Alexi Kaye Campbell, interview: the playwright on Greek poverty, his partner Dominic Cooke and finding his own creative voice

Athens-born writer Alexi Kaye Campbell wanted to stay away from politics for his new play but there is no avoiding how bad Greece has become, he tells Fiona Mountford
Greek odyssey: Alexi Kaye Campbell returned to the land of his birth to write the story of two expat couples living on the island of Skiathos
Robert Viglasky
Fiona Mountford24 May 2016

There’s no getting around the fact: playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell should be sponsored by the Greek Tourist Board. For alongside some subtle if trenchant political commentary, his new play for the National Theatre, Sunset at the Villa Thalia, offers the idyll of Greek island living: it’s all swims at sunset and wine and snacks on the terrace before dinner. It is, if you like, the Mamma Mia! of serious drama.

Campbell, born in Athens to a Greek father and English mother, smiles. “For years I’ve slightly acted as a travel agent for everybody in the theatre who wants to go to Greece,” he says. “Put it this way: I’ve sent quite a few people on idyllic Greek holidays. Then of course if anything goes wrong I take it personally. Somebody told me they got food poisoning in Greece and I was, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry!’”

Sunset at the Villa Thalia looks at the profound consequences — on both personal and governmental levels — of meddling in the business of other countries. It centres on two couples, one British and one American, staying in the eponymous house on the island of Skiathos over the course of 10 bumpy years in the mid-1960s. Ben Miles and Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern play the Americans, Harvey and June: he’s a shady government operative and she’s his increasingly frazzled spouse.

The setting is inspired by the Skiathos house Campbell’s parents built when he was a baby and in which he spent his childhood summers. He hadn’t returned since he was 18 but he and director Simon Godwin went back last autumn as research for the production. “Skiathos is a beautiful island but it’s gone a bit…” he trails off; “mass market British tourism” might be the phrase. “When I was growing up it was like a paradise, this idyllic island, and there was a real innocence.” Campbell, 49, took himself off to Greece to write the play too, this time to the island of Syros. “I was getting emails from the National going, ‘When do you think we’re going to get a first draft?’ and I kept lying. So eventually I said, ‘I’m going to go to Greece and not come back until I’ve finished the first draft’.” This Greek seclusion appears to have done the trick, as Villa Thalia is one of the most promising new plays I’ve read in years.

Increasingly frazzled: Elizabeth McGovern, who plays June
Manuel Harlan

Is it a direct comment on what has happened to Greece over the past few years? “I knew I had to write something about Greece,” he says, “but I didn’t want to write it in a kind of explicit political way. The themes the play talks about are different forms of colonialism and how economic colonialism is a universal thing.”

Regular visits back to his family in Athens have, however, reminded him how bad the situation has become. “There were people in my brother’s neighbourhood, middle-class people, and you could see them getting up early to rummage through bins,” he says quietly.

'I did love being an actor and I was very committed. But what I found unbearable was the lack of control and autonomy and I just got to the point where I couldn’t tolerate it any more'

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Campbell shot to attention in 2008 with his Critics’ Circle Award-winning debut The Pride. A skilful look at a half-century’s worth of changing attitudes to homosexuality, it has proved to be a considerable worldwide hit in countries as far-flung as Japan and South Korea. “A lot of it has to do with code and speaking in code — all cultures have that to some extent,” he says.

Its notable original production was at the Royal Court, of which his partner Dominic Cooke was then the artistic director. “When it went blindly into the script meeting it got a very positive response and they voted to do it, without knowing that it was by me,” he says. “Then it was a question of if I wasn’t with Dominic, would I have my play at the Royal Court? Of course you would, because the Royal Court is the top. I thought: ‘Should I be penalised?’”

Cooke is an early reader of his plays and usually reads a second draft. “He’s brilliant dramaturgically but then I have strong opinions on what I’m trying to write, so sometimes it can be…” He trails off. Do you argue? A mischievous grin appears. “What do you think?”

Before that trailblazing debut Campbell was an actor for nearly 20 years, paying his dues in often small parts all around the country. “I did love it and I was very committed,” he says. “But what I found unbearable was the lack of control and autonomy and I just got to the point where I couldn’t tolerate it any more. That’s one of the joys of writing: you don’t have to wait for somebody to give you permission to do it.”

Until the age of 42 he filled in the gaps between acting jobs with work in a call centre. Was it difficult doing that while your partner was off running the Royal Court? “I think I was very driven to find my own creative voice, let’s put it that way,” he says. “It’s great if you can have your first play produced when you’re 25 but sometimes it’s rather wonderful when things happen later in life.”

What insights from his acting days does he bring to his writing? “One of the things when you’re an actor which is unbearable is if you’re boring an audience and you can feel it,” he says, firmly. “The other thing is that when you’re an actor it takes a certain amount of empathy to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. As a dramatist I try and do exactly the same thing but with five, six characters instead of just the one.”

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He’s not, he says, even slightly tempted to act in one of his own plays. Besides, he’s too busy — last year he made his screenwriting debut with Nazi-art-theft drama Woman in Gold, which starred Helen Mirren, and there are further films in the pipeline. The more films he writes, he says, the more chance he’ll have of buying a little house on a Greek island somewhere.

His parents met at Cape Sounio near Athens in the early Sixties. His mother was a Geordie travelling through Greece and his father a recent widower with two young children. They married but a “traumatic divorce” later followed.

He moved to England with his mother at the age of 10 but a year later his father forcibly took him back to Greece. “I never lived with my mother after that,” he says softly, “but I’d come and visit her on holidays. The experience of being separated from my Mum has shaped my life indelibly.”

So is he Greek or English? “I am what I am by blood: exactly half and half,” he says. “I was watching a rehearsal of this play the other day and I thought: ‘There are three groups of people in it, the Brits, the Greeks and the Americans, and those three represent different parts of me’. I live in Britain but I lived in America for five years [for university] so I’ve been shaped by that. But my soul and my roots are always going to be in Greece.” A fact to which Sunset at the Villa Thalia bears eloquent testament.

Sunset at the Villa Thalia is at the National’s Dorfman, SE1 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk), from May 25 until August 4

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