Gagarin Way is a cruel, funny, first play by Scottish playwright Gregory Burke, about a human heist gone horribly wrong. It opened to rave reviews at this year’s Edinburgh Festival and was snapped up by the National Theatre where it opens tonight. We spoke to Burke on how it felt to see the play performed and to being already compared to Beckett, Mamet and Tarantino.
"Gagarin Way was always going to be funny. It's part of the nature of working in a factory and doing 12-hour shifts, people have to be funny or they’d go mental and I found I could write jokes. If I wrote it as a straight play it could have been a bit earnest, but I thought people would take it seriously as a comedy. There don't seem to be many political plays around, probably because they are seen as a bit boring and as just hitting you over the head with rhetoric. One of the themes is men's self-delusion because I think men are fantastically good at deluding themselves into thinking what we think matters does really matter, whether it be football, politics or anything. In Fife in particular, there is still a staunch belief in the unions and empty rhetoric does exist.
"I didn’t consciously set out to write a play, but when I started writing it came out as dialogue and when the action didn’t move beyond one room, it was obviously going to be a play. As soon as I saw actors speaking the lines, it became completely different and I realised what worked and what didn’t. We made cuts and changes right up to the press night at the Edinburgh Festival. Even after the previews we made two major cuts, so there are parts in the book that have been removed. For the production at the National I have removed a couple of jokes which were too 'inside', a bit too Scottish for the London audience. The actors are firmly on the side of not changing anything for the production whereas I don’t mind at all. There are a couple of anti-American lines so I’ll probably have the CIA beating down my door, but so far nobody has talked about removing them. "It was lovely to win the Fringe award and to have a play performed at the National. It's also great being compared to people like Mamet and Tarantino. (In fact I was watching Pulp Fiction the other night and just thinking how good it is.} Mamet’s American Buffalo was an influence in the respect that it is just men talking. It's great to be compared to these people but I know I have a long way to go."
Gagarin Way opens at the National's Cottesloe Theatre on October 3. Burke has since written a radio play called Occy Eyes about Gibraltar during the Falklands War. He also has an eight- week attachment at the National Studio.
