The brutalist Royal National Theatre, looming aggressively on the south bank of London’s River Thames, is a love-it-or-loud-disdain kind of place, with concrete edges and unwelcoming corners. King Charles III once described it glumly as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London.” For playwright and screenwriter James Graham, however, it has a certain appeal. “I think its geometry is fucking sexy,” he told me recently.
We were seated on a mezzanine in the dining room of the theater’s upscale restaurant, Lasdun, named after the building’s architect, Denys Lasdun. Looking through a large window, we could admire the bustling lobby and the crowd enjoying pre-theatre drinks. The ambiance around us was moody and industrial: white tablecloths and black leather seats, with spot-lit concrete walls and a dark floor. The ceiling, also made of concrete, was coffered, like a particularly solid beehive.
Graham likes an Old-Fashioned at the Lasdun bar when his plays are on tech in the theaters below, and they often are. (Once you know its name, it’s seemingly everywhere.) The restaurant was an ideal location for a playwright known for his historical plays that interrogate, in great detail, the United Kingdom’s most treasured national institutions. In “This House,” his seminal work of 2012, he explored the inner workings of Parliament and the rise of Margaret Thatcher. “Ink,” which transferred from the West End to Broadway in 2019, followed Rupert Murdoch and the rise of tabloid journalism. Earlier this year, Graham won an Olivier Award for “Dear England,” his play about former England football manager Gareth Southgate and the pressures of the game.
The day we met, he arrived with a backpack, apologizing profusely for being late. At forty-two, he has the lively and slightly worried air of someone who likes to be exceptionally busy. This year he opened two rooms in the UK with two more planned for spring. The second season of his BBC show, “Sherwood,” about a real-life murder in Nottinghamshire, the mining county where he grew up, will air next month. At the restaurant, Graham said he had taken the train from Liverpool, where he was speaking at the Labor Party conference. The next day, he would fly to New York to prepare for the opening of Elton John’s splashy new Broadway musical, “Tammy Faye,” for which Graham wrote the book. (Jake Shears wrote the lyrics; previews began at the Palace Theater on October 19.) The show began life at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2022, and has been significantly reworked. “Oh, my God, that looks like something important,” he said nervously. What could go wrong with a Broadway show? “They are very cheap and still work for years,” he joked. He ordered a glass of Italian red.
“Tammy Faye” follows the true story of Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker), the American televangelist who, in the 1970s and 1980s, along with her pastor husband Jim Bakker, was adored by millions. Together they ran a popular television show, “The PTL Club,” and a successful Christian theme park called Heritage USA. This was before it was revealed that Jim had bilked their supporters out of money and concealed a sexual relationship; he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison. But Tammy Faye, with her thick hair, extravagant makeup and big-hearted streak, remained a beloved figure, embracing those whom mainstream evangelicalism shunned. Before the scandal broke, she invited a gay Christian pastor along AIDS on his show. “How sad it is that we Christians – who are supposed to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone – are so afraid of a AIDS patient that we’re not going to hug them and tell them we care,” she said.
An unusually eloquent waiter – an aspiring actor – took our order and returned with the plates: a pork shoulder for Graham, a fish cake the size of a hockey puck with anchovy sauce for me . “I mean, their story – Jim and Tammy’s – is obviously Shakespearean,” Graham said as he cut into his meal. “It’s a rise and fall from poverty, through love, to success, to chaos, to the destruction of the empire, to shame, and then coming out the other side having learned a valuable lesson. Like, it’s all there. However, when Graham joined the project, he had never heard of the Bakkers. Both John and Shears were longtime Tammy fans and had been toying with the idea of a musical for years. They had watched clip after clip of “PTL” and written a few songs, but didn’t have a story yet. “Elton really knew it to the bone and comes from that musical tradition. Southern gospel is his music,” he said. And, he continued, “Jake has been obsessed with Tammy Faye since he was a young boy, he sees her as this gay icon that he knew before he knew he was gay.”
John sent a car to pick Graham up from an apartment he shared with a few others. (“I was like, Please don’t send a car! I can just take the subway.”) They dined at the pop star’s Windsor home. Once he got the job, he immersed himself in Tammy’s world, reading the history of the evangelical movement and the memoirs of Pastor Jerry Falwell, who becomes a villain in the series. Eventually, Graham told John and Shears that he wanted the musical to go beyond Tammy. (Graham told me they said, “Make sure you keep the heart. Don’t go all cerebral.”) “I thought his story would be infinitely more powerful if it had a backdrop of broader exploration of this system. What is televangelism? Why did it appear? What need did it meet? he said. “You say the words, pretty early on: ‘I think I want to include Ronald Reagan in it.’ »
The restaurant had filled up and was getting louder as show time approached. No one seemed intimidated by the prospect of a nearly three-hour production of “Coriolanus” downstairs. Growing up, Graham had never heard of the National Theatre. He was a shy child who spent hours alone in his room making up stories, unless he was playing. He loved ice skating – not a traditional choice in his post-industrial town – and acting in school plays. (“A huge shot of Billy Elliot, I know,” he says.) He studied drama at the University of Hull and only set foot in the Lasdun building when he arrived in London, early twenties. The first play he saw there was David Hare’s “The Permanent Way,” a radical epic about the British railway system. Sexy. “The reason why I love that first play is because it was a very big commercial and popular success on the privatization of railwayswhich gave me the confidence to make, on paper, really cheesy political pieces about things that should seem unappealing.
