Writing Tips: Why Specific Characters Make Better Theatre Than Generic Ones
James Graham’s Punch is set in The Meadows, Nottingham and it proves why specific locations, local references and regional characters can make theatre more universal, rather than less. Many new writers panic when writing a play and try to keep things broad. A “working-class family in the North” appears easier for an audience to recognise than a family from one Nottingham estate. Yet the broader that family becomes, the more likely we are to lose the things that make them believable. So why are playwrights still frightened that specificity will leave audiences behind?
The problem with the generic family is that nobody actually belongs to one. No single northern working-class culture exists. A former mining family in Mansfield, a mechanic in Bradford, and a nurse from Liverpool may share overlapping experiences of class, but their histories, industries, language, religion, migration, and relationship with place differ. Strip those distinctions away and a writer has to fill the vacuum somehow. That is where the familiar theatrical kit often arrives: football, pints, swearing, money troubles, and don't forget the flat-cap to suggest authenticity. You have created recognisable signs of working-classness without creating a real person.
Compare that with a father who worked as a binman for fourteen years, still calls the demolished Broadmarsh shopping centre “Broadmarsh”, considers £6 for a pint an act of organised crime and still wears his dad’s lucky Notts County scarf to every game. Somebody in New York may recognise none of those references, but they still recognise the habits, nostalgia, class, family history and tribal loyalty. The details are local; the behaviour is universal.
Going further into cultural specificity makes writing more human, whereas modifying a culture in search of commercial viability moves the work away from the truth that allows outsiders to connect with it. Quiara Alegría Hudes discussed this phenomenon in relation to writing the book for the musical In the Heights. It works because its Latino characters have different national backgrounds, generations, histories, and ambitions. Hudes said she had to become extremely detailed to reach the questions underneath: where home is, what we owe our communities, and how far we can travel from where we came from.
James Graham’s Punch offers one of the clearest recent British examples. Jacob Dunne remains a teenager from The Meadows in Nottingham; the fatal encounter happens in Old Market Square, outside of Yates Wine Lodge and the city’s social environment is woven into his story. Yet the production travelled from Nottingham Playhouse to the Young Vic, the West End, several UK tours and Broadway. American audiences did not require Jacob to become an anonymous young man from a generic deprived city.
Graham admitted he wondered whether a play set on a Meadows council estate could connect in America. But went on to say that Nottingham’s post-industrial experience contains patterns American audiences recognise too, including communities feeling economically left behind, anxieties about identity and particular models of masculinity. He gave them Nottingham; they recognise their own equivalent.
Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down achieves something similar through Mansfield. Steel recently reflected on the oddity of a play rooted in a Nottinghamshire town unfamiliar to many London spectators becoming a sold-out National Theatre success. Its mining history, employment, migration and resentment cannot simply be swapped for “a struggling British town” without altering the tensions inside the family. Place generates conflict. That is the useful version of specificity.
However, there is a difference between specificity and showing off your research. Having somebody announce that they “went down Mansfield Road, past Forest Rec and got the tram from High School to Old Market Square” achieves very little. Geographically accurate doesn't mean interesting... Unless you're writing Google Maps: The Musical. Local detail should reveal character, change the stakes, establish social hierarchy, produce conflict or give an image emotional weight.
This is where I think playwrights should separate structural specificity from referential specificity. Mentioning Goose Fair is referential. Knowing that two sisters remember Goose Fair differently because one stayed in Nottingham and the other spent fifteen years trying to escape it is structural. Knowing an event's specific location matters less than knowing what happened there and why they still argue about it.
And please... audiences do not need every reference explained. Nobody from Nottingham would naturally say, “I’m going to Goose Fair, the annual travelling fair held every October.” They might say, “You’re not taking my daughter to Goose Fair. Last year somebody got shanked.” An outsider now understands everything the scene requires. A Nottingham audience receives an extra layer. We understand The Crucible without experiencing seventeenth-century Salem and The Beauty Queen of Leenane without growing up in Connemara.
So if the options are “a working-class family” and “a single mum from The Meadows”, give me The Meadows. Which generation remembers the neighbourhood differently? Who moved away? Who thinks saying somebody “escaped” is insulting? What building vanished? Which old pub is the local dive? Most of those answers may never reach the dialogue, but they will change how the characters speak, judge and remember.
Place should shape the character before it decorates the script. Punch did not travel because audiences everywhere understood Nottingham. It travelled because Nottingham was vivid enough for audiences elsewhere to recognise masculinity, shame, responsibility and forgiveness through it.
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