Scrogg face is a fine insult; yokkenthroat’s another.” The writer Blake Morrison is discussing the little-known art of “Yorkshirefication”, at which he is becoming something of an authority. His leather-bound edition of Carr’s Craven Dialect, currently spread across his knees, is one indispensable tool of his trade. It is possibly the only extant dictionary able to inform you that “bummelkite” is Yorkshire for blackberry, a “Cousin Betty” is a mad woman, and “greentail”, which might even be a verb, refers to the diarrhoea of deer.
“You could do every Goldoni play and still not exhaust this book,” says Morrison, wistfully. Barrie Rutter, the artistic director of the acclaimed Northern Broadsides Theatre Company, asked him to modernise just the one: A Servant to Two Masters. Written in 1754, Carlo Goldoni’s best loved play is still largely unknown to English audiences. Partly, Morrison thinks, because its surface detail has dated badly: “I just don’t see the point of staging this play in 18th-century Venice; the odd choice would be not adapting it.”
It’s not immediately easy to agree. Changing the title to A Man with Two Gaffers and substituting a “sod” for every “scoundrel”, is relatively straightforward. But A Servant to Two Masters is a heady Italian farce, with its feet firmly planted in the commedia dell’arte tradition. “But, as soon as I read it,” says Morrison, “it was immediately obvious how I’d shift it. You’ve got all the human themes in there: vanity, avarice, greed and lust. In the original you’ve got a rich Venetian merchant and I thought, fine, a rich Dales farmer. They’re both a bit mingey,” which translates as mean, “they’re both on the make, neither mince their words. And I carried on from there. It wasn’t difficult at all.”
By now, Morrison is fairly practised at the skill of updating classic plays to Yorkshire settings. Gaffers is the fourth such adaptation that he has written for Northern Broadsides: a modern version of Heinrich Von Kleist’s The Cracked Pot in 1996 was followed by Oedipus and Antigone five and seven years later.
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Of his work with Rutter, Morrison explains: “Barrie read a poem I’d written in the 1980s, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, which chimed with what Northern Broadsides is all about: telling good stories in Yorkshire voices.” When Rutter discovered that The Cracked Pot was gathering dust at the National Theatre, he asked the writer to rework it in a Yorkshire dialect.
The resulting comedy was a resounding success, and the two men forged a firm artistic partnership on the back of it. “Just this morning we decided on a play for next year: Lysistrata” — Aristophanes’ tragedy about a war-torn city mirroring the wider conflict of a continental war — “and that one I can do in a contemporary setting. Asian-white conflict in a northern town, and beyond them, a world on the brink of war.”
For the Goldoni, Morrison could update it only to the 19th century without completely rewriting the plot, which was something he resisted: “If you have to change something, you do, but my feeling is why even allude to the original if you’re going to turn it completely on its head?”
Morrison has never felt the need radically to reinvent the plays he adapts. “You have to honour the classic that you’re working with.” he says, “Goldoni was very good at his job. If you’re going to change something you have to have a very, very good reason for it. And this way, the original is very visible. It’s a way of saying: look, this writer who died 200 years ago, he’s still completely alive to a modern audience. That’s the point.”
Above all, the softly spoken, undemonstrative writer has “no great desire to stamp my personality all over everything I do. When you’ve written two or three books that are so personal, it’s a relief to get away from that for a while and do something that isn’t all about me.”
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It was the intensely personal And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the bruisingly honest account of his father’s death, that propelled the then professional journalist Morrison to literary fame in 1993. In 1997, he followed it with As If, his controversial account of the James Bulger trial. Of the book’s reception, Morrison says: “It rubbed people up the wrong way because I was more sympathetic to the two boys than some thought proper, but it was important for me to be honest, and I was.”
Then in 2001 he published Things my Mother Never Told Me, the equally raw counterpoint to his book about his father. “It’s a relief after that to write comedy. People think: ‘Oh, that Morrison, he does dark things: parents’ deaths, child murders, grand tragedies.’ And the rest of my writing isn’t Yorkshire at all. I’ve just written a novel due out next year called South of the River, set mostly in London. So it’s really only the plays that allow me to express the Yorkshire in me, which is very important.”
This adherence to a quiet honesty runs right through Morrison’s writing career. And perhaps it’s only authors cast in that self-effacing mould — those content to allow the classic play beneath the modern production to garner all the glory — who make the best, unsung adaptors.
“I don’t feel it’s mine, but I do feel responsible for it, of course. I’ll be nervous as hell on press night,” he concedes. “I’ll be sitting there when a joke comes up, desperately hoping that it works, that people are having a good laugh. Or a good laff, I should say, shouldn’t I,” he concludes, patting the worn cover of Carr’s Craven Dialect and smiling ironically to himself.