Meet Craig Willman: The Business Playwright

Finito World interviews Craig Willman about his life as a playwright – and why more small businesses need to tell their stories

What first drew you to writing plays, and when did you begin to think of it as something you wanted to pursue professionally?

It’s hard to say but it was very early in my childhood. According to my parents I’ve been writing stories for as long as I’ve been able to hold a pencil. The first one, when I was four or five, was a direct plagiarism of a kids’ book about a school bully. The theatre angle probably predates the first time I went to see anything at the theatre and stems from the desperate desire I had as a child to be the centre of attention. I would perform in front of parents, family, friends, and anyone who had the misfortune of sitting comfortably for more than 30 seconds in our lounge.

I acted throughout my school years and adored drama as a subject. Then I went to Nottingham University, which had a wonderful student theatre. I auditioned for one of the plays in my first term, didn’t get the part, and – so it would seem – developed shyness.

I didn’t audition for anything else, and stayed away from the student theatre until my final year, by which time I had written my first play – and in my final term I managed to persuade the theatre to let me put it on for a week I then wrote another play which represented the theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe. Neither was any good but I found the experience so exhilarating that I went on to do a Masters in Playwriting at Birmingham University during which I wrote a play called The Picture of John Gray, which ended up having a four week professional run at The Old Red Lion Theatre.

The play, about the man who inspired the titular character in Oscar Wilde’s only novel, sold out and was well received and I was – and remain – proud of it. But a mooted west end transfer didn’t end up materialising and I had no other viable plays in the pipeline. And, to answer your question, it was probably at this point, thanks to another blast of that shyness that had stopped me auditioning for more roles at university, that I decided not to pursue playwriting professionally (at least until recently anyway).

You’ve combined a business career with writing and producing theatre. How did those two strands develop, and what have you learnt from moving between them?

It was around this time, and certainly in the course of doing the Playwriting Masters, that I realised how bleak the economic prospects were for a playwright. You could probably count the ones who were making a decent living on two hands and in most cases they’d had at least a decade of struggling by until they had reached that point. And, perhaps arrogantly, I didn’t want to compete for commissions. I only wanted to write the things I wanted to write.

So I decided I would continue to write but I’d have to do it alongside some sort of career (up until this point I’d worked in a succession of restaurants alongside studying). I ended up becoming the first employee at a startup that produced magazines about businesses and entrepreneurs and I felt a real pull towards the world of business creations and the people who put their money and reputations on the line to build them. Our own business grew rapidly and I found myself leading a team of twenty as we produced nearly one hundred publications a year and hosted twenty-plus live events at the Houses of Parliament and elsewhere.

The next thing I knew, it had been over ten years since my last professional theatre production and, armed with several new play scripts, and hundreds of short stories, I decided I needed to put some of the business lessons I had learnt into the practice of creating theatre. This led to me producing my first professional production – While We Wait at Arches Lane Theatre – in March of this year and to the creation of The Business Playwright, where I help entrepreneurs and businesses tell better stories and, in some cases, turn their stories into stage plays.

Looking back at The Picture of John Gray, what did that production teach you about writing for the stage and getting your work in front of an audience?

I learnt an enormous amount writing the play, while studying for the Playwriting Master’s under the mentorship of the fantastic playwright Fraser Grace, with support from Clare Bayley, David Edgar, Steve Waters and others. The most important lesson was probably that you can’t waste a second of the audience’s time, and so a play script is a bit like a Jenga tower – if you can remove something without the play falling apart, you should do.

In terms of getting it in front of an audience without a marketing budget, you just have to write to as many people as you possibly can – everyone you’ve ever met or would like to meet, essentially – and hope word of mouth does the rest.

Which playwrights, productions or people have most influenced your work, and what have you taken from them?

