Richard Marsh: Love And Sweets

In this interview, we talk to writer and performer Richard Marsh about his Radio 4 series...

Hi Richard. Could we start by asking you to explain a bit about your background in writing and performing?

I wrote a short play, Cinderella and the Beanstalk, which ended up winning best comedy in the university drama competition. It was a really fun thing to do socially, but also got me addicted to audience laughter. I started writing plays, not so much pure comedies as dramas with lots of jokes in. I carried on writing those throughout my twenties, getting a lot of encouragement but never full commissions or a professional production.

In the autumn of 2009, I heard about the scratch nights at Battersea Arts Centre. It's a way of letting performers try out new work, and for the venue to try out new performers - basically it doesn't cost you anything to put your stuff on, and the venue keeps the ticket money. I wrote a short piece called Skittles, a story about love (and sweets, which are more reliable). I did two things I hadn't done since my first student show - I decided to perform it myself and to put rhyme in it.

BAC selected my show to be part of the scratch night, so I had to go through with it. I did two performances that night, to about 40 people each time I guess. I was very scared but fairly quickly I could feel people responding to the piece, in a way they hadn't always done to my plays. BAC invited me back to develop the piece further, and I was on my way.

I started performing everywhere I could. I used to get really nervous (I'd wear a shirt over a t-shirt, so people couldn't see me sweating) but I learned a lot and gradually improved as a performer. And I kept writing Skittles, eventually performing it as a full hour at the Nursery Festival before taking it to Edinburgh in 2011.

And now you've got a Radio 4 series...

Yes, it's an adaptation of Skittles for Radio 4 called Richard Marsh: Love and Sweets.

I play a character called Richard - we're not exactly alike, although we do look very similar - who is temping and falls for a girl at work. He finds it hard to say what he feels to her, although he's quite eloquent about his failure to do so.

We recorded it in front of a live audience. That was important - I talk to the audience and they're a big part of the story. Their reaction affects what I say and how I say it. We wanted to capture that liveness on the radio.

As you might guess from the title, it's a love story. It's about love in your twenties and the difficulties that come from living together for the first time. The story very deliberately gives only one point of view - you'll often hear Richard skipping over problems, or assuming things that are probably not the case. As the series goes on, we see the consequences of that. It's comic, with more moving moments. Whenever Richard's on a high, something will go wrong for him, and whenever he's down I put some jokes in.

Ok, confession time. The official blurb for your show uses the words 'poetry and prose' and that made us apprehensive at first. We're not sure we've ever particularly been fans of poetry before. Is that a preconception you have to battle a lot?

When I was flyering the show up in Edinburgh, it soon became apparent that people were quite up for a comic love story, less so for poetry. I ended up telling people about all the other aspects of the story but keeping the poetry to myself. When they came to see it, no one minded the rhyme.

It's certainly quite a common perception - most people think they don't like poetry. Maybe it's due to the experience they had in school, or because they think poetry will be a bit up itself. But they don't mind words rhyming in a comic context, if it's in comic songs - Bill Bailey, Tim Minchin and Loretta Maine are very successful. What I do is in many ways quite similar, except without singing (and in much smaller rooms).

Well said and, yes, having heard your show we have to say our fears were soon dispelled. It's zippy, funny and eloquent and not once does it remind us of those dark days in GCSE English. You must be happy with how it's come out?

Glad you liked it. Yes, I'm pretty chuffed with it. It means a lot to me on two levels - personally, the show took me from being a playwright to being a performer. I'm still very much a writer and I love and will continue doing that, but writing is a solitary activity and it's really enjoyable to stand up in front of a crowd and tell them a story that hopefully engages them and makes them laugh.

As secondly, I'm very pleased that the piece seems to move people. When you're making something, all you can do is put all of your heart into it, and all of your craft into it - you can control all that, but you can't control how it affects its audience (or how large that audience will be). Love & Sweets / Skittles seems to affect people, and now it's going to be on the radio so will reach many more people than I could have dreamed of in a tiny room in Battersea.

As you said earlier, you're playing 'a character called Richard'. We're really curious to know how much of Love & Sweets is actually true...

Richard the character is like me in some ways, but not others. Richard wears glasses, I wear glasses - but he likes Skittles and I don't (particularly after doing this show so much). Calling him Richard was a decision I made fairly casually when writing the first BAC scratch, but I've stuck with it throughout the development of Skittles / Love & Sweets and also the follow-up, Dirty Great Love Story (which I co-wrote and performed with the excellent Katie Bonna) - we call ourselves Richard and Katie in that. It's quite nice if the audience are wondering what's true and what's invented.

In 'Love & Sweets' your partner is called Siobhan... that has to be the hardest to spell name in the world!

It certainly is tricky - but in the show I mostly call her Shiv, which is easy to spell and has a lot of rhymes. Most of the girls I write poems about happen to have easily-rhyming names. The other girl in Love and Sweets is called Jess, entirely because it rhymes with chest. I am unlikely to ever write a character who falls in love with someone called Orange.

So what's this, you don't actually like Skittles?

I wrote them into the BAC scratch because I thought 'you're doing a piece where it's just you talking, better have something visual' and Skittles are brightly-coloured and cheap. I used them a lot in the show - I'd make words out of Skittles then knock certain letters out and have the words say something very different, I gave out Skittles to the audience, and I ate a lot of them at one point in the story.

I don't really like Skittles myself, which at the time didn't seem a big problem as I was only doing the show for one night. I've since ended up performing it at least 50 times. If anyone out there is planning their first show - don't make yourself eat unhealthy food onstage every day. Particularly not at Edinburgh, you eat enough unhealthy food offstage. Write a show where you eat a kiwi or something. That might keep you healthy for most of the run.

Back to the topic of poetry if that's ok, as we're keen to learn a bit more now we realise it's not all torturous. What's a poetry slam?

A slam is a poetry competition. Lots of poets get 3 minutes each to do a poem, they get marked and the highest scores go through to the next round. I'm the London slam champion. There's a lot of luck involved in a slam. But I still won it.

Neat. So, final question Richard, where can we and others who discover you via this series see and hear more of you and poetry in general?

The best comedy poetry night I know is called Bang Said the Gun. It's every Thursday, upstairs at the Roebuck pub near London Bridge. I co-host a monthly night called Sage & Time, the third Wednesday of every month at the Charterhouse Bar in Farrington. For more nationwide stuff, go to www.writeoutloud.net which lists poetry gigs across the UK, and if you want to see where I'm gigging please visit my website.

'Richard Marsh: Love And Sweets' is on Radio 4 each night this week (2nd-5th April 2013) at 11:30pm. For a week after transmission it'll also be on the iPlayer and available as a podcast

To find out more about Richard visit his website www.richmarsh.com and/or follow him on Twitter @richardbmarsh