Luke Kennard & Will Eaves - Black Bag
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Why is it important that Black Bag or why did it become important to you that Black Bag should be an actor?
So I think partly it's because I see actors as a kind of canary in the coal mine of the arts, right? So I think as a writer, it can take you a decade to get rejected. It can take a while before you get knocked back. Actors are like every day going to auditions, putting themselves out there, getting told that not only their performance, but like their body and their... Aura, everything is wrong and you're rejected. You're not good for this part. And that's like a daily thing for actors. So I think like when things are going particularly badly for actors, that's like a sign that things are going badly for everyone and maybe we haven't all noticed it yet. So I think it's like, so it's a sort of, it's an economy of like time more than anything else.
Why did Luke Kennard choose an actor-in-a-black-bag as his protagonist?
It's speed, I think. So he could have been any sort of frustrated person but I guess because I'd sort of come across the real life experiment first and I was like, well, obviously this is, the person who takes this role would be a struggling actor. I also, I suppose I think that like everybody who is trying to do anything, who is trying to make any kind of work, who's trying to create anything is, is probably struggling unless they're part of the kind of 0.01% who are doing okay. There's an element of just like, you have your kind of ambitions, you have your belief in your talent and you have to kind of then both completely crush that and then live off the runoff from that crushing and kind of still sort of believe in yourself, still keep going, still maintain.
But I think for actors, that is like a daily process. And I think for writers, you only have to face that reality every so often.
I do see what you mean. I mean, I must admit that listening to you speak and hearing you read, I wonder whether there isn't something else, which is that... He's a very specific kind of actor. I mean, you say that one of the kind of delicious things about the book is that he says he's this sort of washed-up actor who's not making any money, who's doing dinner theatre. There's very, very funny scenes with, you know, hopeless and hapless dinner theatre. But at the same time, he's clearly someone who is giving an extraordinary... performance yeah yeah which is halfway between stand-up and philosophy right right and the connection between the sort of performance he's giving as a writer and the novel is absolutely crucial.
Yeah. And really the question behind this is it seems to me that you are a natural performer, a natural performance giver.
Yeah.
And have you always felt that that's important in your writing? It's that to write a series of great sentences or a great paragraph is to give a performance.
yeah no i think that i think it is and i think i think the test is how it feels sort of out loud and i think in the past like the dickens thing the bleeding the dickens thing yeah and and and the kind of and i think if you're writing like i think long before i ever had a poem in print i did a bunch of kind of open mic stuff where you just turn up and you get five minutes you can do whatever you want it's an incredibly generous scene you don't have to sound like anybody else who's performing that night it's really i've always found performance poetry this kind of open and yeah, generous kind of place where you can just do whatever it is. You can shamble on stage and just read from some cue cards, you know, it's kind of, you can do whatever.
You can be, you can do a sort of insane sort of modernist experiment or you can do a brilliant memorised performance. It kind of doesn't matter. There's a sort of spectrum there but I do think it's always it's always a kind of performance I think like when I started writing it was for one of my college friends Tom is here somewhere who we had like a fortnightly kind of scratch night in the basement of a pub in Exeter where we were students and we would write
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–1:04
2
Why did Luke Kennard choose an actor-in-a-black-bag as his protagonist?
1:04–14:35
3
How does performance and live reading shape Kennard’s writing style?
14:35–29:36
4
In what ways does Black Bag explore modern masculinity and insecurity?
29:36–45:23
5
How does the novel treat sexuality, romance and the unusual Justine–black-bag relationship?
45:23–58:47
6
What satire of academia and university life appears in Black Bag?
58:47–1:00:03