I wanted to hear stories from young Arabs; everything came from an internal demand to write about my experience in the Middle East." It is a play that hopes to challenge received western notions about people from the Arabic world. The danger, of course, is that he simply visits a further set of stereotypes upon his characters. He counters: "I write women and I am not a woman. I write old people and I am not old. I was entitled to write these characters of my imagination, who are Arab." In any case, he will soon have the chance to discover whether Muna, Zakaria and Wasim stand up, since the play is to tour to Damascus itself, as well as Egypt, Palestine and Tunisia. It is a thought that brings back his worries. "My mouth turns to ash when I think of it," he says. David Greig Theatre guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
