The following interview is taken from John Gill's book 'WILLY RUSSELL AND HIS PLAYS', and is used with John's kind permission.

JOHN GILL Going back to your own time as a school teacher at Dingle Vale, was that influential in the sense of developing your playwriting, because you held the attention of the toughest kids in the school by telling them stories in a real scouse accent? In other words, you would tune into their idiom. Did you learn from that?

WILLY RUSSELL

I did learn from that. I mean, basically what happened was I had this class called 4WD, and it was the first year the school had become comprehensive in name. In fact, it was three different school sites, so politically it was a disaster, tribally it was a disaster because in those areas the kids didn't want anything to do with each other. It was also the first year of the raising of the school leaving age, so we had a terribly resentful fourth year who were going to have to stay on till they could leave at Easter when they were 16. Now it was decided the Dingle Vale boys and Dingle Vale girls should be segregated and so we had a fourth year that included some all boys classes and it was decided that the problems were such that rather than try and integrate them at this late stage in their education, we might as well just grit our teeth, leave them as solo boys classes and solo girls classes and one of these was 4WD. And 4WD had one period a week with me and I was a probationary teacher there. I never thought to wonder why they only had one session a week.

I walked in the first day of the first week, to see all the light bulbs shattering on the floor because they had unscrewed them and as I came through the door, threw them up in the air. They were sitting there innocently with folded arms as the light bulbs exploded, and I thought 'Oh, terrific'. Now even as a very young teacher I could hold a class and I had no problems with communication, creating the right sort of environment but I couldn't with 4WD; there was a resistance that was unbelievable. I mean the noise level was just incredible.

On the timetable it said English and Drama, so in that first week I tried to give out some paper, tried to get them to write something; 'Sir, we haven't got a pen, Sir, we haven't got a pencil'. By the time I'd sorted that out the bell went, it was gone and it was a terribly miserable half hour for me. And this started to play on my mind, because I just couldn't get my hook into this class at all. I went in the next week and it was even worse, I never even got to the point of giving out the paper and they were really quite hard. You couldn't rely upon any sort of assumed respect for the role of teacher. I'd had difficult classes as a probationary teacher and in my teacher training but I have never had anything that was as schizophrenic and as fractured as this; there was no centre to it, that was the weird thing. And, of course, they'd be ruthless in their racism; there wasn't even any sort of vestige of collective liberalism you could appeal to. There was a Chinese kid, they just used to call him a Chinese twat and that was that. I mean, if he held up a pencil they'd whack him around the head, snatch the pencil out of his hand and if he complained, boot him. It was as animalistic and it was as brutal as that. In other classes if an incident happened like that within the class it would be an isolated incident involving two or three kids at most. The consensus in this class was that that was absolutely the right way to behave. You didn't have anywhere to start; and it was almost like a sort of forest fire situation. Obviously, when this Chinese boy got abused like that, I'd move in and I'd say, 'Eh' and they'd back off because I had used a straight forward non-liberal voice like 'I'm actually bigger than you'. You don't say that, but you walk up and go 'Eh' and they back off. You'd then be thinking 'I'm going to have to knock shit out of this kid'. It really was a terribly, terribly complex situation to try and deal with. I thought: 'Don't be the liberal here; you are actually causing that Chinese kid more problems' and you could see it in his eyes, he was almost saying to you 'Piss off'. If you stay away from this situation you won't blow it up into anything big, and at the end of the day, I'll be away from them and I won't have anything to do with them, so there was all that complex stuff that any teacher has to face, highlighted by the nature of this particular class. But anyway, this started to play rather heavily on my brain and I was getting more and more miserable. Having to go in every week to this, it was becoming intolerable.

I'd finished the one half hour session on a Thursday and the first thing to think about is this class rolling around again and next Thursday was on the horizon, so I wasn't enjoying anything I was doing and my bottle was starting to go, privately. Because I felt there was some great failure on my part. I mean, one of the things I didn't think to ask about was why had I, a probationary teacher got this infamously difficult class, when they were split up right across the board. Nobody had them for more than half an hour a week, that's why I only had them for half an hour a week. Even the most experienced teachers wouldn't have them for more than half an hour a week. And the other probationary teachers didn't get tham at all. So I wasn't failing, but I didn't know that at the time. Or, like I say, I was failing along with everybody else. Anyway, this started to prey on my mind. I think I must have read an article in The Guardian about a teacher in New York somewhere down in an area like Queens and he reported how he had a situation which seemed very similar to mine, totally broken down. What he did was he walked in one day and took the newspaper with him and sat down at his desk and opened the paper and he started to read it. The noise got worse, the screams got worse, the abuse and a huge punch up occurred every week until after a few weeks of this eventually the came to him and said, can't we do something? He put the paper down and that was the starting point. I always knew that you could use theatricality in teaching but I wasn't brave enough to do it, because you don't half expose yourself. Because all the best teachers I ever had, Like Harry Armstrong, were intensely theatrical performers. One thing I had learned from a teaching practice in Halewood, is that when you have a mob situation on your hands or a completely unruly class, you don't try and supersede their vocal levels, because all you succeed in doing is pushing up the entire vocal level.

