Interviewing Rose Biggin and Keir Cooper

Helloooo! Earlier this week i fell in love with the amazing Wild Time by Rose Biggin and Keir Cooper a smart, funny and sexual retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve been very lucky to be able to ask the authors about this unusual book (you NEED this one!)

So how would you tempt someone into reading Wild Time?

We’ve been saying it’s for the lovers and the haters. Both an homage to the Dream world, fairies, frolics, the balmy outdoors and the iconic characters; also it’s for people who see the issues that arise out of staging Dream in 2020 and want something substantial said back to it in culture.

It’s for those who like laughing out loud when reading, also for people who like to read on and about sex, for fans of agitating the canon, for people who want to try something different that they’ll be warmly invited in for.

What was your driver to this story?

We set out to tell a story about Titania that gave her some action fitting for such a famous leading lady. After a few experiments, we realised the best way to do that was to correct the story as we know it. Once we went about correcting her storyline, we couldn’t stop and we went on meddling with the rest - although we took pains to make the final result a radical adaptation, not a totally unrecognisable new tale. We wanted to be bold by showing the ‘what could’ve been’ and making it a reality. And of course there was ample room to put our own ideas and markers mixed in with everything else.

I loved the interplanetary scenes - what led to that choice rather than the traditional one for that group of characters?

Well firstly, we were never very into the main lovers plot. Dream exists in the culture but we’d argue that the memory of it centers on the spectacle and mystery of Titania and Oberon. The lovers end up being a vehicle for the plot, they’re all interchangeable, their lovers’ tiffs seem like the teenage arguments that they are. Originally we didn’t have them in at all.

However, when the names were absent from our version of the skeleton plot, we realised that it was important to include them somehow. The play’s structure is as iconic as its content: the sensation of layering these different worlds - fairies and mortals; high court and lowly citizens - is essential to making a story feel like Dream. And then the challenge was can we make that more sensational than fairies? Because, quite frankly, we didn’t want to dip under the fairie level in spectacle. (Having said that, we were careful to make our fairies really quite human, they’re the ‘relatable’ characters in the book in many ways. We wanted to say that these guys were almost just sexually confident humans, or not quite but on that continuum.) So our planetary lovers wanted to be far more fun than quarrelling lovelorn teenagers, we wanted to create a feeling for the reader and for their plot to be very much secondary to that. It’s attempting a colourful poetic cosmos that spans the breadth of scale and turns the entire universe into a container for that sexual energy. We read Dream’s use of magic to be very much sex magic, and therefore we chose to explore our world through that texture, just more celebratory perhaps, than in the play. In the original Dream Titania and Oberon create havoc with the seasons etc when they quarrel (one of the first things they speak about to each other), so, following and expanding on that logic, we wanted the whole universe to respond joyously to the fairie gods’ heightened feelings, and that it ends up tying into these astronomic characters.

What is the appeal of the fae and why do you think they are still part of our culture even in 2020?

Can’t speak much generally beyond Dream, but we have some ideas for within Wild Time. As we said, our reading of the fairie world is as kind of sex gods. The fairies have been made to be generous, emotionally sensitive - looking out for one another, for Bottom. We use fairies as a kind of cypher for people/creatures whatever, with a healthy outlook - at least in terms of these specialities.

I suppose we’re using the idea of fairie as a container for certain attitudes, leaning into the metaphors. We wanted our fairies not to be too uncanny but to actually be quite human, be in the emotional realm a lot. (Letting the cosmos chapters do the heavy lifting for the spectacle). We try and set some of this up, of the fairies being very human-like, when they first come by we see them laying logs out and hoisting stuff up the trees to set up camp. And we also wanted them to approach the monarchy thing lightly, it seemed a step too far to abandon the King and Queen-ness for our retelling but we went as far as making it operate with more of a flattened hierarchy, just like the challenge to other power dynamics in the sexual realm.

With two authors involved how did you work out the writing between each other?

We’ve written together before, and it’s always come easy as working relationships go. We’re very often on the same page, or agree with the other’s amendments. It’s a flowing way to get the most out of ideas when you have another mind to bounce things off. Many if not most artforms are built upon collaborative practice. And finally artworks are collaborations with their audience - we bring this up so as to prod at the idea of the solo project. We were also collaborating with Shakespeare - technically from the grave, although he’s forever at work in culture. So anyway it never felt like a difficult decision - we’d heard that co-authored books are harder to sell, but we were already knee-deep in leftfield decisions.

Do you have anything else coming up soon and where can we find out more?

The first thing will be to take a breath and work out what this pandemic is all about now. When we’re not writers we’re performers and theatre workers, and we’ve been trying to plan our way into the future of that kind of activity, some strategies are afoot. We’ve also set ourselves a period of new project-making, but it’s hush hush for now. Feel free to visit us at keircooper.uk and rosebiggin.uk for updates as they land. Thanks very much for having us!