MOST PEOPLE have never heard of Steven Knight. Yet this is the man who wrote the Oscar-nominated film Dirty Pretty Things, about illegal immigrants working in London. He is also the author of three published novels. He co-designed the format for the TV programme Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He has also written for comedians ranging from Jo Brand to his fellow Brummie Jasper Carrot.
Now he has his first play, The President of an Empty Room, opening at the National Theatre. Set in a Cuban cigar factory, it follows the tensions caused when the owner goes missing and the senior roller proclaims the factory a democracy.
Knight knocked out the drama while suffering jet lag in Los Angeles. He was inspired by his love for everything to do with cigars: “I’m interested in Native American culture and the religion of tobacco and that pre-Columbus culture that survives in voodoo and other supernatural beliefs.”
These elements play their part in the drama, which also features a heroin addict whose girlfriend has left him for a new life in America. “Cigars are also such a central part of life in Cuba, which is a communist country producing the ultimate luxury item for Western consumer society,” Knight continues. “And Cuba’s a society holding its breath waiting for Castro to die, knowing everything is going to change soon. And I do love the cigars.”
The other big attraction of writing a play for the 45-year-old writer, who is already occupied with a blizzard of screenplay commissions, lies in his passion for the spoken word. He confesses to being not much of a theatregoer, but has been drawn to playwriting by an almost gravitational force.
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“The screenplays I’ve written aren’t theatrical, but the thing I enjoy is dialogue. In theatre it’s pure dialogue. What I find most interesting is the way people speak and what they really mean. In dialogue the opposite is often meant to whatever is said, and when an actor gets hold of it, it can have another meaning even beyond the ones you thought it would have.”
His route to the stage has been a circuitous one, but then that’s how he likes to write — circuitously: “In the case of this play I didn’t know it was going to be about this situation in a cigar factory. I just knew it would be about cigars and there would be a supernatural element. If you pick the environment correctly you can go in lots of directions. The trouble with that is you go down a lot of blind alleys. The advantage is that you don’t follow any normal paths.”
Indeed, normal paths are anathema to Knight and his origins sound like the start of a fairy story. Born the seventh son of a farrier, he was brought up in Streetly, Birmingham. Despite his father’s efforts to have his offspring follow in his trade, Knight went from Streetly Comprehensive to study English at University College London. But far from disavowing his roots, he describes himself now as a “very, very fanatical” Birmingham City supporter.
After college in London, Knight fell into copywriting and through sundry connections into writing for TV: “It was the end of the Golden Age of Thames Television’s old stagers,” he recalls. “I did a lot of stand-up comedy script work for people like Frankie Howerd and Ken Dodd at the time of the Eighties alternative comedy boom. It was fantastic training for writing because comedy is the hardest thing in the world and people like Ken Dodd have such an awareness of the delicacy of delivery. If it doesn’t work it’s a nightmare and fear of that makes you get it dead right.”
It was while working as a comedy writer for the TV company Celador that Knight and two others invented the format for Who Wants to be a Millionaire, one of ITV’s biggest cash cows. So is he now a millionaire himself? He refuses to say, but one has to suspect that the man who recently bought a brewery in Birmingham isn’t hard up.
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That doesn’t seem to hamper his productivity. He is adapting his conspiracy thriller Alphabet City for the screen. Then there’s Emma’s War, a screenplay for Tony (Top Gun) Scott about Emma McCune, a British aid worker in Sudan in the Eighties. Add to that Wilberforce, a film about the man who abolished slavery in England, and a pet project about Catherine Weldon, who painted Sitting Bull in 1889. But the work he plans to finish next is a play about Galileo. He hasn’t read Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, but he is praying that he isn’t taking the same line as the German revolutionary agitator.
So we’re going to be hearing more from the prolific and unassuming Steven Knight. Yet he still likes his anonym-ity. “I know I’m doing an interview now, but I’m not interested in trying to become famous. Having been around famous people a lot, it’s no life. There are lots of perks, but you’ve got to have a real appetite for that whole business of being public property to tolerate it. If you’re universally loved, it’s OK, but not many people are.”