There was a girl who was teaching a class next to me when I was a student teacher and I used to cringe at what was happening to her voice box because she kept getting higher and higher in volume and pitch, and the kids just were able to go effortlessly up with her and she was shredded. So I knew that when you had a situation like that, the fatal thing was to go in and try a shout louder than them. I went in to 4WD this day and it was cacophonous as usual, and I sat at the desk, and just started to tell like 'then these children sat on the wall talking and kicking the wall and this woman came out and she said "Get off my wall" so they shrugged and moved'. Sure enough the noise level subsided and started to go - I wasn't doing anything, I wasn't looking at them, I wasn't holding a book to read from but they started to listen to what was going on and I don't know what hooked them so fast, but hook them it did. Half an hour later the bell went and they stormed out, knocking over desks as usual. But I knew I'd got them, I knew I'd hooked them. I went in a week after they were all sitting there and said, 'Going to have that story again, aren't we?' I said 'Which story?' 'That fucking story you told us last week'. And you knew you had them, then, so I just carried on, making up this long, long story about two kids who try and run away to Wales, and it went on and on. I felt guilty about this, I felt I was getting by but I wasn't teaching them, you see. Because I was making the great mistake of thinking all teaching can only be teaching of somehow they write about it, if we can quantify it in some way.

One day I get into the staffroom and this teacher says to me, 'I'm coming to your lesson today because I have to report on you as a probationary teacher'. I said 'Which one are you coming into?' He said 'I thought of coming into 4WD'. He said 'I'll give you five minutes to start the lesson and I'll come in'. So I went in and I took a load of paper and pencils in and said 'Listen lads, I've been telling you this story now for like a last ten weeks but today I'm being examined by a geezer so would you mind if we wrote something about it?' They could see the justice in the situation as it were, because I was asking them, I suppose, to get involved in a bit of a scam on my behalf. But for some reason, I changed my mind and started telling them the story again. This teacher came in, I didn't look at him; I kept my eyes off him, until just before the end of the lesson, I looked up and he was sitting at the back with his thumb in his mouth, as lots of these kids did when they were listening to the story, they went back to the infant stage of putting their thumb in their mouths, and he was doing the same thing. It was a break immediately after that lesson and this teacher told me it was the best lesson he'd come across. And I realised that he was a bit of an off the wall teacher, so I still didn't value it, because he was off the wall like me. He said the level of interaction for those kids was incredible. So at least I could go on doing it, which I did. I mean, I never did any other lesson with this group, all the way through till Easter, when they left. And, of course what I realised years later was that I had stumbled on to something that was really, really important, the nature of oracy as opposed to literacy, the nature of story telling and the fact that working class kids responded to that because I was working in their language - I mean I literally and metaphorically, the language that their culture is carried in, you see. Obviously I had the talent and the theatrical capabilities , the skills to carry that off, in less qualified hands it could have proved disastrous.

A long time before I did think of an idea for a play and it came out of the teaching practice experience. You know what's its like when somebody has a bad teaching experience, all their instinct goes and they seem to exacerbate their own situation. They start trying to work all nights on lesson plans so they go in tired, and then they get desperate and self-conscious. Teaching is like sex really, the more conscious you become of it, the less good you are going to be at it. It is one of those things that takes a certain - well, like acting, it takes a certain jive, you have to get on with it, fly at it. I just thought of this bizarre play in which the student teacher resorts to more and more desperate theatricality to try and grip the kids. Like there's a day when he's got this 4WD class and suddenly the door just opens and Batman leaps in and says, 'Right, now write about that!' and they go 'Aagh!'. And he gets more and more desperate till one day he walks in with a gun. And he shoots the class dead. And I think in a sense me launching into this thing with 4WD was an element of resorting to a theatricality that would immediately grab them and then it was up to me to hold them, which I could do, whereas this character in my yet-to-be-written play only had the theatrical gesture and then nothing to follow it up, you see.

JOHN GILL Did you make up the story using the kids in the class as models?

WILLY RUSSELL

No, I didn't. I created archetypes that they would immediately recognise.

JOHN GILL Is that one of the secrets of your success? The creating of an archetype that people can relate to?

WILLY RUSSELL

I think it is the secret of all successful drama. Why is Willy Loman possible, and rich as a character? Not because he is a stereotype, although lots of what he does id stereotypical. More importantly that that he is an archetype, so he speaks to us a belly and heart level as well as a mind level.

JOHN GILL So in your plays there's a very specific location and setting for the play in, usually Liverpool, but the central character has an archetypal, human significance. And it just comes out instinctively?

WILLY RUSSELL

Yes, it's instinctive, but you know, when I am in the process of trying to write a new play, I will sometimes start things on paper and I won't finish them because my instinct will tell me that it's no good. Other playwrights might want to write it, maybe I should write it but I don't. It doesn't echo back to me. It doesn't have the right sound, it doesn't have the right hallmark, I don't recognise something there that is archetypal, then I don't pursue it, I don't like having to explain a character.

JOHN GILL Shall we talk about 'Our Day Out'? That's play that was written very quickly based on your own experiences.

