82 Books & arts The EconomistJune 29th 2019
J
ack thorne’sphone flashes with mes-
sages and alerts; he turns it face-down,
swearing under his breath. With five baf-
tas, an Olivier and a Tony award to his
name, Mr Thorne is Britain’s most sought-
after scriptwriter. He is juggling several
projects at once: his new play is in rehears-
al ahead of its premiere at the Royal Court
theatre in London on June 27th, while three
television series that he wrote are in pro-
duction. He is becoming to modern British
tvwhat Charles Dickens was to the Victor-
ian novel—a chronicler of the country’s
untold stories and social ills, and the do-
mestic dramas that encapsulate them.
Much of Mr Thorne’s work is concerned
with the challenges faced by ordinary
Britons. The main character in “When You
Cure Me”, his first major stage play, was a
young woman incapacitated after a brutal
sexual assault. Elsewhere he has written
about the impact of local-council cuts, a
couple mourning a stillborn child and the
creation of a community playground out of
scrap materials. His new play, “the end of
history...”, is about tensions between the
generations. Mr Thorne says it both “cele-
brates and castigates” baby-boomers.
A keen interest in the travails of Every-
man has defined his television career, too.
It began in 2007 on the writing team of
“Shameless”, a black comedy set in a work-
ing-class area of Manchester, and “Skins”
(2007-09), a grim teen drama set in his
home town of Bristol. He collaborated with
Shane Meadows on the three seasons of
“This is England” (2010-15), about skin-
head, mod and rave subcultures in the late
1980s and early 1990s, and more recently on“The Virtues” (2019), which follows a man
coming to terms with childhood abuse.
His biggest solo project to date came
about when Channel 4 asked him to write a
trilogy of shows about modern Britain.
“National Treasure” (2016) was inspired by
Operation Yewtree, a police investigation
into sexual misconduct by media personal-
ities; the smash hit “Kiri” (2018) explored
transracial adoption. Caroline Hollick, the
channel’s head of drama, praises the bal-
ance in Mr Thorne’s writing between brutal
honesty and warmth, even humour:
“That’s why he can dig into these huge
state-of-the-nation ideas and make them
so appealing to watch.” The trilogy’s final
instalment will be a mini-series about cor-
porate manslaughter, which will draw on
real-life incidents including the Grenfell
Tower fire of 2017.
Mr Thorne, who is 40, tends to anchor
his stories in families (sometimes uncon-
ventional ones), scrutinising the relation-
ships between siblings or between parents
and their children. These families have a
veneer of unity but, underneath, they tend
to be fractured by lies and betrayals. Much
is left unsaid. In “National Treasure” Dee
(Andrea Riseborough) wonders whether
her drug-addiction and memory loss is
linked to the predatory behaviour of which
her father is accused. In “The Virtues”, to
mask his slide back into the bottle, Joseph
(Stephen Graham, pictured left) spins a
story about a workplace accident to his son.
Mr Graham, who also starred in “This is
England”, reckons that “no one catches
truth and reality the way Jack does”. Mr
Thorne’s shows do “more than make youlook at pretty pictures,” Mr Graham says;
they come “into your living room and make
you think”.
Other threads knit the writer’s disparate
subjects into a coherent oeuvre. Many of
his stories feature loss or violence, explor-
ing how such experiences calcify into
trauma; several of his characters are depen-
dent on booze or sex. He is an acute observ-
er of nuances of affluence and class, that
eternal British theme. Typically, Mr Thorne
avoids the temptation to provide easy mor-
alising and neat conclusions, considering
those unrealistic and therefore dishonest.
He says he wants his work to lead “to peo-
ple asking questions rather than giving
them answers”.
That interrogatory bent is, he thinks,
why he enjoys another, contrasting genre,
which he has honed alongside the social
realism: fantasy. That is also a means to ask
“fascinating questions about the world”, he
says. “The Fades”, a supernatural drama
broadcast in 2011, which followed two
nerdy teenagers battling the evil spirits of
the dead, was really about pacifism, Mr
Thorne suggests. A few years ago he adapt-
ed Dickens’s moralistic ghost story “A
Christmas Carol” for the stage.
He also wrote the script for “Harry Pot-
ter and the Cursed Child”, based on an orig-
inal tale by J.K. Rowling. The play won
more Olivier awards (Britain’s most presti-
gious theatrical gongs) than any previous
West End production. He wanted it to cap-
ture the predicament of outsiders; it fol-
lows Albus Severus Potter, Harry’s son, as
he is bullied at Hogwarts and struggles to
live up to his father’s legacy. And he has
adapted Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materi-
als” for a forthcoming serialisation. Lyra,
the protagonist, struggles to assert her free
will in the face of unpleasant parents,
while trying to set the world to rights.Harry Potter and the state of the nation
Perhaps inevitably, details from Mr
Thorne’s own life have found their way into
his locations, scenes and characters. For
“the end of history...”, his most personal
piece of writing to date, he mined his child-
hood in a politically active household
where—like some of his creations—he felt
he was constantly falling short of his par-
ents’ ideals and expectations. His father, a
union representative, took him and his sib-
lings to rallies and protests from an early
age; Mr Thorne has been a member of the
Labour Party since he was 16.
“My politics are very important to me,”
he acknowledges. He resists the seepage of
those views into his work, but all the same
they “infect the stories I tell”. He dislikes
speechifying, but says that, as he writes, he
constantly questions “what right we have
to try and change the world and how we
can, if indeed we can”. A motto is tattooed
on the inside of his wrist: “Be good”. 7Modern British television has founds its DickensThe lives of othersBard of Britain