Every play I’ve ever watched or read, particularly the ones I didn’t like. I can feel something die within me every time I watch a play and realise that the poor characters are being used as a vehicle to express the writer’s political opinions. Many modern plays would make perfectly interesting Guardian long reads but they don’t work as theatre. A perfect counterpoint to this was Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant starring John Lithgow as Roald Dahl. Deeply political, yes, but I didn’t know what the playwright’s opinion was. I was so immersed in the drama I forgot the playwright existed, which is exactly how it should be.

Was there a particular moment or conversation that gave you the idea for The Business Playwright?

Yes. I had decided I wanted to bring the worlds of business and theatre together but didn’t quite know how to do it. So I invited a load of entrepreneurs to my play in March and one of them asked me to help him write a book about his life story. I suggested instead that I turn it into a one-person play. He agreed. And the idea to turn business stories into stage plays was born.

When a business commissions a play, how do you uncover the story worth telling? Could you take us through an example, from the first conversation to the performance?

I have to have a very clear idea of what the story is before it is commissioned – this isn’t a ‘we’ll write any play’ kind of set up. There needs to be a powerful story there that’s about something far deeper than just business. Fortunately if you look hard enough and the entrepreneur is happy to let you, you’ll find there are powerful emotive stories at the heart of most businesses, particularly when it comes to their origin story or, in certain cases, to the business’ founding purpose. In one instance, for the founder of a huge national brand (who I won’t name at this point because we’re very early in the process) the driving force behind thousands of hours of hard graft and millions of pounds of success was the simple desire to make his father proud.

Drama depends on conflict, uncertainty and imperfect people. How do you persuade a business to let those things into its story, rather than simply presenting its best side?

I don’t try to persuade them. They need to want to share these things- and mostly they do so because there’s a natural desire among entrepreneurs to help the next generation. And I think in this age of AI, businesses are increasingly appreciating the benefit of showing a side of them that is unmistakably human.

For a business accustomed to spending its marketing budget on Google ads or social media, what can a live performance offer—and how would you judge whether it has worked?

Until now, the inbuilt advantage of spending your marketing budget online is that you could clearly see the impact it’s having: the number of views, the number of clicks, etc.

Now though, if something gets 100,000 impressions, how many of them are bots? You don’t know and the social media platform you’ve spent your money with doesn’t know either. Plus your ideal client is so inundated with digital content that ninety odd percent of the stuff they consume will be forgotten the following day.

But if I ask you what was the last thing you saw at the theatre, you remember, right? This is an opportunity to get your ideal clients plus members of the general public to engage with you when they’re in a state of heightened attention – with their phones off – and to remember you for years to come.

In terms of whether it has worked or not, I’m happy to put the poetry to one side and look at the hard numbers. Has the money you’ve spent on this production delivered a return on investment or not? Well, if you value each of your clients at more than a thousand pounds each, the economics are such that it’s very likely to deliver a significant return.

What has surprised you most about the way audiences respond to your work, particularly people who might not ordinarily go to the theatre?

I’ve been surprised – thought it’s obvious when you think about it – how slushy entrepreneurs are. We think of business people as being hard-nosed realists but they all started off chasing a dream. They’re as susceptible to a moving scene as anyone else- if not more so. And I’m always surprised when the audience doesn’t laugh at what I think is a cracking joke and then laugh their heads off at something I didn’t even realise was funny.

What would you most like to write or stage next, and where do you hope to take The Business Playwright over the next few years?

I have two new productions coming up. The first is a one person play, which I will be performing myself (after an eighteen year absence from performing on stage). It’s called Don’t Upset Me and it’s on at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden Town on the 9th and 10th December with (hopefully) further performances to follow.

I want The Business Playwright to help a decent number of entrepreneurs tell better stories. Entrepreneurs are unconventional people who break the mould and yet when it comes to telling their own fascinating stories, they tend to sound just like everybody else. In the AI age standardised anything will get ignored or forgotten. So you have to tell it differently. You have to tell it in a way that is as bold and as daring as the dream that inspired your business. And there is no better place to do that than on a stage.