Are We In A Crisis Of Storytelling?

The brutalist Royal National Theatre building, which sits aggressively on the south side of the River Thames, in London, is a “love it or loudly despise it” kind of place—all concrete edges and unwelcoming angles. King Charles III once morosely described it as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London.” For the playwright and screenwriter James Graham, however, it holds a certain appeal. “I think the geometry of it is fucking sexy,” he told me recently.

We were seated on a mezzanine floor in the dining room of the theatre’s upscale restaurant, Lasdun, named for the building’s architect, Denys Lasdun. Looking down through a large window, we could take in the buzzing lobby and the pre-theatre-drinks crowd. The vibe surrounding us was moody-industrial: white tablecloths and black leather seats, with spotlit concrete walls and dark flooring. The ceiling, also concrete, was coffered, like a particularly sturdy beehive.

Graham likes an Old-Fashioned at Lasdun’s bar when his plays are in tech in the theatres below, and they often are. (Once you know his name, it’s seemingly everywhere.) The restaurant was a fitting location for a playwright known for history plays that interrogate, in unsparing detail, the U.K.’s most treasured national institutions. In “This House,” his breakout work, from 2012, he explored the inner workings of Parliament and the ascent 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 the former English soccer manager Gareth Southgate and the pressures of the game.

On the day we met, he bustled in with a backpack, apologizing profusely for being late. At forty-two, he has the bright, slightly harried air of someone who enjoys being exceptionally busy. This year, he has opened two plays in the U.K., and two more are scheduled for the spring. The second season of his BBC show, “Sherwood,” about a real-life murder in Nottinghamshire, the mining county where he grew up, premières next month. At the restaurant, Graham said he had taken the train from Liverpool, where he was speaking at the Labour 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 started at the Palace Theatre on October 19th.) The show began its life at the Almeida Theatre, in London, in 2022, and has been significantly reworked. “Oh, God, it feels like a big thing,” he said, nervously. What could go wrong with a Broadway show? “They’re so cheap, and they always run 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 nineteen-seventies and eighties, 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 U.S.A. That was before it emerged that Jim had been swindling money from their followers, and had covered up a sexual encounter; he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison. But Tammy Faye, with her big hair, outlandish makeup, and tendency toward bigheartedness, remained a beloved figure, embracing those whom mainstream evangelicalism shunned. Before the scandal broke, she invited a gay Christian minister with AIDS onto her show. “How sad that we as Christians—who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone—are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care,” she said.

An unusually eloquent waiter—an aspiring actor—took our order and returned with the plates: pork shoulder for Graham, a hockey-puck-size fish cake with anchovy sauce for me. “I mean, their story—Jim and Tammy’s—is obviously Shakespearean,” Graham said, cutting into his food. “It’s a rise and fall from poverty, through love, success, chaos, destruction of empire, shaming, and then coming out the other side having learned a valuable lesson. Like, it’s all there.” When Graham joined the project, however, he had never heard of the Bakkers. John and Shears were both 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 yet have a story. “Elton really knew her to his bones, and comes from that musical tradition. The gospel South, that’s his music,” he said. And, he went on, “Jake has been obsessed with Tammy Faye since a young boy, like, seeing her as this gay icon that he knew before he knew he was gay.”

John sent a car to pick Graham up from a flat he shared with a few others. (“I was, like, Please don’t send a car! I can just take the Tube.”) They had dinner in the pop star’s house in Windsor. Once he got the job, he immersed himself in Tammy’s world, reading histories of the evangelical movement and the memoirs of the pastor Jerry Falwell, who becomes a villain-like figure in the show. Eventually, Graham told John and Shears that he wanted the musical to go beyond Tammy. (Graham told me that they said, “Make sure you keep the heart. Don’t go all cerebral.”) “I thought her story would be infinitely more powerful if it was against the backdrop of a wider exploration of that system. What is televangelism? Why did it emerge? What need did it fill?” he said. “You do say the words, quite early on, ‘I think I want to put Ronald Reagan in it.’ ”

The restaurant had filled up and grown noisier as we approached showtime. No one seemed daunted 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 kid who would spend hours alone in his room making up stories, unless he was performing. He loved ice skating—not a traditional choice in his tough, post-industrial town—and appearing in school plays. (“A massive Billy Elliot cliché, I know,” he said.) He studied drama at the University of Hull, and didn’t set foot inside Lasdun’s building until he came to London, in his early twenties. The first play he saw there was David Hare’s “The Permanent Way,” a sweeping epic about the U.K.’s railway system. Sexy. “Why I love that as my first play is because it was a really big commercial, popular hit about the privatization of the railways, which has given me confidence to do, on paper, really nerdy, political plays about things that should sound unappealing.”