How much credit do you get for helming some of British television’s biggest franchises, including Doctor Who, Sherlock and Coupling? In the world of theatre, diddly squat. A few years ago, the TV auteur Steven Moffat tried his hand at playwriting. “I felt absolutely convinced that a writer of my stature would be able to get into theatre quite easily. That was not true at all. I wrote a whole play. Nobody wanted it. Literally nobody. Some of the theatres I sent it to didn’t even reply. So I thought, ‘Okay—once you take that Tardis away, that’s what happens.’”
Moffat tells me this with the playful acceptance of a tired puppy—nothing grand in his use of “my stature”, only self-mockery. He is unfailingly charming as my wireless connection buckles under the weight of a late-autumn storm. We’ve got together on Zoom because he did write a second play. (“I’ve always given this advice to young writers: if everybody says no, blame yourself and try again. The most empowering thing you can do is blame yourself.”) And, this time, a theatre was interested. It helped that Moffat’s long-time collaborator Mark Gatiss introduced the script to veteran producer Matthew Byam Shaw.
The result is The Unfriend, a comedy of manners in which a nervy British couple are imposed upon for a visit by an American they’ve met only once before on holiday—and are too embarrassed to act on their discovery that she’s a notorious murderess. The first production was directed by Gatiss at the Chichester Festival Theatre this summer, and the play is transferring to London’s Criterion from 15th January. Amanda Abbington—who worked with Moffat on Sherlock—stars with Reece Shearsmith and Frances Barber.
When The Unfriend opened in Chichester it received the full spectrum of critical responses, but what everyone seemed to agree on was that they were effectively watching a sitcom. “If people compare anything to a sitcom and mean it negatively, I think they’re fools. Some of the finest television ever made has been sitcoms.” And The Unfriend is a situation comedy in the classic sense: a closed set, a defined scenario, a ratcheting-up of tension. Plus, there are fart jokes.
Even though he’s worked on sitcoms before, The Unfriend feels different from Moffat’s TV work. How does it feel, I venture, to shift from a medium that allows the writer to jump between galaxies to one that requires plausible motivations simply to move characters between rooms? Moffat pushes back on my characterisation of Doctor Who as a limitless playground: “When you say Doctor Who can go to any galaxy—aye, as long it’s in Cardiff! That show was full of amazing restrictions—how long the CGI can be on the screen, how many sets we can build—there’s nothing but restrictions!”
But he’s aware that theatre is an even tighter ship. “Sometimes the best stuff comes out of forcing a limitation on yourself. It’s a point Alan Ayckbourn makes in his very good book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking: one of the things television gets lazy about—that people like me get lazy about doing—is that you can just cut. You can cut to another scene or another place. And sometimes, as he puts it, you cut for no other reason but that you can.”
Continuing, Moffat says that he “quite likes rules… I don’t quite know where I’m going unless someone’s given me a set of rules I can obey. A natural submissive.”
He’s talking about storytelling, of course, though I can’t help but remember some of his observations about women. “I have never known a docile woman,” he’s quoted as saying in one previous interview. “You step through the door and you accept your junior status. I fucking salute the dog.”
Which brings us to the notorious “Moffat woman”. Pop feminism has critiqued Steven Moffat’s work inside and out, and the results do not make for happy reading. One leading fan website defines his female characters as “feisty, sarcastic and flirty… outwardly very confident and independent. However their narrative arcs often revolve around a man.” Hollywood.com can give you “10 Sexist Steven Moffat Quotes”.
Take Irene Adler. The female mastermind appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Holmes stories as the only adversary to properly outwit the great detective. In Moffat’s adaptation, she’s a fiery dominatrix—yet spends much of her time either naked or in need of rescue by Holmes from imminent execution at the hands of terrorists. (Moffat has countered that his is the feminist twist on Adler’s story: “In the original, Irene Adler’s victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That’s not a feminist victory.” He’s wrong, of course. Much of the time, successfully escaping a man is exactly what victory looks like.)
Then there was The Abominable Bride. Moffat’s attempt at writing an explicitly feminist Sherlock episode with Gatiss only made things worse. It featured a cult of murderous suffragettes who end the show silently listening as Holmes and Watson explain feminism to them. Worse, they turned out only to exist as a fever dream in Holmes’s head. As the theatremaker Rafaella Marcus put it, Moffat and Gatiss “use feminism and the collective experiences of women as a metaphor for the psychological issues of one bloke.”
When I start to put some of this to Moffat, I’m taken aback. He is, as one might expect, defensive—particularly about specific quotes. “You’ve got to understand with interviews, they stick sentences together that weren’t ever together. Sometimes, they make up entire sentences that you never said.”
On his female characters, he’s open to criticism: “Are there limitations in the way I write women? Yes, I’m certain there are, but there are limitations in the way I write men. There are limitations in the way I write badgers and limitations in the way I write verbs.”
Yet what opens up a vein of genuine distress is not the feminist critique of his work, but the experience of seeing his own character denounced wholesale. “Once you’re established as having a particular reputation—which, in my case, is that I am homophobic, racist, misogynist—they can say anything. I point out that I’m really good pals with Russell T Davies, and they say, ‘Aha! You can still have gay friends and be a homophobe!’ And I’m like, ‘Literally, you can’t!’”
The Unfriend may not solve the problem of the “Moffat woman”. Elsa, our murderous American, is summed up in initial stage directions as no more than “a powerful battle-axe of a woman”. But the truth turns out to be more complicated. Elsa is loveable. She also makes us laugh.
And it is laughter—or at least live, emotional response—that has drawn Moffat to theatre. “For many years, I did the sitcoms where you have an audience. It’s the only time in television you ever actually know if anybody likes what you do. In the theatre, the instant feedback is feeding into the play. Laughs are easy. You can also detect boredom, confusion, nodding off. You know what the audience thinks in real time.” Provided, of course, that theatre’s gatekeepers let you in the door. Once they take that Tardis away, Steven Moffat is just another first-timer.
The Unfriend will play at the Criterion Theatre from 5th January until 16th April. Tickets available here.
