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Thursday, 8th May 2008

Donald Freed

Donald Freed is a political playwright in self-imposed exile from America. Arts reporter Nick Ahad met him.

After we leave the interview with Donald Freed, the photographer turns to me and says: "He was really testing your shorthand there."

The truth is when you speak to Freed he tests everything. Shorthand, intellect, powers of concentration.

Freed is an intellectual giant, the awards he's won too numerous to mention, his writing admired by Harold Pinter and Robert Altman, who have both directed his work.

Pinter said of him: "Donald Freed is a writer of blazing imagination, courage and insight. His work is a fearless marriage of politics and art."

He speaks with an eloquence that most of us wouldn't have if we were given all day to rehearse what we wanted to say.

And here he is in York.

Freed was recently appointed writer in residence at York Theatre Royal. In early 2008, the theatre will stage his play Patient No 1, a blistering attack on the current American President. For the next three weeks, he is also presenting masterclasses at the theatre.

"My masterclasses are dedicated to Matthew Arnold's battle cry, 'The theatre is revolutionary, organise the theatre'," says Freed. Through the interview Freed will also quote huge swathes of Macbeth and Hamlet, refer to Freud, Nietzsche, Euripides, discuss psychology, politics and what feels like a thousand other topics only such a polymath could comment on.

Clearly, he could choose to work wherever he wants, so why York? "I am what Mark Twain defined as an expert – a man from out of town – and I'm here to tell you there is a world-class theatre here in York," says Freed, with a passion that makes it clear why Pinter used the word "blazing" when talking about the writer.

Whether it's tenaciously trying to find the truth about the murders of JFK and Martin Luther King in his previous books, being a thorn in the side of the current American presidential administration, or discussing his love of theatre, Freed speaks with an all-encompassing zeal.

He had hoped to stage Patient No 1 in America, but the attack on the American President was, according to Freed, "feared as being politically unacceptable".

"I'm in voluntary exile – which I know is an oxymoron – but I had to come here to start the boomerang that I hope Patient No 1 will become before I throw it back to the US in summer next year," says Freed.

Few doubt the potency of what Freed will create, particularly if his past work is anything to go by.

The Chicago-born playwright first worked in theatre as an actor and producer until 1969 when he wrote his first play, Inquest.

Staged in a "little theatre in Cleveland", Freed's play sent shockwaves through the theatrical and political world.

It told of the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sentenced to death for passing nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union. "Every few decades, a political window opens in the US. The first one in my lifetime opened after the McCarthy era which was when I wrote Inquest," says Freed. "The Rosenbergs' trial became an icon of the period. America wanted to draw a line under that era and to move on from the anti-communism that had plagued the country.

"All of a sudden, my little play had the New York Times reviewing it. That meant it went to Broadway – it also led the FBI to open a file on me," adds Freed, before producing documents from said file revealing the FBI's attempt to discredit the playwright.

This set Freed on the path of theatrical political activism. In 1973, he wrote the film Executive Action which starred Burt Lancaster and suggested President John F Kennedy was assassinated not by Lee Harvey Oswald, but by shadowy American political figures.

In 1984, came Secret Honor, directed by Robert Altman, a monologue by President Richard Nixon shortly after his 1974 resignation.

Freed says: "It prompted one journalist at a press conference to say, 'I can never forgive you, you made me feel sympathy for that man'." It is not hyperbole to state that the play has been compared to King Lear.

While Patient No 1 is not being staged in his home country, it will not be a surprise if George W Bush doesn't have his interest piqued by Freed's play.

The play is set two years in the future when Bush is out of office and a patient in an asylum. "The play will not make fun of him. I hate the man and all he stands for, but it is not enough for us to define ourselves by what we are not," says Freed.

"It is too easy to write a play that derides this foolish man. I want people to look at this man when he is no longer in power. When he is gone, who will we look to blame for everything then?

"I want this play to ask people some uncomfortable questions."