I don’t want to be harsh, but I don’t think I have ever felt so uncomfortable in my life than I did during my hour-long rendezvous with Peter Price over lunch. 

Alarm bells should have rung when Peter specifically requested, through a third-party, for me personally to interview him. I had previously reviewed Peter’s play Frozen at the Corpus Playroom, and I had given it two stars. I had wanted to give it one star. It ranked among the worst two and a half hours of my life.

The interview went wrong from the beginning. I’d forgotten that I was seeing him, so I had already eaten. Then I went to the wrong café and spent ten minutes wandering around confusedly. Peter, or ‘Pablo’ as he likes to call himself, texted me to say "I am currently sitting in the bread and meat rolling a cigarette and drinking a cappuccino, you will notice me by my incredible dress sense." My mistake gradually dawned on me. As I opened the door to the right café this time, I found that Peter was right – he was indeed hard to miss. He was in a black suit with a black tie, with huge sunglasses and a beanie hat. He was like this for the entire interview. I have no idea what he really looks like.

So we sat there, with him digging into his meal and me awkwardly nursing a lemonade, and I searched for something to say. “I hated Frozen,” I blurted out. I winced.

He calmly chewed on his chicken, then spoke in a slow, low tone. “In many ways I see myself a Christ-like figure. The masses rose against him and persecuted him. I see my theatre as being before its time,” he smoothly replied.

Okay. “What do you think that I didn’t get?” I asked.

“It could have been quite a snappy play and there could have been a sense of hope at the end. What I saw is that actually deep down at the end of the play there’s no change. Grief is a continuous state and it’s very boring, and the dullness of the play in many ways reflected the issue of grief. I don’t think it’s that you didn’t understand it, I think it’s that you weren’t one of the elect. I mean I went through some hard times with that project, you know, trying to make a big launch onto the theatre scene and not getting great reviews. I thought to myself, Pablo why don’t they love you? Is it something wrong with me, and I am bad director? But deep down I realise that I am better than anyone else.”

There was a very long silence after that profound statement. “What is the purpose of a play? Isn’t it for the audience’s enjoyment?” 

“It’s an interesting question. I struggle with it often. One of my favourite directors is a man by the name of Robert Wilson. He’s an avant-garde director. He did a seven-hour play about the life of Stalin, from midnight until seven in the morning, with a cast of 130 people. By halfway through all of the audience had left the theatre, and the stage manager goes up to Robert Wilson and ask him if they should stop. He said ‘No, there’s a cast of 130 people, we fucking carry on going.’ I think the role of the play can be to entertain, but in general it is to affect the audience. A play can cause suffering. I think suffering is a vital, big part of life. A play can make someone physically ill, it can make someone faint. At the last night of Krapp’s Last Tape someone passed out from the sight of blood. In many ways I wish I could put on a play where the audience is a mirror, and I look at myself and I perform for myself. But this is not the way of life.”

Another long silence. He continued. “With Krapp’s we didn’t use the Corpus Playroom. We used an alternative space, and that really made the production. It gave us an extraordinary opportunity. We put a lot of sand in an enclosed space, in a chapel. The atmosphere was so stunning. I’ve never liked the Corpus Playroom. The white walls are extraordinarily oppressive. I think really people don’t realise how important visuals are for theatre. It’s not just about the text, it’s a visual medium in many ways.

“I think slowly people are realising what I’m trying to do, they’re beginning to see the light and the truth. And I believe that my greatest project yet, my comedy piece, which is extraordinarily high-budget, this will be the equinox before I retire from directing in Cambridge. It’s my last show. I always planned that I would complete a term’s work of art and when I was done I wouldn’t do anything else. And I really believe that this piece will be the most perfect piece that has ever been performed in recent history, if not ever. And then I will move on – I have a passion for bird-watching, gardening, I’ll perhaps focus on my studies. Being the best director in Cambridge is a big burden.”

“So…Grade Expectations is…I mean it’s essentially…It’s a comedy sketch-show?”

“Yes. Rehearsals have been very up-and-down, people dropping out. Frankly I’ll do it on my own if I have to. Some people really just can’t handle the heat, as it were, the tension. I feel the same way that I imagine that Moses did when he came down from the Mountain and looked down across the Jewish people and explained his message, and wanted to leave them in a state of awe and wonderment. I want to make people believe again. I want to make my audience suffer, and then to find happiness. It’s from the ashes that the phoenix will arise. I hope that you write this next bit down because I’ve thought a lot about this - theatre is the shovel, life is the soil. You’re digging life, you make a hole, you plant the seeds of emotion and from those seeds comes the flower of art. This is true.”

I stared at Peter as he tucked into his chicken. It didn’t perturb him. He continued: "It’s also worth noting that we’ve been having some issues with funding recently. There were certain disagreements with The Fletcher Players over a few directorial issues. They didn’t appreciate myself as part of this project, so we’ve had to go our separate ways. We’ve been getting funding from the Labour party, and we’ve been playing around with getting some political sketches in there, some hard-hitting sketches as it were. And of course a lot of it is coming from my own extraordinarily high assets, I’m investing a lot in the piece because I think it will be a vast success. What I present is truth in a comedy sketch, and in that truth laughter is the only response. We are investing a lot in an exact replica of the Corpus clock. We’ve been working with some great designers and architects. It’s going to be beautiful. We’ve actually had to put the whole budget into the Corpus clock, but I think that image is going to stand out so much that it will make up for the lack of any other substantive item on the stage. It’s very evocative.”

“What will you do with the clock after production?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “We’re giving it to an orphanage. There’s a group called the Jungle Children. I think I’m going to give the clock to them.”

“So…” it’s not often that I’m lost for words. “So Grade Expectations is a comedy sketch-show….But….It’s….It’s more than that?”

“You got it.” 

I was grasping for anything to say to get the interview back into the realms of normality. I asked him how he would ensure that Grade Expectations would be a success. “I actually performed a publicity stunt. West Side Story is going to be on at the same time as Grade Expectations, so I told everyone that the ticket system at the ADC was broken and the tickets had been reversed and if you wanted a West Side Story ticket you had to buy a Grade Expectations ticket instead. We were getting a lot of tickets from it until they shut it down. Theatre is a dirty game, I’ve done things I’m not proud of.”

At this point I gave up trying to come up with something to say in response. The weird thing was that the longer I talked to Peter, and the more outrageous his statements, the more he seemed to make sense. I felt like I was losing my mind. Peter continued. “I’ve poured my blood and soul into this piece. It’s saying more than just some fragmentary gags about penises. It’s about life. It’s about love. It’s about libraries. I think in many ways this piece is the result of a crossroads in my life. After the last night of Krapp’s Last Tape, when a man fainted in the pews and we had to drag him out, when the doors opened at the end there was no applause, just silence. This old woman came up to me and said ‘What you’re doing is wonderful and I think you’re an incredible person. You’re beautiful, both physically and intellectually – but why don’t you make people laugh? I don’t have long left, but if you want to make a piece that would make people laugh then that would complete my life.’ I realised that she’s right. Theatre can’t just be myself masturbating on a stage to an empty audience. I’m doing this for her. Perhaps actually I’ll give the clock to her. Really I’ve realised that there’s a lot of stale theatre in Cambridge. People should be willing to make plays where maybe people will hate them, and maybe someone will love them, and we’re creating real responses rather than the piece-of-quiche theatre that we’re developing which is maybe-three star, maybe-four star, and it’s an okay-student-theatre atmosphere. We should make more marmite theatre. You win some you lose some – I lost Frozen, I won Krapp.”

As I left, I reflected that actually a piece of quiche sounded rather nice about now.