After bouncers and rugby players, John Godber has put debt collectors centre stage, as DAVID WHETSTONE finds out
THE third most performed playwright in the UK behind William Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn has returned to a world of big men in suits.
This observation – but not the ranking, which is attributable to the Plays and Players Yearbook – comes from the man himself, John Godber, whose early hit, Bouncers, must have been seen in every town and city with a theatre by now.
The new play is Debt Collectors. “Four days old... started in Stoke... so far, so good,” declares the miner’s son who has made a celebrated career out of writing and putting on plays for the kind of people who don’t, as a rule, go to see plays.
In the torrent of profitable creativity following Bouncers came Up ‘n’ Under, Teechers, On the Piste, Shakers, Gym and Tonic, Weekend Breaks and many others, all slices of modern life peopled with recognisable characters and shot through with good jokes, visual and verbal.
Weekend Breaks is on at the Customs House in South Shields tonight, presented by Reform Theatre Company, based in Chesterfield.
First performed in 1997, the play features Martin who has gone to the Lake District to concentrate on writing a Hollywood blockbuster. He’s looking for peace and quiet but has taken his parents along with him.
“It’s very autobiographical,” confirms Godber. “I’m 55 but I wrote it when my parents were getting older. This is a play about a guy who’s wanting to break away from his working class parents without wanting to get rid of them.
“It’s a play about how far you change when you start to jump from working class into a middle class world of degrees and PhDs. You may think you want to get away from your parents’ values but there’s still that filial relationship. You still love them.”
The Customs House bill it as “packed full of bittersweet humour” which is a tag which can be applied to a lot of John Godber’s work - including, probably, Debt Collectors.
Godber says he read a book about the sub-prime mortgage racket in America. “It was recommended by a cousin of mine who’s a financial consultant. We are all touched by debt in some way, whether it’s for £100,000 or 100 quid.
“Once the credit crunch happened I started to look into it for a TV series. You won’t be surprised to find debt collection agencies get about 20m references on Google.”
He started to focus on the debt collectors themselves, the guys at the sharp end who knock on the door and maybe put a foot in it.
“They occupy a very shady kind of territory and they have no legal powers,” says Godber who stresses that he’s not talking about bailiffs but about the “door steppers” who arrive unannounced and with an air of menace.
He uncovered a lot of stories about people who have run into trouble financially.
“They’re sad stories but we live in a society where everybody wants a flat-screen TV. My kids’ trainers cost about £90. What’s that all about?
“Once you start to look into a subject you find out all sorts of things about it.”
Then he says he has two mates who are actors. “I’m a big fellow but these two guys dwarf me. One’s about 6ft 9ins and 29 stone, the other’s about 6ft 6ins and 23 stone. They said: ‘We’re not getting any work’. In a moment I thought: I know what these guys could do. So I wrote this play for these two guys.”
Godber contacted a number of debt collection agencies and not one of them answered his calls. But he did eventually manage to track a door stepper down. “Nice guy, very nice guy. But he was on a commission.” The more money he extracted for his boss, the better paid he got.