Parenting

Jack Thorne and John Tiffany: 'You're the warrior, I'm the worrier!'


When Jack Thorne’s wife read the first draft she told him: don’t do this. Sounds harsh, but it wasn’t so much a literary judgment as a private one. The End of History, his bruising family drama, is “the most personal thing I’ve ever written”, Thorne admits.

No wonder he looks tense during the rehearsal lunch break. He and his frequent collaborator, the director John Tiffany, sit in school-style plastic chairs, and Thorne – too tall for usual purposes – is awkwardly folded up, feet on the seat, in an orthopaedic nightmare. By contrast, Tiffany brings the jolly – tucking into lunch, lobbing in jokes. The air between them is all warmth and care.

Thorne speaks like someone who fears he’ll never work again. You should check out your CV, I joke – it’s really impressive. It gleams with hits in TV (Skins, The Virtues), theatre (Let the Right One In) and the Potterverse (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). But he always frets that he’s starting from scratch, while feeling the reproachful burden of past success.

We plunge into The End of History. A grand title wrongfoots you into an acutely intimate play. It was, Thorne discloses, originally called The Healthy and the Strong (a quote from the text), but “it didn’t feel like it quite fitted”. A title needs to “zoom out”, Tiffany explains. “I always see things in terms of those series of photos that start off at a cellular level and zoom out to the Milky Way.”

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway.



Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Francis Fukuyama, the political theorist who coined the title phrase in 1989, has since edged back from the idea that, with the cold war over, western liberalism had triumphed and ideological struggles were done with. The play begins in 1997, “the moment before populism completely took over … when people believed in things as opposed to what would get them votes,” as Tiffany describes it.

The play centres on a left-leaning family. Lesley Sharp and David Morrissey play Sal and David, who after a lifetime devoted to equality and principled dissent imagine that their own ideological battles are over, that their work is done – at least when it comes to passing those values on to their kids. But three compulsive acts, set at 10-year intervals, ask what happens to conviction, how belief shapes a family.

For a guarded man, Thorne can tread boldly. “Sal and David are pretty tight versions of Maggie and Mike, my mum and dad,” he declares. Tiffany gasps: “I wondered if you were going to say that so explicitly!” Although awesome role models, Sal and David seem daunting parents. They radiate commitment, with great gusts of passion, humour and no-filter opinion. “My mum and dad really are those people – they are amazing and brilliant. They are tricky parents. I want to shake them sometimes. But I love them very much, and this is a love note.”

Lesley Sharp and David Morrisey star in The End of History.



Principled dissent … Lesley Sharp and David Morrissey star in The End of History. Photograph: Niall McDiarmid

Thorne, who grew up in Bristol, began work on this play almost immediately after becoming a father. He ruefully quotes a line about suspecting that “you’re shitter than your parents at being a parent”. Can he ever transmit as clean a set of values as they did? “I am a lot more compromised as a person than either of them. I’ve made a lot of decisions about my work and life that aren’t as pure.”

The play begins in 1997, Thorne’s own coming of age: “My first vote was for Tony Blair.” As New Labour’s shiny liberal democracy has receded into history, Thorne says: “I look at my peers and don’t see the same need and passion to set the world right, being prepared to stand in the cold to protest, to do the hard miles that I see still in my parents’ generation.”

Do the play’s dogged conversations over burnt cheese on toast reflect life with the Thornes? “Yes, though my mum was a better cook,” Thorne says, “and she talked about anal sex slightly less.” He knows his parents will not pretend to like the play – they never do. “You haven’t written it for them to like, though, have you?” Tiffany reminds him. “My little sister went; they’ll be cool with it, they’ll like it.” He describes his sister – a former political adviser who is retraining as a maths teacher – as “the true child of my parents, so her reading was very important. She is pure of heart, my sister.”

Even the Thornes feel the strain of these trying political times. “For the first time we haven’t discussed how we all voted in the European elections. I think we’re all exhausted by it.” Despite a final act set in 2017, “the B-word is mentioned only once. Brexit is a symptom of a country that’s got itself into a malaise and this play is about that malaise.”

How do Thorne’s parents feel about his work? He scrunches up. “I think they are proud of bits of it – and then there are other bits where they would question it. They saw a film I wrote and went, ‘What happened?’ [in terms of his involvement]. I quite like that they’re so honest.” But honesty is hard. “I feel the judgment constantly. Growing up in judgment is really tough. That idea of ‘What are you doing for the world today?’ is something that still haunts me.”

Martin Quinn and Rebecca Benson in Let the Right One In at the Royal Court in 2013.



Biting drama … Martin Quinn and Rebecca Benson in Let the Right One In at the Royal Court in 2013. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Thorne and Tiffany first met more than 20 years ago, and have since collaborated on wizards and vampires – but Thorne submitted this script to the Royal Court rather than direct to Tiffany. “I don’t want to put our friendship under that test. I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the rejection.” If he couldn’t work on it, Tiffany interrupts, there would be pragmatic reasons. “I know,” Thorne answers, nine times in rapid succession. “But this one’s very personal to me – so the fact that it’s being directed by him is really important to me.”

Tiffany’s productions (Black Watch, The Glass Menagerie) are notably dynamic, and here, too, he drafted in Steven Hoggett, his long-term movement collaborator. “All the frou-frou – we always call it frou-frou – goes into the decade jumps. There isn’t one moment where all the characters sit round the table – the second it’s about to happen, someone moves.”

Their last Royal Court collaboration was Hope – but wasn’t there some little project after that? Oh yes, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, still storming London and Broadway. Thorne’s rollicking text, astonishingly for a play script, teleported to the top of the bestseller charts. So, did the show change their lives? Tiffany considers. “It marked the climax of something we’d been working towards as a group of people for 20-odd years,” he says. “The amount of people that see it is gorgeous, and of course it gives a bit of freedom, financially. And creatively, just because it worked.”

In retrospect, that success seems inevitable – but Tiffany recalls widespread public doubts that it could satisfy fervid fan expectation. “I never allowed us to think about it.” That, Thorne explains, is the director’s characteristic response. “I would have let it overwhelm me. But we were all on the John train and the John train was just going.” Is the John train always positive? “Always,” Thorne says several times. He laughs, then asks: “When have I ever been the positive force in our relationship? You’re the warrior and I’m the worrier.”

Meanwhile, back to this play, and its two most crucial audience members. “I’m very nervous about what my parents will think,” Thorne says. “They haven’t read it, but they know it’s about them – they’re coming with all their mates. I feel their impending arrival now.” I dread to think what this will do to him. “I’m literally not in the country! So that’s good.”



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