WILLY RUSSELL

Well, yes, it was. It took about four days to write it but I had taken a long time thinking about it. I'd tried a few times when I was still too close to teaching I think, to have that necessary objectivity. And then I was in London in an apartment which Robert Stigwood had hired for me and the family when I was writing the screenplay for 'John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert' and visiting us one night wee Michael and Margaret and a couple of other people and Sheila and Jackie, two girls who were at St. Katherine's with me, who used to share the same dayroom with me and they'd been teaching for about 18 months and I hadn't seen them for about a year. I was then out of teaching. And during the course of the evening, I began to tell tales of the day I went on a school trip with Dorothy King, and I suddenly realised that I had liberated myself from the actuality of it and I was telling tales I could edit, amplify, and I knew then, that this could be a play one day. But even then, it was another six months before I actually tried it. I tried it a few times and got it wrong and I just hit the right tone this day, so I just stuck with it for four days and wrote it.

The film was written solo but then Bob Eaton, who was the then director of the Everyman, where I used to have my office, came in one day and said 'We'd like to do a musical in conjunction with the Youth Theatre of "Our Day Out"'. I said, 'Well, it's very interesting you should say that because I'm at work on "Blood Brothers" now but I've long had it in my head .' In fact I'd written to Paul McCartney about six months before asking him did he want to come in and compose the music of 'Our Day Out', because I was sitting on a perfect musical plot, with an in-built chorus, principal, sub-principals - it had staging difficulties but I was going to do it after 'Blood Brothers' as a very big, high production value musical. So I said to Bob, 'As soon as I get "Blood Brothers" finished, I'll do it.'

Well, of course, I gave him a vague date and, as I said, 'Blood Brothers rolled on for a year, rather than three months and what happened was, Bob came in and he was desperate because his date was coming round, they'd pushed it forward and pushed it forward, and I think he was about to leave the theatre and it'd never be done. So he said to me 'Look, why don't you let us workshop it? "No, I said 'No way.' I mean, I hate the idea, I could see it being a complete and utter mess but he was desperate so I reluctantly came to a compromise and told him I would spend some time working on it with him and that he and Chris Mellors could come in as collaborators. I would specify where the music would be, what sort of songs they should be and all that. Well, it eventually ended up with me having to come back from 'Blood Brothers' rehearsals for two days, Bob came round to the house and we opened up the script. For example, 'I'm in love with Sir', I had that idea, so it was written. We lobbed in an old song from my folksong days and I said to Bob 'Look, I think it should start with them all singing the idea of "Our Day Out". Because we've got to find a way to stage this thing and bring them all on.'

So Bob went away that night and wrote 'Our Day Out.' And I'd throw in a couple of verses and then I said 'Briggsy should sing the instructions for how to enjoy a good day out.' Bob and Chris, I don't know which of them, wrote it and then I'd say 'Right there - Boss of the Bus - Right - Give me a solo moment.' So Bob went away and wrote 'The Boss of the Bus' in a matter of minutes, I then came back to rehearsals and it was amazing. I mean I had said to Bob, 'Right, here the feeling should be why can't it always be this way?' and lines like 'I would his collars really clean'. I remember sitting in my kitchen saying, 'That's the sort of thing'. Bob was amazing, he just took any lines that I was giving him and he married them into songs beautifully.

I think looking at it the other night it could still stand the sort of job that I was talking about doing on it. (interviewed prior to the Belgrade Theatre Production in 1996) There are moments in which it is really musically weak and it could benefit from a really good look at but, the chances are that if you did that you could really damage the charm of it. It does have an innocent charm to it that reflects the way in which it was written. Anyway, what happened then was I came to rehearsals and there were hints of things that we put in that were not developed, so before it was published I did sit down with the script and I applied myself to the observations on the coach which crippled me the other night, had me in tears. I did it in a rather scatty travelling, rhyming structure and we'd had the boring girl just once, so I developed the boring girl all the way through. I tidied it up a bit. But it could still do with a look at, and it might be worth it one day. But then, you cut it off from the very people who I wanted to be able to play it: Youth Theatres, Schools Groups, Rep Companies. There is a terrible dearth of plays. Youth Theatres have been into improvising for so long and what they've not done is throw up writers. Very sad that, I think. But what it does is it provides another play in that very thin list of plays that are do-able by large groups of youngsters. There's 'Zigger' Zagger' which now is dated I'm afraid, 'Oliver', 'Grease', ''Blood Brothers' - but it's not available any longer because of the West End - 'Our Day Out' and I'd start to flag now in the plays you can actually do that have meaning for the age of the kids that are playing them. I'm not talking about kids dressing up in Tudor frocks, but plays that have some meaning for them.

JOHN GILL Would you re-write the explicit political bit in 'Our Day Out' if you were writing the whole thing now? Would you make it less explicit?

WILLY RUSSELL

No. I think every word of it rings true but I think I would develop it more. I'd probably also find a way to dramatically weave it more into the fabric of the piece instead of stopping the play in order to have the platform confrontation.

'WILLY RUSSELL AND HIS PLAYS' by John Gill

Published by Countyvise Publications (link from the links page)

ISBN: 0-907-76894-6