520
Second Act
With his debut production,
actor turned playwright
Simon Woods makes a domestic
drama into an allegory for
a nation. By Sarah Crompton.
Photographed by Anton Corbijn.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 571
“I’D STARTED PLANNING to do a garden-
design course,” says Simon Woods with a
shy smile. “I’ve always liked nature, and I
thought, Well, writing is never going to hap-
pen. I’ll never be able to finish anything that’s
any good. So I started googling garden-design
courses. They follow me around the internet
to this day.”
Woods is sitting in a tiny room at the top
of the National Theatre in London, where
his first play is about to be staged. It is a clear
spring day, five months before opening night,
and he has just seen the model of the set. He
did, in the end, write something very good
indeed, a touching and original piece called
Hansard, about a 1980s Tory politician and
his left-leaning wife—a play where people
and politics collide, and truths are revealed.
“I’d always written for myself,” the 39-year-
old says. “I’d written 500 pages of a really
complicated historical novel. Then I just start-
ed writing about these two characters in the
middle of nowhere. They were trapped in a
hell of their own making, and I sort of engi-
neered it backward to work out what mistake
they had made.” Still, the former actor didn’t
show anyone what he had written—except his
husband, the longtime Burberry chief creative
officer Christopher Bailey. “I’d been very
squirrelly about it,” he adds with a laugh. But
Woods eventually sent it to an agent, and the
agent sent it to the National, and here we are.
“I knew a few pages in that it was some-
thing special,” says Rufus Norris, the direc-
tor of the National. “It’s rare to encounter
writing of such ease, wit, and such emotional
and theatrical intelligence. To find it com-
ing from an unproduced playwright is even
rarer.” Norris decided to workshop the play
with the actors Lindsay Duncan and Alex
Jennings, both of whom are old friends of
Woods’s from his acting days. When they
join us, it is like witnessing a family reunion.
“There’s no point in hiding it; we basically
live together,” jokes Duncan with a warmly
protective air. “To be doing Simon’s first play
means a huge amount to both of us. We just
want everything for him.” Jennings nods his
agreement. “I was dazzled by the dialogue as
soon as I read it,” he adds.
Set in 1988, in Oxfordshire, Hansard fol-
lows the Conservative MP Robin Hesketh,
who is spending the weekend with his discon-
tented wife, Diana. She is fighting him over
his support for the infamous Section 28 clause
in the Local Government Act, in which the
government of Margaret Thatcher attempted
to ban teaching about the acceptability of
homosexuality. The debate is remembered
today as one of those moments when En-
glish society was asked to define itself, and
when politicians imposed a certain view of
the values people should live by.
Even in the briefest of meetings, you can
see why Woods inspires such warm loyalty
from the people involved in this project. He
is a gentle and charming figure, with an en-
dearing smile and a tendency to let his sen-
tences drift away as he tries to pin down the
circumstances that led him to this point. He
grew up in the same region that his play takes
place, in what he describes as “a very warm,
loving, supportive, encouraging, nurturing
family.” His father, now an organic vegetable
farmer, was a lawyer; his mother is a garden
historian; and young Woods followed a safe
route to adulthood, going first to Eton and
then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where
he read English literature and, for a time,
dated the actress Rosamund Pike. He became
an actor almost by accident. “It was what I
was doing with my life, without really having
yearned to do it,” he says. He was successful,
with parts in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice
(opposite Pike) and plentiful work on TV,
but slowly a certain disillusion set in. “I re-
member trying to persuade a writer for one
show that I needed a scene that involved me
unburdening myself. Nobody was interested.
I remember thinking then, I wish I was in the
writers’ room. On film sets, I’d sit behind the
camera between scenes and ask questions of
everyone.”
In 2008, he decided to stop acting. He had
become friends with Chelsea Clinton while at
Oxford, and, he explains, “having got to know
her mother, I felt there was this huge gulf
between the public
