Skyscraper Lullaby (NHB Modern Plays)

By James Fritz

A powerful drama about two parents trying to come to terms with the disappearance of their toddler, written and first performed as an audio drama for Audible Original.
As they recount the events surrounding the disappearance of their toddler – one with a tendency to bite – two parents cope with grief in vastly different ways. While the father wrestles with feelings of guilt, the mother is convinced she's spotted the boy in frightening TV news reports… though let's just say he looks nothing like the precocious little boy they remember from a decade ago.
James Fritz's Skyscraper Lullaby is a haunting examination of the ways we cope with tragedy, complicity, and remorse. It was first produced as an audio play for Audible Original in 2022.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788507585

James Fritz

James Fritz is a playwright whose work includes: The Flea (Yard Theatre, London, 2023);Lava (Nottingham Playhouse/Fifth Word, 2018; revived 2022);Parliament Square (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, and Bush Theatre, London, 2017);Start Swimming (Young Vic Taking Part, Edinburgh Fringe, 2017);The Fall (National Youth Theatre at the Finborough Theatre, London, 2016);Comment is Free (Old Vic New Voices, 2015; BBC Radio 4, 2016; winner of the Imison and Tinniswood Awards for audio drama, 2017);Ross & Rachel (MOTOR at Assembly George Square, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2015; 59E59 Theaters, New York);Four Minutes Twelve Seconds (Hampstead Theatre, 2014; Most Promising Playwright, Critics' Circle Awards);Lines (Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2011).

Book preview

JAMES FRITZ

Skyscraper Lullaby

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

.

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Original Procuction

Characters

Skyscraper Lullaby

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

An Interview with James Fritz

September 2023

Hi James. Thanks for sitting down with me.

Thank you! This is really exciting.

So sorry I was late. This is a nice place.

Yeah, I love this café, it’s close to the library where I sometimes work.

So I don’t know how much they’ve told you, but these things always take the same sort of form. We’ll talk a brief bit about each of the plays, in chronological order, where they came from, how you wrote them –

Yeah, great, I actually love reading these intros. It feels mad doing one of my own.

Why do you love them?

I think it’s a place where writers are often quite honest. You get a sense of who they are and what’s important to them, from the way they look back at their old plays. And you can pick up some really good tips and bits of advice as a writer!

I’d like to start with Four Minutes Twelve Seconds, which was your debut play –

Well, you know what, it wasn’t. I actually had a play on in London about four years before. It was called Lines, and it probably changed my life more than any included here.

How so?

Well, I started out writing comedy – sketches and stuff – but it never felt natural, like I was wearing clothes that didn’t fit and everyone could tell. My first writing partner was Jamie Demetriou, who’s an astonishing comedy writer and performer, and I remember sitting across from him as we were working and thinking: ‘Fuck. How the hell does he do that?’ My brain doesn’t work that way.

So how did Lines come about?

Around the same sort of time, Tom Martin, who would go on to direct Ross & Rachel, pushed me to write him something he could put on in the theatre above The Rosemary Branch pub in Islington. This was in 2010. And I wrote this thing which wasn’t funny, but was dramatic and sort of formally playful and it felt like, ‘Okay, maybe this is more me than the comedy stuff.’ We put it on for a week or so and it was very special for a few reasons. It made me want to be a playwright. It was how I met my agent Emily, who has been with me the entire time. It was also the only play of mine my dad saw performed.

And that led to Four Minutes Twelve Seconds –

Four Minutes came a few years later. I got funding to do a writing MA, and in that year I wrote loads and saw loads and I got to know the other brilliant writers on the course. One of them, Vinay Patel, is still one of the few people I share my early drafts with. He’ll almost certainly be the only one of my mates who’ll read this intro, so I should say hi to him.

I became a complete theatre obsessive during this period. I worked in theatre bars and I reviewed for theatre blogs and I submitted writing to every short play night under the sun. I wrote a lot of plays that I’m very glad never made it to the stage. But you learn, don’t you, from each of them, you learn a bit about who you are as a writer.

Is it hot in here?

A bit, yeah.

I shouldn’t have worn this jumper. What were we talking about?

Four Minutes…

Right. Yes. How it came about.

My dad had died in spring 2013, and in the months that followed, to distract myself I sort of threw myself into working on an old idea in a frenzy, until it became Four Minutes Twelve Seconds. I think I wrote it in May and June of that year, at the small desk in my bedroom in a flat in Shadwell that I shared with four of my best mates.

You’ve said before that it was inspired by Dennis Kelly’s play Orphans.

That’s a polite way of saying I ripped it off. I remember seeing Orphans at the Traverse in Edinburgh and it blew my mind that people were audibly gasping. I love stuff that has twists. I wanted to write something like that.

So I